Chinese Whispers from New South Wales
Janis Wilton records the stories of 19th-century Chinese immigrants and their descendants, and explores their relationship with ‘White Australia’.
Australia’s past and present is dotted and, at times, swamped by the expression of racist sentiments and by an ethnocentric fear of cultural difference. In the mid-1990s it is surfacing in the bigoted and ignorant statements of a small number of right-wing politicians whose foremost spokesperson has been Pauline Hanson, who in early 1996 became the newly elected federal parliament member for the seat of Oxley. (She was dubbed ‘the Oxley moron’ by one local newspaper.) Their words plug in to a long tradition of racism in this country, one which the media delights in focusing on. It is also a tradition which historians over the past two to three decades have spent time and intellectual effort to dissect, analyse and explain.
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