Australian-born Chinese (ABCs)

Chinese / Chinese Australian / Australian. Generational change and perception of Chineseness.

Statistics and gradual rise in proportion of the Australian born over China born in the 1920s. Role of Australian born such as William Lee experiences in the village.

Australian born people of Chinese origin were only grudgingly seen as Australian, especially as the White Australia policy developed. For Wong Ling Chow in 1912, for example, the perception of his Chineseness overwhelmed his legal status as a British subject. Despite his Victorian naturalization in 1885, his enrollment as a voter and his good character references, he not only had difficulties re-entering Australia, but was made to pay the usual fee for the Dictation Test exemption and was not able to bring a wife who by the law of the day was in fact a British subject by marriage. Similarly Earnest Howard Hang Gong, who was born in Palmerston of an Australian-born father, needed two witnesses to his Australian birth to ensure he was allowed to re-enter Australia. On the form that gave official shape to his Australian birth his nationality is described as ‘half caste Chinese’."

Michael Williams, Australia’s Dictation Test: The Test it was a Crime to Fail, Brill, 2021.

This negative attitude to those of mixed heritage was not limited to Europeans.

"On Monday there was a very mixed medley of the rising generation present at the joss-house, and although they had the little almond eyes of the pong there were evidences of a cross of some sort in them. This annoyed one Chow who is known about Queenton as "Dirty Water," and he gave expression to his feelings about "half-castes" in such a pronounced manner that he was cleared out of the place."

The Evening Telegraph, 5 Febuary 1908, p.6.