'The Chief Chinese Interpreter' Charles Hodges: Mapping the Aurality of Race and Governance in late colonial Melbourne (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aboriginal History, 2011
The permits allowed Miss Yuanho Quan Sing of Derby in northwestern Western Australia to engage the services of two individuals: 'Bobbydol' and 'Roebourne Annie'. The permits had been authorised by the Resident Magistrate and local Protector of Aborigines, William Hodge. 'Miss Quan Sing was told … you could not grant her a permit to employ [A]boriginals', explained the covering note, 'but not withstanding this & the cancellation of her permit last year, she persists in her endeavour to obtain the privilege of employing natives'. 1 Neville immediately directed Hodge to cancel the permits, telling him, 'Quan Sing and his family have made numerous efforts from time to time to employ natives, all of which have been frustrated'. 2 Indeed the 'privilege' of employing Aboriginal workers had been fought hard for by the Quan Sing family, initially by Quan Sing snr, and subsequently by his eldest daughter Yuanho Quan Sing, who was, as she would repeatedly point out, Australian-born. Tracing the long-running confrontation of this Chinese-Australian family from a remote northwestern township with the racial politics of Western Australia's Aboriginal administration offers a rare, detailed glimpse into the significance of Aboriginal employment control for constructing categories of inclusion and exclusion in the Australian colonising project. 'Quan Sing's affair', as one official termed it, also highlights how local politics of race played out on the frontiers of white Australia in the early twentieth century, revealing the instability and fragility of colour-coded citizenship, and the role of 'Aboriginal protection' in the development of Australian citizenship in the early twentieth century. It is a story that might be considered the most marginal of histories. Chinese people, and Asians generally, were explicitly prohibited from employing Aboriginal workers in Queensland (from 1902), Western Australia (from 1907),
Limina, 2017
Protest movements are an aspect of history garnering closer attention in recent years, in particular those instigated by ethnic minorities or diasporic communities from the mid-1800s to early 1900s, when governments introduced discriminatory policies. This article will survey Chinese protest movements in this period in Australia and around the world with a focus on the Northern Territory (the 'Territory') as a case study of organised, sustained, and varied resistance. The Chinese in the Territory, led by wealthy merchants, were active protesters around the time of Federation and the formulation of discriminatory legislation, such as the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. Remarkably, such protests were often made in English and were supported by some Europeans.
Voices of Sydney's Chinese Furniture Factory Workers, 1890–1920
Labour History, 2017
Chinese furniture factory workers were the focus of a heated debate that helped shape “White Australia.” Often considered a threat to the “European,” or “white,” working class, they were vigorously campaigned against by labour activists and staunchly defended by Chinese merchant elites, the outcome of this contest being the institution of a range of anti-Chinese legislation from the 1880s. While labour activists’ claims about Chinese furniture factory workers – and to a certain extent the counterclaims of Chinese elites – have been scrutinised in historical scholarship, workers’ own reflections on their lives have not been examined. Drawing for the most part on New South Wales bankruptcy files, this paper explores the world of Sydney’s Chinese furniture workers as they described it. It argues that their understandings of their activities were considerably more complex than the assertions made about them.
Listen to Nodes of Empire: Speech and Whiteness in Victorian Hawker's License Courts.
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian, Syrian and Afghan immigrants arrive in Victoria, Australia, many of whom took up the highly mobile and audible occupation of hawking. New transnational and Imperial histories have illuminated the racially circumscribed mobility of colonial and Imperial subjects in traveling in and across Empire(s). In this article I conceive the Hawker’s License Courts of colonial Victoria as linguistic “nodes” where met subjects from locales in and beyond the British Empire. I argue that further than studying the mobility of colonial subjects, and of Indian hawkers in Victoria in particular, focusing on the speech uttered by hawkers demonstrates the importance of studying the linguistic colonial past. Doing so brings into focus the spatially located processes by which Whiteness and English language ability were gaining affinity in the late nineteenth century.
Radical Chinese labour in Australian history
Marxist Left Review, 2015
The prevailing view among historians has for many years attributed the racism of the White Australia Policy to the xenophobia or even the alleged material interests of organised white workers. This mistaken understanding ignores the role of the Australian ruling class in actively propagating anti-Chinese racism, but it also rests on a racist stereotype of Chinese workers themselves, insisting that they were anti-union, pliant, "cheap labour" and so on. As such, the real history of radical and rebellious organising among Chinese workers has been largely ignored. This silence, ironically, only reinforces the stereotype. This article brings together a treasure trove of strikes, rebellions and mutinies undertaken by radical Chinese workers in Australia, including material never written about before, and offers a long overdue correction to the stereotypes that pepper most historical accounts.
The Transcolonial Politics of Chinese Domestic Mastery in Singapore and Darwin 1910s-1930s
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2011
Feminist and postcolonial scholars have long argued that the home was a microcosm and a symbol of the colony. To exercise power in the home, to practice domestic mastery over colonised servants, was an expression of colonial power. At the same time, intimate contact and domestic conflicts between nonwhite servants and their employers had the potential to destabilise hierarchical distinctions, thereby threatening the stability of colonial rule. As Ann Laura Stoler puts it, the home was a site where "racial classifications were defined and defied" and where relations between coloniser and colonised could sustain or challenge colonial rule. The vast majority of the literature on the colonial home focuses on European homes and the domestic service relationship as one between a white master/mistress and a native servant. The 2007 special issue of Frontiers, for example, focuses on white-"native" encounters. Yet, in many colonial contexts, Asian and Indigenous elites employed domestic servants in their homes. As Swapna Banerjee has shown in her study of Bengal in British India, the relationship of "subordination" in colonial societies was not unique to "white masters/mistresses and native/black servants" but crossed class and ethnic lines. This paper rethinks understandings of colonial power and intimacy by analysing domestic service in Chinese homes in the neighbouring tropical British colonies of Singapore, in the Straits Settlements, and Darwin, in Australia's Northern Territory, from the 1910s to the 1930s. A comparison of this sort might, at first glance, seem implausible. Singapore was an exploitation colony where the aim was to extract labour and produce. Darwin, on the other hand, was part of a settler colony where the intended outcome of colonialism was permanent white settlement based on the dispossession of the Indigenous populations. The different colonial objectives in Singapore and Darwin became more obvious following the federation of Australia in 1901, at which point Darwin became part of a settler nation rather than a British colony. However, as Penny Edwards and Deana Heath have shown, the process of analysing settler and nonsettler colonies side-by-side enables historians to draw broader conclusions about colonialism itself. In this case, such a comparison highlights the extent to which the position of coloniser was ambiguous, bound up with issues of race and class, and dependent on colonial context.
Postcolonial Studies, 2020
This article traces the spatially grounded operation of ‘medical sovereignty’ by reading property alongside medical practice and regulation in a settler colonial city. It does so through the lens of the Antipodean life of one Canton-born doctor, James Lamsey, who was a prolific proprietor in the regional Australian city of Bendigo and used his interlinked proprietorial and medical powers to mediate between the Bendigo Chinese community and white settlers and doctors. Reading medical power through the lens of Lamsey’s life, shaped, as it was, by European-made laws, shows how settler medical sovereignty was enacted in a dynamic relation with Chinese medical sovereignty, performed here in the urban context of Bendigo, on unceded Indigenous Dja Dja Wurrung land. With support from the common law system, health-related boards were, in the late nineteenth century, intensifying a settler sovereignty, where board members and doctors practised increasingly exclusive forms of discretionary power and exercised the right to exclude non-white people from membership. At the same time, Lamsey was enacting a diasporic medical sovereignty that drew on Chinese imperial and British colonial authority. He leveraged his medical sovereignty towards promoting collective Chinese entitlements to health and to counter the exclusions of a whitening settler sovereignty.
White Cargo: Australian Residents, Trade and Colonialism in Shanghai Between the Wars
This article follows Australians who went to treaty ports in China in the 1920s and 1930s to find work. By 1932 there were so many Australians in Shanghai that the British government asked Prime Minister Joseph Lyons to issue an official warning dissuading Australians from travelling there for employment. One result of this migration was the generation of files on Australians in the Special Branch surveillance files of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) archives. Using these files, as well as Chinese language newspapers circulating in Shanghai at the time, this article examines links between Australians in Depression-era Shanghai and the development of Chinese anti-colonialism. It also suggests that reports on Australian behaviour in treaty port China in Australian newspapers recast the ways in which some Australians understood inter-colonial exchanges. Much is known about Australian attitudes to Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Little, however, has been written about how Asian populations viewed Australians. The Shanghai Municipal Police files provide one register through which these viewpoints can be excavated.