Despite improvements in our understandings of Australia's Chinese history and heritage, there remain many aspects of the lives, culture and community of Chinese immigrants and their descendants about which we know frustratingly little. This can be daunting for those researching their Chinese ancestry. What members of the Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria (CAFHOV) want to demonstrate through our work is that these challenges are not insurmountable, and you don't have to face them alone. The first half of this book illustrates the diverse paths CAFHOV members have travelled in order to understand more about their families. Each journey starts with a different set of circumstances and challenges. The second half of the book focusses on historical sources and skills which might prove valuable to those researching their Chinese ancestry.

South Flows the Pearl is a fascinating journey through the history of Chinese Australia. Taking the reader from Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta to Sydney, Perth, Cairns, Darwin, Bendigo and beyond, it explores the struggles and successes of Chinese people in Australia since the 1850s, as told in their own words. This unique book was written by an insider. Mavis Yen was born in Perth in 1916, the daughter of a Chinese father and an Australian mother. She lived in both countries and understood what it meant to navigate two worlds, to live through war and revolution, and to experience racial discrimination. In the 1980s she began interviewing elderly Chinese Australians, recording hours of conversations. Her intimate understanding of their languages and life experiences encouraged them to share their stories. Published here for the first time, they will change how you think about Australian history. “This is a book that offers a new way to be Australian in this country, and casts Chinese Australians as the protagonists in their own stories... When people agree to tell their stories, they speak to the future. Whether or not we listen is up to us.” — Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, University of Sydney

'Secrets, Silences and Sources' tells the stories of a range of Chinese immigrants who established families and made homes in nineteenth-century Australia. Chapters explore notions of identity, family secrets and the pain of exclusion. Contributors also share the resources they drew on to construct these stories in the hope that this will inspire others in the research. Told by members of the Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria, these are histories that have grown over many years and continue to be actively researched.

This, the first major study of Chinese women in Australia, is all about global journeys and perspectives. It is also a story of the various stories that connect Australia to the pathways of women of Chinese ancestory. Ryan interrogates issues of ethnicity, gender and identity to present the diversity of the women's lives.

In Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance key scholars explore how Chinese Australians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced the communities in which they lived on a civic or individual level. With a focus on the motivations and aspirations of their subjects, the authors draw on biography, world history, case law, newspapers and immigration case files to investigate the political worlds of Chinese Australians. The book also introduces current literature and thinking about the history of the Chinese in Australia and includes a postscript that reflects on the importance of historical analysis to current day political science.

This edited collection invites the reader to enter the diverse worlds of Australia’s migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day. With a focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups’ newspaper ventures, this volume has two overarching aims: firstly to demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces – the global within the local; and secondly to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian ‘voices’ through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society.