Paper details
‘Me no...’: the talk of Chinamen and policemen
In November 1893, Constable James Cooke arrested a Chinese man Hen Shing for stealing wood from a Carlton depot. In his testimony Cooke reported that when he arrested the 'prisoner', Hen Shing, Cooke said, 'I have a warrant for your arrest for stealing timber', to which Hen Shing reportedly replied, 'Me no steal timber'.’ In order to understand colonial power, argues Bhabha, historians might examine 'those strategies of normalization that play on the difference between an "official" normative language of colonial administration and instruction and an unmarked, marginalized form – pidgin, creole, vernacular – which becomes the site of the native subject's dependence and resistance, and as such a sign of surveillance and control.' This paper should demonstrate that the Melbourne Supreme Court briefings are valuable sources for studying the linguistic history of the Chinese in Australia. Amongst other social conversations, they report spoken communications between policemen and Chinese men recorded in and evidence patterns of spoken communications between policemen and Chinese men of varying linguistic abilities. A vital arm of colonial legal systems, colonial policemen evoked and enacted the authority of the law via spoken language. In late 19th-century colonial Victoria, the police were government authorised to arrest speakers of any language in the name of the law – without the aid of an interpreter. While the majority of policemen in the colony were monolingual English-speakers, colonial Victoria was a multi-lingual society and many Chinese arrestees were Pidgin English, non- or second-language English speakers. This paper will examine such conversations between policemen and Chinamen during arrests, and in particular reports of Pidgin English speech. In doing so it will analyse the racial identities that were produced and performed in these conversations, and thereby attempts to understand and highlight the linguistic agency of Chinese in the legal system.