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.