How is Chinese Australian history re-telling Australia's history?
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Friday, 11 November 2011
As a welcome to Dragon Tails 2011, join a lively group, including historians Marilyn Lake and Regina Ganter, to consider how Chinese Australian history is re-telling Australia's history.
Included in the evening will be the launch of a special Chinese Australian issue of Historic Environment, guest edited by Dr Keir Reeves and Dr Damien Williams, by Kristal Buckley, International Vice President of Australia ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites).
This event is open to the public and refreshments will be provided. The roundtable is generously supported by the Faculty of Arts, Monash University.
Chinese Australians have often lived on the margins of mainstream Australia, but have been central to defining what it means to be Australian. They have asked us to confront the racial prejudice underpinning White Australia. They have shared in shaping aspects of Australian culture for which we feel great pride – egalitarianism, mateship and a fair go. They are part of what makes Australia a multicultural nation. Chinese Australians and their social, economic and political links to China, SE Asia and other countries have also challenged Australians to consider the ways that we are part of Asia, as well as belonging to the history and traditions of the British Empire, Europe and the Pacific. So, how does what we know about Australia's Chinese pasts reshape Australian history?
Participant details
Marilyn Lake
Professor Marilyn Lake was awarded a Personal Chair in History at La Trobe University in 1994. Since that time she has also held Visiting Professorial Fellowships at Stockholm University, the University of Western Australia, the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. Between 2001 and 2002, she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. She has published 12 books and numerous articles and book chapters in Australian and international anthologies, including 'Chinese colonists assert their “common human rights”: Cosmopolitanism as subject and method of history’, Journal of World History (21: 3, 2010). Her book Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge University Press and Melbourne University Press, 2008) won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Australian History, the Ernest Scott prize for the best book in Australian, New Zealand and Colonization History and the Prime Minister's Prize for Non-Fiction.
Regina Ganter
Associate Professor Regina Ganter specialises on interactions between indigenous, Asian and European peoples in Australia.
Her books include The Pearl Shellers of Torres Strait (1994) based on award-winning research, and Mixed Relations (2006), which received the NSW Premier's History Book Award and the Ernest Scott Prize in Australian History in 2007. She has published widely in the field of cross-cultural encounters and contributed to a number of broadcasts, musem exhibitions and curriculum materials.
She teaches Australian history and heritage studies in the School of Humanities at Griffith University.
Paul Macgregor
Paul Macgregor is an historian who is the convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, and was the curator of Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History from 1990 to 2005. He is the editor of Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific (1995), and joint editor of both Chinese in Oceania (2002) and After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940 (2004). He has organised three international conferences on the Chinese diaspora in Australasia, and has curated numerous exhibitions on the history and material heritage of Chinese Australians. He was also involved in the development of five major research projects: the Australia-China Oral History Project, the Thematic Survey of Sites of Chinese Australian History, the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project, the Chinese Historical Images in Australia project, and the (Chinese on the) Mt Alexander Diggings Project.
Keir Reeves
Dr Keir Reeves is a Senior Monash Research Fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies in the School of Journalism, Australia and Indigenous Studies and the director of the Australian and International Tourism Research Unit at Monash University, Australia. His research currently concentrates on the intersection between heritage, history, cultural tourism and regional studies. Keir completed his PhD on the history of the Chinese gold seekers on the Mount Alexander Diggings at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on Chinese-Australian heritage and history and is the current historian member of the Heritage Council of Victoria.
Amanda Rasmussen
Dr Amanda Rasmussen wrote her thesis at La Trobe University under Professor John Fitzgerald and Dr John Hirst. Her history of Chinese in Bendigo 1880–1920 is concerned with the interplay between local experience, national policy-making and transnational living. While researching her thesis, she tutored in modern Chinese, Australian and European history at La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne. Since 2009, she has lived in Beijing. In 2010, she completed the Inter-University Program’s advanced intensive Chinese language course at Tsinghua University, and taught twentieth century Chinese history for American exchange students. She now works at China Policy, a policy research and information management company in Beijing. She is gradually grappling with the behometh that is understanding China, and her Mandarin is rapidly improving.
Jen Tsen Kwok
Jen Tsen Kwok is completing a doctoral thesis at the University of Queensland. His thesis sits between the fields of political sociology, cultural studies and political history and looks at the legislative recruitment and political incorporation of Chinese Australians under multiculturalism. His areas of research interest include citizenship
studies, migration studies, studies in multiculturalism, Chinese political transnationalisms and Asian Australian studies. Jen works full-time as a Policy and Research Officer for the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).