Within a year the prospect of otherwise respectable British workers supplanting locals from their jobs had been replaced by the alarming spectre of millions of ‘flat-faced, flat-footed heathen Chinese’ driving the white race out completely. That at least was the awful vision tormenting those who attended a rally on 23 July to protest all Chinese immigration. There were just under 1000 Chinese resident in Sydney then, considerably less than the 1500 working men who squeezed into the city’s guild hall, with many more spilling out onto Castlereagh Street. Sydney’s Chinese community, almost entirely male, lived crammed into small dank terraces around the inner city. Some were market gardeners, exercising a skill – farming in dry, poor soils – of great use and some mystery to white Australians. Many others were employed in the furniture trade, centred on George Street, arousing the rally’s indignation on behalf of white cabinet-makers driven out of their trade by ‘coolie labour’. Most of the evening’s considerable heat and anger was not generated by economic debate but by the belief that the Chinese were inherently immoral and a danger to the virtue of the city’s females. Curthoys records that by November 1878, 181 European women were married to Chinese men, a further 171 were ‘living in sin’ with them. These outrageous liaisons had also brought forth 586 Anglo-Chinese children. The ‘twin issues of economic competition and immorality’ were only exacerbated by the fact that ‘Chinese arrivals were again, for the first time since 1861, exceeding departures’. Although the vast majority of the Chinese were to be found in remote mining districts and although, almost to a man, they wished only to build up a very small pile and return home, their passage through the metro centres, the small remnant populations they deposited there, and the memories of earlier bloodshed on the goldfields had snagged like a fishhook in the national psyche.
The angry tradesmen were addressed by Seamen’s Union reps and a group of anti-Chinese politicians, including Angus Cameron, a carpenter and a member of the Legislative Assembly who was one of the original organisers of the push against British migration. To roars of approval, he denounced the Chinese invasion, proclaiming, ‘We came here to better our position and we will not have this moral pestilence – we will have none of them!’
A little earlier Thomas White, the President of the Seamen’s Union, had first linked their dispute with ASN to the wider issue of Chinese immigration. White’s was one of the wilder performances that night. He told the crowd that he had seen ‘old schoolmates and young girls with whom he had gone to church’ fallen into depravity in the Chinese dens of the city. He tore into the newspapers, most notably the Herald, for going arm in arm with the Chinese merchants responsible for importing the ‘pestilence’. And he referred to the parliamentary report on common lodging houses, saying it was not possible for a man to read the evidence of witnesses like Inspector Seymour without disgust. Cameron, who had chaired the committee which produced the report, described its findings as loathsome and beastly, but nothing compared to what the audience might see for themselves in the Chinese quarter that very night. Whipping his listeners into a frenzy, he declared that the Chinese did not just threaten their individual livelihoods but the nation’s very character, along with the virtue and character of their wives and daughters. ‘Their presence here means moral and political degradation in every sense of the term’.
Some of the audience who were not in the habit of keeping up with Parliament’s publications were very keen for the offending passages to be read out. And they were especially keen to hear from Inspector Seymour. Given the fevered atmosphere, White and Cameron were probably wise in recommending that the men read it for themselves later. Seymour, an ‘Inspector of Nuisances’ for the city council, had spent a good deal of time amongst the Chinese and was not shy about passing on his findings. Asked simply whether he knew if the Chinese kept lodging houses in the city, Seymour peeled off into a long colourful diatribe about the conditions to be found in opium dens, some of which were just down the street from the guild hall.
The Chinese live eight or ten in a room and lie on stretchers … I have gone into a room and found a small lamp in the centre, and a Chinaman with a woman between his legs, naked all but a petticoat, and another Chinaman in the same position on another part of the stretcher; in the next room the same and in the next the same. These were white women, some of them married women, and others women of the town. I have found another Chinaman lying with his arms around a woman, one hand on her bosom, and his other hand under her legs, pulling her parts about like a dog. In another place there was a Chinaman had a girl on the table, sitting up, with his trousers down, and one of the girl’s legs over his shoulder; she was under the influence of opium, and he was using her – having connection with her – and seven or eight Chinamen waiting at the door to do the same to this woman.
Seymour went on to explain that he found scenes of this sort repeated up and down Cyrus Lane, the girls telling him that they were enslaved to the Chinese through their addiction to opium. The smokers’ dens could be found all through the central city, in dangerous, filthy warrens like Abercrombie Lane and Rowe Street and throughout Surry Hills, where many of the Chinese lived. It was enough to drive God-fearing white men to violence. However, the Inspector of Nuisances may not have taken into account that many of the couples – 181 of them at least – whose boudoirs he had happily barged into were married. And the rest, ‘women of the town’ as he called them, were unlikely to be the object of societal concern under normal circumstances. Elsewhere in the report the witnesses and their parliamentary questioners are less solicitous of the city’s ‘lowest sort’ of women. When shacked up in cheap lodgings with poor white trash they were little better than Ralph Clark’s abandoned trollops. Only when they started snorting up drugs and throwing their legs over Chinamen’s shoulders was there any concern expressed for their ‘virtue and character’. It seems that the workshop was not the only place where white men had to worry about the special skills of the Chinese.
Curthoys writes that while Thomas White briefly described Chinese labour as unfair competition, because they could live on virtually nothing and had no families to support, he canvassed non-economic objections to the Chinese at length; the dangers of cohabitation with young white women, the dangers to British institutions of secret tribunals and societies, their lack of respect for the law. Whereas twelve months previously he had decried the assisted migration of British workers to Australia, he now told the meeting he would ‘rather see all the convicts of Great Britain in New South Wales than one Chinaman’. The Evening News reported that a rousing cheer went up as he said he would be the first to shoulder a musket to prevent the Chinese coming to drive out the Caucasian race. When the Anglo-Saxon smelt blood there was no holding him back, he declared, adding quickly that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But he continued that he also hoped decent people would decline to travel in any ship where Chinese were employed, or dine in a hotel where they ate, or buy furniture from a factory where they worked. The crowd erupted again when he said it was their duty to shove aside any Chinaman they encountered on the footpath.
In the months leading up to the November strike, meetings like this were a regular feature of the city’s night-life. The machinery of the movement had already been built for the campaigns against assisted British migrants. Whilst that had largely been a working class affair, opposition to the Chinese crossed class boundaries and left the shipping company largely isolated, save for lukewarm encouragement from the Herald and the Chamber of Commerce. Their argument that the Chinese were an inferior race whom working men could exploit, thus improving their own position, was recognised and denounced for the self-serving tosh that it was. A number of non-union and middle class organisations had grown out of that first anti-immigration meeting sponsored by the TLC in 1877. They included the Working Men’s Defence Association (WMDA) and the Political Reform Union (PRU), the latter becoming a focal point of anti-Chinese agitation, organising most of the public meetings which took place each Saturday in
Hyde Park and Haymarket.
In early August the WMDA called its own public meeting, attended by about 250 people. Several speeches denounced ‘the Chinese variously as inhuman, immoral, incapable of becoming civilised, and loathsome’. A much larger meeting about a fortnight later raised a petition, eventually carrying thousands of signatures, which was presented to the Legislative Assembly on 6 November, two weeks before the seamen walked off the job. In the meantime Thomas White had led a delegation to the Colonial Secretary, Michael Fitzpatrick, to present demands for legislative action. Fitzpatrick demurred, pointing out that not many Chinese had arrived and many who had were on their way somewhere else. He also had to consider British imperial obligations, ‘which involved a reluctance to offend China’. At this point, despite the anger and anxieties of the general populace, the TLC seemed to have lost. The decision to strike from 18 November, after another 109 Chinese had arrived to man five ASN ships, changed everything.
Although the strike was principally designed to force ASN’s hand, it also revived the wider anti-Chinese movement. The Evening News reported that Angus Cameron received a wild, cheering reception when he addressed a ‘monster’ gathering in Castlereagh Street on the first day of the walkout. Cameron admitted that Chinese labour might be excused under strict free-trade principles, but ‘in the eyes of God and man they had just grounds for rejecting these people’. Hard as it was, he could justify simple competition between Englishmen and Orientals, but ‘all the powers between heaven and earth could not justify the prostitution and the disease of their female population; the curse and the dregs of infamy which the Mongolian bore in his face when he came amongst us’. Previously the industrial issue of the Chinese seamen had been lost in this sort of rhetorical tumult over opium dens, disease, secret societies, down-breeding and the curious preference of some white women for yellow men. But with increasing numbers of idle ASN ships filling the harbour, the whole city could see the tangible effects of racial conflict. As the confrontation escalated it dragged in more and more people – waterside workers, businessmen, shopkeepers and finally, as the city’s commercial arteries clogged up, the public themselves. The action spread to Newcastle and Brisbane within four days and ASN quickly found it did not have enough Chinese to replace the nearly 800 seamen and wharf labourers on strike.
On 19 November at a meeting between the union executive and company directors the union argued that the Chinese would cost all of their members their jobs and that they should be sent home. The directors refused to negotiate while the union was on strike, saying they were breaching their contracts, that ASN had been forced into this position by their competitors, and that the Chinese were only to be used in tropical waters, to which they were more suited than whites. The company thought the union would cave in under financial pressure and on 28 November it knocked back an offer by the seamen to pay the fares of the returning Chinese and to enter into a £500 bond not to strike for a year. A shareholders meeting the next day strongly supported the directors who announced they would use volunteers on their ships from 2 December and, far from backing down, they would now be sending to Hong Kong for another 300 Chinese.
The company was both overplaying its hand and underestimating the level of support for the strikers. The Queensland Government announced it would withdraw ASN’s mail subsidy if it continued to use Chinese labour. Spontaneous donations from the public and from unions as far away as New Zealand poured thousands of pounds into the TLC’s fighting fund while few volunteers materialised to help out the company. Tension climbed through the summer. A severe heatwave in the bush triggered the migration of millions of insects which descended on Sydney as the two sides geared down for a long and bitter confrontation. Residents in Ashfield were driven to hide in their houses as plagues of locusts and flying ants swarmed over their suburb. But even greater consternation was aroused by the approaching swarm of 300 Chinese, their progress charted in regular press reports. Public meetings grew in size and volatility. A speaker by the name of Stedman inflamed a meeting of 250 in the Oddfellows Hall at Balmain, telling them that the Chinese picked up dead and decaying dogs to eat, and that some even threw ‘the remains of children’ into their cooking pots. Whilst 500 listened to the usual suspects at a Political Reform Union meeting in Woollahra, two men were taking more direct action in Essex Street where they attacked a man named Ah Gee with a hammer, smashing him about the head and face before being driven off by a cab driver. Indeed, a lot of people took to heart Thomas White’s advice about shoving Chinamen out of their path. The Herald published a growing stream of letters detailing attacks on Chinese residents throughout the city. One reader described seeing ‘a respectably dressed Chinaman’ try to hail a cab, only to be clouted in the face with the driver’s whip. A crowd of up to 1000 materialised around the post office after a young man had intervened to protect a Chinaman from assault by ‘a number of roughs’. The good Samaritan was himself set upon and had to be escorted away by police. Another mob of ‘thirty or forty lads’ chased a single Chinese man up William Street, pelting him with such a shower of stones that passersby had to duck and run for their own safety. One woman who argued with a member of the crowd was told, ‘the Chinamen are taking our country from us and we must kill them’.
In spite of White’s inflammatory speeches, most press reports were careful to separate this anarchic, spontaneous violence from the actions of the striking seamen. The Evening News, a great supporter of the anti-Chinese movement, deplored the attacks, editorialising that they would rather have a population of Mongolians than a city full of these ‘low brutal fellows’. Even the Herald, which supported the ASN and the city’s mercantile interests against the union’s claims, described the strikers’ overall behaviour as sober and orderly, only turning on them when a riot broke out on the afternoon of Saturday 9 December.
Half a dozen mounted police and up to sixty uniformed and plain-clothes police were patrolling Lower George Street around ASN’s wharf. A crowd of a few hundred had gathered there to harass a smaller number of strikebreakers due to leave the company’s premises after four o’clock. The police directed the men to leave via a small street which ran beside the Mariner’s Church, but no sooner had they stepped out than the crowd rushed them, screaming abuse. The police formed a thin shell around the workmen and attempted to move into George Street, the crowd tearing along after them ‘hustling, jeering, hooting and attempting to seize and assault some of the workmen’. The paper described the crowd as ferocious and their victims as being in great fear despite the armed escort.
If any of them happened for an instant to get away from the side of those who were protecting them an attempt was made, with what can only be compared to the ferocity of wild beasts, and when one of them, in deadly fear of a repetition of a brutal beating he had received the previous day, ran a little in advance of the crowd and the police for a cab … a number of his persecutors broke from the crowd, chased him and clambered about the cab as though they would pull the driver from his seat and demolish the vehicle rather than be baulked of their prey.
Distinctions between the mob, the police and the strikebreakers became confused, the violence cranking up as they surged and fought. At Charlotte Place the police suddenly regrouped, turned on the attackers and charged into them with whips and billy clubs. The Herald’s man watched as ‘the blows of the police fell fast and heavy’, unleashing panic and confusion amongst the ‘roughs’ who scattered ‘like chaff’ in their attempts to flee, quickly leaving the scene deserted save for the police, their charges and a score of injured bystanders. The Evening News reported that after the skirmish such fears were held about an assault on the company’s property that No. 2 Battery of the Permanent Artillery was issued with rifles and live ammunition, marching from Victoria Barracks in Paddington to put down any trouble.
The idea of the military being called into the streets to fire on the populace was considered a routine, if regrettable, precaution. Just a few days previously an ugly m
ob had broken away from a huge congregation in Hyde Park to rampage through the city attacking any Chinamen they could find. The night-time rally, complete with burning torches and ‘the ascent of a rocket’ to draw a crowd of 10–15 000, had dispatched a deputation to Parliament with another petition calling for legislative action to ban Chinese from the colony. Many of the protesters were described as ‘larrikins’, an all-purpose label for the thousands of shiftless, teenaged criminals who haunted the city streets. These were the ‘low brutal fellows’ who had been increasingly drawn to the anti-Chinese movement by the opportunity it presented for a spree of community-sponsored violence. At least 2000 of them left the Hyde Park demonstration to trawl the city in packs, seeking out victims. With large numbers of plain-clothes police on patrol around the park, one group of larrikins made their way at ‘full speed’ to Lower George Street where many Chinese merchants and warehouses were located. Lit by burning branches, they gathered stones to hurl against the walls and shuttered windows of the shops while a smaller party charged the premises of a furniture maker called Ah Toy. They tried to hurl their torches inside the building, where dozens of Chinese lived and worked, but were thwarted by a nearby constable. More police appeared, formed up and charged. The Herald reported that the riot line ‘unmercifully’ laid into the seething, raucous mob ‘with whip, staves and sticks’, driving them back up George Street.
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