Anti-Chinese Cartoon from The Bulletin, 1886
The second half of the nineteenth century saw not only a change in migration to Australia, as, as an effect of the gold rush, thousands of Chinese migrants came to the colonies, but also a shifting public opinion and an emerging ‘white’ Australian consciousness. An effect of this consciousness of Australian whiteness was a growing hostility towards the Chinese migrants. Contemporary newspaper articles, especially letters to the editors, show that even though the leading voices of Anti-Chinese resentment were English or Scottish, many, if not most, Irish-Australians expressed the same hate and hostility towards the Chinese as their British compatriots. As in western parts of the United States of America, this hostility made it easier for the Irish to fit into the new, emerging ‘Australian’ society.[1]
It is remarkable to see how the public opinion towards the Chinese shifted during the second half of the nineteenth-century. In the 1850s, they were often pitied as ‘slaves’ shipped to the colonies under false promises and then used and abused in the most horrible manner. ‘Australian’ workers raised complaints about this, as cheap Chinese labour was unwelcome competition. Soon enough, the argument became not only one of economics and access to labour, but one about identity and race.
Anti-Chinese sentiment
One leading Anti-Chinese voice of public opinion in the second half of the nineteenth century was the Bulletin magazine published in Sydney from 1880 (and still published today!). This publication, which changed its slogan from ‘Australia to the Australians’ to ‘Australia to the Whites’ in 1886, pointed out that the Chinese were ‘not morally, physically or intellectually fit to sit in the same continent with the Europeans’ adding that the ‘Chinese remains unclean … he doesn’t read the papers, he doesn’t wash, he neglects all the first duties of white humanity.’ The rhetorical question asked after these slurs was: ‘Then why should he enjoy its privileges?’[2]
The Bulletin often referred to the Chinese as ‘Mongolians’, recalling pictures of wild, looting hordes in the reader’s mind. This rhetorical trick was used by many demagogues until well into the twentieth century to point out an eastern danger to a western, European country.[3] ‘Western’ and ‘European’ was evidently how many Australians saw their emerging nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. To show the dangers of Chinese migration, the Bulletin referred to America, where most of the population wanted the Chinese gone, but as there were already too many of them, it was impossible to get rid of those ‘aliens’. The ‘Mongolian Octopus’ represented by the illustration above seemed to already have taken control over the cities of America’s west coast.
Another leading Anti-Chinese newspaper was the Boomerang, a radical paper published in Brisbane, Queensland, by William Lane, son of an Irishman and an Englishwoman, who grew up in Bristol and emigrated to Australia in the 1870s. This publication promoted a bitter and absolute picture of race, stating that races could and must never mix. It defended the Anti-Chinese riots in the 1880s as self-defense and actions for the good of white Australia. William Lane himself was horrified by the idea of a mixed-race Australia, a ‘piebald population’ as he put it. In his fear, he tried to be a prophet, and in a twelve part serial, predicted a race war between ‘the whites’ and ‘the yellows’ for the beginning of the twentieth century. This war, his paper stated, would be a decisive battle between western and eastern culture that the west would win as had occurred at Salamis in 480 BC, Tours in 732 AD, or at the Siege of Vienna in 1683.[4]
Another reason for this hostility against the Chinese was that they were seen as underdeveloped. Their mentality was hence seen as a threat to ‘the Australian way of life’, which was characterised by strong workers’ unions and worker’s rights. It was a widespread belief that the Chinese would retard the colonies. As the New South Wales MP Angus Cameron, a Scottish carpet-maker and ‘the first labour parliamentarian’, stated:
the Chinese endangered ‘the whole community of having its character transformed and demoralized by the influx of a race alien to us in every feeling that we praise and cherish’. [5]
Irish views of the Chinese
Significantly, such arguments and opinions can also be found in articles and letters to the editor of the Freeman’s Journal. This was an ‘Irish’ English language newspaper published in New South Wales since 1850 (during its history, it has also been published as Catholic Freeman’s Journal and The Catholic Weekly). The focus was on Irish affairs in Europe as well as in the colonies. As public opinion in the colonies, especially in New South Wales, became more and more concerned with remaining white and ‘British’, the heritage of others, not only the Chinese, was openly used in political confrontations.[6]
The Irish faced another issue when confronted with the ‘Chinese question’, as they sometimes still were victims of discrimination themselves, especially from the Anglican governing, propertied, and business interests who openly referred to the Chinese as ‘the new Irish’ and compared them to the Irish working in England for a lower wage than his English counterpart.[7] It was seen as especially insulting to compare the Irish settlers, or even Irish migrants who went to England or the United States, with the labourers from China, who were, as one 1862 article in the Freeman’s Journal stated,
‘certainly undesirable colonists … suspicious of worse crimes than generally disgrace humanity.’[8]
It was a pattern that neither in the articles or in the letters to the editor of the Freeman’s Journal that such allegations or suspicions were further explored or explained. (The Bulletin was more explicit giving the historian an insight into the Anti-Chinese mindset, declaring that the Chinese to have no respect for the authorities and condemning their ghettoisation.) However, it was not so much the writers of the Freeman’s Journal who were driving an Anti-Chinese agenda, but the readers.
In several letters to the editor, readers gave their opinion regarding the Chinese question; all were full of Anti-Chinese stereotypes promoted by the very publications in which they were printed. Many readers complained about the Chinese, or as they call them ‘the Mongolians’ being preferred over ‘British’ workers, which includes Irish people as part of the kingdom at that time, as the Chinese would just work more and take less than the other workers. The reader sees that as a national shame, asking if the colonists left their pride in Hong-Kong or Singapore. And another issue is marked in this letter, as the reader states that in his opinion, ‘this vexed Chinese question’ has become a question of having ‘our own countrymen shuffled from their legal employment by Chinese’. In his opinion everything has to be done, everything else ‘thrown aside to maintain our character.’ In his opinion there should be no use of violence against the Chinese workers, as the Chinese was ‘nothing but a base coward, who would vent his spleen by’. However, if moral means became exhausted, the readers opposition to violence would end as well.[9]
Promoting federation as a tool to get rid of the Chinese pest. Anti-Chinese cartoon, 1888
‘A threat to the morale and wealth of the colonies’
The question of employing Chinese workers was one of the bigger issues of the whole debate, as in another letter to the editor from the year 1878, a man, calling himself ‘The Rambler from Clare’, proudly states that he never employed and hopefully never will be forced to employ Chinamen, even though they were fifteen percent cheaper than European workers. It was however not only the cheap workers that made the Chinese undesirable for so many colonists, but also their strange manners and often rumours about their manners. The same reader who proudly states that he would never employ a Chinaman, states that he heard from others about the poor hygiene amongst the Chinese. He speaks of ‘a stench arising from the spot where they camped (which) was so great that he dreaded fever or some other dreadful illness’ to be caused by it. The Chinese, who are described as ‘Opium Eaters’ by another reader of the Freeman’s Journal, are to him a pest wherever they settle. Not only amongst the farmers and workers, the ‘Rambler’ states, but also amongst the diggers ‘John Chinaman’ is a most hated individual, as he would commit most horrid crimes against all decency and morality. Religiously, morally, commercially and politically the ‘Heathen Chinese’ will only take part in the decay of the colony.[10] Similar to The Bulletin, he states that the rejection of Chinese migrants in the United States would show that the Chinese are just not capable of living in a civilized, western country.
Following the opinion of many readers of the Freeman’s Journal, the Chinese were not only an unfair competitor on the job-market, but also morally inferior than them. It insults his good taste as an Irishman one reader states, when he sees a ‘Chinaman’ being married, maybe even having children with an Irish woman.[11] On the other hand he then states that he feels sorry for that ‘fallen woman’ as she was not aware of the malignity of the Chinese man, which ‘must never be forgotten’. Like most of the other readers, the author of this letter gives no real answer on the question to what makes the ‘Chinaman’ that malignant. Instead he just calls him an ‘Opium-eater’, another often used Anti-Chinese stereotype. It is interesting to see that the more radical statements are made in later years. As the first publications are sometimes even neutral or pro-Chinese, or sometimes pitying the poor Chinese workers who are working as ‘whitewashed slaves’ for the plutocracy of the colony, a common enemy of the white workers and the Chinese ‘slaves’.
More and more hate can be seen in letters from the late 1870s and 1880s. This is no coincidence, as the public debate about Australian identity and what did or did not belong to it, got more and more important and as the influence of openly racist journals as the Bulletin is growing more and more. The debate shifts from one about economical questions to one about identity, manners and ‘Australian values’, which are simply not shared by many of the Chinese workers in Australia. The Chinese as a ‘opium smoking heathen’ can never be part of the new emerging Australian society.
A common enemy
Some historians have pointed out that the strong Anti-Chinese sentiment in the colonies played a part in the relatively good integration of Irish immigrants into colonial Australian society. Similar to the situation in the western states of the U.S.A, the ‘common enemy’ helped to link Irish and other European, in Australia’s case mainly British, migrants, and so create a new society. Those writers however, who were calling for ‘fair play’ for the Chinese workers had to encounter the Rambler from Clare as well. As he states in his letter, there can be no fair play towards the Chinese, as these ‘horrible pigtails’ do not even respect a priest or the holy mother church. He therefore states that he was ‘regretfully astonished to find a correspondent of the good Catholic Freeman putting forth such heretical views.’[12]
In conclusion we can say that the Irish in the second half of the nineteenth century did not distinguish too much from their English and Scottish neighbours, when it came to the ‘Chinese question’. All groups were part of a political discourse that would eventually lead to several Anti-Chinese and Anti-Immigration Acts enacted by the legislation of the colonies and later by the federal government. Acts that would lie the ground to the infamous ‘White Australia’ policy of the first decades of the twentieth century.[13] The Irish might have played a special role in this, as they were still seen as inferior by many English and Scotsmen, however, the new ‘enemy’ did unite the rest of the colonial population. The old ‘No Irish need apply’ was now replaced by the cry to ‘kick out the heathen vile Chinese’.[14]
REFERENCES
[1] Malcolm Campbell: ‘“Ireland’s furthest shores: Irish immigrant settlement in nineteenth-century California and Eastern Australia’ in Pacific Historical Review, 71:1 (2002). p.88.
[2] Bruce C. Mansfield: ‘The origins of White Australia’, in Australian Quarterly, 26:4 (1954), p. 62.
[3] The Nazis and other European fascists were fond of the word ‘mongolian hordes’ to describe their opponents at the Eastern theatre of the Second World War.
[4] Mansfield, ‘The origins of White Australia’, pp 63-64
[5] Cited in Mansfield, ‘‘The origins of White Australia’, p. 66.
[6] Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Adviser (New South Wales), 12 March 1853. National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/664290/127728) (26 April 2017)
[7] Queensland Times, 15 April 1862 National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/125598879?) (26 April 2017)
[8] Ibid.
[9] ‘Letter to the Editor’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 Jan. 1879 National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/110560635?searchTerm=chinese%20freeman‘%20journal&searchLimits=dateFrom=1879-01-18) (26 April 2017)
[10] ‘Letter to the Editor’, Freeman’s Journal, 29 June 1878.National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/111096671?searchTerm=chinese%20freeman%27%20journal&searchLimits=dateFrom=1878-06-29) (26 April 2017)
[11] ‘After Dark’, Freeman’s Journal, 27 September 1873. National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128809691?searchTerm=after%20dark%20freeman%27s%20journal&searchLimits=) (26 April 2017)
[12]‘Letter to the Editor’, Freeman’s Journal, 29 June 1878 National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/111096671?searchTerm=chinese%20freeman%27%20journal&searchLimits=dateFrom=1878-06-29) (26 April 2017)
[13] Mansfield, ‘The origins of White Australia‘, pp 61-62
[14] ‘The Chinese Question’, Inquirer and Commercial News, 2 March 1881. National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/65960657?searchTerm=chines%20question&searchLimits=exactPhrase) (26 April 2017)
Irish Aussies: historical perspectives 