ON MAY 19, 1883, the Queensland Figaro newspaper printed the following verse about the country's "Yellow Agony":



Shoals of pigtails, almond­-eyed

Flooding all the country-side,

Skimmed off as their country's scum,

Odorous of opium.

Yellow rascals, cunning, knavish,

Bowed in foul vice-­bondage slavish,

They, with Eastern filth imbedded

Form one monster hydra­-headed.

Orientate, leprous­-fitted.

Blood­-diseased and smallpox-­pitted;

Noxious, maid­-devouring dragon he!

That's Sim's loathsome Yellow Agony

In 1901, the year of Australia’s federation, our first prime minister, Edmund Barton (he was knighted the following year), stood up in parliament and spoke the words: “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. … These races are, in comparison with white race – I think no one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior."

Jump forward nearly a century and you can hear echoes of Barton's xenophobia in Pauline Hanson's maiden speech in federal parliament in 1996: “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos, and do not assimilate.”

And yet these abrasive quotes tell just one side of the long history of the Chinese in Australia, spanning the era of the “Yellow Peril”, Cold War communist fears, the post-Tiananmen Square wave, and today’s concerns over property and agriculture being gobbled up by foreign interests.

The Chinese are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in Australia today. The number of Australian residents born in China has doubled over the last 10 years, now making up 2% of the total population (481,800 people), third behind the United Kingdom and New Zealand, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. An additional 2% of Australians identify as having Chinese ancestry.

I grew up in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s. Most children I knew were known as ABCs – Australian-Born Chinese – however, the grownup Chinese people in our lives were immigrants with accents, weird pickled shit in jars and plastic-­lined drawers permanently smelling of Tiger Balm.