Cultural Legacies of a Globalised Past
Regina Ganter
Australia’s connection with the Asia-Pacific long predates the conspicuous
focus that has been placed on our region since the Labor prime-ministership of
Paul Keating (1991-1996). The intercourse between the cultures of Asia and the
Pacific and the indigenous and white inhabitants of Australia was prolific
despite a determined effort to control these links through the White Australia
Policy. The flow of peoples and ideas from the region is under-valued in our
national historical narrative. We only need to look at our heritage lists and
registers to see how little recognition of the considerable evidence of our
multicultural heritage is reflected there.
Australian history is suffused with interconnections to the Asia-Pacific region.
In the age of sea transport places that are now considered remote – Cooktown,
Kupang, or Broome – were well networked and serviced, and the island
archipelago between Australia and China harboured several flourishing trade
networks facilitating migration, trade, and the flow of ideas. White Australia as
the central plank in the policy of a federated Australian nation itself was a
response to just this proximity and connectedness, but the idea of a white
Australian history is subverted by the manifold ways in which it was
undermined in practice. Strong connections between Australia and the Asia-
Pacific region revolved around trepanging1, pearling, gold mining, and
missionising. 2
From sandalwood to pearl shell: the Pacific trading paradigm
The Australian pearling industry, which became a pillar of economic activity on
the northern shores, emerged from the Pacific sandalwood trade. The other
legacy of that trade was the practice of blackbirding labour from the Pacific.
European traders keen on the lucrative China trade in tea, silk and porcelain
pursued luxury commodities from the Asia-Pacific region to redress the trade
imbalance resulting from a lack of Chinese demand for the European trade
goods. One of these luxuries for which there was a ready market in China was
sandalwood used for incense. Dorothy Shineberg has observed a series of shifts
in this labour-intensive resource-raiding industry.2 It was at first based on
bartering relationships with Polynesian chiefs who could commandeer local
workforces and were keen on European trade goods, particularly metals and
weapons. However, this left the traders exposed to unstable supply depending
on seasonal calendars and competing traditional obligations, and they began
setting up trading stations in Melanesia to which they imported labour, creating
a dependent workforce over which they had much more control. In the climate
of labour shortages resulting from the Australian gold rushes, such Pacific
trading companies extended their labour trade to the tropical east coast in the
early 1860s.
The quick depletion of sandalwood resources required a constant lookout for
new fields of activity, both in terms of geographical spread and the range of
resources sought, including tortoise shell, pearl shell, trepang, and other
products. The traders moved west towards New Guinea and Australia and were
setting up shore stations to gather trepang. The first trepang station in the Torres
Strait was established in 1862 at Warrior Island. From this station emanated the
first commercial harvest of pearl shell in Torres Strait in 1871, which quickly
erupted into a new industry. By 1877 sixteen owners ran 109 vessels in Torres
Strait, working from island stations and importing workers from the South
Pacific as swimming divers. The companies entering into pearling were wellknown
Pacific traders, like James Merriman, John Bell, Johann Cesar
Godeffroy, James Paddon, Robert Towns, and Henry Burns (later Burns Philp).
They brought with them their share-trading captains and boats, their connections
in the Pacific, their marketing channels, and their financial resources to act as
financiers, buyers and exporters of the produce.33
An administrative centre was established at first at Somerset (1863), and later at
Thursday Island (1877), to supervise this new economic activity, and to raise
revenue from it, and by 1879 the industry was so significant that Queensland
shifted its boundary northwards for the second time (1872 and 1879) to include
the whole of Torres Strait under its ambit.
The first pump diving boat was introduced in 1871, shortly after the discovery
of commercial pearl shell, and by 1877 more than half the fleet had the latest
deep diving equipment instead of relying on swimming divers. This changed the
dynamics of the industry. The work on a lugger now became focused on the
single diver on whose productivity the success of each boat depended. Instead
of importing large numbers of crew from the south Pacific for swimming
diving, recruiters increasingly targeted Malays, Filipinos and Japanese, and
ethnic hierarchies began to characterise the industry.
By the 1890s Japanese predominated in the diving industry, not only as divers
but also increasingly with an entrepreneurial involvement which led to a long
drawn-out struggle to reclaim white dominance. Every Australian pearling port
had a substantial Japanese population, consisting of permanent residents, mostly
merchants and their families, and a transient population of contract workers.
Well-established recruitment channels facilitated the flow and repatriation of
workers, and targeted impoverished villages in the provinces of Ehime and
Wakayama, so that in these villages, “Thursday Island seemed closer than
Tokyo”4. Such villages still pride themselves as having been the first in Japan to
have water-flush toilets, and to indulge in white bread and tea with milk. Their
‘Arafura divers’ opened horizons of economic opportunity and cultural
influences for these villagers.
Like sandalwooding, pearling (or rather, pearl shelling, since the main produce
was the shell) was a resource-raiding activity without an attempt to husband the
resource, so that the stocks became quickly depleted and required the constant
extension of the fields of operation. By the turn of the century most of the
Australian-based fishery operated outside of territorial limits. This weakened the
ability of the Australian governments to regulate the industry because pearling
companies could just as easily operate from Dutch colonies, or under any other
flag for that matter. This gave the master pearlers considerable leverage and
they achieved the exclusion of the pearling industry from the white Australia
policy, safeguarding their continued access to cheap and docile labour, the main4
reason why the northern Australian population remained much more Asiandominated
than the remainder of the continent until World War II.
By the 1930s the strong reliance on Japanese divers began to backfire. In a
period of ebullient industrialisation, the Japanese government began to lend
scientific support to its pearling fleets, and well-equipped fleets started to
operate in areas which the Australians considered their own.
The strong participation of Japanese fleets in offshore pearl fishing became a
sensitive issue during the 1951 peace treaty negotiations, which involved an
agreement on international fishing rights. The Australian government advanced
the continental shelf doctrine to claim rights to the off-shore pearl beds. The
United States had successfully argued the continental shelf doctrine after the
war to stake out exclusive rights over its oil reserves, but the doctrine had not
been tested with regard to sedentary fisheries. The Japanese negotiators stalled
and the Australian negotiators were reluctant to bring this matter before the
International Court of Justice fearing that Japan may be able to successfully
claim traditional rights to the pearl fishery on the strength of the long standing
Japanese participation in the pearl fishery. Eventually a bilateral agreement was
negotiated which side-stepped the continental shelf argument, as Japan agreed
to observe the same regulations as those binding Australian pearl shellers under
the Pearl-Shell Fishery Act, without accepting Australian claims to the area.
The Christian Pacific rim strategy
In the Torres Strait the year 1871 marks not only the discovery of pearl shell for
commercial use, but also the arrival of Christian missionaries, again from the
Pacific. Just like the European traders, the mission societies scrambled for fields
of influence. Insofar as newly acquired colonies supported mission endeavour at
all, the French favoured Catholic mission work whereas Dutch and British
territories were inclined towards Protestants. The interdenominational Protestant
London Missionary Society (LMS) had come under pressure in French New
Caledonia and sought to extend its reach into the virgin territory of New Guinea.
In 1871 it settled a group of Pacific Island missionary teachers and their wives
on Murray Island (Mer) and Dauan Island which were seen as outside the reach
of any colonial power. The LMS missionaries James Chambers and William
Lawes went on to New Guinea and left the evangelists to themselves.5
The effect of the Pacific Island evangelists on these islands without any external
government was swift. They established a ‘theocratic rule’ where even trivial
offences, such as quarrelling or making jokes about the missionaries were
punished with severe floggings.5 Even islanders as far away as Mabuiag (about
200km by sea) complained of their raids on women. They were able to withhold
or supply local labour to pearl shell and trepang station and formed strategic
business alliances with pearl shellers, becoming partners in their ventures.
Queensland extended its boundaries in 1879 and swiftly relocated the Pacific
Island evangelists to Darnley Island (Erub) keeping an eye on their activities.
The lasting legacies of the LMS stepping-stone strategy in the Torres Strait was
the amplification of the entanglement of local with Pacific Island genealogies
already underway through the island stations, and the ready acceptance of the
gospel in the Torres Strait.
Having extended its boundaries to the north twice already, Queensland annexed
the southern part of the non-Dutch area of the island of Papua in April 1883,
attempting to forestall German interest. But by this time Queensland’s
international reputation arising from the blackbirding trade and its treatment of
indigenous people was such that the McIlwraith government received nothing
but a strong rebuke from the British government. (After the German annexation
in 1884 Britain declared the remaining area a protectorate as British New
Guinea, which became an Australian-administered area after 1902.)
Fifteen years after the LMS had used the Torres Strait as a stepping stone into
New Guinea, the German Lutherans followed suit, responding to the German
acquisition of the northern part of New Guinea as Kaiser Wilhelmsland in 1884.
The German advance into New Guinea was at first the responsibility of the
Neuguinea-Kompagnie. Like most other colonial trading companies preceding
direct rule, this company resented and resisted interference from missionaries.
The Lutheran missionary Johann Flierl, as the missionary spearhead into the
German territory, was refused permission to board the company’s ships, and
was therefore delayed on his northward journey for a couple of months in
Cooktown, still a fairly new place servicing the Palmer River goldrush.6 This
was actually the closest trading post to a future mission in New Guinea (soon to
be overtaken by Thursday Island, which was opened to settlement in 1885).
Flierl expected that Cooktown could become a recuperation station for staff
from a future mission in tropical New Guinea, and proceeded to make
arrangements to form a Lutheran mission at an unsupervised reserve that had
been set aside for Aborigines at Cape Bedford in 1881, without even inspecting6
the site. In January 1886 he led a party to the site, assisted by local government
and police officers. This became Elim mission (later part of Hope Vale).
Internal and external dynamics then converged to result in a string of three
Lutheran missions on the east coast, followed by a string of three Moravian-
Presbyterian missions on the west coast of the Cape. This Christian colonisation
of the north was facilitated by a Queensland government concerned about the
German presence to the near north, the extension of white settlement into the
north, and the supervision of the pearling and trepang industry that operated at
the margins of the influence of the state.
For the Queensland government, the mission was a welcome receptacle for
coastal Aboriginal labour then under much pressure from recruiters in the pearl
shell and bêche-de-mer industry, while in Cooktown Aborigines had been
excluded from town after dark in 1885, after an initial policy of ‘bringing them
in’ to perform odd jobs.
The mission idea had been recommended to the Queensland government by the
influential Moravian missionary Friedrich Hagenauer from the Aboriginal
Protection Board of Victoria, who had conducted a tour of the north in 1885.
His idea was to establish missions on which indigenous people could be trained
as useful labour, so that they could replace the imported Pacific Islanders whose
importation had brought so much international criticism. Negotiations with the
Moravians led to the setting up of Bloomfield (later Wujal-Wujal) in 1886 but
the Moravians retreated from the idea because Premier Griffith was lukewarm
with support. The Lutherans therefore took over that station in 1887. Also in
1886, a separate, and short-lived Lutheran mission was established at Mari
Yamba near Proserpine, which was essentially the result of splintering among
the German Lutheran synods. The Moravians finally commenced their work on
Cape York Peninsula in association with Presbyterians at Mapoon in 1891,
adding Weipa in 1898 and Aurukun in 1904, with a short-lived attempt at
Mornington Island (1914-18).
Government support for missions was always qualified, since the aims of state
and church only converged on the ‘civilising’ project, leaving much room for
disagreement. The Queensland government always insisted on English as the
mission language, whereas Lutherans emphasized the need to acquire local
languages. Lutheran missionaries therefore resisted the breaking up of language
groups and the removals of individual children and adults. Half of all mission7
work in the Australian colonies was conducted by Germans until 1850, and half
of the Queensland missions were staffed by German speakers until World War
I. The result is that much valuable work was conducted on indigenous
languages, recording vocabularies, grammars, oral traditions, and translating
bible texts.
The German missionaries on Cape York preferred to offer employment on the
missions rather than allow mission residents to sign on with outside employers.
Because the soil on the gazetted reserves was unproductive for most crops, they
embarked on sandalwooding, collecting trepang, pearl shell and trochus shell,
turtle and dugong fishing, in order to keep mission residents away from contact
with civilisation, or “syphilisation”, as Rev. G. H. Schwarz at Mapoon
expressed it.
Coconut plantations became a staple mission activity in Papua New Guinea and
tropical Australia. The Queensland government handed out free seedlings to
new missions, and transnational companies interested in palm oil and copra, like
Lever Brothers and Cadbury, supported such initiatives. In 1904 an LMS
missionary, Fred Walker, initiated a community development scheme for Papua
and Torres Strait based on coconut plantations to generate cash income with
which community boats could be acquired on a time payment scheme. He
intended this scheme as a direct competition with trading companies like Burns
Philp who paid the lowest possible prices for copra and generated dependence
on their company trading posts. The LMS distanced itself from the idea and
Walker had to quit the mission society to form the Papuan Industries Limited
(PIL).
Torres Strait Islanders embraced the scheme with enthusiasm. Island after island
acquired community luggers with which they also engaged in sedentary and
pelagic fishing activities, competing with the commercial pearl shellers in the
Torres Strait. They also used the boats for inter-island visits, and supported each
others’ cultural activities, such as church building, with liberal gifts of coconuts.
The scheme harboured the potential for genuine community development,
creating economic independence and the potential for self-determination. For
that reason the Queensland protection bureaucracy, which was extending its
administrative reach into Aboriginal lives, resisted it. Torres Strait Islanders
were brought under the Aboriginal Protection Act in 1904, and gradually
government schoolteachers and superintendents on the islands took control of
the lugger scheme. By 1936 the Papuan Industries Limited had been8
transformed into an Island Industries Board administered by the Director of
Native Affairs, and Torres Strait Islanders went on strike, refusing to work on
the luggers because they had lost all control. According to Nonie Sharp, this
was the decisive moment when the island communities, belonging to different
language groups in the Torres Strait, converged into a regional identity.7 This
regional identity has given them the political clout to be considered as a separate
indigenous group in Australia next to Aboriginal peoples, so that all policies,
institutions and instruments dealing with indigenous people now refer to
‘Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders’. It is only under the pressure of
competing native title claims that this regional identity might be threatened in
the twenty-first century.
The cultural legacies that emerged from colonial activities in the Australian and
Asia-Pacific region are submerged but palpable. Pacific trading with a view to
the Chinese market heralded the pearling industry which became the economic
pillar of far north Australia. The trade also transmogrified into the mass
importation of indentured workers from the Pacific under conditions that
aroused universal condemnation from humanists. The labour trade so tarnished
the reputation of the Queensland government that it was held incapable of
administering yet more indigenous populations in neighbouring Papua, with the
result that the northward extension of Queensland’s boundaries was halted. Both
of these activities – pearling and Pacific indenture – imprinted the northern
population so that whites were never more than a fragile minority, as southern
observers nervously observed.
Colonial trading also paved the way for mission activities, although the trading
companies controlling new territories were often reluctant to admit missionaries.
The scramble for Papua New Guinea brought both the LMS and the Lutherans
to North Queensland, where both denominations developed successful mission
fields. For Cape York the cultural legacy is the preservation of indigenous
languages facilitated by German missionaries, and for Torres Strait it consists of
a strong commitment to Christian faith, admixture with Pacific Island ancestors
and the emergence of a regional identity.
Prior entanglements
At the top end of Australia the entanglements with the Asia-Pacific are much
older than the British settlement. The upshot is that Muslims were entrenched in
northern Australia long before any British interest there.9
The Australian north coast formed the far distant fringe of a trading zone
between China, India, and what became the Dutch East Indies. Chroniclers of
the kingdom of Gowa in Sulawesi claim to have incorporated ‘Marege’ (the top
end of Australia) as early as 16408, but solid historical evidence of contact with
the top end only commenced in 1751, when a Chinese merchant undertook a
voyage from Timor and landed in what was thought to be north Australia.
Alexander Dalrymple of the British East India Company gave some description
of a trade to north Australia in 1763. In 1769 he published ‘A Plan for
Extending the Commerce of this Kingdom and of the East-India Company’,
again referring to lucrative trading excursions from Sulawesi to north Australia,
just a year before James Cook was expressly instructed to chart the remaining
terra incognita of the Australian coastline.
The trade, centred on the port of Makassar, revolved around trepang that was
marketed to southern China. By the time Matthew Flinders observed this trade
first hand in 1803 it was well established. Following various trade routes
between Makassar and ‘Marege’, Macassan fishing fleets rode the annual
monsoon winds for four-month voyages.
Visiting the same camps each year, they established close relationships with
coastal Yolngu people. There are reliable reports of Yolngu travelling with them
back to Makassar, where they formed families, and of families formed by
Macassans9 with Yolngu. As a result of this long-standing and close connection,
Yolngu languages are infused with Macassan words, including personal and
place names, and Yolngu identity is infused with the Macassan contact history,
revealed in a vast range of cultural productions from paintings to songs and
dances, to story-telling, even basket-weaving patterns. The earliest Europeans
on the north coast observed with amazement that local Aborigines addressed
them in Malay, which had become the trade language used to communicate with
strangers. In 1906, the year that the Pacific Islanders were expelled from
Queensland, the South Australian government also forbade the Macassan visits
to its northern territory.
The tangible traces of this contact consist of wells dug by Macassans and the
characteristic tamarind trees marking their former camps, but much more
profound is the intangible heritage expressed in linguistic and cultural traces
among Yolngu, and the sense often expressed that Yolngu and Macassans are
‘one people’ united by deep roots of spiritual kinship. Just as in Torres Strait,
indigenous identity among Yolngu is extremely strong, and incorporates creole10
ancestries, in contrast to the black-white binary thinking that is essentially
premised on the untenable and ahistorical idea of racial purity.
Another trail of legacy arising from this Macassan contact history is the interest
which it aroused among British in the north of Australia. In the lengthy debate
about the reasons for founding a British colony at Botany Bay, a number of
authors have pointed out the attraction of trade with China as a major strategic
consideration, but no reference has been made to the observations by Alexander
Dalrymple published the year before Captain James Cook charted the East
coast. Matthew Flinders received some of Dalrymple’s notes from Joseph
Banks, who helped to finance the circumnavigation in order to advance the
commercial interests of the British East India Company. The precise contents of
these notes have remained undiscovered, but it is tempting to speculate that they
revealed a promising trade. During his ten-months circumnavigation of the
continent, Flinders spent five-and-a-half months in the Macassan trading zone,
from the Sir Edward Pellew islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he found
some of their traces, to Kupang, where he obtained confirmation of the
information obtained from the Macassans at Cape Wilberforce (near Yirrkala).
From Kupang Flinders hurried back to Sydney performing only the most
perfunctory charting according to the letter of his brief. He was at that time
harbouring plans to go into private trading with his friend George Bass, but Bass
perished at sea and Flinders himself was detained by the French for six years
and died soon after his release. Had he been thinking of the trepang trade as new
commercial opportunity? French explorer Nicolas Baudin, too, had encountered
a fleet of Macassans on the west coast.
After the Napoleonic wars, Phillip Parker King completed the task left
unfinished by Flinders from 1818 to 1822, and he, too encountered a fleet of
Macassans on the Kimberley coast. Soon after his report was received, the
British established an outpost at Melville Island in 1824, exactly where they
thought the main Macassan trading station was. This was even before the
western half of the New Holland continent was claimed by the British. Being
unsuccessful in establishing a trading relationship with the Macassans, the
outpost was shifted to Raffles Bay on the Cobourg Peninsula in 1827, and
abandoned in 1829. It was followed up with another attempt from 1838 to 1849
at Port Essington, also on Cobourg Peninsula. Clearly the Macassan activity
attracted the British interest to the north coast.11
The New Gold Mountain and the polyethnic north
Whereas pearling was the main driver of immigration from the Asia-Pacific in
the north, gold forms another strong link in the entanglements with the region.
Soon after California became known in southern China as the ‘Gold Mountain’,
Victoria became the New Gold Mountain (xin jin shan), and 10,000 Chinese
arrived in Melbourne in 1854 alone.10 This was the year of the Eureka Stockade,
followed in 1855 by an immigration restriction act that imposed a poll tax and
limitation on the immigration of Chinese. In 1856 more than 10 per cent of gold
prospectors in Victoria were Chinese, rising to 20 per cent by 1860, the year in
which gold-diggers in New South Wales rampaged against the presence of
Chinese on the diggings at Lambing Flat near Young. Finally that colony, too,
responded (as South Australia had already done) with immigration restrictions
and an 1861 Goldfields Act Amendment Act targeted against the Chinese.
These dynamics were repeated in Queensland in the 1860s, the Northern
Territory in the 1870s and Western Australia in the 1890s.
By this time anti-Chinese sentiment had become transformed into a generalised
anti-Asian, or rather, pro-white stance. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds
(2008) observe how closely the settler societies monitored each other. Charles
Pearson warned Australians in 1892 that “the time will come” when the most
populous nation on earth, then making up one-third of the world’s population,
would elbow the white settler society aside. As a dire warning he cited the
example of Singapore, where the Chinese population had increased from a few
thousand to 86,000 within just over decade. In March 1896 a premiers’
conference in Sydney extended the restrictions on Chinese to “all coloured
races”. Half a year later, in the face of increased arrivals from India, the
government in Natal (a province of South Africa) resolved “we must follow the
example of New South Wales”. The requirement to write an application in a
European language in the Natal 1897 Immigration Act was adapted in the
Australian Immigration Act of 1901 in a manoeuvre to circumvent the
protections implied in the idea of a ‘British subject’ which was a cornerstone of
Indian protests in southern Africa.11
The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 shook the confidence of white settler
societies and firmed their resolve to pursue racial homogeneity. A mass rally in
San Francisco in December 1906 achieved the exclusion of Japanese children
from schools (Chinese children were already excluded), and in Canada the
Asiatic Exclusion League rioted in Vancouver in October 1907 against Chinese12
and Japanese. In 1910 Boer-British hostilities were reconciled with the Union
of South Africa over the realisation that whites had to unite to save the
Transvaal “from the fate that had overtaken places like Mauritius and
Jamaica”.12
By the 1890s the Australian north was suffused with non-white residents and
immigrants, and whites constituted but a thin layer of the population. In 1888
more than three-quarters of the settler population in the Northern Territory were
Chinese. By 1910 the Asian population of the Territory had fallen back to about
two thirds of settlers, but settlers constituted less than 20 per cent of the
population compared to Aborigines. The central business districts of the coastal
trading centres had a definite south-east Asian flair, and growing up in Broome,
Darwin, Thursday Island, Katherine, Derby, or Wyndham meant growing up in
a polyethnic society, not in a predominantly white one. Nowadays only the
external territories of Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands have a population
reminiscent of the whole northern coast at the turn of the last century.
The northern settler communities were much more tolerant of Asians in their
midst than the goldfield populations, with a strong sense that their economic
prosperity actually depended on Asian businesses and workers. The Buffaloes
Australian Rules football team, formed in 1916, was dominated by Aboriginal
and Asian-Aboriginal players, and the North Australian Workers Union
(established in 1927) had a decidedly mixed membership.13 Southern observers
commented with concern about the mixed northern population, with the towns
looking like “proper little Japanese principalities”. Pearl-shellers and sugar
growers came under federal pressure to seek alternative sources of labour. In
1906 South Sea Islanders were expatriated and the Macassan visits were
stopped, but the pearlers were able to continue recruiting until World War II,
which spelled the end of the poly-ethnic north as Japanese were interned and
later repatriated, and Chinese townships demolished in a strategy to prevent the
re-formation of Asian settlements.
Visible legacies
The most visible legacies of historical entanglements with the Asia-Pacific are
the mixed lineages of indigenous people in Torres Strait and northern Australia,
and some of their cultural practices, such as a predilection for chilli and rice.
There are some temples, mosques and joss-houses dotted around Australia that
stem from the 19th century, but none have made it from the old Register of the13
National Estate to the new Commonwealth and National Heritage Lists, with the
exception of two sites in external territories, the West Island mosque on Cocos
(Keeling) Island, and the Malay Kampong on Christmas Island. Many
cemeteries, and most of the older cemeteries in northern Australia, have
Muslim, Chinese, and Japanese sections. On the state heritage registers we
might find Chinese temples in Innisfail, Darwin, Melbourne, or Bendigo;
Afghan cemeteries, mosques, or sites of riot such as at Buckland River; but, on
the national heritage list, the only indication of our migrant history is the
Bonegilla migrant camp in New South Wales.
As for Australia’s world heritage, represented through 18 inscriptions, there is
nothing to reflect a multicultural Australia, or a nation of immigrants. From
1981 to 2003 Australia listed 15 sites, all of them natural heritage sites, that
were subsequently re-inscribed as also having cultural significance for
indigenous people. None of Australia’s inscriptions on the world heritage list
show fusion, migration, or religious or ethnic tolerance. How different that is to
the nations from which the migrants I have just referred to had come!
In southern China whole villages were drained of young men who took
advantage of opportunities in California, Australia, New Zealand, Chile,
Singapore, Japan and elsewhere. Colonial pressures and weak government
produced social turmoil and the relative wealth of émigré villages that received
transfers from overseas, and the absence of their young men, rendered such
villages more vulnerable to attacks from bandit gangs. In one of them,
Australian Researcher Michael Williams found a safe marked ‘Anthony
Hordern, Sydney’14 A quirky architectural feature of such villages are fortified
towers (diaolou) financed from overseas transfers. These served as
watchtowers, shelters and for the safekeeping of valuables and stores, usually
for several families. Often surrounded by a moat, they have the appearance of
miniature castles. In 2007 China listed a diaolou site as world heritage. It is
described as a site of fusion architecture that emerged from traditional migrant
links to Australasia, the United States and South Asia.
This site represents an emerging trend in thinking about national heritage. In the
same year Japan listed a silver mine area at Honshu Island, also describing it as
a site representing of cultural exchange arising from extensive trade with Korea,
China, East Asia and Europe. The inscription places much emphasis on transnational
connectedness.14
Similar meanings arise from the baroque churches in the Philippines, world
heritage listed in 1993 as representing a fusion baroque style emerging from
Spanish, Filipino and Chinese collaborations. A number of sites listed in the
1990s represent the layering of meanings and religious co-existence, such as is
evident in several Chinese sites where Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian elements
converge. The Prambanan and Borobodur temples in Indonesia, listed in 1991,
signal respect for Buddhist and Hindu temples in a predominantly Muslim
society, and post-Taliban Afghanistan listed the Bamyan Buddha site in 2003
after the statues were destroyed in March 2001, as a signal for a new deal in
Afghanistan.
World heritage listing and national heritage listing is a way for a nation to
display what it values about itself. What is significant about a nation’s history
and identity often arises from its connections to other parts of the world. The
most unique cultural phenomena are generally those that are most connected to
elsewhere (the Eiffel tower, the Statue of Liberty). Australia’s sites of cultural
significance on the world heritage list (Sydney Opera House listed in 2007, the
Melbourne Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens, listed in 2004, and the 11
convict sites listed in July 2010) all sit comfortably with the view that the
Australian past was ‘98 per cent British’. But this image clearly only fits a very
short period in Australian history, and all these sites actually do have
transnational undertones. They refer to an international exhibition and
international trade, and an international competition and a Danish architect, and
the convict trade which was a global phenomenon in human capital. It is the
way in which we think about and describe these sites that makes the difference.
As a nation of immigrants we have no shortage of sites that lend themselves to
displaying a nation of immigrants. The Queensland Heritage Register includes
the Cooktown cemetery, Croydon Chinese Temple, the Hou Wang Temple in
Atherton and Atherton Chinatown, but not the Innisfail Chinese temple that was
on the Register of the National Estate. But one needs to look hard to find such
sites referring to immigrants, as the keyword search option bravely lists
Aboriginal, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, South-Sea Islander, Afghan,
Scandinavian, German (and many other) kinds of heritage, but returns no strikes
under these keywords. The New South Wales Heritage Register is more
accommodating, with strikes under ‘migrants’ and ‘ethnic influence’. The
Western Australian Heritage Register should contain many references to a
polyethnic past, given the prominence of the pearling industry and the exposure
of that states’ northern coastland to Asia. The Register contains the Chung Wah15
Hall in Perth (which doesn’t turn up under the keyword Chinese), the Sikh
Cemetery in Canning (which doesn’t turn up under a search for Indian or
Afghan), and the Broome cemetery (which turns up under most of these
searches, but not under ‘pearling’). The South Australian and Tasmanian
registers can only be searched through the Australian Heritage Database (which
includes all states, as well as sites that are not registered on any statutory list).
Only the Victorian and Northern Territory heritage registers are fully keyword
searchable and return 53 and 11 strikes respectively under ‘Chinese’. The
Northern Territory Heritage Register most completely whitewashes its history.
It contains the Sue Wah Chin building, and Chinatowns at Brocks Creek and
Pine Creek, but in the absence of a search option one needs to be creative find
other references to Chinese (for example, under Kohinoor Adit), while the
entries on the Palmerston cemetery in Darwin, the Daly River, and the Pine
Creek Bakery (associated with the Ah Toy family) make no reference to
Chinese whatsoever. This is the same Northern Territory where three-quarters
of the settler population were Chinese in the 1880s. The entry on Victoria
Settlement is entirely silent on the Macassans who were the reason it was
formed. Here we have the ultimate irony of a heritage without a history, which
renders it meaningless, and certainly bland.
During a 2008 excursion to the Chendge Mountain Resort (world heritage listed
in 1994) our Chinese guides were leaving us in no doubt that the Hebei area
with its outer temples was a site of trans-cultural harmony between Chinese,
Mongolians, and Tibetans, due to tangled histories of migration and political
patronage, and an association with the Panchen Lama since 1780. It is perhaps
not surprising that modern China is keen to impress visitors with its
multicultural histories. But Australia’s image overseas does not encourage
nonchalance about our own poly-ethnic histories. We have many interesting
sites of cultural interaction. We would do well to make much more of them.
Chapter notes
1 Trepang, or bêche-de-mer is a sea slug (holothurian) used in Chinese haute
cuisine. There was a ready market in southern China for this luxury
commodity.
2 Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood
Trade in the South-West Pacific 1830-1865 (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1967).16
3 Regina Ganter, The Pearl-Shellers of Torres Strait: Resource Use,
Development and Decline, 1860s-1960s (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1994).
4 Regina Ganter, “The Wakayama Triangle: Japanese Heritage of North
Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 6 (1999): 55–63.
5 Nonie Sharp, Torres Strait Islands 1879-1979 – Theme for an Overview, La
Trobe Working Papers in Sociology (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1980). Also in C. Pennefather, “Report of an Inspection of Torres
Strait on HMS Pearl,” in Queensland Votes and Proceedings, vol. 2, 1880.
6 See entries on Hope Vale and Johann Flierl at the German Missionaries in
Queensland web-directory: “Cape Bedford Mission (Hope Vale) (1886-
1942),” prepared by Regina Ganter, German Missionaries in Queensland,
2009, http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/qld-mission/cape-bedford-missionhope-
vale-1886-1942 (accessed September 2009), and “Flierl, Johann (1858-
1947),” prepared by Regina Ganter, German Missionaries in Queensland,
2009, http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/biography/flierl-johann-1858-1947
(accessed September 2009).
7 Nonie Sharp, “Culture Clash in the Torres Strait Islands: The Maritime Strike
of 1936,” Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 11, no. 3
(1981-82): 107–26.
8 Abdul Razak Daeng Patunru, Sedjarah Goa (Jajasan Kebudajan Di
Makassar, 1967).
9 Macassan is a short-hand description incorporating all the ethnic groups that
formed part of the trepang trading fleets, including Timorese, Sama Bajo or
sea gypsies, and people from various parts of Sulawesi.
10 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White
Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 2008), 15.
11 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 72, 125, 146.
12 Jan Smuts, in ibid., 217.
13 Julia Martinez, “Ethnic Policy and Practice in Darwin,” in Mixed Relations:
Asian/Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, by Regina Ganter (Crawley,
WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2006): 136–39.
14 Michael Williams, “Brief Sojourn in Your Native Land: Sydney Links with
South China,” in “Asians in Australian History,” edited by Regina Ganter,
special issue, Queensland Review 6, no. 2 (1999): 11–23.17
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