Keith Windschuttle
This year is the 150th anniversary of what Daphne Lowe Kelley recently labelled “the worst anti-Chinese riots in Australian history”. The incident took place at Lambing Flat on the goldfields at Burrangong, near Young in New South Wales on June 30, 1861, when European gold-miners attacked a group of about 800 Chinese, knocking down their tents, destroying their possessions, and chasing them from the field.
Kelley is the president of the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, reproduced in a number of other newspapers, she said the Lambing Flat riot, plus anti-Chinese immigration restrictions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meant that for 120 years “the Chinese were treated in this country as lesser human beings”. She was particularly angry about an entry tax placed on Chinese who came here for the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes. This was a discriminatory practice, she said, applied only to Chinese, not to white…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins