Early colonial restrictions to Chinese entry

In June 1855, the Legislative Council of Victoria imposed an entry tax on all Chinese coming to Victoria. The master of a ship was required to pay a poll-tax of £10 for every Chinese immigrant on his ship. In addition each ship was limited to carrying one Chinese immigrant for each ten tons (about 4.5 tonnes) of their registered tonnage. The legislation also established an apartheid-like protectorate system. All Chinese would have to register, live within designated areas on the goldfields and pay an annual residence tax of £1. The protectorates were never fully implemented. Where they were introduced, they appear to have benefited the Chinese in one unplanned way at least. They reduced violence against them in those areas.

The entry tax succeeded in slowing the arrival of Chinese immigrants into Victoria by sea. However, the masters of ships discovered that the way around the Act was to land the Chinese at Port Adelaide and Robe in South Australia. From there they made their way overland to the Victorian goldfields traveling in stages of about 32 kilometres a day. The journey to the Bendigo goldfields from Adelaide (800 kilometres) would have taken approximately 25 days, from Robe (416 kilometres) approximately 13 days. Some in Adelaide thought that this would lead to trouble. They thought that joss houses would be built near Christian churches, which would be filled by crowds of worshippers, bowing before idols of wood and stone. Such behaviour, they argued, would be repulsive to Christians and would affect children’s minds.

By the second half of 1855 travelers on the overland route from Adelaide via Encounter Bay to the goldfields of Ballarat, Bendigo or the Ovens Valley saw processions of six hundred to seven hundred men moving ‘at the Chinaman's trot’. They usually walked in single file, each one carrying a pole and two baskets over his shoulders, talking to his mate in front in a sing-song tone. On their heads they had circular hats, like the top of a haystack, nearly a yard in diameter. The Europeans noticed that the young Chinese always respected their parents and older people. For example, the young did not sit down until the older men said they could.

In 1857 nearly eleven thousand Chinese walked from Robe to the Victorian goldfields. Between 1856 and 1858, 16,500 Chinese landed at Robe. By 1857 there were 23,623 Chinese on the goldfields of Victoria, and a total of 25,424 in the colony at large. The Aborigines of the south east now had to cope with another invader of their land.

Although in 1857 the South Australian government passed similar entry restrictions to the Victorian legislation, the Chinese were still able to come in through New South Wales. During 1859 the number of Chinese in Victoria passed 40,000 and made up nearly 20 per cent of the adult males in the colony.

Alarmed by the flood of Chinese, on 4 June 1857 John Pascoe Fawkner asked the Legislative Council of Victoria to appoint a select committee to prepare a bill to control the number of Chinese settling in the colony. Fawkner argued that he wanted to prevent the goldfields of Australia from becoming the property of the Emperor of China and of the Mongolian hordes of Asia. Fawkner had been told the Chinese had been teaching the youth of Victoria to smoke opium, and had been chasing girls as young as ten years of age on the goldfields. Other moralisers fanned the flames of prejudice. Rumours flew around Melbourne that simple-minded men were shivering and quaking at the prospect of being outnumbered in the not too distant future by hordes of yellow men!

There had been moderate voices too. Caroline Chisholm, who in the decade before the discovery of gold had been described as a 'second Moses in bonnet and shawl', reminded her contemporaries that there would be no rest until man was recognised as man, without distinction of 'colour or clime'. If Europeans went on humiliating and insulting the Chinese, she argued, one day there would be a 'sweeping calamity'.

The Chinese also contributed to this plea to be calm and reasonable. In a petition to the 'Honourable the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly sitting on Chinese business' in 1857, they told how glad they had been to come to the goldfields. They had heard the English were good and kind to everybody. Now they had heard the Assembly was going to put a tax of £1 a month on them, and they were so sorry they did not know what to do. Digging was very difficult, and it was hard to earn a living. If they paid £1 a month, they argued, they could not get enough gold to buy food to eat. They asked the members not to proceed with their proposal.

Nothing could calm the madness in the diggers. At the Buckland River in North East Victoria early in July 1857 riots followed a rumour about the unnatural behaviour of a Chinese man. The rumour was seen as final proof that the Chinese were monsters in human shape, who practised abominations and made lewd gestures towards women and children.

On 4 July 1857, a meeting was summoned at the Buckland where the leaders of the meeting called on their fellow diggers to take the law into their own hands and drive the Chinese out of the Australian bush. Men on horseback armed with bludgeons and whips tore at the Chinese. Some 500 tents and stores were destroyed. The Chinese population, estimated at 2400, were all driven off the Buckland. If it were not for armed English miners who protected the Chinese from the mob as they rushed a single log that bridged the river, many might have died.

Twelve men were arrested. Four received sentences of 9 months gaol, one for rioting, the others for unlawful assembly. No charges of theft were proven.

The evidence of the European wife of Ah Leen, who had been badly beaten by the mob, was not believed on the grounds that any white woman who would marry a Chinese showed a character of poor morals and people would not place any confidence in her.

The anti-Chinese sentiment continued. In Beechworth the white diggers formed an Anti-Chinese League in 1857. Their aim was to get the Chinese expelled from the colony. The League disowned the rowdy, ruffians who had used brute physical force on the Buckland. Their first objective was to stop the influx of the Chinese into the colony. Petition after petition was submitted to the Legislative Assembly but without success.

Scaremongers also spread stories that the time was not far distant when the Chinese would outnumber the British and the Germans in South Australia. Some also argued that South Australia had a moral obligation to the well-being of the inhabitants of Victoria. The legislators finally acted. They argued that it was absolutely necessary to restrict Chinese entry into the country by legal means. Otherwise brutal warfare might rage and society would be shaken to its foundations. To preserve the European predominance over their territory, the South Australian government passed through Parliament an act, modeled on the Victorian act. Within months the streets of Robe which had streamed with Chinese were almost deserted.

Adapted from Chinese and the Law by Brian Barrow Deputy Chief Magistrate, 2001. Published by The Golden Dragon Museum, Bridge Street, Bendigo.