Australia’s Multicultural Colonial Past

Australia’s colonial period was much more multicultural than a lot of people realise.

According to University of Tasmania historian and Family History program coordinator, Dr Kate Bagnall, “People came to Australia from some pretty unexpected places,” she said, “and even in if we look at those who were transported as convicts, there is a diversity within that population that people often overlook, including convicts who were black, Māori or Chinese.”

Kate and her team have created a list of five unexpected places that people migrated from during the 19th century.

1. Japan: Immigration from Japan did not start until the late 1800s because until 1866 it was a capital offence for Japanese people to leave Japan. The first known Japanese settler was Sakuragawa Rikinosuke, an acrobat who arrived in 1873 and settled in Queensland. The Japanese who came here in the 1880s and 1890s largely worked as crew and divers in the pearling industry in the north of Australia. Elsewhere they worked on Queensland’s sugar cane farms, and as cooks, laundry workers and domestics. Some became merchants with import-export businesses in bigger population centres.

2. Chile: The first two Chilean immigrants to reach Australian shores arrived in 1837, and one of them was former president General Ramon Freire. Freire had been exiled from Chile following an unsuccessful attempt to re-take power in a coup. The 1850s saw a larger but still small number of Chilean immigrants coming to Australia, lured by the Victorian gold rush.

3. Mauritius: Seized from the French by the British in 1810, the tiny island nation near Madagascar was a big producer of sugar, and colonial Australia developed a strong trading relationship with Mauritius. Based on this relationship, Mauritian merchants, seamen and their families began settling in Australia very early on, arriving on merchant vessels.

4. Syria and Lebanon: When Syrian immigrants started arriving in Australia in the late 1800s, Syria and Lebanon were part of the Turkish-controlled Ottoman Empire. The earliest Syrian immigrants to Australia were mostly Christians who were fleeing religious and cultural persecution by the Ottomans. They started to arrive in larger numbers in the 1880s and 1890s, and most became engaged in commercial occupations.

5. Bohemia (Czech Republic): The former provinces of Bohemia and Moravia are now in the modern Czech Republic. The earliest known settler from Bohemia was a convict named Mark Blucher in 1830, who was transported to Sydney from England. The gold rushes attracted a small number of Bohemians during middle decades of the 19th century. Later, Bohemian-Moravian born missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, worked in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

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• History