{"id":30831,"date":"2013-05-11T01:42:18","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T01:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30831"},"modified":"2021-10-28T16:40:38","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T16:40:38","slug":"the-outsiders-within-telling-australias-indigenous-asian-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30831","title":{"rendered":"The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia&#8217;s Indigenous-Asian Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsouthbooks.com.au\/books\/the-outsiders-within_telling-australias-indigenous-asian-story\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia&#8217;s Indigenous-Asian Story<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsouthbooks.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">University of New South Wales Press<\/a><br \/>\nJune 2007<br \/>\n256 pages<br \/>\n234 x 153mm<br \/>\nPaperback ISBN: 9780868408361<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/profiles\/peta-stephenson-4495\/profile_bio\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Peta Stephenson<\/a><\/strong>, Honorary Fellow<br \/>\n<em>Asia Institute, University of Melbourne<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsouthbooks.com.au\/books\/the-outsiders-within_telling-australias-indigenous-asian-story\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51BxSLfvjzL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An engaging account of the ways in which over hundreds of years Indigenous and Southeast Asian people across Australia have traded, intermarried and built hybrid communities. It is also a disturbing expos\u00e9 of the persistent\u2014sometimes paranoid\u2014efforts of successive national governments to police, marginalise and outlaw these encounters.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Introduction<\/li>\n<li>1. Trading places<\/li>\n<li>2. Makassan meetings<\/li>\n<li>3. Dangerous liaisons<\/li>\n<li>4. Colonial encounters<\/li>\n<li>5. Paranoid nation<\/li>\n<li>6. Invasion narratives<\/li>\n<li>7. Where are you from?<\/li>\n<li>8. Detoxifying Australia<\/li>\n<li>9. Old roots, new routes<\/li>\n<li><em>Bibliography<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Interviews<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Index<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>With a gun in hand Ah Hong, a Chinese cook and market gardener, shouted these words at the police: &#8216;you sleep with black women too. My woman&#8217;s got my kids.&#8217; It was <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alice_Springs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Alice Springs<\/a> in the early 20th century and Ah Hong had committed the &#8216;crime&#8217; of fathering three &#8216;mixed-race&#8217; children. Ah Hong met Ranjika, a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aranda_language#Varieties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Western Arrernte<\/a> woman, <strong>after the white man who stole her from her tribal husband abandoned her. Government officials targeted Ranjika and Ah Hong&#8217;s children for removal because they were of mixed Aboriginal-Asian descent.<\/strong> Reminding local officials that they also had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women. Ah Hong underlined the <strong>hypocrisy of fining or deporting Chinese and other Asian men because of their relationships with women or Aboriginal descent.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Around the same time, more than 2000 kilometres east in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Queensland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Queensland<\/a>, another triangular relationship between Aboriginal, Chinese and white Australians was being played out. White authorities had seized Princy Carlo and her family (like many other &#8216;fringe-dwelling&#8217; Aborigines) from their home country and packed them off to a government reserve more than 200 kilometres south-east. Princy Carlo was a mixed-race woman of Chinese and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wakawaka\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wakka Wakka<\/a> descent (from the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eidsvold,_Queensland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Eidsvold<\/a> district of southern Queensland, about 430 kilometres north-west of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brisbane\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brisbane<\/a>). She did not yield to the assimilationist intent of government policy. Instead, she and her family established a camp they called &#8216;Chinatown&#8217; at the Aboriginal settlement of Barambah (now <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cherbourg,_Queensland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cherbourg<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cathy_Freeman\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cathy Freeman<\/a> is identified as Australia&#8217;s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beijing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Beijing&#8217;s<\/a> bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman&#8217;s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman&#8217;s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?<\/p>\n<p><em>The Outsiders Within<\/em> is the story of the triangular relationship between Asians, Aborigines and white Australia. The three anecdotes just recounted are the tip of an historical iceberg. A unique and fascinating tradition of cross-cultural alliances between Indigenous and Asian Australian people exists in Australia, but it is largely unknown. In <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Broome,_Western_Australia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Broome, Western Australia<\/a>, by the 1940s, cross-cultural unions between Indigenous and Asian people had become so commonplace that a majority of the Aboriginal population had some Asian ancestry. And, while Broome is an exceptionally multicultural society, an Indigenous-Asian heritage is a feature of most communities across northern Australia. Nor is it confined to the north: as this study shows, it stretches south to the metropolitan centres and, more recently, in the work of artists, film-makers and writers it has become part of a vigorously pursued project to understand Australia&#8217;s past and present differently. For the story we have to tell is both troubled and troubling. It obliges us to confront a legacy of discrimination, and to ask why the social, political and geographical legitimisation of Australia as a nation-state depended so profoundly on declaring Indigenous-Asian alliances illegitimate&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia&#8217;s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,16,11,459,8,17,4405],"tags":[986,14614,14615],"class_list":["post-30831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-asia","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-oceania","tag-australia","tag-peta-stephenson","tag-university-of-new-south-wales-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30831"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53916,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831\/revisions\/53916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}