2024/10/01 by Sophie Loy‐Wilson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society
paper · doi:10.1080/1031461x.2024.2370768
openalex publication_date 2024/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Where are Chinese Australians in Australian history? Australia’s Chinese past is persistently framed as ‘forgotten’ in public debate, a perpetual newness which ignores forty years of scholarship in the field. Contemporary works on Sino-Australian relations proliferate, resurrecting Cold War mentalities but avoiding Australia’s colonial history of Chinese migration and settlement. This article accounts for this forgetfulness while also drawing attention to a spate of recently unearthed Chinese-language sources written by Chinese Australians. These sources, newly translated, invite us to see Australia’s past in a Chinese context, revealing a propensity in Australia to organise historical time along European lines, obscuring ties of causality between events in Asia and Australia. Multilingual archives challenge the primacy of English-language sources in the narration of Australia’s past, humanising Chinese Australians and destabilising China as the proxy for Australian security fears.