Peter Martin; 8/12/09
China has become Australia’s biggest source of migrants, for the first time eclipsing New Zealand and Britain. The latest migration figures show a record 6350 new settlers arrived from mainland China in the four months to October, compared with the 5800 from Britain and the 4740 from New Zealand. The Chinese ascendancy owes more to a collapse in migration from the traditional sources than it does to the 15 per cent annual growth in migration from China. The number of migrants from the UK is down 28 per cent over the year and the number from New Zealand down 47 per cent. Adelaide University demographer Graeme Hugo said the global financial crisis had hit migration from our traditional sources in ways that hadn’t much affected China.
See: http://www.theage.com.au/national/china-top-source-of-immigration-20091207-kfcp.html\
Legend and history
Big White Lie – Chinese Australians in White Australia, John Fitzgerald; UNSW Press; 2007; No Internet Text
The moral economy of Chinese immigrant labour is embedded in the oral traditions of the Yee Hing secret-society network. In the Australian case, it can be traced through the legend of Loong Hung Pung that forms part of Australia’s Yee Hing legacy. The Cantonese name Loong Hung Pung, or Long Xingbang in Mandarin, can be read to mean ‘dragon who founds lodges’.” Names of this kind are frequently found in legend but less often in actual life. This particular name could plausibly apply to any lodge-founding dragon who happened to lead the secret brotherhood into uncharted territory; nevertheless, Australian colonial records indicate that the name Loong Hung Pung was attached to an actual historical figure who worked and died on the goldfields of western New South Wales. Legend and history converge in the story of Loong Hung Pung.
Our starting point in exploring the role of the Yee Hing network in Chinese labour emigration to Australia is a series of essays composed in Shanghai by the young Australian journalist Vivian Chow, which circulated among Chinese-Australian communities in the early 1930s
through his English-language magazine, United China.
Chow’s Shanghai periodical was the source for Sleeman’s account in White China of Loong Hung Pung’s role in the founding of the Australian Yee Hing network. Chow’s account of Loong Hung Pung is best approached, like that of Sleeman, as a later written record of an early oral legend. It is not entirely reliable. It is told, nevertheless, with a passion born of the conviction that the young Chinese-Australian author bore a proud working-man’s heritage that could be traced to the time of the headman Loong Hung Pung.
As we shall see, Vivian Chow’s published essays are bound up with his own family history centred in western and northern New South Wales. The story is animated by the author’s own struggle for recognition as a proud Australian of Chinese heritage born in White Australia.
Loong Hung Pung, Chow wrote, was born in China in 1800 and fled to Sydney in 1848 as an outcast and refugee ‘with a huge price on his head for his revolutionary activities against the Manchu Dynasty’. By this account Loong died in 1886.
Elsewhere Chow described Loong as an ‘august scholar … exiled to foreign parts by the Manchu officials for reform and revolutionary work in the central provinces’. Loong was reported to have travelled to Australia by way of Malaya, where he was trailed by Manchu spies and to have founded the Yee Hing ‘Chinese Masonic fraternity’ in 1850, a few years after stepping ashore in Australia. Loong ‘led the Australian Chinese’ until stepping down as Grand Master in 1878.
As an exiled scholar and gentleman Loong was reputed to have been on good terms with successive governors of New South Wales and ministers of religion.28
Two independent sources confirm Chow’s assessment of Loong as a contemporary figure of some note in western New South Wales. At the same time they provide grounds for questioning the dates Chow ascribes to Loong’s birth, his arrival in Australia and the year of his death.
The first source is a newspaper column dating from 1874. The second is an article that appeared 15 years before Chow put pen to paper, written by a man who had little personal association with Chinese-Australian communities apart from his observations as a child growing up in rural New South Wales.
The first source dates from August 1874 when the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article entitled ‘Burial of a Chinese Storekeeper’, recording unruly scenes that erupted at the burial of a Bathurst storekeeper named Kong Loong. Hundreds of mourners were disturbed when young rascals ran amuck at the funeral.
A crowd of 500 or 600 who had ‘assembled at the grave which had been prepared for the deceased … became witnesses of about as disgraceful a scene as perhaps ever occurred in a Christian community’.
The account continued: Upon the coffin being removed from the hearse, the six Chinese who were carrying it found their progress toward the grave stopped at the outset. The crowd were asked to stand aside, and allow the coffin to pass, but they refused to budge an inch, and we beheld the melancholy spectacle of a number of Chinamen fighting their way,
with a dead comrade, through a body of ruffians who call themselves civilised men.
The second source was drafted by John Daniel Fitzgerald, a prominent Irish-Australian barrister, Sydney city alderman and Labor member of the NSW parliament. Fitzgerald’s memoir of his childhood in rural New South Wales first appeared in 1917 in a book edited by the established literary figure Ethel Turner for distribution among Anzac soldiers and seamen serving abroad during the Great War.
He published a similar account a few years later in a children’s novel, The Ring Valley (1922), that appeared in the year of his death, in which he detailed the life-and-death struggle of able-bodied Irish-Australian youngsters to overcome anti-Chinese racism in rural New South Wales.
Both works include episodes recalling the author’s childhood encounters with Loong Hung Pung and give an account of Loong’s death and funeral in a goldfields town in western New South Wales.’
Tags: Australia, China, Migrants & Refugees