Early Chinese Restaurants of Melbourne 1857-1970s

Directories Searched:

Sands & Kenny Melbourne Directories 1857-1861 (Melbourne: Library Council of Victoria, 1985).
Sands & McDougall’s Commercial and General Melbourne Directory (Melbourne: Sands & McDougall, 1862).
Sands & McDougall’s Melbourne and Suburban Directory (ibid: 1863-1901).
Sands & McDougall’s Melbourne, Suburban and Country Directory (ibid: 1902-1911).
Sands & McDougall’s Directory of Victoria (ibid: 1912-1939).
Sands & McDougall’s Directory of Victoria and Canberra ACT (ibid: 1940-1947).
Sands and McDougall’s Directory of Victoria (ibid: 1948-1974).

Limitations:

The database should always be regarded as a work in progress and a conservative reading of the number of Chinese restaurants in Melbourne over the early decades, for a number of accuracy reasons.

Abstract

This thesis presents an exploration of Melbourne’s Chinese restaurants and their relationship with the city from the late 1900s to the early 1950s. Apart from acknowledgement and commentary in historical recipe books by Chinese Australians, these businesses are dismissed in a line or two whenever new culinary and general histories appear. Recorded as socially isolated and frequented by prostitutes, gamblers, drunks and other unrepresentative social groups, they are recorded as ‘uncomfortable’ places for respectable non-Chinese Melburnians to patronise. Despite almost continuous growth from the late nineteenth century, they do not gain currency until the 1950s when they come to the fore as part of the postwar socio-cultural and economic success story.

In order to address negative understandings and marginalisation of the early Chinese restaurant sector, three broad questions underpin chapters: Why has European involvement in the early restaurant sector been privileged while Chinese restaurants have failed to gain similar recognition? How did the Chinese restaurant sector continue to expand in a political climate of Chinese exclusion and decline, and what do these local businesses and their supporters have to tell us that changes the way the early Chinese community has been recorded and challenges the construction of the city’s and the nation’s history? This research required wide ranging and detailed investigation at the local, state and national levels, including the gathering of oral histories of early Chinese restaurateurs, their families and customers, interrogating city directories, government archives, and contemporary press commentary.

The first chapter establishes the foundation for the thesis by reconstructing the development and spread of early Chinese restaurants throughout greater Melbourne and introducing their complex character. Chapters two and three focus on Chinese restaurant management of matters relating to public health, drawing comparison with the non-Chinese restaurant sector, and in responding to, and managing, shifting discriminatory non-European immigration policies as they affected business development and succession plans. Chapters four and five identify customer groups over the pre-war, wartime and early post-war years, questioning negative understandings of the influence of the early Chinese restaurant sector as a site of cross-cultural engagement. Chapter Six concludes the thesis by examining restaurant food and menus in order to challenge persistent claims of `bastardised’ or inauthentic Chinese food served to the city’s marginalised groups.

The thesis shows a substantial, complex and influential Chinese restaurant sector which presents a more inclusive way of thinking about the city’s early cross-cultural engagement and the origins of post-war socio-cultural and economic change. It also adds complexity to the way the early Chinese presence has been recorded in the city’s and the nation’s histories and highlights the importance of in-depth research at the local level in dismantling generalised negative stereotyping of groups.

Barbara Nichol