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…