Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

The title of this paper is taken from a testimonial signed by a number of Gundagai residents on the departure for China in 1903 of Mark Loong after sixteen years in the district. That the notion of a person ‘sojourning’ in China is a contradiction of the prevailing ‘sojourner’ concept usually held about early Chinese migrants in Australia is the result the failure of Australian-Chinese research to fully appreciate the significance of family and district links between Australia and China and their impact upon the motivation, organisation and settlement patterns of Chinese people in Australia before the middle of the twentieth century. Without such an appreciation most research into Australian-Chinese history has focused only on those who established families in Australia or who ran successful businesses. This paper will focus on describing some features of these family and districts links with regard to that generation who arrived after the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1870s but before the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, who originated in one south China district, Zhongshan , and who lived primarily in one Australian city, Sydney. These restraints are partly due to reliance on sources such as the administrative files of the Immigration Restriction Act which begin only in 1901, and partly to the fact that this research represents a first step in the investigation of the significance of district of origin and the people of Zhongshan district in Sydney are the first to be investigated.

In 1824, a group of London businessmen established the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC), Australia's oldest chartered company. Their prospectus listed amongst their objectives, after the raising of sheep and cattle, the production ‘at a more distant time, of Wine, Olive-Oil, Hemp, Flax, Silk, Opium, &c. as articles of export to Great Britain’. In 1828, a local manager reported that he thought that ‘if the labour of the Blacks can be procured for the operative part the culture [of opium] would likely prove profitable to the Company.’ And in 1833, the Australian manager of the company sent the London Board a sample of the first opium grown on company lands in the Hunter River area. The board had it evaluated by a pharmacist, who reported that it was ‘of fair, merchantable quality, about equal to Egyptian Opium. — It contains two thirds of the quantity of Morphia usually found in the best Turkey Opium. In this market, when Turkey Opium is worth 15s./ p lb., we have no doubt that such Opium as your Sample would sell for 14s/ p Ib. On the basis of this disappointing assessment, the Australian Agricultural Company abandoned opium growing — and opium growing was abandoned in Australia for another hundred and fifty years.

From the late 19th century, a scattering of small Japanese communities gradually established themselves around the northern coast of Australia. These communities existed as ethnic minorities within already established communities of Europeans and indigenous Australians in towns such as Broome, Darwin and in the sugargrowing areas of northern Queensland. The largest of these communities were found on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, and Broome, in Western Australia. At the outbreak of World War II, Thursday Island was the largest Japanese community in the country.

This paper examines the ‘Malay’ community in pre-war Darwin, focusing on those men who were brought to Australia to work in the pearling industry. It considers their status within the community, and questions the degree to which the White Australia policy impinged upon their lives. The tenn ‘Malay’ in this context does not refer to the ‘Malays’ of present-day Malaysia, but rather to the ambiguous colonial construction which was loosely based on notions of ‘racial’ grouping. Adrian Vickers’ study of South-East Asian ‘Malay’ identity points to its multiple forms: the colonial constructions of the British and the Dutch; the existence of non-Muslim Malays; and the many ethnic groups whose identities cut across the national boundaries which form present-day Malaysia and Indonesia and the southern Philippines. In the Australian context, the works of John Mulvaney and Campbell Macknight have examined Macassan contact with northern Aboriginal groups, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria. According to Mulvaney, the term ‘Macassan’ was used to refer to the Bugis and Macassan seafarers who came to Australia from southern Sulawesi. He notes, however, that nineteenth-century Europeans, such as French commander Baudin and Matthew Flinders referred to them as ‘Malays’.

Romantic Broome — the pearling centre of the North West … the locale of exciting novels! White-sailed luggers skimming across azure seas in the early dawn. Colowful Asiatics jostling in Sheba Lane — the famous street 0’ Pearls. And languorous tropical nights beneath the glittering southern Cross.