School of Humanities

Writing women into Chinese Australian history

Speaker: Dr Kate Bagnall
University of Wollongong, Australia

Abstract
Women have been largely invisible in the broad sweep of Chinese Australian
history. From the earliest days of Chinese migration to Australia, it was
predominantly men and boys who went south to the colonies as labourers, miners
and merchants. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were still fewer than
500 migrant Chinese women in Australia among a population of nearly 30,000
Chinese men. These small numbers have made it easy for historians to overlook
the presence of Chinese women and girls in Australia and this, combined with the
challenges of locating sources that document women’s lives, has contributed to an
apparently legitimized acceptance of male-centred history. In this seminar I
challenge the framing of Chinese Australian history as a history of genderless men
and consider how tracing the lives of Chinese women in Australia disrupts
accepted narratives of Chinese migration and settlement.

Bio
Dr Kate Bagnall is a social historian specialising in Australia’s engagement with
China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on Chinese
migration and settlement from a feminist perspective, much of Kate’s work has
explored the history of women, children and the family in Australia’s early Chinese
communities, as well as the history of Chinese exclusion. Kate has worked
extensively with family and community historians, and for the past three years
has led a ‘roots-searching’ heritage tour to Guangdong. Kate is currently an ARC
DECRA Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the
University of Wollongong, Australia, where she is undertaking a comparative study
of Chinese colonial citizenship in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

All are welcome.

Date/Time: Tuesday, 21/03/2019 16:30 – 18:00
Venue: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus
Language: English
Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=62133
For further information, please visit : https://genderstudies.hku.hk/events/