The history of Chinese immigrants in Darwin from the 1800s

​I am  currently having a brief sojourn in Alice Springs and realised that whenever I come to the NT I become lost in stories of the past.  For context I was born in Alice and spent my early childhood here but we moved to Darwin where we lived until I was fifteen.   As with all stories of the past, you pull on a thread and realise that the ball of yarn is  so much bigger than you thought. 

 Yesterday I took the dog for a walk to the local IGA and found an array of bags of salty plums.     This plummeted me back into  a beloved childhood ritual of buying salty plums from Sue Wah Chin in Darwin, a place steeped in nostalgia. This led me to look into who Sue Wah Chin was and before long I was unravelling a big ball of curiosity wool into the origins of the Chinese population in Darwin.
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A very brief background to the  arrival of the Chinese people in Darwin
In the 1870s the South Australian Government, (which also governed the Northern Territory). recruited Chinese people to work on the goldfields and later the building of the railway from Darwin to Pine Creek.   Government sponsored indentured contracts agents in Singapore, Hong Kong and Guangdong province in China.     In 1874 an initial group of  186  Chinese labourers arrived from Singapor but  the numbers swelled over the following years and in 1878 alone 900 Chinese arrived from Hong Kong.  By 1888 there were  7,000 Chinese living in the Northern Territory compared to 1500 Europeans.

Que Noy family at Pine Creek c1910 Library & Archives NT historical collection.

A deputation of Chinese merchants waiting upon South Australian Governor Sir George Le Hunte during his official Northern Territory tour.    1905
Photo taken at the Residency  Roger Nott Collection, held by the Library & Archives NT

The majority of the Chinese who settled in Darwin occupied an area around Cavanagh/Bennett/Smith Streets, known as Chinatown.  It was a thriving hub for about forty years with herbalists, cafes, general stores and boarding houses.    

​Chin Que Ave 1913    Photo taken by   Chief Medical
Officer Mervyn Holmes  to document 'unsanitory'
​conditions of Chinatown.

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Chinatown street c1911

This photo of Children in Palmerston Chinatown   is a still from a 1926 film   made by Clarence Judd   
Darwin c1926 (NFSA ID: 377TEFSJ).

Group of Chinese children playing around a tree. One of the boys is reading a book sitting in the tree. ​1917 Photo by Walter Herbert Bradshaw.
Citation address: https://hdl.handle.net/10070/591234