“An Australia that could have been”. What a challenging thought from Prof Peter Yu, Vice-President, First Nations Portfolio at the ANU. He’s describing an exhibition that’s now open at the National Museum in Canberra, ‘Our Story : Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia’. In it, he says, we learn of “the shared brutality of European colonisation, underpinned by white supremacy” and discover how this, “combined with deep respect for cultural beliefs and practices, forged the romantic unions“ between male Chinese gold-hunting migrants and Aboriginal women that have produced so many mixed-race families like his own.
And it is in the “dignified and resilient voices” of offspring like himself – many of them artists – that the story is told in both the exhibition and its accompanying book, published by the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne.
Many touching stories of ancestry emerge from the book, as well as substantial dives into Aboriginal/Chinese histories State by State (apart from NSW?). But it’s down to historian Henry Reynolds to paint the big picture of the first Chinese arrival in 1818 and the 30,000 Chinese men here in 1901 who had arrived in two gold rushes; the 1850s in the south and the 1870s in FNQ, from where they spread out across the north to justify that Cassandra of geographers, Griffith Taylor’s prediction that the north was far better suited to Asians than European colonists. Peter Yu reckons the Broome he grew up in was two-thirds mixed race.
Reynolds praises the post-gold move of Chinese migrants into agri- and aqua-culture and claims that Aboriginal employees preferred to work for Chinese employers more than Whitefellars. They shared their food, for instance. And he also recognises that Chinese men were more likely to stay with their Aboriginal partners and care for their children than Europeans. Elsewhere it’s suggested that few men could return to China with a ‘foreign’ bride, though some were simply deported after the White Australia policy was implemented at Federation.
Behind this project – both as curator at the NMA and interpolater of the family stories in the book – is the purely Chinese, Zhou Xiaoping. As Margo Ngawa Neale, First Nations lead at the NMA asserts, probably only he could have encouraged some of those story-tellers to ‘come out’ as Chinese. For Zhou has had a remarkable history with Aboriginal Australia since arriving as a classically trained artist from Anhui in 1988. Almost immediately he was off to the north, and, as he told me in the catalogue for the 2017 tour of his art and artistic collaborations with Aboriginal artists back to China, “Outside Australian cities, you don’t get the sense that you are specifically Chinese. You are just a person in a vast environment”.
As a result, he built relationships with artists such Ganalpingu man, Johnny Bulunbulun and the Walmajarri Jimmy Pike, living on Country and sharing canvases. “Each artist collaborated with sensitivity, respect and integrity”, Margo Neale believes, “appreciating the commonalities in their respective cultures: ancient origins, profound mythological significance conveyed through marks of meaning, deep reverence for nature and the wisdom of elders, as well as ritual and ceremony”.
That equality between Aboriginal and Chinese cultures doesn’t always emerge from the eight artists involved – for whom Aboriginal-Chinese in that order is their favoured descriptor, or even Aboriginal-born-Chinese. Vernon Ah Kee, despite his surname and Chinese ancestry on both sides of his family, barely recognises his Sino-side “There was a sense you couldn’t be Asian when I was growing up”, he explains. Jason Wing, on the other hand, lived with a grandfather who spoke Cantonese and celebrated Chinese New Year, and only added his Birupi culture when he took to art. Still he regrets, “And yet nobody celebrates the beautiful combination of strong cultures, like serpents and dragons coming together”.
Maybe they will after this effort? For who could possibly not celebrate the Cubillo family of Darwin? The Filippino surname (and musicality) came from a pearl diver who got together with the offspring of William Lee and his Larrakia wife Widgett. Today Jenna Lee is an installation artist; and she’s the daughter of Chris Bandirra Lee, and niece to both his siblings, artist Gary Lee and curator Tina Baum! And then there’s First Nations maven, Franchesca Cubillo.
Meanwhile the artist who almost always makes works about himself as a Bidjara man, Dr Christian Thompson, actually came out as Chinese as well last year in a show called ‘New Gold Mountain’, as I reported. His grandmother had always insisted, “Never forget your Chinese heritage”. And, while Damien Shen was always Narrindjeri/Chinese, Lloyd Gawura Hornsby had to fight for both his Yuin and Chinese selves after an ancestor insisted she was a Maori princess. His mother continues to deny his 2004 acceptance.
Did Zhou Xiaoping bring the Chinese out of Indigenous proppaNOW provocateur, Gordon Hookey. The exhibition features a 2024 painting by him, a wild confrontation of dragon and Rainbow Serpent, though he admits to not knowing much of the Chinese mythology. And he’s also mystified by his researches which revealed that his family tree contains an 11 year old Chinese boy arriving in Darwin alone in 1886, later moving to the Gulf and joining a Waanyi wife. Could young Yuen Kim Hook have been fleeing the Tai Ping rebellion which killed 20 million people?
These artists have contributed 17 contemporary artworks and more than 30 archival photographs and documents to the exhibition. There’s archival material based on Zhou’s research over more than two years into colonial records, obtaining quotes and family histories from more than 100 people, making connections between two of the world’s oldest cultures and their values. Then there’s audiovisual material; photomontages and artwork such as the A’hang Family Tree by Zhou Xiaoping himself; and there are artworks by Aboriginal–Chinese artist Jenna Lee and curator Zhou exploring the themes of culture and prosperity.
Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia, an essential act of truth-telling, will be on at the National Museum until 27 January 2026.
