Reviewed: Ken Oldis, The Chinawoman, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008
As a proportion of the total population, there were more Chinese people in Victoria in the 1850s than there are now.1 Nearly all of them were men. Ponder that for a moment: horse-drawn carriages rattling down the streets, most of Melbourne’s landmark buildings still under construction, and every tenth man in the colony is Chinese.
This is the world of The Chinawoman, a gripping true crime book by local historian Ken Oldis. The story starts in December 1856, when a white woman, Sophia Lewis, is robbed and murdered in her home on what’s now Exhibition Street. Lewis is a sex worker, and her neighbours scornfully call her ‘The Chinawoman’ because most of her clients are Chinese.
As Oldis pieces together the subsequent police investigation and criminal trial against the backdrop of rising anti-Chinese sentiment, we see colonial Melbourne from the perspective of corrupt cops, enterprising sex workers and competing factions of Chinese men. We also get glimpses of public discourse on race at the time through quotes from the press and parliament anxiously debating ‘The Chinese question’. Two Chinese men are convicted on shabby, circumstantial evidence, and hanged in front of a crowd at Melbourne Gaol. Their supposed crime soon becomes part of the Australian canon—proof of the wicked and depraved Chinese character and white Australians’ worst fears.
Rigorously researched through contemporary sources, The Chinawoman is a granular account of an obscure criminal case that still resonates today. Who deserves dignity, protection and care? Who is replaceable, even disposable?
Sex, race, violence, innocence and injustice: it’s #anotherdayinthecolony.2
• • •
The coronial inquest concerning the death of Sophia Lewis takes place in a pub—the Leinster Arms Inn on the corner of Lonsdale Street and Stephen Street (now Exhibition Street).
While I read about this in The Chinawoman, the inquest into the death of Tanya Day—a Yorta Yorta woman, grandmother and activist who died as a result of a fall sustained in police custody—is taking place at the Coroners Court in Southbank. Day had been taken into custody under the offence of public drunkenness3 after she was found asleep on a V/Line train, then left alone in a cell for hours. This inquest is the first to consider the role of systemic racism, looking at how institutional and structural racism contributed to the way Day was treated.4
On my days off work, I join dozens of friends and strangers at the inquest to support her family and bear witness. It’s my first time in a court.
I expect to hear a litany of denials, deferrals and obfuscations. ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise,’ as per Jenny Holzer’s Truisms. But everything at the inquest surprises me: I gasp as multiple officers say that there is nothing they would do differently, knowing what they know now. I feel numb when one police officer responds that he doesn’t know anything about Day as a person. How can a woman die under your watch, and you don’t even care to find out who she is? How many more people will be killed by the state?
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody began the year I was born and reported its findings the year I arrived in Australia. Every day that I have spent in this country is a day in which the government has had the knowledge and means to address this catastrophe, but most of the commission’s recommendations—such as the decriminalisation of minor offences such as public drunkenness—were never implemented. Instead, Indigenous people are now even more overrepresented in custody than they were then.5
Obviously, the issues involved in a Chinese man’s likely wrongful conviction and execution in 1857 and an Aboriginal woman’s death as a result of police prejudice and negligence in 2017 are worlds apart. There are plenty of more obvious comparisons available. Yet I can’t help but see echoes and parallels in these two cases where racial stereotyping is enmeshed with state violence. In a society that is so ready to see Aboriginal women as unruly drunks and Chinese men as menacing intruders, justice doesn’t come naturally.
The lawyer for the Day family, Peter Morrissey SC, questioned the police officers involved about unconscious bias: Why were Aboriginal women ten times more likely to be arrested for public drunkenness in 2017 than non-Aboriginal women? Would you arrest a white woman for falling asleep on the train after drinking?
In The Chinawoman, Oldis quotes dissenting voices who question the case against the two Chinese suspects. ‘Good God, sir! Would an Englishman be hung on evidence like that?’ one contemporary writer comments. But to others, it seems, it mattered little if they got the wrong Chinaman, so long as someone was punished for the crime. ‘Instead of approaching each case separately’, Oldis writes, defendants Chong Sigh and Hang Tzan were ‘treated as an amalgam’ by judge Redmond Barry.
• • •
The Lewis case is also a telling example of how white womanhood can be weaponised in narratives of national security and state power.
Two of the chief witnesses in the Sophia Lewis case are William Harper, a well-built black man originally from London who lives behind Lewis, and Jane Judge, Lewis’s friend and her protégée in the sex trade, who lives a couple of doors down. Young, beautiful, educated and devious, Judge easily falls into the role of the femme fatale in Oldis’s narrative.
Initially Judge is accused of being an accessory to murder, but before the trial commences, the prosecution decides that she will instead testify as a witness for the Crown. She impresses all the reporters with her good looks and fine manner, and soon she is effectively exonerated by the press—despite Oldis’s intimation that she had both the means and the motive to orchestrate the murder. Harper, on the other hand, is maligned during the trial, with the defence portraying him as a pimp and a scoundrel. His arrest for robbery is brought up to discredit his witness testimony, though Judge’s more recent arrest for theft is not.
Lewis’s murder quickly became tabloid fodder in colonial Melbourne. ‘Sophia Lewis was allowed no dignity in death,’ Oldis writes. Journalists circled her corpse like vultures, rifling through her belongings and revelling in the salacious and exotic details of her life and death—albeit using the euphemisms of the time.
The Age, for example, reported that soon after Lewis’s arrival in the colony, ‘she took up this miserable style of life in which she has ever since remained, and in which she on Sunday night died a violent death, by the hands of a midnight assassin’.6
Sex workers are often considered unworthy of respect and protection. Violence against sex workers typically does not draw the same level of media coverage and public outrage as other crimes, while what coverage there is often shifts blame onto the victim’s profession.
Yet soon after the case closed with the double execution of Hang Tzan and Chong Sigh, the story began to change as it entered popular culture. ‘Sex and murder became a staple of anti-Chinese tirades,’ Oldis writes, and the victim was ‘transformed from the Chinamen’s whore into a pure and innocent maiden’. Lewis had to be recast as the perfect victim before her story could service the calls to lock up your wives and daughters and protect your country from marauding yellow hordes.
• • •
The foundational logic of Australia is the violation of Aboriginal sovereignty. That’s the rot that runs under everything, the shaky ground beneath this house of cards.
But anti-Chinese racism was also a formative part of the nation-building narrative, especially in Victoria. Early Chinese migrants were both complicit in the colonial project and positioned in contrast to white settlers, who at that point had hardly started to articulate an identity as Australians.
As Oldis writes, ‘The purpose of the Victorian colony was to benefit Britain and Britons […] yet the colonists considered it tantamount to theft that Chinese diggers took gold back to China.’
Almost immediately after invading these lands, the British began to fear the Chinese invader. As white Australian identity developed, it was in large part produced in juxtaposition to the Chinese question, as I have explored before in relation to the labour movement.7 Debating the viability of Chinese people in the colony is part of what turned white settlers into Australians.
Sex, too, has always been central to the colonial endeavour. The Victorian census of 1857 is a fascinating document. Nearly every population table in it lists the figures both inclusive and exclusive of Chinese and Aboriginal populations—sometimes disaggregated, sometimes combined, and likely unreliable. The preface notes that the colony’s worrying gender imbalance has diminished since the previous census: ‘When, however, the Chinese and the Aborigines are excluded from the calculation, the result presented is still more satisfactory; the disproportion falling to only 163 males to every 100 females,’ reports registrar-general Norman Campbell.
In 1857 there were more than 25,000 Chinese people in Victoria. That made many white Australians nervous. Through a series of anti-Chinese measures, starting with the Chinese Immigration Act 1855, they managed to get rid of most of us.
The dominant narrative of this country tells migrants that we have to be patient. Racism has already been switched off and we’re just waiting for the residual heat to subside. But all the evidence tells us that’s not true. Racism cannot be because we are new here, as Aboriginal people bear the worst of it.
No-one can afford to wait any longer.
The prejudices against Chinese Australians have evolved substantially over time. While Chinese men were once regularly drawn as violent sexual predators in the Australian press, these days it’s more often black and Muslim men who are vilified in this way.8
As David Lo Pun (@helpmeskeletor) tweeted earlier this year, ‘If you follow the racist stereotypes of Asian people in Australia it sort of tells the story of an immigrant who arrives in the 1980s, joined a violent triad gang but turned their life around to become a real estate development mogul with a PhD who is taking every job.’9
Chinese Australians are now sometimes portrayed as a ‘model minority’, an example of the upward mobility that is supposed to be possible if you assimilate. But there’s still a current of distrust. It doesn’t take much to upset such a fragile and conditional kind of inclusion.
All the prime suspects in the Sophia Lewis case were Chinese men. But these men were not the downtrodden miners and indentured labourers typically depicted in the era. They were men of means and sophisticated tastes—they spoke good English, ‘smoked their opium and enjoyed the company of women’.
The Chinese community raised an impressive sum for the defence fund and posted a reward for helping the investigation. They were organised, political and vocal, eager to demonstrate and defend their place in the colony. In many stories about this period, Chinese people are either invisible, or exist only as oppressed victims. Here they are complicit and complicated, willing to navigate these early colonial government structures, which were steeped in nepotism and bribery. That makes them surprisingly relatable, even though Oldis relies on English-language primary sources and features little dialogue from the Chinese characters.
Right now the Chinese question is back in the headlines as we debate Australia’s relationship with China. There are some necessary and overdue conversations in this field, but the debate is also coloured by racism, from tabloid headlines that drop Chinese food puns into serious geopolitical issues to charges of foreign loyalty (rather than corruption) that easily slip into ethnic profiling. It’s been a difficult time for Chinese Australians.
Every generation likes to imagine that it’s doing something new. Particularly when it comes to questions around race, gender and sexuality we often assume that things are progressing in a certain direction. It can be too heartbreaking to think otherwise. But as exhausting as Australian racism is, it can be a comfort to remember that we’ve been through this before.
Jinghua Qian is a Shanghainese writer living in the Kulin nations. Ey has written on resistance, desire, and the Chinese diaspora for publications including Overland, Sydney Morning Herald, Cordite and Sixth Tone.
References
- According to the 1857 census, more than 6 per cent of the Victorian population was Chinese. In the 2016 census, 4.7 per cent of Victorian respondents selected Chinese ancestry (respondents could choose up to two).
- A Twitter hashtag popularised by Dr Chelsea Bond (@drcbond).
- Four days before the inquest started, the Victorian Government announced that it would decriminalise public drunkenness, replacing existing laws with a health-based response.
- Alison Whittaker, ‘Aboriginal woman Tanya Day died in custody. Now an inquest is investigating if systemic racism played a role’, The Conversation, 28 August 2019, <https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-woman-tanya-day-died-in-custody-now-an-inquest-is-investigating-if-systemic-racism-played-a-role-122471>.
- Thalia Anthony, ‘Deaths in custody: 25 years after the royal commission, we’ve gone backwards’, The Conversation, 13 April 2016, <https://theconversation.com/deaths-in-custody-25-years-after-the-royal-commission-weve-gone-backwards-57109>.
- ‘Shocking Murder in Stephen Street’, Age, 2 December 1856, accessed via Trove: <https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/154872480>.
- See Safdar Ahmed, ‘Our long history of cartoons demonising foreigners’, SBS Life, 18 February 2019, <https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/culture/article/2019/02/14/our-long-history-cartoons-demonising-foreigners>.
- See Safdar Ahmed, ‘Our long history of cartoons demonising foreigners’, SBS Life, 18 February 2019, <https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/culture/article/2019/02/14/our-long-history-cartoons-demonising-foreigners>.
- See <https://twitter.com/helpmeskeletor/status/1108115091017236481>.
