War, Migration and Belonging

At Bulimba, a Chinese workers’ camp formed part of Brisbane’s wartime landscape from 1943. Men gathered from different circumstances, including seafaring and evacuation, to work for the Americans on landing barges, invasion nets and other equipment.

The camp was also a place of living, not merely a workforce. State Library research records accommodation and connections with the surrounding community. Wartime reporting sometimes turned the men into subjects of suspicion; other residents and workers spoke in their defence. Read those accounts beside the photograph of the camp. Employment in a common war effort did not erase the unequal status Chinese people faced, nor guarantee a future in Australia when the work ended.

The end of the war changed the future of the Bulimba workers. The National Archives holds four volumes in series BP210/7 indexing Chinese men employed by the US Army at Bulimba who were repatriated to China in 1945. Its research guide records departure from Brisbane on the SS Cheshire in December.

A register can preserve a name while saying little about the person’s hopes, family or feelings about leaving. Place it beside the newspaper images of luggage being prepared for China. Work and departure belong to the same history, but neither tells us what every individual wanted. These records are starting points for tracing lives, rather than complete biographies.

The barriers associated with White Australia were dismantled through successive changes. The dictation test ended in 1958. Reforms followed in 1966, and in 1973 the government renounced the White Australia policy and advanced a multicultural approach. The Racial Discrimination Act followed in 1975.

These were national changes with consequences for people living in Queensland and for those hoping to come. Legal reform mattered, but a date in a timeline cannot tell us that prejudice ended or that every family experienced change in the same way. Read this history alongside the earlier travel documents in Room 03: the contrast makes the power of administrative rules, and the importance of challenging them, more visible.

A census records a different kind of evidence from a camp photograph or a border document. In Queensland’s 2021 Census, 83,607 people reported Mandarin as the language used at home and 27,437 reported Cantonese.

These are language responses, not a count of all people with Chinese ancestry. Language, birthplace, ancestry and citizenship describe different things; none alone tells a complete story of belonging. Behind a table are households with their own histories of arrival, family and everyday conversation. This room ends with a record that can be counted, while leaving space for experiences it cannot measure. The museum’s People and Associations collections offer other ways to continue exploring Queensland community life.