We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright

they worked on Sundays, when all
the good Christians knocked off to go to church, that they were thieves and gamblers,
and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive everybody else’s wages down too. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was this: they didn’t
bring their women with them. As one Royal Commission reported in April 1855, Even
if the Chinese were considered desirable colonists, they are unaccompanied by their
wives and families, under which circumstances no immigration can prove of real advantage
to any society.
    People didn’t like the fact that the Chinese kept to themselves. Though they seemed
harmless, they came to Victoria in great numbers— thousands at a time , wrote one commentator—and
stuck together, walking in long files to the goldfields then setting up separate
camps. There were estimated to be 3000 Chinese in Ballarat alone by early 1855, among
a total of 5000 on the goldfields.
    They ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical
hats instead of the usual digger’s cabbage hat; loose gowns that looked like women’s
attire and long pigtails—the kind of get-up thought to be more suited to a schoolgirl
than a working man. They practised their own medicine—acupuncture was readily available
at the Chinese camps, and some Europeans gave it a go. They opened their own restaurants.
They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their earnings home to
family members in China, where their wives were looking after the old and the young
in the community, in line with Confucian tradition, rather than blowing it on a spree.
    All this marked the Chinese out as different and peculiar. But who might actually
be hurt by John Chinaman ? Why, European women. This is what Mrs W. May Howell was
warned when she went to the diggings. Oh the diggers would not annoy you , she was
told by a friend, It’s those brutes of Chinamen; but they’d better not begin to insult
white women, or they’ll find it rather dangerous . Although Mrs Howell’s friend admitted
he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder what might
a man be capable of, when he had none of his own kind of woman about?
    Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the suspicion
of the Chinese diggers and their womanless ways. Police discovered a set of foul
and wicked prints . The pictures, which were evidently of naked ladies (whether Chinese
or European is not clear) and were said to bring the blush of shame and indignation
into the cheek of respectable men, were being sold on the sly to Europeans.
    One journalist wrote an article on ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in the Melbourne Monthly
Magazine. He was a lone voice in publicly defending the Chinese, pointing out their
industry and energy, their impeccable credentials as citizens, their intelligence
and cleanliness. But ask a Britoner on the street what objection they have to the
Celestials , he wrote, and they will answer: Morals, sir, morals. Pagans, you know
Pagans. No Mrs Chisholm at the Chinese Ports…no wives for the Pagans, sir, Prints,
sir, improper Prints.
    As the writer of ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ duly noted, the only argument against an otherwise intelligent, educated and industrious people was the absence of their wives. The
rest was blind prejudice . We are afraid of the Chinese, he wrote, and we have not
the moral courage to say so .

WINNERS AND LOSERS
    Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.
    It was May 1854, and Ballarat was a raft of tents in a sea of cold mud. The summer
of 1853–4 had been dry, the wet season had arrived early and now the rain had come.
Mining had practically ceased. John Manning, the master at St Alipius Catholic School
on the Eureka lead (where Anastasia Hayes was now working as a teacher while Timothy
mined), complained that few of the 74 children on his roll were in attendance owing
to the severity of the weather . Abandoned mine shafts