Identification Photography and the Surveillance of Chinese Mobility in Colonial Australasia

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, colonial governments across Australasia began experimenting with ways of documenting the identity of mobile Chinese residents – including naturalised and natural-born British subjects – who were exempted under colonial anti-Chinese immigration laws enacted from 1881 onwards. In this article, we begin to catalogue the remaining fragmented collections of these colonial-era Chinese exemption documents and, concurrently, explore the introduction and use of identification photography in Australasian systems of immigration control. By analysing the photographs on colonial Chinese exemption documents and historicising them in comparison with photographs of prisoners, we consider the negotiated processes embedded within them. They are simultaneously evidence of Chinese residents’ rights of belonging in colonial Australasia and the ways that Chinese residents were, regardless of formal legal status, made into second-class citizens.