Fourteen years ago Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam promoted a new vision of Australia as a multicultural society, one which was pulling away from an exclusively British past. Previously, white Australia, founded two hundred years ago by Great Britain as a penal colony, had paid little heed to its non-European minorities. In fact, a carefully managed immigration policy had, since World War II, brought 3.5 million people, mostly Europeans, to Australia. The aim of the policy, while not racially exclusive, was to increase the population without changing its predominantly European composition--or at least without changing it very quickly.
If Australians needed any evidence that their ambivalent policy toward non-European immigration had to change, it was provided by the Vietnam War. The arrival of the Vietnamese refugee "boat people" was not part of any policy. They had not been processed, thousands of kilometers away, by immigration officials. They simply arrived, uninvited, by the thousands. Though there had long been a small Asian minority presence in the country, the composition of Australia's population was now to irreversibly change.
The first wave of Asian immigrants dates back to the Australian gold rush. Chinese workers began arriving in great numbers in 1855 and 1856, when the income of alluvial gold diggers was sinking to that of unskilled manual workers. By then gold was being found at such depths that operating teams of four to six independent alluvial diggers were being replaced by gold-mining companies, employing diggers as wage earners.
The gold diggers came from southern China, generally bound to some overseer and working under his orders in order to repay debts incurred in their homeland. They arrived in groups of six or seven hundred, each man bringing with him a pole, two baskets, and a distinctive hat, shaped like the top of a haystack and nearly a yard across. By 1857 there were almost twenty-four thousand Chinese workers in the Victorian goldfields alone, and the Chinese population in the city of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory far out-numbered the British.
The Europeans began to fear this preponderance of Chinese, and in various places, Anglo-Saxon gold diggers resorted to violence. On the Buckland River in Victoria there was an ugly riot against the Chinese. The European diggers accused the Chinese of immorality and resorting to prostitution due to the absence of their wives and families; of exporting all their wealth to China rather than contributing to the wealth of the country, and of other crimes of equal magnitude. Chinese pigtails were cut off. In one horrific instance, a European woman married to a Chinese man was assaulted; her clothing and that of her children was torn to pieces while her tormentors took counsel on how to rape her.
The Chinese, surprisingly, thought the English very kind and delightful. In one account they said: "We Chinamen who are here get gold only by working, headings and tailings, and from old holes abandoned by Europeans, from which we can but barely make a living…As soon as we get a little money we will try to get home to our aged parents, for our ancient books teach us that we must look after our parents…And when we get to our own country we will ever speak in honor of such kind rulers of poor people."
Early Chinese immigration:
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