The Segmentation and Integration of the Chinese in Brisbane, Australia

Abstract

The history of the Chinese in Australia is traced, beginning with the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century when there were nearly 10,000 at one point, almost all of them being male. Numbers of Chinese in Australia declined under the White Australia policy until there were fewer than 8,500 full-Chinese enumerated in the 1947 census, roughly half of them being Australian born, but only one quarter of them being female. Well more than half of all Chinese in Australia at that time were in Sydney, whereas Brisbane had only 500 or so. There were in addition some thousands of part-Chinese in Australia, over a quarter of whom were in Queensland. In 1956 immigration restrictions were eased, and in 1965 they were removed entirely, leading to a gradual influx of highly educated, largely westernized, and often affluent Chinese from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, and later from the ex-Australian Trust Territory of Papua New Guinea. By 1976 there were again nearly as many Chinese in Australia as there had been 100 years before (37,000), three-quarters of them foreign-born. Unlike the ear ly Chinese in Australia, who maintained sub-ethnic distinctions based on origins in China similar to those found in other overseas Chinese communities, the recent arrivals in Brisbane and elsewhere in Australia have congregated and formed associations on the basis of their country of birth (or extraction), although most are highly integrated into Australian society in general. Between the 1976 census and the one in 1981, Australia took in some 50,000 refugees from lndo-China, well over half of whom were ethnic Chinese. However unlike the other immigrant Chinese they are neither well educated (at least in English), nor westernized, nor wealthy. As a result, they have congregated in low-rent inner-city areas rather than dispersing in the affluent suburbs. These new, highly visible concentrations of Chinese, whose numbers have continued to grow, represent an entirely new element, and may come to compose an Australian Chinese proletariate that can be increasingly exploited by established Chinese, as well as wealthy new immigrants from Southeast Asia and, especially, Hong Kong.