Fishing
Date Published
Chinese fishing industry.
"Evidence for Chinese fish-curing establishments in Victoria, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, leaves no doubt that Chinese people were heavily involved in Australia’s colonial fishing in- dustry. Documentary evidence shows overseas Chinese activity in Victoria’s fishing industry by 1856. However, Chinese people were probably participating in Victoria’s fishing industry as early as 1855, with the mass arrival of Chinese goldminers. Primary documentation and material remains have shown the types of fish Chinese fish curers cured, the preferred species, how they obtained them, cured them and even how they were cooked and eaten.
Fish-curing establishments were not general retailers. Chinese cured fish was sold primarily to the overseas Chinese population in Australia, markets in China and other opportunistic bulk buyers. Fish-curing establishments were capitalist endeavours that used the Chinese kinship system of obligation to procure, process and supply bulk-cured fish very cheaply. This provided overseas Chinese people – particularly those working on the goldfields – with an abundant food source and helped to maintain cultural continuity in the Chinese diet and way of life."
"... the new Northern Territory administration [the Commonweath in 1911] quickly got down to the more serious business of making the Commonwealth safe for its white destiny. In this case by, within a matter of weeks, the ‘closing of the avenues of employment’ of non-white peoples or ‘Asiatics’ as the term was, in ‘mining, fishing, coolie labor on the wharf and in gardens’. What the specific intention of those responsible for this was is unclear, but one result was an organised protest by 40 to 50 now unemployed ‘Chinese and Malays’ demanding either ‘employment or rations’. A well-argued petition declared ‘it means great hardship and in many cases starvation’.
Michael Williams, Australia’s Dictation Test: The Test it was a Crime to Fail, Brill, 2021, p.170.
