Chinatowns / camps
Date Published
What makes a Chinatown?
The concept of “Chinatown” is a confused one, laden as it usually is with mythology and sterotypes. For many people, the mental image derives from San Francisco—a unique case within the global Chinese diaspora, shaped by the particular circumstances of American urban development and racial segregation. In Australia, however, what are now retrospectively called “Chinatowns” were more accurately camps or small settlements. These were rarely distinct ethnic enclaves in the modern sense; they were often integrated parts of towns, where Chinese and non-Chinese residents lived and worked side by side.
The term camp itself emerged from colonial legislation in Victoria and New South Wales, which ostensibly required Chinese miners on the goldfields to live apart in order to prevent violence or conflict. In practice, such segregation was inconsistently enforced, and by the later nineteenth century the “Chinese camp” usually referred simply to an area with a few Chinese shops, perhaps a Joss House, or market gardens on the outskirts of town. In some cases, the clustering was more pronounced, not because of law or hostility, but for practical or cultural reasons—shared commerce, kinship, or proximity to temples and gardens.
Historian Sandy Robb more accurately described these spaces as cultural precincts, fluid and locally specific rather than fixed or homogenous. Yet the enduring term Chinatown continues to project a stylised, romantic image of Chinese community life—an image further reinforced by the decorative gates erected in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1980s. These monuments, while intended to celebrate Chinese heritage, also represent a kind of retrospective self-orientalising, translating complex histories of settlement into a single, easily recognisable symbol for contemporary multiculturalism.
Chinese people themselves usually referred to a locality where they lived as "Street of the Tang people". Tang being a general term for people of China common among Cantonese speakers, nowadays replaced by the term Han.
“In general appearance this Chinese settlement is not particularly Chinese. The houses are mostly of weatherboard, covered with bark and shingles ; but besides the joss house there is a typical Chinese cook shop with its little dishes of "delicacies," exactly the same as anyone may see all over the Celestial Empire. There is a butcher's shop, where a Chinaman is cutting up a pig. It is altogether a bit of Little Bourke- street."
For the definition of Sandi Robb's concept of cultural precincts:
See also:
‘The Things That Unite: Inquests into Chinese Deaths on the Bendigo Goldfields 1854-65’, Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, issue no. 7, 2006. ISSN 1832-2522. Copyright © Valerie Lovejoy.
