Radical Perth, Militant Fremantle

Charlie Fox, Alexis Vassiley, Bobbie Oliver, Charlie Fox, Alexis Vassiley, Bobbie Oliver

• Publisher: Interventions Inc
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780645183931
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Radical Perth, Militant Fremantle tells 34 fascinating stories of radical moments In the cities’ past, from as long ago as the 1890s and as recent as Occupy: the revolutionary theatre of the Workers Art Guild; the riot of unemployed workers outside the Treasury building; rock concerts inside St Georges Cathedral; bodgies and widgies cutting up the dance floor at the Scarborough Beach Snake Pit; the Point Peron women’s peace camp, and many more.

This revised 2 nd edition bring four new tales: student radicalism at Curtin University (then WAIT), Perth’s very-own Green Bans; Perth solidarity with the famous strike of Aboriginal pastoral workers; and the unknown tale of striking Chinese seamen on the Fremantle waterfront, who faced brutal repression, but won support from Fremantle unionists.

This engaging, inspiring book charts Perth and Fremantle’s radical past, uncovering the obscure and neglected, reframing the better known, opening new windows on Perth and Fremantle’s history. It is structured as three self-guided walking and driving tours, so readers can visit the very places and buildings where these hidden histories took place.

PART 1

WALKING
RADICAL
PERTH

LEGEND
WALKING RADICAL PERTH

1.Chung Wah Hall, James St (See chapter 1)

2.Connections Nightclub, James St (See chapter 2)

3.John Curtin at the Worker (See chapter 22)

4.Forrest Chase (see chapter 3)

5.Open area, Forrest Chase (See chapter 4)

6.Padbury Building, now walkway opposite GPO steps, Forrest Chase (See chapter 5)

7.Murray Street mall (See chapter 6)

8.Hay Street mall (See chapter 24)

9.Perth Town Hall (See chapter 7)

10.Young Australia League Hall, Murray St (See chapter 8)

11.Hibernian Hall, Murray St (See chapter 9)

12.St George’s Cathedral, St Georges Terrace (See chapter 10)

13.Treasury Building, intersection of Barrack St and St Georges Terrace (See chapter 11)

14.Chancery Building, bottom of Howard St (See chapter 12)

15.Elizabeth Quay (See chapter 13)

16.Elizabeth Quay (See chapter 14)

17.Palace Hotel (See chapter 23)

18.Barracks Arch, St Georges Terrace (See chapter 15)

19.Solidarity Park, Harvest Terrace, behind Parliament House (See chapter 16)

20.Goonininup, Mounts Bay Road (See chapter 17)

21.Everywhere (See chapter 18)

The Chung Wah Association’s float, proudly displaying a large red silk and blue satin banner, featured in a parade on Trench Comforts Day, 9 September 1917

1

Perth Chinese Community’s Fight for Survival

Lenore Layman

Situated on James Street in what is now the Northbridge heritage precinct is the Chung Wah Hall, opened in 1911 as the headquarters of the Chung Wah Association. It was, according to the association, to be ‘a suitable place of resort for Gentlemen of the Chinese nationality residing in Western Australia for the purpose of providing and encouraging literature and education amongst the members of the Association’. Behind this reassurance of educational self-improvement, intended to soothe fears in the wider society, lay the aim of bonding Chinese residents more closely for their survival, improved welfare and protection of common interests. The new association insisted in 1909 that

Unity is strength and an association is vitally necessary … We are like scattered sand and it is no wonder that the Westerners are bullying us and passing stringent legislation aimed at displacing us.

By ‘us’, Chung Wah meant ‘all Chinese’ and the association promised that no regional or ancestral separations would divide members. Rather, all would be bonded – ‘everyone together whoever you are’. Collectively, they would stand more chance of resisting discrimination and ensuring a fair go.

Built in Federation Free Style, the two storey Chung Wah Hall announced its permanent presence in Perth’s urban landscape with its solid brick structure, balustraded parapet, iron filigree front balcony, elaborate detailing and an imposing front entrance with tessellated tiled floor and timbered staircase. Perth’s Chinese merchants and shopkeepers who established the association and its hall, led by inaugural president Louis Wah Louey (1909–12, 1914–15), were determined to imprint a Chinese presence in Western Australia’s overtly hostile social environment. While this presence was not assertive (indeed it was most often self-effacing) the Chinese community organised to insist on its own existence, legal rights and resistance to unequal treatment.

The Hall was located ‘over the line’ in James Street in the centre of the community’s business and social life, surrounded by Chinese shops, restaurants and places of licit and illicit entertainment. Between Roe and James Streets were the major produce markets used by market gardeners. Goods imported from China could be easily purchased, letters written and translated, mail collected, meetings held and friends encountered. This Chinatown met the community’s social and cultural needs and sustained its members who worked at market gardening, laundry work, shopkeeping, furniture making and domestic service, but lived in economic and social isolation from the wider society, on its margins.

From its establishment in 1909 the Chung Wah Association represented Perth’s Chinese residents who sought fundamental change to Western Australian society and culture. Members did not march in the streets in protest, hold public rallies, make provocative speeches or confront the police in any way; rather, they eschewed all direct action and always avoided attracting public and media attention to themselves. Instead, members of the association utilised the tools of a democratic order – written appeals to authorities, petitions, court actions and letters to newspaper editors – to seek the elimination of discrimination. Could such a non-confrontational approach be called radical? The means may not have been but the goal certainly was: an end to discrimination against a racial minority and therefore greater equality and justice. Theirs was a quiet, tempered radicalism. It had to be, given the widespread hostility they faced.

By the early twentieth century, fierce anti-Chinese attitudes and policies prevailed in WA. Chinese people were virtually barred from entry to the country. When labour was in short supply after the end of convict transportation, the colony had imported Chinese indentured labourers and servants. With the aim of temporarily utilising Chinese labour without according them any recognition as settlers the Imported Labour Registry Acts of 1874, 1882, 1884 and 1897 established ever tighter controls on employers and contract workers. The last of these Acts confined these indentured labourers to the north of the colony. Colonial legislation to restrict Chinese immigration culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act 1897, which established the use of a dictation test that could be given to a prospective immigrant in any language to prohibit the entry of anyone deemed undesirable, a practice that foreshadowed the Australia wide legislation of 1901, commonly known as the White Australia Policy. WA had been slower than its sister colonies to erect ‘great white walls’ but, when they were built in the goldrush era, they were just as high.

Discriminatory colonial legislation aimed at those Chinese who were already resident in the country also escalated from the 1880s to the 1900s. The Sharks Bay Pearl Shell Fishery Act 1886 barred Chinese from obtaining a shallow pearling licence, while the Goldfields Act 1886 prohibited any ‘Asiatic or African alien’ from holding a miner’s right or lease. Then the Factories Act 1904 struck again at the survival of the Chinese community by harshly discriminating against Chinese owned and run furniture factories and laundries, where most Chinese enterprise was concentrated. The Act imposed more limited working hours and higher registration fees on Chinese businesses than on their non-Chinese competitors, blocked all new Chinese owners or occupiers from factory businesses and required that furniture be branded with the words ‘Asiatic labour’.

This plethora of legislative discrimination resulted in shrinking Chinese businesses and an ageing community unable to renew itself because wives and relatives could not emigrate. Adding to these legislative shackles was intense anti-Chinese public sentiment, particularly in the press and growing labour movement. Their representations of Chinese residents as ‘a giant evil in the land’ hardened public opinion and made it more extreme.

Chinese residents responded determinedly but strategically to the legislative discrimination, avoiding anything that might inflame the febrile atmosphere within which they were forced to live. In 1886, sixteen Chinese Sharks Bay pearlers employed the Perth legal firm Stone and Burt and petitioned the governor, calling for a reversal of their exclusion from shallow pearling that had been instituted in the Sharks Bay Pearl Shell Fishery Act.

Your Petitioners and others who have been engaged in this industry for years would be shut out from working the banks and would therefore lose our livelihood. Our boats and plant would be useless to us and we would be utterly ruined.

This petition did not bear fruit but persistent lobbying did result in a government payment of £1000 compensation for the loss of value of the fishing boats and other plant. Exclusion from the industry could not be reversed.

When the Factories Act 1904 sought to exclude Chinese from WA factories and workshops, Chinese furniture makers and laundrymen employed lawyer C. J. R. Le Mesurier to petition the British government, asking that the Act be disallowed because it abrogated Britain’s treaty obligations to China, which required that the Chinese be treated ‘on the same footing as all other races, and that there shall be no disqualification of colour or race permitted against them’. The Act perpetrated ‘a cruel wrong’ for which, at the very least, there should be just compensation. The protest was also sent to the Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Afghan governments. When the press reported that the Colonial Office had confidentially requested reconsideration of the legislation it caused outrage in the WA parliament.

At the same time, Chinese businesses used the legal system to extend their resistance, challenging the Factories Act 1904 clause by clause. In six cases between 1905 and 1912 Chinese firms that had been successfully prosecuted appealed their convictions; four cases were successful. WA Minister for Commerce and Labour J. S. Hicks commented in December 1905 on the outcome: ‘There is no doubt that as the Factories Act stands, the Constitutional law will not allow it to have full force.’ In 1912, the last year of overt protests against the Factories Act, Chinese businesses gained the support of the Chinese Consul-General in their campaign. He spoke to the premier about the registration fees and the regulation requiring furniture to be stamped. All this campaigning failed to change the wording of the Act, but there was some relief. Only the clauses relating to wages and hours of work in furniture factories were enforced; the rest were not.

In 1912 Perth’s Chinese community established a Chamber of Commerce to try to strengthen their voice. And they protested again in 1920 when another discriminatory Act, the Factories and Shops Act, replaced the 1904 Act. The Chung Wah Association presented to parliament a petition signed by eighty members together with letters to all parliamentarians, while twenty-seven Chinese laundrymen submitted another petition, all without result.

In 1901 Western Australian Chinese had joined their fellows around Australia to protest the imposition of the new Commonwealth’s Immigration Restriction Act. The Reverend Paul Soong Quong, a leader of WA’s Chinese community, wrote a letter in protest to the prime minister:

Speaking for the majority of my Countrymen in this State I can attest that they are industrious, frugal, honest and good living as any other class of citizen in the State, that they do not, as it is frequently asserted, work for a less wage than Europeans, but always demand fair remunerative payment.

In 1902 several businessmen petitioned the Chinese emperor for assistance to fight the Act. These appeals continued, with WA Chinese representatives calling on the Australian government in 1905 to treat them not as an enemy but as Australians.

Perth’s Chinese people tried as best they could to show that they were Australians in everything but name. If allowed they joined in wider community events, taking part in celebrations for a Royal visit and coronation in 1910. Active in fundraising during World War 1, they provided a decorated float for a 1914 parade and carried the Chung Wah’s large red silk and blue satin banner in parades on Trench Comforts Day and Rose Day in 1917, as they did later to celebrate war’s end in 1918. They also contributed to local charities, including hospitals, the Red Cross, the Home of Peace and orphanages.

The Chung Wah Association provided an effective welfare service to all WA Chinese. In 1911 any old or sick member who requested help was given £4 to return to China. As the Association declined in strength in line with the community it represented, it was forced to reduce this assistance to £1. As well, money was collected to pay defence lawyers for Chinese who were caught in the legal system net. Community members were keenly bonded to their homeland, and contributed frequently to causes in China, particularly to disaster relief. They were nationalist in sympathy and strong supporters of the Kuomintang, giving generously to nationalist political causes, hoping that their political powerlessness in Australia might change as China became a stronger, united and more modern country.

Their hard work, self-effacement and financial generosity were to little avail. The existing Chinese community could only struggle on as the inability to renew its population with family immigration put more and more pressure on the community’s viability. By 1947, of the 1539 who had been resident in 1901, just 385 Chinese remained. Demographic renewal by immigration and community revival required changes to public attitudes and an end to legislative discrimination, changes that were not evident until the mid 1960s with the beginnings of relaxation of the White Australia immigration policy. At the same time attitudes, especially among young people, were changing as endemic racism began to come under critical scrutiny. The Whitlam government’s ratification of the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and its passing of the Racial Discrimination Act, both in 1975, were important milestones on Australia’s path to becoming a multiracial society. That path has been rocky in places. During the 1980s, for instance, the Australian Nationalist Movement, led by Jack van Tongeren, fire bombed a number of Perth’s Asian restaurants and businesses and preached race hatred until van Tongeren was imprisoned in 1989. Despite such setbacks, Australia has moved steadily towards full multiculturalism. Indeed, by 1985 the WA Minister for Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs named the former immigration restriction policy as ‘one of the darkest chapters in Australian history’.

In the early 1970s the Chinese population and the Chung Wah Association began to revive and the hall was restored and renovated. Welfare services recommenced and in 1974 Mandarin language classes began. By the 1980s the community was flourishing. It conducted all sorts of cultural activities to entertain the community itself and the wider society – a dragon boat club, a lion dance troupe, a literary and arts group, t’ai chi classes and a group for teaching Chinese dancing and singing; a youth group was formed in 1990. Chinese New Year and the Moon Festival became celebrations for everyone. In 1985, at the time of the Chung Wah Association’s seventy-fifth anniversary, its president reflected on a turbulent history.

The strong sense of community and family solidarity are the hallmarks of our community. These core values are those that help us overcome adversity in the search for a rightful role in this land which we have made our home and that of our children …

We strongly believe that retaining our culture, language and heritage, handed down to us through thousands of years, will enable us to participate and develop a truly multicultural Australia, one where minorities have the same rights as the majority as citizens.

In its own way it is a quietly radical history with much suffering and many defeats but eventual victory.

2

CAMP and Gay Rights

Charlie Fox and Bri McKenzie

Four unsuccessful legislative attempts were made – 1973, 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction by Charlie Fox
• Part 1: Walking Radical Perth
• Part 2: Walking Militant Fremantle
• Part 3: Driving the Radical Suburbs
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Editors and Contributors