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This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an introduction to the historical presence of women of Chinese heritage in Australia. For too many years Chinese Australian women’s history has been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. This has been compounded by the perceived absence of the primary sources needed to undertake a recovery project. As feminist historians we now recognize that aided by the digital revolution and a creative use of newspapers, family histories, official statistics, and government records, it is possible to uncover and illuminate Chinese Australians women’s lives in the past. In doing so we question the framing of Chinese women as static or immobile while their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons took part in large-scale migration from Guangdong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Placing the movements of migrant and Australian-born Chinese women in an international context, we propose a spectrum of mobility along which women’s individual, and changing, situations can be situated. This introduction also surveys existing historical scholarship on Chinese women’s migration and settlement in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, recognizing that international themes offer inspiration for Australian research.

Although women were largely absent from male-dominated Chinese community discussions on democratic values, brotherhood, diaspora unity, and Han-identity nationalism, they were not absent from Chinese Australians’ modern social life from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. By examining public comments and views in Chinese Australian newspapers regarding gender as a new social relationship, this chapter argues that the newspapers provide a window through male narratives that now enables us to espy how the Chinese population deliberated women’s social role and the way it was changing. The chapter aims to uncover through an investigation of the historic records, in the social life of Chinese Australians, the male-dominated view of gender role reconciled on the one hand the desire to segregate women from public discussions and participation, and on the other the need to involve women’s presence to demonstrate respectability and social standing to meet Australian social expectations. These public narratives and social networks provide a new approach to apprehending the nature and importance of Chinese Australian social life.

Despite ‘unchanging tradition’ being a key characteristic of the white wedding, the cultural practices that make up the white wedding have evolved and become integrally linked to the creation of the wedding photograph. From the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women, including Australians with Chinese heritage, were married and photographed in white. This chapter analyses Chinese-Australian wedding photographs from the 1890s to the 1940s within larger global movements in fashion and culture. It suggests that by marrying in white, Chinese-Australian women were not assimilating into Western, Christian cultural practices that already existed, but that they, alongside other women in Australia, China, Hong Kong and around the world, were building something new – the global phenomenon of the white wedding.

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese heritage. They both went on to path-breaking careers, demonstrating a strong commitment to public and political life. Mary Chong, after graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929, was employed by the Chinese Consul General in Sydney. Soon after she went to China, working first for the Republic of China government and later in journalism, returning to Australia in later years. Gwen Fong, who graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1947, remained in Melbourne working as a doctor. While pursuing her medical studies and career, Gwen was politically active in the Communist Party of Australia, as a leader of the university branch and as an organiser of educational events. Education within the Australian university system allowed these pioneering women to take up fulfilling careers in Australia and in China. Their writings, which include protests against a range of Australian government policies, enrich the archive of women’s political history.

In July 1925, the body of a young Chinese-Australian woman was dragged out of the harbour in Fremantle, Western Australia. An inquest ensued, leading to the trial of her husband for murder. From press reports and legal documents concerning the case emerge details of family life in the small Australian Chinese community of between-the-wars Perth. Drawing on Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s concept of the singularization of history, the chapter considers the implications of research on one person, or one family, for a subfield such as ‘Chinese-Australian history’, or ‘the history of Chinese women in Australia’.  Ruby’s was a singular story. How was it Chinese? How was it Australian? Where is the historiographical space for it to be recounted?

This chapter revisits a well-known immigration case from the early White Australia period. In 1913, Ham Hop, the wife of fruit merchant Poon Gooey, was made to leave Australia with the couple’s two young Australian-born daughters. She had come to Australia on a temporary permit in 1910, but Poon Gooey had then mounted a determined campaign to gain permission for her to remain more permanently. The campaign, while ultimately unsuccessful, found widespread community support and was an ongoing embarrassment to the federal Labor government. This chapter focuses on the experiences of Ham Hop – first as a gum saam po, then as a migrant wife – to explore the possibilities for uncovering the lives of Chinese wives who were largely excluded from permanent migration to Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores how Chinese cultural expressions of charity, based on interpersonal relationships (guanxi) and native place (tongxiang) ties, came to mix and interact with contrasting traditions of Christian charity practiced in a predominantly British milieu in colonial and federation Australia over the late 19th century and 20th centuries. We employ the term “philanthropic sociability” to capture the spirit of innovation that came to characterize a number of voluntary organizations in which Chinese Australian women were active organizers and innovators. By analyzing male-dominated writings and records of charitable fairs and public celebrations, the chapter argues that women undertook “invisible work” in voluntary organizations and built a variety of informal networks among them. Although their social impact was limited, women contextualized their participation in male-dominated activities in ways that cannot be explained in terms of patriarchal values. We find that the impact of women in Chinese- Australian voluntary organizations was not just about the feminizing of community formations but also about promoting philanthropic sociability in ways that traditional organizations could not match.

The inclusion of Chinese contemporary art in the exhibition, collection, and market circles of the global contemporary art world, was brought about by both the global response to the rise of China as an economic and cultural superpower and the increased migration of Chinese mainland artists since the 1980s, which elicited a diasporisation of the Chinese art scene. This particular constellation makes it necessary to rethink global contemporary Chinese art from the transnational perspective of migration and diaspora studies. By focusing on two Chinese overseas artists – Ah Xian and Fan Dong Wang, who share the experience of emigrating from mainland China to Australia in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 – this chapter analyses the production of diasporic Chineseness in Chinese Australian art with regard to the globalisation of contemporary Chinese art. Drawing on the concept of the ‘migrant image’, it discusses conditions for and elements of diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery in the cross-cultural work of Chinese overseas art. This case-study analysis explores the impact of migration and the diasporic experience on the creation of art, in particular on the role of transculturation between Chinese and Western art traditions and the significance of image ambiguation for aesthetic transmigration.

This chapter presents a case study of Christian charity work among mobile Chinese of the Cantonese Pacific which suggests that the pull of native place charity was not weaker among women Christian converts than among men wedded to patriarchal hometown lineages. Braced by her triple marginalization as a woman, a Pentecostal, and a member of the minority Chinese community in Australia, Mary Kum Sou (Wong Yen) Yeung (Chen Jinxiao 陳金笑‎, 1888–1971) expressed her faith through a life of empathy for the marginalized and generosity towards those in need. By tracing Yeung’s strategic networking, her vocal support for charitable contributions, and the patterns of community engagement that characterized her charitable work, this research illustrates the concrete connections linking her spiritual beliefs to her distinctive style of hometown charitable engagement. Mary Yeung’s experience as a girl, a young woman, and a pioneering missionary and charity worker of the Australian Pentecostal church is more than a story of native place charity. It is also a story of faith and suffering, and privilege wedded with sacrifice. At the same time, in Mary Yeung’s charitable practice we find native-place welfare preserved and transformed within a radical Christian protestant tradition.