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Julia Martinez

University of Wollongong, Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty Member

University of Wollongong, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, Faculty Member

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I am an historian of the Asia Pacific, with a focus on north Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. My work traces transcolonial mobilities across the region. Pearl Frontier (with Adrian Vickers) considered colonial labour networks between north Australia and Indonesia. Colonialism and Male Domestic Service (with Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel & Victoria Haskins) explored the lives of Asian and Indigenous men in colonial service across the Asia Pacific. My edited book (with Kate Bagnall) Locating Chinese Women: Historical mobility between China and Australia (2021) was recently published by Hong Kong University Press. Current projects include an ARC-funded Future Fellowship on the traffic in women in the colonial Asia-Pacific and an ARC Discovery Project on Chinese indentured labour after 1919 (with Lowrie and Benton).

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Papers by Julia Martinez

Ethnic policy and practice in Darwin

Mixed relations between the Aboriginal and Asian communities in Darwin formed and endured in the ... more

Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Asian labour in tropical white Australia, Darwin, 1911-1940

$Research paper thumbnail of \u27Unwanted Scraps\u27 or \u27An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People\u27? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo$

\u27Unwanted Scraps\u27 or \u27An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People\u27? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese ... more In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called coolie labor

Mae Ngai investigates Chinese exclusion across the Anglo-American world

History Australia

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong: University-Educated Chinese Australian Women

Locating Chinese Women

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese... more Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese heritage. They both went on to path-breaking careers, demonstrating a strong commitment to public and political life. Mary Chong, after graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929, was employed by the Chinese Consul General in Sydney. Soon after she went to China, working first for the Republic of China government and later in journalism, returning to Australia in later years. Gwen Fong, who graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1947, remained in Melbourne working as a doctor. While pursuing her medical studies and career, Gwen was politically active in the Communist Party of Australia, as a leader of the university branch and as an organiser of educational events. Education within the Australian university system allowed these pioneering women to take up fulfilling careers in Australia and in China. Their writings, which in...

Introduction: Chinese Australian Women, Migration, and Mobility

Locating Chinese Women

This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an... more This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an introduction to the historical presence of women of Chinese heritage in Australia. For too many years Chinese Australian women’s history has been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. This has been compounded by the perceived absence of the primary sources needed to undertake a recovery project. As feminist historians we now recognize that aided by the digital revolution and a creative use of newspapers, family histories, official statistics, and government records, it is possible to uncover and illuminate Chinese Australians women’s lives in the past. In doing so we question the framing of Chinese women as static or immobile while their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons took part in large-scale migration from Guangdong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Placing the movements of migrant and Australian-born Chinese women in an international con...

Locating Chinese Women

This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chines... more This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny. Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class. Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come ...

Everyday Life for Chinese Workers on Nauru under Australian Administration

The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)

The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila

Journal of Women's History, 2021

Jon Piccini on Australia’s patchy human rights record

History Australia

The Chinese traders in French Indochina: partners or rivals?

Book review: David Walker and Agniezka Sobocinska, eds. Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century

Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent de... more Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent debates on Australia's Asian Century. As the use of the term 'yellow peril' in the subtitle suggests, there is a strong emphasis in this book on Australia's ongoing anxieties about the rise of Asia.

Belated labour reform: Australia and the abolition of Asian indenture

The abolition of indentured labour and the rejection of so-called' coloured' labour was a central... more The abolition of indentured labour and the rejection of so-called' coloured' labour was a central concern of the first parliament of Australia, following" Federation. An exception was made, however, for the pearl-shelling industry which continued to import Asian indents despite concerns that this undermined the ' White Australian agenda. In the 1950s Australian government support for indentured labour remained steadfast ignoring growing international criticism. The dismantling of the indenture system in the late 1960s was a belated attempt at labour reform. Government debates, however, reveal that the liberalisation of labour policy masked a continued desire to limit Asian immigration. The international abolition of indentured labour was a drawn-out process, beginning in the nineteenth century and reaching its peak in the first decades of the twentieth century. Scholars of indenture, such as David Northrup and Kay Saunders suggest that the indenture system was in decline by the 1920s.1 A 1994 ILO publication, however, stated that indentured labour survived the longest 'in the Dutch colonies where the Coolie Ordinance remained in force until 1941'.2 In this paper I argue that Australia, despite its much-vaunted image as a country of early labour reforms, maintained the offIcially sanctioned use of indentured Asian labour until the early 1970s. This belated reform was examined by Adrian Cunningham in his unpublished 1992 Masters' thesis which argued that indenture in the pearl-shelling industry lasted until 1962. Cunningham'S conclusion was partially influenced by the fact that 1962 was the last year of open archival records, under the thirty-year restriction applying to government flIes. 3 I will revisit this topic, taking advantage of a further ten years of archival documents in order to demonstrate that it was not until the 1970s that indenture was offIcially abandoned in Australia and that this delay can be largely explained by the continued desire, on the part of the Australian government, to restrict Asian immigration. Unfree labour in Australia The use of indentured labour in Australia is inextricably connected to changes in immigration policy. The chronology of Australian immigration history can be loosely divided into the colonial or pre-Federation period, prior to 1900; the White Australian period from 1901 to 1975; and the supposedly non-discriminatory, 'Multicultural' period after 1975. It is widely assumed that the practice of indenture relates to the pre-Federation period. The largest group of indentured labourers in Australia was the Melanesians and Asians employed in the Queensland sugar industry between 1863 and 1904. The Federation years mark the transformation of the Australian labour system. Raymond Markey notes that from the 1890s to 1904 there was a 'phasing out of unfree labour systems in Australia' brought about by the political organization of the labour movement. 4 Federation coincided with the abolition of indentured labour in the sugar industry, formalised in the Pacific Islanders Act of 1901. In addition, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was intended to restrict the importation of 'coloured' labour. Because of the publicity surrounding the 1901 legislation it is generally believed that indenture was an anathema to the new Australian nation. Nevertheless, it is clear that unfree labour remained and that it continued to be sanctioned by the state. Though not described as indenture, the system of employment of Aboriginal workers in Australia was a form of unfree labour which survived into the postwar period. 5 Aboriginal workers could be forced into employment and failure to obey employers could lead not only to penal sanctions with hard labour, but to unoffIcial corporal punishment meted out by employers.6 Australia's colonial administration of Papua New Guinea also retained the. indenture system until 1950. Peter Fitzpatrick has argued that the 'agreement system' which replaced indenture, was essentially the same system by a different name. The penal provisions were repealed, but they were replaced with alternative sanctions whereby court action could terminate a worker's contract and have 'damages' paid to the employer out of the worker's deferred pay. The agreement system survived into the 1970s.7 The pearl-shell industry was the only industry to be exempted from the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. Unlike the Aboriginal and Papuan examples, the Australian pearl-shelling industry employed indentured workers from Asia, thus promoting a traditional colonial form of labour migration. Japanese, Indonesian, Filipino, Malayan and Chinese indents were employed in the north Australian ports of Darwin, Broome and Thursday Island from the late 1800s. Pearling masters were permitted to import Asian divers, tenders, and crew under indenture contracts. The exemption was controversial given that both coloured labour and indentured labour were contrary to spirit of the new Australian nation. S The controversial nature of the pearl-shelling industry has been discussed in the works of David Sissons and J.S. Bach and more recently Regina Ganter writing on the Queensland industry.9

The Limits of Solidarity: The North Australian Workers Union as Advocate of Aboriginal Assimilation

Pearling Women in North Australia

Pearls, People, and Power

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong

Locating Chinese Women

THE EVOLUTION OF ‘MALAY ’ LABOUR ACTIVISM, 1870-1947: protest among pearling crews in

‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

International Labor and Working-Class History

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese ... more In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

8 Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang

Chinese Australians, 2015

In the 1920 and 1930s Chinese political activism in Darwin in northern Australia was roughly divi... more In the 1920 and 1930s Chinese political activism in Darwin in northern Australia was roughly divided between the Kuo Min Tang, founded in 1924, and the older Wah On Society. Darwin had a majority Chinese population in 1911 and despite the effects of the White Australia policy the community maintained strong numbers through its Australian-born children. Before 1924 the Wah On Society was the main force in Chinese politics, concerning itself with community issues such as the temple, the aged and maintaining links to China. Its members also addressed the Australian government on matters of immigration, trade and employment-identifying themselves as the merchants of Darwin. With the advent of the Kuo Min Tang, and the related Chinese Recreation Club in 1923, the role of the Wah On Society was diminished. They maintained many responsibilities, such as celebrating Chinese New Year and raising funds for China, but Kuo Min Tang and Chinese Recreation club officials were more vocal on women's and workers' rights, segregation in sports, and immigration restriction. Differences of opinion arose between young and old, the left and right wing, and over which group best served the Chinese Consul and the goals of modern China.

Chinese rice trade and shipping from the North Vietnamese Port of Hai Phong

This overview of Chinese trade in northern Vietnam explores the role of the Chinese rice traders ... more This overview of Chinese trade in northern Vietnam explores the role of the Chinese rice traders there, especially in Hải Phong, and their connections with Hong Kong and southern China, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows they were never mere colonial middlemen but economic actors with ties to German and English business interests as well as to the French. The article traces what various primary sources can tell us of their community and business history, as well as revealing the intricate business ties of Chinese rice exporters in colonial Hải Phong with German shipping companies, up until World War One.

Ethnic policy and practice in Darwin

Mixed relations between the Aboriginal and Asian communities in Darwin formed and endured in the ... more

Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Asian labour in tropical white Australia, Darwin, 1911-1940

$Research paper thumbnail of \u27Unwanted Scraps\u27 or \u27An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People\u27? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo$

\u27Unwanted Scraps\u27 or \u27An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People\u27? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese ... more In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called coolie labor

Mae Ngai investigates Chinese exclusion across the Anglo-American world

History Australia

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong: University-Educated Chinese Australian Women

Locating Chinese Women

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese... more Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese heritage. They both went on to path-breaking careers, demonstrating a strong commitment to public and political life. Mary Chong, after graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929, was employed by the Chinese Consul General in Sydney. Soon after she went to China, working first for the Republic of China government and later in journalism, returning to Australia in later years. Gwen Fong, who graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1947, remained in Melbourne working as a doctor. While pursuing her medical studies and career, Gwen was politically active in the Communist Party of Australia, as a leader of the university branch and as an organiser of educational events. Education within the Australian university system allowed these pioneering women to take up fulfilling careers in Australia and in China. Their writings, which in...

Introduction: Chinese Australian Women, Migration, and Mobility

Locating Chinese Women

This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an... more This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an introduction to the historical presence of women of Chinese heritage in Australia. For too many years Chinese Australian women’s history has been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. This has been compounded by the perceived absence of the primary sources needed to undertake a recovery project. As feminist historians we now recognize that aided by the digital revolution and a creative use of newspapers, family histories, official statistics, and government records, it is possible to uncover and illuminate Chinese Australians women’s lives in the past. In doing so we question the framing of Chinese women as static or immobile while their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons took part in large-scale migration from Guangdong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Placing the movements of migrant and Australian-born Chinese women in an international con...

Locating Chinese Women

This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chines... more This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny. Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class. Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come ...

Everyday Life for Chinese Workers on Nauru under Australian Administration

The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)

The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila

Journal of Women's History, 2021

Jon Piccini on Australia’s patchy human rights record

History Australia

The Chinese traders in French Indochina: partners or rivals?

Book review: David Walker and Agniezka Sobocinska, eds. Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century

Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent de... more Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent debates on Australia's Asian Century. As the use of the term 'yellow peril' in the subtitle suggests, there is a strong emphasis in this book on Australia's ongoing anxieties about the rise of Asia.

Belated labour reform: Australia and the abolition of Asian indenture

The abolition of indentured labour and the rejection of so-called' coloured' labour was a central... more The abolition of indentured labour and the rejection of so-called' coloured' labour was a central concern of the first parliament of Australia, following" Federation. An exception was made, however, for the pearl-shelling industry which continued to import Asian indents despite concerns that this undermined the ' White Australian agenda. In the 1950s Australian government support for indentured labour remained steadfast ignoring growing international criticism. The dismantling of the indenture system in the late 1960s was a belated attempt at labour reform. Government debates, however, reveal that the liberalisation of labour policy masked a continued desire to limit Asian immigration. The international abolition of indentured labour was a drawn-out process, beginning in the nineteenth century and reaching its peak in the first decades of the twentieth century. Scholars of indenture, such as David Northrup and Kay Saunders suggest that the indenture system was in decline by the 1920s.1 A 1994 ILO publication, however, stated that indentured labour survived the longest 'in the Dutch colonies where the Coolie Ordinance remained in force until 1941'.2 In this paper I argue that Australia, despite its much-vaunted image as a country of early labour reforms, maintained the offIcially sanctioned use of indentured Asian labour until the early 1970s. This belated reform was examined by Adrian Cunningham in his unpublished 1992 Masters' thesis which argued that indenture in the pearl-shelling industry lasted until 1962. Cunningham'S conclusion was partially influenced by the fact that 1962 was the last year of open archival records, under the thirty-year restriction applying to government flIes. 3 I will revisit this topic, taking advantage of a further ten years of archival documents in order to demonstrate that it was not until the 1970s that indenture was offIcially abandoned in Australia and that this delay can be largely explained by the continued desire, on the part of the Australian government, to restrict Asian immigration. Unfree labour in Australia The use of indentured labour in Australia is inextricably connected to changes in immigration policy. The chronology of Australian immigration history can be loosely divided into the colonial or pre-Federation period, prior to 1900; the White Australian period from 1901 to 1975; and the supposedly non-discriminatory, 'Multicultural' period after 1975. It is widely assumed that the practice of indenture relates to the pre-Federation period. The largest group of indentured labourers in Australia was the Melanesians and Asians employed in the Queensland sugar industry between 1863 and 1904. The Federation years mark the transformation of the Australian labour system. Raymond Markey notes that from the 1890s to 1904 there was a 'phasing out of unfree labour systems in Australia' brought about by the political organization of the labour movement. 4 Federation coincided with the abolition of indentured labour in the sugar industry, formalised in the Pacific Islanders Act of 1901. In addition, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was intended to restrict the importation of 'coloured' labour. Because of the publicity surrounding the 1901 legislation it is generally believed that indenture was an anathema to the new Australian nation. Nevertheless, it is clear that unfree labour remained and that it continued to be sanctioned by the state. Though not described as indenture, the system of employment of Aboriginal workers in Australia was a form of unfree labour which survived into the postwar period. 5 Aboriginal workers could be forced into employment and failure to obey employers could lead not only to penal sanctions with hard labour, but to unoffIcial corporal punishment meted out by employers.6 Australia's colonial administration of Papua New Guinea also retained the. indenture system until 1950. Peter Fitzpatrick has argued that the 'agreement system' which replaced indenture, was essentially the same system by a different name. The penal provisions were repealed, but they were replaced with alternative sanctions whereby court action could terminate a worker's contract and have 'damages' paid to the employer out of the worker's deferred pay. The agreement system survived into the 1970s.7 The pearl-shell industry was the only industry to be exempted from the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. Unlike the Aboriginal and Papuan examples, the Australian pearl-shelling industry employed indentured workers from Asia, thus promoting a traditional colonial form of labour migration. Japanese, Indonesian, Filipino, Malayan and Chinese indents were employed in the north Australian ports of Darwin, Broome and Thursday Island from the late 1800s. Pearling masters were permitted to import Asian divers, tenders, and crew under indenture contracts. The exemption was controversial given that both coloured labour and indentured labour were contrary to spirit of the new Australian nation. S The controversial nature of the pearl-shelling industry has been discussed in the works of David Sissons and J.S. Bach and more recently Regina Ganter writing on the Queensland industry.9

The Limits of Solidarity: The North Australian Workers Union as Advocate of Aboriginal Assimilation

Pearling Women in North Australia

Pearls, People, and Power

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong

Locating Chinese Women

THE EVOLUTION OF ‘MALAY ’ LABOUR ACTIVISM, 1870-1947: protest among pearling crews in

‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

International Labor and Working-Class History

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese ... more In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

8 Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang

Chinese Australians, 2015

In the 1920 and 1930s Chinese political activism in Darwin in northern Australia was roughly divi... more In the 1920 and 1930s Chinese political activism in Darwin in northern Australia was roughly divided between the Kuo Min Tang, founded in 1924, and the older Wah On Society. Darwin had a majority Chinese population in 1911 and despite the effects of the White Australia policy the community maintained strong numbers through its Australian-born children. Before 1924 the Wah On Society was the main force in Chinese politics, concerning itself with community issues such as the temple, the aged and maintaining links to China. Its members also addressed the Australian government on matters of immigration, trade and employment-identifying themselves as the merchants of Darwin. With the advent of the Kuo Min Tang, and the related Chinese Recreation Club in 1923, the role of the Wah On Society was diminished. They maintained many responsibilities, such as celebrating Chinese New Year and raising funds for China, but Kuo Min Tang and Chinese Recreation club officials were more vocal on women's and workers' rights, segregation in sports, and immigration restriction. Differences of opinion arose between young and old, the left and right wing, and over which group best served the Chinese Consul and the goals of modern China.

Chinese rice trade and shipping from the North Vietnamese Port of Hai Phong

This overview of Chinese trade in northern Vietnam explores the role of the Chinese rice traders ... more This overview of Chinese trade in northern Vietnam explores the role of the Chinese rice traders there, especially in Hải Phong, and their connections with Hong Kong and southern China, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows they were never mere colonial middlemen but economic actors with ties to German and English business interests as well as to the French. The article traces what various primary sources can tell us of their community and business history, as well as revealing the intricate business ties of Chinese rice exporters in colonial Hải Phong with German shipping companies, up until World War One.