Director: Tony Matthews
Country: Australia
Runtime: 55’
Language: English
Year: 2010
The discovery of gold in Australia in the middle of the 19th century brought a vast army of Chinese gold-diggers to Australia. Forced to borrow passage money, to join violent secret societies which demanded exorbitant protection fees and interest on loans, the Chinese diggers endured long voyages in substandard shipping, crammed in together under vile conditions with simply a bowl of rice and a little water a day to sustain them. Once here, the Chinese migrants were forced to trek for hundreds of miles through hostile and rugged terrain to the various diggings where they were brutally treated by hostile European and Australian miners.
Yet during the height of Chinese migration many predicted a race war between the Chinese and white Australians. Chinese cabinet makers were made to stamp their products indicating that they were of Chinese manufacture. Chinese restaurants and tearooms were boycotted. As the federal parliament pushed through the notorious White Australia Policy anyone who could not pass a dictation test in English was likely to be deported. These measures spelt the end of large-scale Chinese influence in Australia and many of the Chinese diggers were eventually forced to return to China, although some remained to form the nucleus of today’s Chinese community.
Today, over 150 years after the first wide-scale Chinese immigration to the colonies, the complicated difficulties faced by those early Chinese migrants have largely been forgotten, yet without this powerful labour resource, without the diligence of the Chinese miners, the Australian goldfields and many of the country’s industries could never have been successfully exploited. Emotive, powerful, and carefully researched, this is a true story of survival and the struggle for success against almost impossible odds.
