This year James Cook University celebrates its proud legacy in historical research, writing and publishing through the Studies in North Queensland History Collection. In partnership with the JCU College of Arts, Society and Education (CASE), the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department. To complement this showcase a series of blog posts provides a fresh response to each work through the contemporary lens of a prominent practicing historian. In today’s post, Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson (University of Sydney) writes about Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns 1870-1920 by Cathie R. May, published in 1984 by the JCU Department of History and Politics.
What is the pre-history of Australian multiculturalism? Historians of the north have long led the way on this question, tracing the complex enmeshments, the blood and the bone of Australia’s multi-ethnic past; Indigenous, European, Micronesian, Asian. But in 1974, when Cathie May was a student in James Cook University’s legendary Australian history program, the legacies of Asian migration to Australia’s north were little studied and little known. Long before it became au fair to add China-literacy to one’s CV, and long before Chinese Australian ‘voices’ and ‘agency’ became a byword in much historical scholarship (including my own) May sat down and talked to the people of Cairns, Chinese and white, about their Chinese past. It was the early 1970s and no one had asked these questions before, not like this.
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| Parade near the centre of Cairns, ca.1919, Source: State Library of Queensland |
The bush around Cairns is a dense, tangled thicket; clearing it was dirty work. Farming it was even harder. Drive through the outskirts of Cairns, down to Babinda, Innisfail and Atherton, through cane country on Yirrganydji land, and the marks of banana, maize, tobacco farms are clear – alongside the iconic sugar cane. In the 1970s, May was the first to argue that Cairns was a Chinese town, dependent on Chinese agricultural enterprise. Early produce was grown by Chinese farmers, taken to port by Chinese workers, laden onto Chinese junks, built on the banks of the Barron River itself. May’s argument – that Chinese farmers cleared and farmed Cairns – is now a truism in the field, oft repeated in documentaries and popular histories, but rarely is she given credit for being the first to prosecute the case.
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Loading bananas onto
boats on the Johnstone River, Queensland, 1922, Photographer: William Pettigrew
Wilson, Source: State Library of
Queensland |
In her classic text, Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns 1870 to 1920, May showed that the Chinese in Cairns were indeed ‘topsawyers’ and that Cairns long depended on their enterprise for its economic survival. The book is beloved of Chinese Australian historians for its granular detail, cautious arguments and collation of astoundingly rich archival material, including the contributions of numerous ‘Chinese informers’ interviewed by May. In addition she lists no less than sixteen local newspapers in her bibliography (many, such as the Cooktown Herald, remain undigitized) and its clear she read through all of them meticulously. Her appendices span over a hundred pages: maps, a list of notable Cairns Chinese, running over twenty pages, statistics, government reports, bank books, court depositions, even the accounts of a local market gardener Ah Hoy who spent big on religious items, 20 percent of his earnings over three years.
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Joss House in Cairns,
ca. 1895, Source: State Library of
Queensland |
May did the work, she ran the numbers. While Europeans initially turned Chinese migrants away from Cairns, blocking their boats from landing in 1877, within a few months the population was dependent on the Chinese for its fish supply. By the 1890s, 73.9% of all farmers in the district were Chinese. Between 1890 and 1910, there were always 20 junks carrying bananas on the Barron River, travelers compared the scene to Canton harbour.
Influenced by Cronin, Bolton and Markus, and part of an academic community peopled by the likes of Clive Moore and Henry Reynolds, May set about dismantling myth after myth associated with Chinese migration to the area. As Brian Dalton would write of her work in a foreword, “…her emphasis was on the action of, rather than reactions to, the Chinese.” May devoured pioneer histories written during the 1920s and 1930s, when towns in the Cairns district were celebrating their first fifty years, and found they “virtually ignored the earlier importance of the Chinese…apparently the phase of dependance on Chinese agriculture was something which local authors were still trying to forget.” Finding that the Chinese largely laid the economic foundations of the region, she argued that scale mattered, regional histories could dislodge generalization made at a national level. By zooming in away from imperial and national frames she could confront “racial myths” and generalization, “It becomes possible to become acquainted with individual Chinese and the relations between them.”
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| Newspaper article titled “Chinese Nationalists”, The Cairns Post, Monday 19 June 1922, Source: National Library of Australia Trove |
She argued that, far from lowering working conditions, Chinese workers were keenly aware of their rights. By 1908 Chinese laborers were demanding 27/6 to 30/ per week and keep, skilled labour being even more expensive. Far from living in poor and degraded conditions, Chinese migrants spent large sums on religious activities (the Cairns temple, built in 1887, cost 800 pounds), on gambling, and – if naturalized – on land speculation. She found that Europeans banks acted as character references on Chinese naturalization and domicile documents, and that many Chinese migrants had bank accounts as a result. She discussed the social isolation of some Chinese woman and the social inclusion of others. She showed shocking police behavior. Indigenous decoys were employed by the police to obtain opium from Chinese storekeepers and police regularly used extreme violence when conducting gambling raids. She found that actions for the recovery of debts accounted for 56.3% of Chinese litigation and noted the readiness with which the Chinese took their disputes before the courts. This observation sparked the fuse on my own research project, collating Chinese language material kept as evidence in Australia’s legal archive.
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Chinese consul in Cooktown. This photo was published in the
NQ Register on May 5th, 1897 and is credited to Sidney H. Till,
Source: State Library of
Queensland |
May also documented anti-Chinese violence, of course she did, it is laid bare in almost every archive I’ve combed through in this period. But she did so with care and with respect. And she never reached for easy answers. For just as the Chinese suffered in Cairns, they also prospered, they also conquered, co-colonists with Europeans, hacking through the wet scrub hugging the banks of the Barron River.
Article by Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson (University of Sydney)
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