Hidden history of Aboriginal-Chinese culture comes alive at National Museum of Australia
Australian show of art and artefacts highlights a doubly marginalised community for whom racism has long kept their stories in the shadows
In 1989, Zhou Xiaoping was a 29-year-old Chinese artist travelling around Australia pursuing his passion for Aboriginal culture.
He had explored the desert town of Alice Springs and the tropical Arnhem Land region before he arrived in the coastal resort of Broome. Here, immersed in an environment that felt completely foreign to him, Zhou was shocked to discover a connection to his home country.
“I met the Aboriginal songwriter Jimmy Chi,” Zhou says. “Jimmy asked me to say something to him in Chinese. He wanted to hear the sound of spoken Chinese. He then told me that his father was James Joseph Minero Chi, the son of a Chinese gold miner who had come to Australia around 1870.”
The conversation sparked Zhou’s decades-long fascination with Aboriginal-Chinese history, culture and communities, which are largely unacknowledged in either Australia or China.
Zhou was so fascinated by Aboriginal culture – and by Chi’s family history – that he relocated from Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, to Australia soon after that trip.
His years of research into Aboriginal-Chinese relations have now culminated in an exhibition he has curated at the National Museum of Australia, “Our Story: Aboriginal-Chinese People in Australia”, and a book of the same name.