…at a place called “Chinaman Garden”
In 1989, artist Zhou Xiaoping found himself in Broome, Western Australia. There, he met the Aboriginal songwriter Jimmy Chi, well known for his musicals Bran Nue Dae and Corrugation Road. Jimmy asked Xiaoping to say something in Chinese. He wanted to hear the sound of Chinese spoken words and talk about his Chinese heritage.
Jimmy Chi’s grandpa was a Chinese man called John Chi who came to Australia from Guangzhou as a young man looking for gold in about 1860.
Xiaoping asked him how Chinese culture had influenced him. Jimmy said that he liked Chinese food. He also liked the way that Chinese men looked after their kids and families. He remembered how his Dad used to say, “It is easy to make babies, but you got to look after them. You do not just make babies and run away.”
Later in that trip Xiaoping travelled from Halls Creek to Balgo, an Aboriginal community on the fringe of the desert in Kimberly. Travelling with a missionary, they stopped for the night at a place called “Chinaman Garden”. As father Paul lit a fire, Xiaoping was startled by four Chinese faces staring at him. Father Paul introduced them, and they all had Chinese names.
Xiaoping recounts this inspirational first meeting in 1989:
I greeted them in Chinese, ‘Ni-Hao,’ but Ah Lee looked puzzled and tried to repeat the words, making everybody laugh. ‘Aboriginal,’ Ah Lee said, “We all Aboriginal. But everyone tells me, I am Chinaman. Now I see you… em, yeah… I am, we look the same, right?”
He knew very little about his origins. All he remembered was Chinese food.
“I like Chinese food, everyone like it,” he said. But because of his Chinese facial features, he could not forget his identity.
While chatting, Ah Lee lay on a blanket, one arm resting on his bent leg, looking lazily at a dog somewhere off in the dark. He made quiet pattering sounds as he sucked on a self-made pipe. To me he looked just like some Chinese villager, even though we had met here in the outback and communicated more with body language than with English.
“Em, I’m getting old.” said Ah Lee sighing heavily. I wondered, who will take care of this mob now? It seemed that this task would fall to young Lee.
Father Paul told me how these men really wanted to understand their Chinese bloodlines. “Didn’t you see how excited they were when they first saw you?”
“Yes, I know, but what I can do for them?” I asked myself.
After this encounter, Xiaoping has thought at length and many times about these two meetings.
They were among the first stories he discovered regarding the relationship between the Aboriginal and Chinese people in Australian history. Over time, Xiaoping encountered many, many more stories – a rich intersection of peoples hardly acknowledged.
Today, 30 years later, Xiaoping has formed a group of academics and experts, to study and document this little-known history to bring it patently into our collective consciousness.
Inspirations
“WE ARE ALL A HUMAN FAMILY, WHETHER IT IS WHITE, RED, YELLOW OR BLACK…”
Jimmy Chi