European-Chinese economic interaction in a pre-Federation rural Australian setting
Rod Lancashire
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, NSW
PP: 229 - 241
Abstract
This paper reports on a regional study of a Chinese community in the small north-east Victorian border town of Wahgunyah during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the economic contribution of the Chinese as a labour source for the developing local wine industry and also their participation in the surrounding pastoral districts, particularly the southern Riverina district of New South Wales.
The findings demonstrate that, as with other Chinese communities in nineteenth-century Australian society outside the goldfield sector, Chinese-European interaction was often one of mutual cooperation and benefit. Racial differences and tensions existed, but within the contextual setting of economic interaction these differences were not as significant a social phenomenon as many historical interpretations of nineteenth-century rural Australian society have tended to convey. In this particular study there are strong indications that the Chinese were a vital and integral component of the economic development of both the Rutherglen wine industry and the pastoral activities of the Riverina.
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