Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese Australian History

Abstract

During the past thirty years, our understanding of the history of Chinese Australians has been remade. Today, as a growing community of researchers delves into the archives, new insights into the political, economic and cultural dimensions of Chinese Australian experiences are emerging. The tired, one-dimensional depictions of the sojourning celestial digger have, at last, given way to a more complex view. Historians of the Chinese in Australia have been both instigators and beneficiaries of a move towards a more inclusive, multicultural approach to Australian history within the academy and beyond. They have played an important role in challenging the often peripheral status of specialised ethnic and multicultural studies, or ‘ethno-histories’, within Australian historiography. At the same time, their efforts to better understand the history of the Chinese in Australia have provided a ‘valuable counterpart’ to ongoing research into Australia's relations with Asia.1 1Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds., Richard White and Hsu-Ming Teo (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), 146; For the peripheral status of ethno-history in Australia into the 1990s see Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia (Canberra: Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies, 1996), 27.