The hidden Chinese history of Australia

share_windows This article appeared in The Australian's Culture on June 20 2026.

Historians are strange creatures. They happily sit in dusty archives so we don’t have to. They spend hours searching for hidden stories, silenced voices and pieces of evidence that few knew existed. They become excited when they stumble upon something to show us – something that has the potential to shed new light on how we
think about ourselves, our country and our past – and in some cases force us to rethink national stories we have long taken for granted.

Craig A. Smith, the editor of Sinophone Australia, has managed to bring together a team of such historians. Contributors to the volume have worked through Chinese-language newspapers, letters, travel diaries, essays and other documents – even sketches drawn by semiliterate men – dating back to the 19th century. Taken together, the book presents a history of Australia, told, at least in part, through the eyes of the early Chinese Australians.

But the Chinese-language sources in the book shed light not only on Chinese-Australians, but on Australia itself. They reveal what visitors noticed about Australian society, what migrants admired, and what animated, confused, or aggrieved them. In doing so, they offer a rare perspective on the country that is both surprising as a historical record and deeply resonant with contemporary life.

For instance, Ely Finch and Michael Smith’s excavation of the archives of the State Library of New South Wales uncovered a sketch drawn by a semiliterate Chinese labourer who had been charged with murder and feared for his life, despite maintaining his innocence during the gold rush era. Also, by poring over the contents of some of the earliest Chinese-language newspapers published in White Australia, Kuo Mei-fen shows how Chineselanguage media reflected the diversity of the community. The Chinese Times, for instance, adopted a populist tone, championed working-class interests and was strongly patriotic towards China, while the Chinese Australian Times sided with Taiwan and was staunchly anti-communist.

Similarly, Sophie Ley-Wilson demonstrates the importance of tracing the origins of historical knowledge and understanding how ideas change as they are translated from one language to another and move across different national contexts. Through a nuanced analysis of the translated records of Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao’s visit to Australia in 1901, she reveals the extent to which racial nationalism shaped the history of Australian as a nation.

Austin Tseng’s account of discussions about Indigenous Australians in early 20th-century Chinese publications gives us a vivid sense of how Chinese migrants sought to work out their place in Australia’s social hierarchy, not only in relation to white Australians but also in relation to Indigenous Australians.

Readers also learn from Chao Guo and Josh Stenberg, who, drawing on reports published in the Goulburn Evening News in 1943, uncover the fascinating story of white Australians performing Tchaikovsky and Chopin in Hurstville to raise funds for the Chinese Red Cross and express solidarity with China during the war against Japan.

With meticulous attention to detail that is characteristic of historians, they also document the prolific antiJapanese theatre and literary activities produced in Chinese-language wartime Australia.

Craig Smith clearly played a crucial role in this project. As the editor who brought together historians working with Chinese-language sources from disparate fields, he also contributed chapters of his own on the Cold War era and on how Chinese travellers to Australia and Chinese-speaking scholars in Australian universities have viewed Australia, particularly the White Australia policy.

Australians often assume that our history is well documented. In many ways it is. Yet most of that history has drawn on English-language records. Sinophone Australia reminds us that another archive has been sitting largely unnoticed alongside it.

Within these Chinese-language sources are accounts of colonial Australia, observations about race relations, reflections on Australian democracy, descriptions of everyday life and discussions of the White Australia policy.

There are reports from journalists and intellectuals as well as travellers’ accounts, and there are plenty of debates within Chinese communities about what Australia was and what it might become.

Readers will be rewarded by a sense of discovery. They will encounter figures and stories that have rarely appeared in mainstream Australian histories. We are reminded that Chinese migrants were not merely passive subjects of government policies. They were active participants in Australian society who established businesses, founded newspapers, staged performances, wrote poetry, had run-ins with the law, debated
politics and left behind a substantial written record of their experiences.

The collection also quietly challenges some assumptions about Australia’s past. Public discussions of Chinese-Australians often begin with stories of exclusion and the White Australia policy. This book also reveals the depth and longevity of Chinese engagement with Australia. Long before multiculturalism became official policy, Chinese migrants were building communities, actively contributing to Australia’s political, economic and social life.

The timing of the book is particularly interesting. Today, public discussion about China is often dominated by geopolitical tensions between China and the West. Whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about Australia’s future relationship with China, those debates can make it difficult to remember that the connection between the two societies did not begin in the 21st century.

The writings collected in this volume remind us that the early Chinese-Australians’ interaction with Australia as a society was more elaborate than contemporary headlines sometimes suggest. This makes one wonder if a history of Australia can be complete without a history of Chinese-Australians – told in their own language and from their own perspective.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Sinophone Australia is its reminder that history is never finished. With old documents uncovered with patient and often meticulous archive work, we now get a glimpse of what these forgotten or silenced voices sound like. Even familiar stories acquire new dimensions. For Australian readers, the book offers a rare opportunity to see the country from a different vantage point.

You do not need to speak Chinese to appreciate the significance of that achievement. In an age when opinions about China are plentiful but nuance and complexity are often in short supply, Sinophone Australia provides something increasingly rare: historical perspective.

It is an accessible and at times fascinating contribution to our understanding of Australia’s past and ourselves.