Catch up Online - ACIAC Chinese Australian History Seminar Series 1 (Lecture 2): From Gold to Artisans 1851 to 1881

Speaker: Dr Michael Williams

The gold rush period of Australian history looms large for many reasons, not least because it brought among many others the largest group of non-British arrivals to the Australian’s colonies – the Chinese. Since that time the Chinese as goldminers and the associated restrictions and events such as the Lambing Flat riots have dominated popular histories almost to the exclusion of anything else. Here the “anything else” – which ranges from home villages to opera and from bank notes to tin mining and much in between – will be discussed in order to add much needed context to this gold dominated history. As in the previous lectures much consideration is also given to the reflective nature of history and it is hoped to consider why so much has been whitewashed from this history and what modern perspectives are striving to add back in.

Seminar Series

* Background: Mirroring the Past   [Watch Online (opens in a new window)]

* Before there was gold   pre-1788 to 1851  [Watch Online (opens in a new window)]

* From gold to artisans                        1851 to 1881

* Merchants and the Qing                    1881 to 1911

* A white Australia tested                     1911 to 1936

* Wars and Revolutions                        1936 to 1972

* One (multicultural) Nation                  1972 to 2020