The performance of ‘Chinese music’ in Australian has a long and varied history. Performances of sonic arts which display a Chinese origin or connection range across various genres including classical, folk, opera, popular and sacred music. The performers are and have been equally diverse, including immigrants, international students, visiting artists and cosmopolitans from mainland China, the Sinosphere and the population of ‘Chinese overseas’, as well as people born or permanently residing in Australia of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage. This chapter focuses on contemporary practice of different genres and on ethnographic examples from our own experience, but as space and historical records allow, we also look back in time. Our discussion illustrates some of the main ways that music has served to enhance social connections within and beyond Australia’s Chinese community, including within an Australian sociocultural fabric that has increasingly acknowledged and valued cultural diversity and multiplicities of cultural identity.

Save the Children was revived during the war and became a major organisation in dispersing funds to local children after the war, as discussed in Chapter 8. This signified a major shift in the role of the Fund in Australia, with localised branches working for the first time within Australia and in the Asian region. These activities directly impacted on Indigenous and migrant children, framed around the assimilation policies. The White Australia policy bound these endeavours. In Chapter 8 I consider two broad arguments. The first is that while the Save the Children branch developed a new localised identity, a form of imperial humanitarianism remained. My claim is that it did so through assimilation policies – which promoted an Australian way of life based on a White Britishness – that underpinned humanitarian work with Aboriginal children and war migrants. While this might not be surprising, it did make the Fund unique in post-war Australia. It was the only organisation that linked international humanitarianism to humanitarianism in Australia through its focus on Indigenous children and newly arrived war-refugee children. Arguably, these connections were possible only through a focus on children and the insistence that children were innocent, vulnerable victims across the globe. Second, this chapter continues the thread of examining the biography of lesser-known activists such as nurse Florence Grylls, which allows us to consider humanitarianism in action through attention to these campaigners.

Chapter 2 introduces the eighteen major camps created in Australia to intern “enemy aliens,” as well as overseas internees/refugees and POWs, as an expanding military-camp typology, an extension of the punitive-space typologies that had historically filtered entry into the continent. Unlike in other case studies, the proximity of POW and internee populations to both theaters of conflict forced Australia to devise evermore complex schemes that would segregate nationals of belligerent countries, as well as the political factions within them. The centerpiece of this chapter is the Waranga Basin’s Tatura group of seven camps – the key camp cluster in Victoria.