Beyond Chinatown, extracts

Natalie Chin, Grace Fintlen and Lily Ah Toy at the Darwin launch of Beyond Chinatown . (Courtesy Francis Good)

'Who do we think we are?...The false representation of history is not something that can be forced on a free people without an organised, Stalinist-style campaign. But a national history that denies all its people voices can be totalitarian by default… Jimmy Ah Toy spoke out against officials and others who insisted on classifying the Chinese as sojourners. His family remembers the hardship the campaign against Chinatown created for the Chinese. They did not wish to be repatriated to some non-existent "home". "These old men did not want to go home because they had no homes to go to," he said. After having laboured to build and sustain the settlements of Australia, "after having been here 50 or 60 years, they claimed this as their home".' ¹

¹  Jimmy Ah Toy, transcript of undated talk to the Historical Society of the Northern Territory

Wartime evacuees from Darwin at Eden Hills, South Australia. The Ah Toy, Que Noy, Cheong and Hee families are represented. (From Beyond Chinatown , page 13 and the Pictorial Collection, National Library)

Links

To read the whole book, go to http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/31345940and find a list of the 73 libraries which hold copies.
A National Library of Australia e-book can be found in two versions at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3715309 and
http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/ebooks/pdf/Beyond%20Chinatown.pdf

See pictures of the Darwin launch at http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/212164387

See also '"Where others failed, the Chinese succeeded": collecting and re-evaluating the history of the Chinese...' in Paul Macgregor (ed.), Proceedings, conference on Histories of the Chinese in Australia and the South Pacific, 1995 at http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/51869095

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