Mapping Tasmania’s Chinese history

Over the past thirty years, research on the history and heritage of Chinese migrants and their descendants in mainland Australia and New Zealand has flourished, with contributions from academic historians, curators, archaeologists, heritage professionals, and local, family and community researchers. But what about the history of the Chinese in Tasmania? In this talk, Kate Bagnall will discuss her recent bibliography on Chinese Tasmanian history and the new research project she is currently undertaking with digital historian Tim Sherratt as part of the ‘Everyday Heritage’ ARC Linkage project. In the project Kate and Tim will be building on existing research and digging further into the archives to visualise (using digital mapping) the ‘everyday heritage’ of Chinese Tasmanians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kate Bagnall is a social historian whose research focuses on Australasia’s historical connections to China, in particular Chinese migration and settlement in the ‘Tasman world’. She has a PhD in Australian history from the University of Sydney, and is Senior Lecturer in Humanities and coordinator of the Family History program at the University of Tasmania. She brings a unique perspective to the study of Chinese Australian history, having lived, worked and travelled extensively in the overseas Chinese home districts of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province.

Image: Edward ‘Teddy’ Chung Ah Gan, who was naturalised in Tasmania in 1891, with his wife Annie née Harris and their children, 1917 (NAA: B13, 1933/22224)