長夜星稀 : 澳大利亞華人史 1860-1940

Abstract

This book aims to explore into the life of Australian Chinese. The temporal period of the 1860’s was particularly intriguing as it was an era in which a rush of Chinese diggers arrived in Australia and boosted the local population to its peak within a twenty some years’ time frame; the Chinese community came to a gradual and painful atrophy just before the Second World War after some long and exasperating years of Sino-Japanese conflicts in the mainland China. For the region of investigation, I started mainly from where my home was located, that is New South Wales and its bordering Victoria and Queensland. As for the scope of investigation, I dedicate the focus of my research on the relations between Chinese laborers and immigrants with the local Australians in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century as well as the disputes in political and commercial issues within the Chinese community. Besides hunting specifically for negative data, I also hope to throw some new light on the entertainments of Australian Chinese. The sources used in my investigation, therefore, are rather different from those gathered in traditional archival study, as I paid more attention on local newspapers which revealed more truthfully the lives of the local people within the community. Government journals are another important element in my research as they represented largely the general views from the main stream.