Tracing the long history of Aboriginal-Chinese people in Australia, through archives and art
- Written by: Alex Burchmore, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Curatorial Studies, Australian National University
Metaphors of cooking and eating are a firm favourite among writers on multiculturalism. No comment on cultural contact seems complete without the proverbial “melting pot”. This metaphor tends to imply a balanced mix of diverse ingredients, each adding its own flavour but merging with the whole.
We now associate this image with visions of broth, stew, maybe a fondue. In the early 20th century, however, the phrase more often suggested an alchemical blending of base metals in a crucible. The turning of lead into gold stood in for the conversion of the foreign into the familiar.
The later move into the kitchen can tell us something about changing attitudes toward cultures other than our own.
Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia suggests another metaphor. The National Museum of Australia exhibition brings together works of contemporary art, personal reflections on cultural inheritance and a rich selection of archival photographs.
While the melting pot isn’t entirely absent, a richer analogy arises here in the equally time-honoured image of the market garden.
Preserving the seeds of future growth
It’s a short walk from the garden to the kitchen. But as metaphors for cultural contact, the two are miles apart.
The kitchen implies a one-way process of selection, preparation, combination, cooking and consumption.
The garden is a place for setting down roots, grafting and pruning, nurturing and cultivating. A place for preserving the seeds of future growth after the fruits of the present have been harvested and enjoyed.
The analogy is clearest in the pairing of Zhou Xiaoping’s Chinese Cabbage Leaves with his handwritten mapping of the A’hang family tree, which face each other on opposite walls.
Zhou has traced eight generations of this family from “Johnny” A'hang. Johnny arrived in South Australia in 1851 and there met a Nauo woman, “Topsy”. Zhou then takes us through hundreds of their descendants to the present.
Zhou’s glass cabbage leaves, in shades of jade and ochre, call to mind a comparably sweeping installation of glass coolamons created at the Canberra Glassworks by Ngambri-Ngunnawal artist Paul Girrawah House and glass artist Tom Rowney. Both works cast a humble and familiar object in a spectacular form with an elegant grafting of cultural experiences.
This metaphor of grafting is also powerfully conveyed in the A’hang family tree. The genealogy provides a conceptual anchor for the exhibition overall.
Our Story is a deeply committed exploration of generational experience as a counter-current to the mainstream of Australian history.
An emphasis on the personal
Stories of Aboriginal people and Chinese-Australians are usually told apart. Here, they come together in a range of well-known scenes: the harvesting of trepang (sea cucumbers) for Chinese consumers, the allure of the Victorian goldfields, the scars of White Australia, the trauma of the Stolen Generations.
These more familiar moments are cited as a contextual background for the real focus of the exhibition.
Our Story is the culmination of a larger research project dedicated to uncovering the long history of individual and familial Aboriginal-Chinese relations.
In the gallery hang portraits of some of the many individuals of combined Aboriginal and Chinese heritage who participated in this project. This ensures an emphasis on the personal.
An 8-year-old Michael Laing stands between his Aboriginal grandfather Gordon Charles Naley and his Chinese grandfather Leung Kee.
Photos courtesy Michael Laing
Their words are reproduced on the gallery wall and in the substantial exhibition text. Their voices, recorded for the documentary footage playing throughout the space, narrate a “history from below”. This phrase has recently gained use among historians to describe projects that seek to highlight previously overlooked or marginalised experiences and perspectives.
Or, to extend the garden metaphor, a history from the grassroots. A history that is very much alive, continually in process of discovery and rediscovery, animated by family ties and tales affording protection and solidarity.
Dragonserpent, 2024, Gordon Hookey, oil on linen canvas, 179 x 237 cm.
Photo courtesy of the artist
The works of contemporary art shown among this wealth of archival and testimonial material offer points of focus crystallising core themes.
Koori artist Lloyd Gawura Hornsby’s paintings in acrylic on canvas New Beginnings and Coming to Australia combine images of gold and opal mining, tuna fishing, Uluru and the Great Wall. These are joined by affectionate portraits of his great-grandfather James Ahoy and the infamous anti-immigration caricature of “The Mongolian Octopus”, united in a shimmering field of dots.
New bonds and older connections, long denied or erased in official accounts, are here established.
The complex layering of culture
Our Story seems designed to inspire such reparatory unions. Its location in the museum’s First Australians Gallery is marked by a conspicuous fringe of red paper lanterns punctuated with woven grass dillybags.
This variation on a Chinatown theme is taken up again by Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and Karrajarri artist Jenna Lee. Dillybag lanterns are recreated in rice paper and woven silk for her To Light Up installation and photographs.
To light up stories, 2024, Jenna Lee, assorted rice papers, powder-coated steel, rice paste glue, inks, light cord, lead bulb, 15 x 15 x 45 x 10 cm.
National Museum of Australia
The Chinatowns found in cities across Australia are one of the most cherished landmarks of our multicultural identity. They are a magnet for “melting pot” rhetoric. In contrast to the vision of that identity as a succulent meal of exotic dishes, however, Our Story celebrates the complex layering of culture as a lived experience of multiple connections.
Chinese and Aboriginal Australian heritage are presented here not as calculated percentages or assigned labels. Instead, they are celebrated as dimensions of family history and personal meaning to be tended, nurtured and, above all, to be shared.
Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia is at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, until January 27.
Authors: Alex Burchmore, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Curatorial Studies, Australian National University
