Sophie Loy-Wilson

Where are Chinese Australians in Australian history? Australia’s Chinese past is persistently framed as ‘forgotten’ in public debate, a perpetual newness which ignores forty years of scholarship in the field. Contemporary works on Sino-Australian relations proliferate, resurrecting Cold War mentalities but avoiding Australia’s colonial history of Chinese migration and settlement. In this seminar I account for this forgetfulness while also drawing attention to a spate of recently unearthed Chinese language sources written by Chinese Australians. These sources, newly translated, invite us to see Australia’s past in a Chinese context, revealing a propensity in Australia to organize historical time along European lines, obscuring ties of causality between events in Asia and Australia. Multilingual archives challenge the primacy of English-language sources in the narration of Australia’s past, revealing an architecture of Australia-Asia interconnection often hidden in nationalist conceptions of the past.

About the Speaker

Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Sydney. She is the recipient of an ARC DECRA Fellowship for her new project, Chinese Business: economic and social survival in White Australia, 1870-1940.

This event will be delivered in-person and online.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.