Lambing Flat riots
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Chinese Australian
Chinese Australian is an Australian of Chinese heritage. In the 2006 Australian Census, 669,890 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, either alone or with another ancestry....
demonstrations that took place in the Burrangong region, in New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. They occurred on the goldfields at Spring Creek, Stoney Creek, Back Creek, Wombat, Blackguard Gully, Tipperary Gully, and Lambing Flat (now Young, New South Wales
Young, New South Wales
-Demographics:On census night, 7 August 2001, there were 6,821 people counted in Young. There were 238 people who identified as being of Indigenous origin in the 2001 Census...
), in 1860-1861.
Antipathy on the Goldfields
Events on the Australian goldfields in the 1850s led to hostility toward Chinese miners on the part of many Europeans, which was to affect many aspects of European-Chinese relationsWhite Australia policy
The White Australia policy comprises various historical policies that intentionally restricted "non-white" immigration to Australia. From origins at Federation in 1901, the polices were progressively dismantled between 1949-1973....
in Australia for the next century. Some of the sources of conflict between European and Chinese miners arose from the nature of the industry they were engaged in. Most gold mining
Gold mining
Gold mining is the removal of gold from the ground. There are several techniques and processes by which gold may be extracted from the earth.-History:...
in the early years was alluvial mining, where the gold was in small particles mixed with dirt, gravel and clay close to the surface of the ground, or buried in the beds of old watercourses or "leads". Extracting the gold took no great skill, but it was hard work, and generally speaking, the more work, the more gold the miner won. Europeans tended to work alone or in small groups, concentrating on rich patches of ground, and frequently abandoning a reasonably rich claim to take up another one rumoured to be richer. Very few miners became wealthy; the reality of the diggings was that relatively few miners found even enough gold to earn them a living.
The Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
generally worked in large organised groups, covering the entire grounds surface, so that if there was any gold there, the Chinese miners usually found it. They lived communally and frugally, and could subsist on a much lower return than Europeans. The rural background of most of the Chinese diggers suited them very well to life as alluvial goldminers: they were used to long hours of hard outdoor work as a member of a disciplined team, accustomed to simple sleeping quarters and basic food, and were satisfied with a much smaller return of gold than the majority of Europeans.
European resentment of the apparent success of the Chinese first surfaced as petty complaints: Europeans made stereotyped claims that the Chinese muddied the water holes, they worked on the Sabbath, they were thieves, they had insanitary habits, they accepted low wages and would drive down the value of labour. There is no evidence that any of these things were true. But because the Chinese were distinctive in appearance, language and dress, they became classic targets for xenophobia
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...
, and surly resentment became systematic hatred.
These pressures gave rise to several violent protests against government policies across Victoria and New South Wales in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The first anti-Chinese demonstration occurred in Bendigo in July 1854. Some of these incidents took the form of outright attempts at excluding the Chinese from a goldfield, or a portion of it. Disputes between European and Chinese miners flared into brawls at Daylesford
Daylesford, Victoria
Daylesford is a town located in the Shire of Hepburn, Victoria, Australia. It is a former goldmining town about 115 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. At the 2006 census, Daylesford had a population of 3,073...
and Castlemaine
Castlemaine, Victoria
Castlemaine is a city in Victoria, Australia, in the Goldfields region of Victoria about 120 kilometres northwest by road from Melbourne, and about 40 kilometres from the major provincial centre of Bendigo. It is the administrative and economic centre of the Shire of Mount Alexander. The...
. A party of Chinese en route to the Victorian diggings from Robe
Robe
A robe is a loose-fitting outer garment. A robe is distinguished from a cape or cloak by the fact that it usually has sleeves. The English word robe derives from Middle English robe , borrowed from Old French robe , itself taken from the Frankish word *rouba , and is related to the word rob...
discovered a new goldfield at Ararat
Ararat, Victoria
Ararat is a city in south-west Victoria, Australia, about west of Melbourne, on the Western Highway on the eastern slopes of the Ararat Hills and Cemetery Creek valley between Victoria's Western District and the Wimmera...
, and were driven off their find by Europeans. Similar events occurred in New South Wales, which was just feeling the impact of significant Chinese immigration. European miners drove Chinese off the diggings at Rocky River in New England (Australia)
New England (Australia)
New England or New England North West is the name given to a generally undefined region about 60 kilometres inland, that includes the Northern Tablelands and the North West Slopes regions in the north of the state of New South Wales, Australia.-History:The region has been occupied by Indigenous...
in 1856. Serious confrontations followed at Adelong in 1857 and Tambaroora in 1858. In Victoria the Buckland River
Buckland River (Victoria)
The Buckland River is a river in north eastern Victoria, Australia. With its source in the Victorian Alps, it reaches a confluence with the Ovens River immediately downstream from the small town of Porepunkah....
goldfield was the scene of repeated incidents, culminating in a major riot
Buckland Riot
The Buckland Riot was an anti-Chinese race riot that occurred on 4 July 1857, in the goldfields of the Buckland Valley, Victoria, Australia. At the time approximately 2000 Chinese and 700 European migrants were living in the Buckland area.-Riot:...
in July 1857.
The Burrangong Affair
The most notorious of these incidents, and the one which has generated more folklore than any other, was the so-called Lambing Flat Riot, actually a drawn-out series of incidents on the Burrangong Goldfield in New South Wales between November 1860 and September 1861. Several place names are sometimes used interchangeably when describing these events. Burrangong was the name of the gazetted goldfield, and its principal settlement later became the modern town of YoungYoung, New South Wales
-Demographics:On census night, 7 August 2001, there were 6,821 people counted in Young. There were 238 people who identified as being of Indigenous origin in the 2001 Census...
. Lambing Flat, the name which has attached itself most persistently to the events, was a sheep paddock where one of the more violent incidents took place.
Another important aspect of the story is the political events that were going on in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, for the Burrangong affair was played out against the background of a contentious debate in the New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
Parliament
Parliament
A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French , the action of parler : a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which...
over legislation to restrict Chinese immigration. Chinese numbers on the New South Wales goldfields had been relatively small, but were rising in the wake of restrictions imposed in Victoria. Restrictive legislation had also been proposed in New South Wales as early as 1858 in the wake of Victorian and South Australia
South Australia
South Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories.South Australia shares borders with all of the mainland...
n laws, but the Premier, Charles Cowper
Charles Cowper
Sir Charles Cowper, KCMG was an Australian politician and the Premier of New South Wales on five different occasions from 1856 to 1870....
, found his own party divided on the issue and the Bill failed. Then in 1860 the Chinese and British governments signed the Convention of Peking
Convention of Peking
The Convention of Peking or the First Convention of Peking is the name used for three different unequal treaties, which were concluded between Qing China and the United Kingdom, France, and Russia.-Background:...
, a diplomatic agreement that subjects of the Chinese and British Empires would have reciprocal rights under their respective countries' laws. As the Australian colonies enacted British laws, it raised the question of whether New South Wales could legally exclude citizens of the Chinese Empire. A new Chinese Immigration Regulation Bill was being drafted for debate in Parliament while the first gold miners were arriving at Burrangong.
The events at Burrangong were well-recorded at the time, and have been analysed by a number of historians in recent decades. The popular impression of the riots as a savage assault on the Chinese by European miners is a mere thumbnail sketch, greatly understating the complexity of what happened there. The Burrangong affair was arguably the most serious civil disorder that has ever happened in Australia, involving more people and lasting much longer than the Eureka rebellion at Ballarat six years earlier.
Trouble began late in 1860 with the formation of a Miners Protective League, followed by roll-ups (mass meetings) of European diggers evicting Chinese miners from sections of the field. These events involved the quasi-legal posting of notices to quit, and were carried out ceremonially, with a brass band leading the marchers. There was little violence at first. Most of the Chinese moved to new diggings nearby, and some returned soon afterward. This pattern of behaviour was to be repeated on several occasions over the next eight months; there seemed to be an understanding from early in the Burrangong events that the Chinese would be tolerated if they remained in certain areas of the goldfield.
The Lambing Flat Riots
In ten months of unrest at Burrangong, the most infamous riot occurred on the night of 30 June 1861 when a mob of perhaps 3,000 drove the Chinese off the Lambing Flat, and then moved on to the Back Creek diggings, destroying tents and looting possessions. About 1,000 Chinese abandoned the field and set up camp near Roberts' homestead at Currowang sheep station, 20 km away. There were two triggers for the violence: in Sydney the Legislative Council rejected the anti-Chinese bill, and a false rumour swept the goldfield that a new group of 1,500 Chinese were on the road to Burrangong. The policePolice
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
arrived in the days that followed, identified the leaders of the riot, and three were arrested two weeks later. The mob's reaction was an armed attack on the police camp by about a thousand miners on the night of 14 July, which the police broke up with gunfire and mounted sabre
Sabre
The sabre or saber is a kind of backsword that usually has a curved, single-edged blade and a rather large hand guard, covering the knuckles of the hand as well as the thumb and forefinger...
charges, leaving one rioter dead and many wounded.
The police briefly abandoned the field, but then a detachment of 280 soldiers, sailors
Sailors
Sailors is the plural form of Sailor, or mariner.Sailors may also refer to:*Sailors , a 1964 Swedish film*Ken Sailors , American basketball playerSports teams*Erie Sailors, baseball teams in Pennsylvania, USA...
and police reinforcements arrived from Sydney and stayed for a year. The Chinese were reinstated on the segregated diggings, the ringleaders of the riots were tried and two were gaoled. At the end of the affair, Burrangong was quiet and the Chinese were still there.
The Lambing Flat Banner
A banner from the period, painted on a tent-flap in 1861, is now on display at the Lambing Flat museum in Young, New South WalesYoung, New South Wales
-Demographics:On census night, 7 August 2001, there were 6,821 people counted in Young. There were 238 people who identified as being of Indigenous origin in the 2001 Census...
. Bearing a Southern Cross superimposed over a St. Andrew's Cross
Flag of Scotland
The Flag of Scotland, , also known as Saint Andrew's Cross or the Saltire, is the national flag of Scotland. As the national flag it is the Saltire, rather than the Royal Standard of Scotland, which is the correct flag for all individuals and corporate bodies to fly in order to demonstrate both...
with the inscription, 'Roll Up - No Chinese', the banner has been claimed by some as a variant of the Eureka Flag
Eureka Flag
The Eureka Flag is a design; a dark blue field with a central white symmetric cross consisting five eight-pointed stars, representing the Crux constellation....
. It served as an advertisement for a public meeting that presaged the infamous Lambing Flat riots later that year. Painted by a Scottish migrant, it is a testimony to the transfer of cultural practices and values through migration. Though it has been claimed to be an example of Chartist
Chartist
Chartist may refer to:*Chartist , a person who uses charts for technical analysis*Chartist , a British social democratic periodical*An adherent of Chartism, a 19th-century political and social reform movement in the UK...
art, the Chartist movement was not racial in nature and sought only to protect the poor from the rich. Nevertheless, along with the Eureka Flag
Eureka Flag
The Eureka Flag is a design; a dark blue field with a central white symmetric cross consisting five eight-pointed stars, representing the Crux constellation....
it is a rare example of an historic Australian banner designed to rally support to a cause.
There are many conclusions to who designed the flag as some say it was 3 men's wives and some say it was a famous tailor.
See also
- The Lambing FlatThe Lambing FlatThe Lambing Flat is a novel written by Australian author Nerida Newton and was first published in 2003. It was Newton's first novel. She has since written a second novel, Death of a Whaler....
- a historical fiction novel by Nerida NewtonNerida NewtonNerida Newton is an Australian novelist who first came to light in 2002 with her first novel, The Lambing Flat, which won the Emerging Author category for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the The Australian/Vogel Literary Award...
set in and around Young at the time of the Lambing Flat riots
External links
- Objects Through Time: Lambing Flats Roll Up Banner (NSW Migration Heritage Centre - Statement of Significance)
- History of Young
- ABC history page