Descriptions of Chinese women in Australia

Chinese women in Australian were rare before the mid-20th and descriptions of them rarer.

The history of the Chinese in Australia is, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, overwhelmingly a history of men. Only as the Australian-born Chinese population began to grow in the early twentieth century did the gender ratio begin to shift. Yet Chinese women were never entirely absent.

Those who did migrate were usually the wives of merchants, men wealthy enough to bring their families or to maintain more than one household. In some cases the woman in Australia was a second or secondary wife, while the principal wife remained in China. These women attracted considerable curiosity from the local community, but they typically lived within the seclusion expected of married women in Chinese society at the time. They did, however, receive visitors, and contemporary newspapers contain several accounts of Europeans calling on Chinese wives in their homes — such as the wife of Philip Lee (Lee Chung), proprietor of Kwang Wah Chung in Sydney.

The exoticism of bound feet or other markers of Chinese femininity fascinated the colonial press, and a few court cases involving Chinese women caused public sensation — as Peter Gibson and others have documented. But in general, Chinese women in Australia were few in number and largely shielded from public life.

Other women connected to Chinese communities were non-Chinese wives — European or local-born women who married Chinese men. They, too, were subject to stereotypes and social prejudice, often regarded as of “lower status” because of their association with Chinese partners. In reality, their backgrounds and circumstances were highly varied, reflecting the same range of character, aspiration, and social experience found in the wider settler population.

Together these small but significant female presences complicate the assumption that nineteenth-century Chinese Australia was a world of men alone.

“While in Geraldton, I was taken to see some real Chinese ladies, and one of them was unmistakably as well-bred as she was courteous and refined in her manner. Conversation was, after the exchange of many compliments, chiefly, confined to dress. Our hostess was very plainly though becomingly attired, but she showed us some really magnificent dresses of ceremony. When it came to a matter of refreshments, I was somewhat startled to be asked if I would take some whisky. On my declining, my hostess went through the whole gamut of intoxicating and non-intoxicating liquors till she came to ever welcome tea. It was explained to me afterwards that when the first white lady called upon the Chinese dame, the latter began with tea, but only struck her visitor's taste when, in despair, she suggested the waters of Lethe. Now she always begins with whisky."

Evening News, 1 June 1901, p.2.