The Year of the Snake: unseen bogs; unbridled good-luck
Amidst colourful lion dances and whatnots, many Chinese community leaders will, once again, fete their white guardian angels at fanciful Chinese New Year banquets, at one venue or another, throughout this wide brown homeland of their heirs. These felicitous communions no doubt lend weight for many Aussie pollies to boast about ours being the most successful multicultural nation on earth.
If only.
Sadly, for the Chinese in Oz, many have yet to feel as if they have finally got to “Somewhere over the rainbow”.
Instead, they often have cause to feel that they will never get out of their probationary status.
The Chinese, some 1.4 million, are bona fide citizens. A good half have come in the last 35 years or so, dominated by settlers from PRC, and almost all have come since 1973.
When the Chinese first came as indentured labourers in 1848, their dream was to make wages and return in glory to Amoy which was beset by chronic famine. Few if any did. And they suffered terribly under the Master and Servants Act. The Chinese next came in huge numbers for the gold rushes, 1850s till 1900s. Among them a good half made it home, some with unimagined riches. But these gold seekers too suffered, unforgettably in the Lambing Flat Attack on 30 June 1861, which ended with 1,200 of them driven far from their diggings and severely beaten up, some with open scalps where their queues had been sliced off from the skull, camping in open paddock in James Roberts’ farm with nothing more than the clothes they had on. It was the dead of winter, and it rained heavily that first night. This historical event signposted the bumpy road to the White Australia Policy at Federation in 1901. By then, for a good half-century, the Chinese had been treated as vermin, to be got rid of by hook or by crook. Those who could had left.
At Federation, the remaining Chinese, about 30,000, were permitted to stay, by the grace of the Colonial Office in London, as tolerated aliens, at the pleasure of the Commonwealth of Australia.
But they were destined to die out, as under the infamous Dictation Test no more Chinese could come in, and as there were very few women amongst them.
Yet the remaining Chinese survived, doing work that White Aussies did not want. Some even prospered in hand-based agriculture. In time they were rehabilitated as reliable........
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