Robe the start of epic journey by thousands of Chinese migrants in 1850s/60s from South Australia to goldfields
Inset map shows the trek taken by the 17,000 Chinese migrants, in groups of up to 700, from Port Adelaide and then en masse from Robe in South Australia's southest across to the goldfields on Victoria in the 1850s to early 1860s. Also inset: Historian Liz Harfull's book on the Chinese landings at Robe's Guichen Bay.
Images courtesy State Library fo Victoria and City of Ballarat
Robe on the southeast coast of South Australia became the starting point for about 17,000 Chinese people in 1856-57 to the early 1860s to make the 440 kilometres overland trek to the goldfields of Ballarat.
The first Chinese people, mainly men, arrived in Robe in 1856, walking from the larger Port Adelaide where they arrived by ship. During the next year, about 15,000 Chinese, brought direct from mainland China and the Sze Yap area in Canton province, arrived in Robe, with its local isolated population then of 200. Besides wanting to make their fortune from gold, the Chinese were escaping conflicts such as the opium wars and the Taiping rebellion on top of the famine from overpopulation and natural disasters.
The gold discovery Bendigo and Ballarat brought the government of the new Australian colony of Victoria plenty of revenue but, responding to xenophobic public pressure over the growing thousands of arrivals, it imposed a £10 poll tax on every Chinese newcomer. Besides the specific poll tax, the 1855 Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants in Victoria restricted passage to one Chinese person per ton of ship’s cargo.
To avoid the tax, ships began to sail instead to Port Adelaide before their captains decided the best docking point was Guichen Bay at the small port of Robe, close to the South Australian and Victorian border. Typically, the Chinese trekkers walked in single file in groups of up to 700 over wool trade tracks through southeast South Australia towards Victoria. They would carry twin bags or baskets of belongings on a long pole, balancing the weight of the bags with a distinctive gait. Through muddy winters and harsh summers, the trek lasted almost five weeks. During the trek, the travellers endured starvation, sickness, and discrimination from townspeople who wouldn’t allow them to set up camp.
Some Chinese immigrants stayed in South Australia and started market gardens or worked as farm hands or helpers to service the growing Penola township and surrounding grazing properties on their rich vivid-red terra rossa soils.
Along the way, walkers dug wells, planted gardens and marked routes to aid future migrants on their journey. In 1857, a group of 700 stumbled across the richest shallow alluvial goldfield in Australian history: initially called the Canton Lead, later renamed Ararat – the only Australian town founded by Chinese migrants.
In 2017, members of the Chinese Community Council of Australia, Victoria chapter, including descendants of migrants who made the trek, retraced its steps walked eastwards from Robe through Lake Hawdon, Penola, Casterton, Coleraine, Hamilton, Dunkeld, Skipton, Linton, Smythesdale and Ballarat. The team arrived on the steps of Victorian parliament house in May 2017, where premier Daniel Andrews made a formal apology to Chinese Australians for the discriminatory policy decisions made by the Victorian government in the 1850s.