Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:26:20.721Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Chinese shopkeeper on the Atherton Tablelands: Tracing connections between regional Queensland and regional China in Taam Szu Pui's My life and work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2014

Sophie Loy-Wilson
Sophie Loy-Wilson*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
Get access

Extract

Chinese-run stores were a vital part of the regional communities that developed throughout Australia in the nineteenth century. Functioning variously as supply stores, post offices, banks, cook-shops, hotels and hiring depots, they helped to maintain links between regional areas and metropolitan centres, connecting local businesses to overseas markets. Chinese immigrants were a dominant part of this retail trade across the country. By 1901, there were 800 people of Chinese descent working in Queensland shops, while the South Australian census listed 400 Chinese shopkeepers for the same year.

Type
Articles
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Migration , December 2014 , pp. 160 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Endnotes

1 May, Cathie R., Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns 1870–1920 (Cairns: James Cook University, 1984)Google Scholar.

2 For a discussion of the early development of immigration restriction against Chinese people, see Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, ‘The coming man: Chinese immigration to the goldfields’, in Drawing the global colour line: White men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 15–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ferrall, Charles, Millar, Paul and Smith, Keren (eds), East by south: China in the Australasian imagination (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Johnson, Henry and Moloughney, Brian (eds), Asia in the making of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Bagnall, Kate, ‘Crossing oceans and cultures’, in Sobocinska, Agnieszka and Walker, David (eds), Australia's Asia: Reviewing Australia's Asian pasts (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2012)Google Scholar. My thanks to Kate Bagnall for sharing a draft of her paper. See also Curthoys, Ann, ‘Chineseness and Australian identity’, in Chan, Henry, Curthoys, Ann and Chiang, Nora (eds), Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, settlement and interactions (Taipei: Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, 2001)Google Scholar.

5 Reeves, Keir and Khoo, Tseen (eds), ‘Special issue: Chinese Australian history’, Australian Historical Studies 42 (1) (2011)Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Fitzgerald, Shirley, Red tape golden scissors: The story of Sydney's Chinese (Sydney: State Library of NSW Press, 1996)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 5, ‘Tightening the screws’, pp. 124–55. An exception can be found in the work of Carole Tan, ‘Boundaries, border-crossing and gatekeepers: Issues relating to the formation of identity amongst young Chinese Australians in the 1920s and 1930s’, paper presented at the Australia and New Zealand Chinese History Workshop, 13 February 2000.

7 See, for example, Stephenson, Peta, The outsiders within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian story (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Reeves, Keir, ‘Echoes on a cultural landscape: Glimpses of Chinese community life in Castlemaine’, in Gold tailings: Forgotten histories of family and community on the central Victorian goldfields (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010)Google Scholar.

8 Palfreeman, A. C., The administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 3, 5–7, 11–13, 86Google Scholar; Young, C. F., The new gold mountain: The Chinese in Australia (Richmond: Mitchell Press, 1978)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 2, ‘Chinese labouring classes and merchants’, pp. 35–59. See also Loy-Wilson, Sophie, ‘Peanuts and publicists: Letting Australian friends know the Chinese side of the story in interwar Sydney’, History Australia 6 (1) (2009), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Bowen, Alister, ‘The merchants: Chinese social organisation in colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42 (1) (2011), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macgregor, Paul, ‘Dreams of jade and gold’, in Epstein, A. (ed.), The Australian family: Images and essays (Melbourne: Scribe, 1998), p. 26Google Scholar.

10 See, for example, ‘Kong Sing family tea merchant collection’, Chinese Australian History Museum Acc. 1322567, especially receipts relating to customs (Box 112). There are other important collections also held at the Chinese Australian History Museum, as well as the autobiographies of Chinese Australian businessmen held at the Shanghai Institute of Historical Research and Taiwan's Academica Sinica.

11 Fitzgerald, John, Big white lie: Chinese Australians in white Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), pp. 179–91Google Scholar.

12 Loy-Wilson, Sophie, ‘The gospel of enthusiasm: Salesmanship, colonialism and religion in Australian department stores in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, forthcoming (2014)Google Scholar.

13 Reynolds, Henry, North of Capricornia: The untold story of the people of Australia's North (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), p. xGoogle Scholar; Holthouse, Hector, River of gold: The story of the Palmer River gold rush (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967), p. 138Google Scholar.

14 May, Topsawyers; Jack, Ian, Holmes, Kate and Kerr, Ruth, ‘Ah Toy's garden: A Chinese market-garden on the Palmer River Goldfield, North Queensland’, Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology 2 (1984), 51–8Google Scholar.

15 May, Topsawyers, p. 18.

16 Trentmann, Frank, ‘Crossing divides: Consumption and globalization in history’, Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (2) (2008), 202Google Scholar.

17 Margaret Burns has written on ‘imaginative space’ and trade in the Pacific, and I am borrowing from her theories. See Burns, Margaret E., ‘Of tongues and temporalities: Notes towards an understanding of the recent Chinese past in French Polynesia’, Journal of Pacific History 35 (2) (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Williams, Michael, ‘Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Qiaoxiang’, Modern Asian Studies 38 (2) (2004), 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The Chinese represented over 60 per cent of the non-Aboriginal population in Darwin in 1881 and over 70 per cent ten years later, to fall back slightly at the turn of the century. From then on, the Chinese population declined to under 40 per cent in 1911 and to 25 percent in 1938. Henry Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 107.

20 Cited in Stephenson, Outsiders within, p. 62.

21 Pui, Taam Sze, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui (Innisfail: Author, 1925), pp. 12–34.Google Scholar

22 Taam, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, pp. 9–10.

23 Taam, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, p. 12.

24 Taam, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, p. 16.

25 Taam, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, p. 17.

26 John Broadley, ‘Chinese tenants in the municipality of Cudgegong 1860–1904’, The muse 60 (Mudgee Historical Society, 2010), 2. My thanks to Louise Prowse for this reference.

27 May, Topsawyers, p. 72.

28 May, Topsawyers, p. 62.

29 Syme, A. M., Shipping arrivals and departures: Victorian Ports, 1846–1855, vol. 2 (Melbourne: Roebuck Society, 1987)Google Scholar.

30 National Archives of Australia (NAA): A6661/413, Arms & liquor traffic (later opium) between Australia and the New Hebrides; NAA BP234/1/SB1937/2472, Location of Chinese and Japanese shops, market gardens, etc — includes boarding inspectors’ reports, lists of Chinese and Japanese business owners and their addresses in the Fortitude Valley, Newstead and Woolloongabba areas 1936–38.

31 May, Topsawyers, p. 8.

32 The Queenslander, 5 April 1879, 473.

33 May, Topsawyers, p. 111.

34 The late Mr Taam Sze, unpublished manuscript, James Cook Library, Queensland.

35 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 26.

36 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 27.

37 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 27.

38 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 29.

39 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 31.

40 Taam unpublished manuscript, p. 33.

41 ‘Location of Chinese and Japanese shops’; NAA CP285/2 Bundle 1/B, New Hebrides.

42 Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 66.

43 Sophie Couchman, ‘The banana trade: Its importance to Melbourne's Chinese and Little Bourke Street, 1880s–1930s’, in Paul Macgregor (ed.), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the Pacific: Proceedings of an international public conference held at the Museum of Chinese Australian History Melbourne, 8–10th October 1993, pp. 80–3.

44 Aborigines often became directly involved in mining itself. Women used bark dishes in the process of yandying ore to separate tin from other rock and dirt. Quoted in Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 27.

45 May, Topsawyers; Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 76.

46 Church News 28 (1896), 41, quoted in Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 31.

47 Stephenson, Outsiders within, pp. 62–4.

48 Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 76.

49 Byrne, Denis, ‘Nervous landscapes: Race and space in Australia’, in Mar, Tracey Banivanua and Edmonds, Penelope (eds), Making settler colonial space: Perspectives on race, place and identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 111Google Scholar.

50 May, Topsawyers, pp. 194–7.

51 Wilton, Janis, Golden threads: The Chinese in regional New South Wales 1850–1950 (Armidale: New England Regional Art Museum, 2004), p. 17Google Scholar.

52 Masson, Elsie, An untamed territory, the Northern Territory of Australia (London: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 31–2Google Scholar.

53 May, Topsawyers, p. 141.

54 Ganter, Regina, Mixed relations: Asian–Aboriginal contact in North Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2006), pp. 149–58Google Scholar.

55 ‘Chinese Shopkeepers’, Cairns Post, 7 June 1937, 3.

56 Taam Sze Pui, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, p. 29.

57 Jack, Holmes and Kerr, ‘Ah Toy's garden’, 51.

58 Jack, Holmes and Kerr, ‘Ah Toy's garden’, 52.

59 Burns, ‘Of tongues and temporalities’, 189.

60 Guo, Daisy, ‘Autobiography’, in Pei, Dong Feng (ed.), Shanghai de Feng Hua Xue Yue (Shanghai Memorabilia) (Shanghai: Shanghai Historical Press, 2008), pp. 307–20Google Scholar.

61 M. Gurthrie, ‘A trip through Chinatown, sketcher. Northern sketcher’, The Queenslander, 30 December 1911, 8.

62 ‘Location of Chinese and Japanese shops’; ‘New Hebrides’.

63 Richard Waterhouse, ‘Australian rural towns and the ideology of progress and modernity, 1900–2000’, paper presented at Colonial Cities, Global Connections workshop, University of Sydney, 24 September 2010.

64 Goodall, Heather and Cadzow, Allison, ‘Salt Pan Creek: Rivers as border zones within the colonial city’, in Ghosh, Devleena, Goodall, Heather and Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk (eds), Water, sovereignty and borders in Asia and Oceania (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 190Google Scholar.

65 ‘Early history and foundation of the Western Stores 1889–1963’, Coles Myer archive, SLV, MS 13488, Box 1505.

66 ‘Picturesque fair’, Argus, 17 November 1933, 4.

67 ‘Early history and foundation of the Western Stores 1889–1963’.

68 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 112Google Scholar.

69 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Illusion of permanence: Interview with Arjun Appadurai’, Perspecta 34 (2002), 46Google Scholar.

70 Appadurai, ‘Illusion of permanence’.

71 Davison, Graeme and Brodie, Marc, ‘Introduction’, in Struggle country: The rural ideal in twentieth century Australia (Melbourne: Monash University ePress, 2005), p. xGoogle Scholar. See also Hirst, John, ‘The pioneer legend’, Historical Studies 18 (71) (1978), 316–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Davison and Brodie, ‘Introduction’, p. x.

73 Watson, D. B., Squatter, selector and storekeeper 1859–93 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968), pp. 97–126Google Scholar.

74 Taam, The life and work of Taam Sze Pui, p. 51.

75 ‘Location of Chinese and Japanese shops’; ‘New Hebrides’.

76 Taam, unpublished manuscript.

77 Taam, unpublished manuscript.

78 Williams, Michael, ‘In the Tang Mountains we have a big house’, East Asian History 25/26 (2003), 85–112Google Scholar.

79 Williams, ‘In the Tang Mountains’, 85.

80 ‘Kong Sing family tea merchant collection’, Chinese Australian History Museum Acc. 1322567, especially receipts relating to customs (Box 112).

81 Taam, unpublished manuscript, 21.

82 Taam, unpublished manuscript, 37.

83 William Liu, ‘Australia's Chinese connection’, unpublished manuscript, William Liu papers, MS 6294/1.

84 Liu, ‘Australia's Chinese connection’.

85 Liu, ‘Australia's Chinese connection’.

86 Kingsmill, John, Australia street: A boys-eye view of the 1920s and 1930s (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991), p. 64Google Scholar.

87 Kingsmill, Australia street, p. 65.

88 McArthur, Kathleen, Bread & dripping days: An Australian growing up in the 1920s (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1981), p. 44Google Scholar.

89 ‘A northern port: The pearlers of Broome’, Western Mail, 24 November 1938, 5.

90 ‘Chinese shopkeepers’, The West Australian, 11 May 1906, 7; ‘Chinese shopkeepers’, The Brisbane Courier, 28 December 1878, 5; ‘Trades and Labour Council’, The West Australian, 23 September 1897, 6.

91 ‘Through the sugar districts’, The Worker, 5 January 1901.

92 May, Topsawyers, p. 159.

93 Reynolds, North of Capricornia, p. 117.

94 ‘Chinese shops’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 18 December 1913, 6.

95 Fitzgerald, Big white lie, pp. 190–2.