Chinese Australian Perspectives on the ‘Protection’ of Aboriginal People in the 1890s

Abstract

Anti-opium policies in the 1890s, particularly the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld), connected and separated Aboriginal and Chinese peoples for the first time in Australian legislation. Little scholarship has hitherto explored the agency of the Chinese community in the control of opium and their responses to this legislation, as well as their perspectives on Aboriginal protection invoked in the legislation’s title. This article uses Chinese-language newspapers published in Sydney during the late 1890s to delineate a distinctly Chinese approach to settler colonial governance – including opium control and the ‘protection’ of the Aboriginal population – prior to federation.