Collections, web based

Web-Based Chinese-Australian Collections

The rise of social media and the internet has given a new avenue to the preservation and presentation of Chinese-Australian heritage through a growing number of web-based collections. Scattered Legacy is one such example, but it sits within a broader ecosystem of more than fifteen identified relevant digital collections across Australia.

Several of these are specialist projects focused on regional Chinese-Australian history. Notable examples include Two Centuries of Chinese Heritage in Western Australia and Our Chinese Past which focuses on the New England region of New South Wales. Earlier initiatives, such as CHIA in Victoria, remain accessible even if no longer actively maintained. Among the pioneers in this field was Janis Wilton’s Golden Threads project in New South Wales — an influential regional study that has since evolved into Different Sights.

Beyond these focused efforts are larger institutional aggregators, such as Victorian Collections and the National Library of Australia’s Chinese Australian collection. These allow users to search for “Chinese” or “Chinese-Australian” as keywords and return hundreds of objects — some directly tied to Chinese life in Australia, others more broadly connected to China or Chinese material culture.

Heritage databases also play a part, with each state maintaining its own registry that often includes Chinese-related entries. These tend to be more object- or site-specific, providing basic descriptive information rather than broader historical context. While some exceptions exist, such as Territory Stories, the majority of these resources focus on cataloguing rather than interpretation.

Scattered Legacy attempts to bridge that gap — functioning as an umbrella resource that draws together these dispersed online materials and provides thematic, historical, and interpretive context to help situate individual artefacts within the wider Chinese-Australian story.