Review of Paul Jones' 'Chinese-Australian journeys: Records on travel, migration and settlement 1860-1975'

Abstract

In the mid 1980s when I began my own journey into Australia's Chinese history I was guided by Jennifer Cushman's plea to move away from the obsession with the White Australia policy and to relocate the Chinese within their own communities and, in so doing, to make reference to the expanding literature on the overseas Chinese elsewhere (Cushman 1984). How pleased Cushman would be now. Twenty years later, the hole which was the history of the Chinese in Australia is starting to be filled by a variety of approaches and emphases. Community and family historians, archaeologists, sociologists, sinologists, museum curators, public historians, academic historians and archivists are all wielding their individually shaped tools of trade. A measure of this growth in activity is Paul Jones' 'Chinese-Australian journeys'. This is Number 21 in the Research Guides commissioned by the National Archives of Australia (NAA). Tellingly, Number 1 in the series is Julie Stacker and Perri Stewart's earlier and New South Wales focused 'Chinese immigrants and Chinese Australians in NSW' (1997). These guides mark the increased usage of the very rich National Archives of Australia records on the Chinese, and the organisation of Jones' 'Chinese-Australian journeys' reflects the increasing focus on the Chinese communities and the experiences of individual Chinese-Australians. Jones provides a very brief overview of the history of the Chinese presence in Australia and of the legislation generated to control the flow of immigrants and to shape their settlement patterns and experiences. The guide is then divided into thematic sections which focus on policy, arrival and settlement patterns, naturalisation and alien registration, wartime experiences, community, and Chinese in New Guinea and Pacific Island territories. Each section offers a brief introduction explaining the historical context, government actions and legislation that created the documentation, and the nature of the records and the evidence they offer. This is followed by a detailed listing of the relevant holdings by capital city. Occasional photographs from the records and reproductions of documents give a taste of the look and feel of the material available.