On the evening of 1 May 1856, A'Tung had supper with his relative Ah Pou in their tent at the Kangaroo Gully Chinese village on the Bendigo goldfield.² Afterwards he changed his shoes and went out into the moonless night to visit his friend Ah Sing. As another friend was waiting for him to smoke opium, A'Tung stayed for just a few minutes to enjoy a drink of Chinese spirits with Ah Sing. Shortly afterwards, Ah Sing heard a great commotion. Other Chinese told him that someone had fallen down a deep mine shaft. It seems that A'Tung, who was tipsy when he left Ah Sing's tent, had fallen down the forty foot shaft on his way to the opium shop. The Chinese went to seek European help as the shaft belonged to some Englishmen. William Ingram went to the rescue. Many Chinese were gathered around the hole, their only light a burning taper. Ingram tied a rope around his waist and descended the shaft where he found A'Tung dead, bleeding from the mouth and nose. A'Tung's evening of pleasure had come to an abrupt end.³

From this short vignette, based on the inquest record of A'Tung's death, we learn something of A'Tung's networks and leisure activities as well as the nature of mining on the Bendigo goldfield in the 1850s. A'Tung had a relative with whom he shared a tent, and he also had friends. In his leisure time, he liked to drink and smoke opium with his friends. He lived, as he was compelled to do, in a Chinese village, together with his countrymen, but Europeans lived and worked in the same vicinity. An Englishman performed the difficult and dangerous task of bringing A'Tung's dead body from the shaft, which we know was forty feet deep and uncovered.

Episodes like this, recounted in inquests conducted close to the scene, capture brief moments in the everyday lives of Chinese goldminers that can challenge many preconceived ideas about the Chinese on the Victorian goldfields. Contrary to the widely held view of the poor Chinese miner, scratching out a living on abandoned fields, victim of European prejudice and hatred, isolated from friends and family, the story in these inquests is of ordinary lives being lived in extraordinary circumstances. It is not such a different picture from the lives of European miners. The Chinese miners go to work each day to mine for gold, and come home each evening to enjoy their leisure. Some are young, others are old, some are well, others suffer from illness, and all face the dangers of life on the goldfield. In most cases networks of relatives and mates surround them. Close by are other countrymen. When tragedy strikes they rush to give support. Europeans also work and live close by and some lend a hand in an emergency.

We have entered a phase in researching the history of Chinese in Australia that is marked by a desire to know who the Chinese immigrants were and how they lived. Ignored by early writers in their nationalistic 'white man's histories', the Chinese became a focus of attention only with the political swing to multiculturalism from the late 1960s, when historians began to recognise the role of the Chinese as the largest non-European group with the longest history of immigration to Australia. Historians sympathised with the Chinese, but they were treated only as foils to European hatred and passive victims of European prejudice. This approach denied Chinese agency, as Jennifer Cushman commented in her review of books written in the 1970s and 1980s.⁴ Yet at the time, Kathryn Cronin's Colonial Casualties heralded a new approach with her complex picture of the interactions of Chinese and Europeans on the Victorian goldfields⁵ and CY Choi's demographic study, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, broke free of previous confinement by presenting the Chinese immigrants as a richly diverse people.⁶ John Fitzgerald's recently published Great White Lie explodes the myth of the Chinese victim with his focus on the struggle of Chinese Australians for their rights as equal subjects under the law.⁷

 For the historian, turning to the regions can be a way of beginning to understand ordinary lives. Local records, such as inquests, hospital admissions, council correspondence, rate books and local newspapers can add considerably to the official archives. Keir Reeves' writing on the nineteenth-century Chinese of the Castlemaine district, and Amanda Rasmussen's emerging work on twentieth-century Chinese in Bendigo, make use of local sources to enrich our understanding of the central Victorian experience.⁸ Grimshaw and Fahey have also used such sources to give context to their demographic study of colonial Castlemaine families, allowing the reader to enter imaginatively into ordinary people's lives. They suggest that such an approach 'takes us away from the district's elite and begins instead with the personal experience of the "underside" of history'.⁹ The work of regional historians such as Jan Ryan, Cathie May and Shen Yuanfang is sympathetic with this approach.¹⁰

It is the lives of 'ordinary people' that I intend to explore in this paper. Using inquest records, this paper presents a view of Chinese lives and relationships on the Bendigo goldfield in the years between 1854 and 1865 that challenges the view of Chinese as victim. Without wishing to deny that European miners often demonstrated their prejudice or that Chinese miners were treated unfairly in many ways, I believe that dwelling on conflict and violence has limited insight into their personal lives on the Bendigo goldfields. The inquest records allow a unique opportunity to hear Chinese witnesses present their versions of circumstances surrounding a friend's or relative's death. Inevitably, we stand outside the lives of these Chinese goldminers, but inquests present a window of opportunity to see inside the tents and down the mineshafts, gaining a rare glimpse into the living and working world of individuals.¹¹

Figures 1 and 2 - Comparative Population June and December 1854-1860.
Graphs by Valerie Lovejoy based on information from PROV, VPRS 1189/P0 Inwards Correspondence, Fortnightly Reports from Sandhurst Goldfields. NB no figures available for December 1860.