For 10 wretched months between 1860 and 1861, the Burrangong goldfields – near the town of Young, four hours drive west of Sydney – were consumed by riots. Chinese miners were attacked by white miners, martial law was proclaimed and new laws passed that paved the road for the White Australia policy decades later.
Historian Karen Schamberger tells the story with brutal precision. “On the day of the largest riot, over 3,000 Australian, European-born and American miners marched from Tipperary Gully through different goldfields. They cut off the queue [pigtails] from Chinese miners, scalped some of them. They burnt the Chinese miners’ tents, brutalised them.” Civility disappeared, an unknown number of people went missing and the riot act was read in July 1861. “That’s how much they lost control of the colony.”
Schamberger investigated the riots as part of her doctoral thesis, and recently worked with multimedia artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge to bring a new perspective to that myth with The Burrangong Affray, an exhibition currently showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney’s Chinatown. The cross-generational show is founded on a sense of community catharsis, blending personal storytelling, historical research and irreverent, contemporary artmaking, and seeks to address fundamental questions about the riots, such as: why has a key moment in the evolution of the White Australia policy been marked as a mainly Chinese-Australian concern? Why is the struggle of Chinese miners considered part of a diasporic tale, rather than squarely in the national imagination like Ned Kelly, the Eureka rebellion or the Gallipoli diggers?
The landscape of Young remains haunted by the hollowed-out goldfields but the bloodshed of the Lambing Flat riots, as they became known, has been largely subsumed in the myths that Australia tells of its birth and nationhood. The exhibition does not weaponise the riots or the ghosts of this continent’s history but, like the massacres map marking genocidal killings of Indigenous people, The Burrangong Affray is part of a push for truth-telling in Australian history. Across videos, photography, text-based works and installations, Phu and Young subvert the received meanings of historical artefacts, such as Chinese men’s pigtails (which were used by white miners as war trophies) and emergency blankets.
“The history [of the riots] has been used across the political spectrum as a tool,” says Michael Do, who curated the show with Mikala Tai. “An article came out last year from Australia First saying it’s an example of why we need the borders to be shut. There are people who want to rename Young ‘Lambing Flat’ to celebrate the riots.”
Official records are messy, incomplete and disputed, which means narrative is characterised by rumour and erasure: missing evidence, the predominance of white historical sources and competing local oral histories of mass graves. The town was renamed Young in 1863 in a government effort to distance the area from the atrocities, Schamberger says, and, in the 19th and 20th century, official histories omitted the riots all together.
“Because it has a contentious story, it doesn’t have a clear myth,” Do says.
Schamberger says: “In broader Australian history, there’s little known about the riots and it has been avoided, because it’s difficult.
“I think there’s a lot of shame around it, to be honest. And that shame has been there since the beginning. But if you look at it from the Chinese-Australian perspective, it’s definitely in the popular memory.”
At the time, The Yass Courier and Goulburn Chronicle reported on miners driven into watercourses and trampled under police horses’ hooves. One report speaks of “several killed and wounded” by a “mobocracy” of lawless insurgents, while expressing sympathy with “meek” local mining populations suffering from “insecurity of life and property” at the hands of the dying gold industry. Another report reads like a horror story, describing “abominable diggers”, “rebels swallowed up in abysses of mud” and “the artillery, the military, the blue jackets, and the troopers” descending on nearby Yass. In 1935, the Sydney Mail said that the riots’ “close approximation to civil war is only comparable in Australian records to the tragedy of the Eureka Stockade”. By 1978, labour historian CN Connolly had called the riots a “monument to fear.”
They were certainly defined by impunity. Just one rioter was convicted, William Spicer, and two unconvicted rioters were later elected to parliament. The Chinese immigration act was passed in New South Wales in November 1861, after 3,000 white miners petitioned for it. And the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, the basis of the White Australia policy, effectively formalised the sentiment of the riots. Fear turned to law and the Chinese miners were forgotten.
Schamberger says that the issue isn’t race alone but how racism connects to the conflicting tensions of colonialism. “It’s really about our connection, at that point, to Britain,” she says. “Britain had signed a treaty with the Chinese empire to allow free movement of citizens through the colonies. Petitions from Sydneysiders and businesses wanted the Chinese to be there, because it’s good for business. You grow the population, you can trade, you can buy stuff, you can sell things.”
But as the mines were exhausted, the Chinese miners, with their highly effective collective mining techniques and distinctive cultural practices, bore the brunt of local anxieties about job security.
“[With] the broader mentality of settler colonialism, the way that the colonies were settled, you had to get rid of Aboriginal people, and you had to dominate the landscape in such a way that nothing else was going to challenge your authority. So when there were people who were clearly different, who worked in ways that European miners didn’t understand, who were successful in ways that made them envious, they had to demonise them. They needed to feel like they were repelling somebody.”
Phu and Young’s exhibition offers “a new interpretation” that connects to “a deeper history”, Schamberger says. “They’re really honest works … We forget to look for the voices and experiences and thoughts of the Chinese miners. It’s important that Chinese-Australian voices are there. Most of the writing throughout history has been from European-born perspectives.”
The work on display as part of The Burragong Affray is based on multiple visits to the region and community consultation, and follows a public work the artists performed at Young Chinese cemetery in April. The exhibition’s entire team – curators, artists and historian – come from Chinese-Australian families of later migration waves. In 2019, they will create public monuments in Young memorialising those scarred by the rampage (just as colonial figures have been remembered), and an educational book. The multi-staged project suggests a way forward from Australia’s culture and history wars, and that reckoning with the monstrous reality of Australian history might be healing.
That approach is most summed up by the way the current exhibition handles a key piece of propaganda from the time: the circus-like banner reading “Roll Up No Chinese”, raised in the riots to the marching band tune of Rule, Britannia! Phu reworks it in the exhibition, associating the word “roll” with “spring roll”.
“The pieces that Jason created are trying to find a way of owning that history,” Schamberger says. “It’s thinking about what the Chinese brought, in contrast to the way that they were so forcefully excluded.
“He’s really trying to say that Chinese people belong here.”