Melbourne Chinatown redevelopment: the unwritten perspective from the Chinese community

© 2018 Lok Yee Lotte WongThis thesis presents a history of Melbourne’s Chinatown revitalisation in the 1970s and 1980s from the Chinese perspective. In 1970, with its heritage significance, the City Council and later the State government decided to revitalise the area and transform it into a tourist attraction in 1975 and 1983 respectively. Interestingly, responses from the Chinese community to the revitalisation in 1975 (i.e., stage-one redevelopment) and 1983 (i.e., stage-two redevelopment) were very different: there was resistance towards the project in 1975 while no criticism was noted towards that in 1983. The thesis seeks to fill the gap of this part of Chinatown history and understand the Chinese attitude to the establishment of Chinatown ‘on its own term.’ Two major questions were discussed in the thesis: (i) who in the Chinese community had resisted the redevelopment and what were the reasons that might have influenced their judgment to the redevelopment and (ii) why there was a shift of attitude among the Chinese community within a short span of eight years between 1975 to 1983? Apart from looking into council records, newspapers (in both English and Chinese), oral testimonies of the Chinese representatives and businessmen who were involved in or witnessed the revitalisation are the primary source that the research relies on to conduct a thorough investigation of the Chinese’s perception of the revitalisation. To ensure the accuracy of sources, this thesis sought to correlate with other primary sources, such as newspapers and testimonies from other interviewees. Accounts that were not verifiable were removed from the thesis. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is an overview of the objectives and motivations of the revitalisation in 1975 and 1983, as well as a comparison of the Chinese responses towards the revitalisation between its first and second stage. The second chapter is a further discussion of the Chinese resistance in 1975-6. It identified the group in the Chinese community who had resisted the project and explored the major reasons that had driven the resistance. In particular, it investigated how David Wang’s inadequate representativeness in the Chinese community (a Chinese politician and businessman in Melbourne who had very likely initiated the revitalisation to the council) might have led the project to be less appealing to some of his Chinese fellows. The last chapter focused on the stage-two redevelopment in 1983 and explained the shift of attitude in terms of the different objective of the latter scheme; the consultation process; and the changing circumstances of the Chinese experience in Multicultural Australia