Perth Chinatown

A condescending and stereotyped description of Perth Chinatown is available from 1922. Like many such descriptions we are reliant on European observers who usually come with a distinct bias. In addition they are usually writing for a while readership who expect to be titillated and would not welcome or understand a nuance explanation from a Chinese perspective if one were offered.

Despite this as an eyewitness report a number of interesting more or less factual observations can be drawn out from this account:

There is a Chinese woman singing, and an elderly Chinese man smoking a bamboo water-pipe. While other men chop roast duck. There is also a doctor of Chinese medicine. These are all plausible. That some have what are described as opium pipes is an almost compulsory observation but not implausible in itself.

Other things observed include pens for ducks, sausages hanging from the verandahs, and other meats such as pork and mutton as well as buckets of soup, baskets of rice and tins of fish preserved in peanut oil.

Of especial interest is that "pigs are roasted whole, but in an oven ten feet deep" – pig ovens. Though spits are also used.

Other items include red and white spotted ebony dominoes, dice, a fan-tan game and puk-a-poo lottery tickets, joss sticks and herbs for medicine as well as teas and spices.

Sunday Times, 5 March 1922, p.17.

See also: Sunday Times, Sunday 13 July 1924, p.12.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/58055411

The Daily News, Monday 12 January 1903, p.2.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/83160374

Sunday Times, Sunday 8 March 1908, p.1.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/57578087

Mirror, Saturday 25 January 1930, p.5.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/76040662