Responses to the Chinese on the Goldfields

Between 1852 and 1889, forty thousand Chinese men and women arrived in Australia heading for the goldfields. Although few were to stay in the long term (of these forty thousand, eighty-five percent later departed), their presence was to create a growing sense of anxiety and alienation amongst gold diggers throughout the Australian colonies. For many, the difficulties of migration meant that the considerable Chinese presence was to be their first experience with a culture and race so completely removed from their own. In looking different, wearing different clothes and speaking a seemingly indecipherable language, the Chinese became targets for indiscriminate abuse and brutal violence . They were accused of various acts, from fouling the creek waters and spreading disease to encroaching on white’s men’s territory and unnatural vice. Yet when much more serious crimes were enacted towards the Chinese, juries faced with even the most incriminating evidence refused to convict the perpetrators.
   

This image of white miners protesting the the large Chinese prescence on the goldfields before police troopers reflects a common sentiment of the time. [Source: http://www.aaac.100megsfree5.com/lambingflatmpl.htm]

 There are two major reasons for this response. Firstly, many on the goldfields felt that a large Chinese population threatened their chances of success and their livelihoods. The Chinese were accustomed to working long hours for pitiful wages, and the fact that they were often indebted to squatters whose workmen had left for the diggings was seen as a threat to colonial workmen’s standard of living and job security.
   
However, perhaps the most powerful reason for such violent responses was not economic, but racial. There is little evidence throughout the 1830’s and 40’s of a popular animosity towards the small number of Maoris and non-whites present on Sydney’s streets. Yet the goldfields were to change this. They became a place of growing animosity towards racial and cultural difference that was to spill over into violence at such places as Lambing Flat in 1861 and Clunes in 1873, where unresisting Chinamen were subjected to brutal assaults, robbery, arson and even murder. Although these are the most notorious examples of the prejudice that Chinese faced when the arrived in Australia, they are perhaps indicative of the deeper undertones emerging in Australian society during the period.

Frontier or History Wars?

By their very nature, the narratives of nations evolve and change over time as the opinions of the populations that belong to them alter. Yet because this change is so irrevocably linked to our identity both as individuals and as a nation, it evokes a diverse range of emotional reactions from a number of different sections of society.

One such change is that in the perception of Australia’s ‘frontier’. As notions of Australian national identity became more inclusive in the 1970’s, historians and the general public alike began to acknowledge the struggles of groups that had previously been ignored in favour of focussing on the perspectives of the white population. Rather than ideas of grand achievement and virtues that Australia had seemingly always espoused, this new revisionist view of history evoked feelings of shame, guilt and anger. It was not a piece of curious but unrelated history, but instead evoked feelings aimed at individuals’ own ancestors, and by extension both their own identity and that of the nation at large.

The violence and atrocities that occurred on both sides of the frontier wars characterise these negative feelings. It is this that is focussed on by historians such as Dirk Moses, who goes so far as to label the actions taken towards Aboriginal society in the years after European colonisation as genocide.

A drawing of the Myall Creek massacre of May 1838, one of the more notorious conflicts on the frontier. Note the rope binding the Aboriginal people together and the child on her mother's back on the far right. First published in the Chronicles of Crime, 1841. [Source: http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/images/myall-creek-massacre-drawing-1841.jpg]

 However, critics of this view, including ex-Prime Minister John Howard and historian Keith Windschuttle, argue that by focussing attention on these negative aspects of Australian history, proponents of so-called ‘black arm-band’ history degrade Australia and its people at the expense of its successes.

There are important elements to both sides of the argument. It is certainly important to acknowledge the struggles and violence that occurred on the frontier. From dispossession to removal to murder, it was indeed a horrific experience for many members of the Aboriginal population. Yet by focussing solely on the violence, such as is done by Moses’ label of ‘genocide,’ individuals risk not only ignoring the attempts at reconciliation and accommodation that were made, but also obscuring Aborigines into solely being victims of violence rather than complex individuals with the ability to make their own decisions.

Convict Lives

The significant role that the largely unknown men and women who were sent to Australia in the eighty years from 1788-1868 have played in defining Australia’s national identity has long been a fascination for both historians and the wider Australian public. While Australia’s colonial obsession with its international image meant that convicts were for a long time resented, in recent years a convict ancestor has become something to be celebrated. Yet the nature of those transported here and the impact of their identities on our nation remains a controversial issue.

Convicts being put to work under the close guard of British soldiers. [Source: http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2007/07/25/convict2_wideweb__470x295,0.jpg]

Historian Manning Clark argues that convicts were members of a ‘professional criminal class’, a hypothesis sympathetic to the contemporary views of the period that created such intense anxiety of a ‘birth stain’ amongst Australian colonists for decades. Clark draws upon the informed opinion of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which associated theft with a criminal class and saw it as arising not from unavoidable want or destitution but  instead from a temptation for property obtained without enduring the hardships of labour. He asserts that George Arnold Wood’s notion of convicts as ‘more sinned against than sinning’ ignores crucial facts in favour of upholding nationalist sentiment.

However, whilst this perhaps explains the actions of later convicts who arrived at a time when crimes that were previously capital offences were now largely commuted to transportation, others would argue that the conditions of social inequality and injustice within the British legal system were indeed responsible for many of the convicts’ crimes. This is particularly the case in the early years of the penal colony. For example, the women aboard the Pyramus, which sailed in 1836, were almost exclusively working-class Irishwomen convicted of various forms of theft. The fact that people in these circumstances were predisposed to conditions of social inequality and injustice within the British legal system, while not ruling out that some of the convicts amongst their number had acted specifically for their own ends, does suggest that social circumstances did account for the actions of many transported to Australia.

Outpost of Empire

A number of events occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century that influenced the creation of a new British colony in Australia in 1788. America’s revolution and subsequent declaration of independence in 1776 meant that Britain lost control of a colony important not only for its resources but also as a ‘dumping ground’ for unwanted convicts. Yet the increasingly reluctance of juries to execute prisoners, especially for petty crimes, meant that individuals were being committed to transportation more than ever. As they were only ever intended as a temporary solution to the dramatic increase in prisoners that these situations created, prison hulks were overcrowded, filthy and rife with disease. Therefore, with the British prisoner population doubling between 1782 and 1788, a long-term solution was urgently needed. This solution was provided by Botany Bay, a site recommended for a new penal colony by Joseph Banks after he returned from there in 1770.

English hulks such as these were unable to stem the dramatic rise in prisoner numbers. [Source: National Library of Australia, http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an5601463]

Australia provided many advantages for Britain in the region. At a time of great colonial expansion, settling Australia would not only expand Britain’s own empire, but prevent French and Spanish expansion at a time of war with both. Australia was also of great strategic importance. It gave Britain a base to expand its empire on this side of the world, particularly through trade with China. It would give the empire access to the whaling trade, and allow their domestic economy to make a profit from Australia’s need to buy additional resources. Although this access to Asia was arguably already provided by the Indian ‘jewel in the crown’, the subcontinent was not seen as a place for white men to do hard labour. Many convicts became extremely sick and often died there from diseases and conditions which they had not been exposed to previously. Under these circumstances, reforming the convicts and using them to aid the empire was not possible.

The widespread availability of flax and timber throughout the Australian landscape was also an important consideration, as it was these materials that were needed to build up a dominant Navy, the symbol of imperial might. Although there were British colonies better able to provide high quality resources, the importance of accessibility to these resources, as well as Australia’s other advantages, mean that historians such as Geoffrey Blainey argue that this was the chief reason for Australia’s colonisation.

By creating a convict settlement here, Britain could not only solve the government’s problem of overcrowding on hulks that was creating both public and political discord at home, but also gain the use of the convicts’ labour to create a desirable new colony. The distance from Britain meant that few settlers would initially want to come, and certainly not enough for the colony to survive. In order to gain the advantages that Australia offered they would need to force the first group to come. Britain therefore not only benefited by using Australia as a ‘dumping ground’ for convicts, but also used these same convicts to access other opportunities and resources and expand its empire further than ever before.

Australia and the Enlightenment

In the almost one hundred and thirty  years that passed between Abel Tasman’s voyages of 1642-44 and the arrival of Captain James Cook and his crew at Botany Bay in 1770, a new age of Western philosophical thought emerged that used scientific reason to challenge traditional concepts of monarchy and the place of the church in society. It was to have a significant effect on world history, influencing the creation of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France, as well as contributing to the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Challenging the traditional place of Europeans in the world, it was also the primary reason for the revival of exploration in the Southern seas and determined the way in which the men of the Endeavour and those who followed them were to act towards those they found in the great Terra Australis.

This behaviour was significantly different to that of earlier explorers such as Tasman, Jansz and Dampier. Their search for the lands in the south was undertaken at a time of great expansion for Europe’s imperial powers; Columbus had recently returned from the discovery of the New World in the Americas, and many of the islands of Africa and parts of East India were appearing on European maps for the first time. Driven by material profit and immortal fame, they aimed at the conquest of lands and their resources in the name of the king and the spread of Christianity in the name of God. They sought a different type of civilisation to that they found in the Great Southern Land; the stark contrast of the aboriginal way of life to their own, coupled with a land characterised by desert and unusable soil led Dutchman Willem Jansz to describe it as a place where nothing good could be done. It was a view popularised by Dampier half a century later and was the reason why no European set foot here again for over a century.

It was the arrival of Cook that was to mark a great change in opinion towards Terra Australis. Unlike his predecessors, Cook and his crew saw the aborigines as the natural inheritors of the land who had the same right to exist under God as any European, and as such killing them or taking their land without permission was morally wrong. Yet the aborigines’ disinterest in trade and material goods, as well as their seeming lack of the social and legal structures that Europeans saw as essential to maintaining civil order, meant that the crew of the Endeavour still saw themselves as superior. Cook describes the aborigines as ‘timorous and inoffensive’ and the land as ‘in a pure state of nature’, such as that of European society before the development of ‘civilisation,’ and despite the successes of the aborigines he describes their way of life as an ‘inequality of condition’ when compared to European civilisation. Although the realities of European ‘enlightened’ civilisation were often in stark contrast to those perceived by Europeans at the time, like those seeking to spread the beliefs of Christianity far and wide before them the explorers of the newly discovered continent saw it as their duty to spread European ‘civilisation’ across the globe.

 

Samuel Calvert’s impression of The Endeavour’s arrival in Australia, entitled ‘Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian continent on behalf of the British crown, AD 1770, under the name of New South Wales’. First published in the ‘Illustrated Sydney News‘, December 1865.  [Source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an7682920]

However, civilising the aborigines was not only a desire in itself, but also a means to expand the boundaries of the British empire. The policies of the period’s imperial powers also sought to use new Enlightenment understandings of trade and social progress in order to advance their own colonial ambitions. Through offering gifts such as the cloth given by Cook to the aborigines, Europeans sought to encourage a dependency on European trade and commercial exchange, the great mechanism of colonial control at the time. Either way, the introduction of the Enlightenment’s key idea, civilisation, into New South Wales would have a profound effect on the future of Australia and its people.