In 1857, a scandal erupted in Sydney over New South Wales (NSW) customs officials’ seizure of gold from Chinese gold miners. These men were returning to China with gold earnings without paying a newly introduced duty tax. Much more than a dispute over unpaid taxes, the act was a violent expropriation of the Chinese miners’ gold. This article focuses on arguments made by NSW authorities in defense of the seizure, including the accusation made by customs officials that Chinese miners were taking part in a conspiracy to reintroduce a “coolie” trade. A little known footnote in the history of the Australian gold rushes, this scandal has never been studied before. Here I use it to probe the legacy of the coolie trade in the Australian colonies and how it informed debates in NSW over free and unfree labor. Chinese miners protested the confiscation of their gold forcing the colonial government to conduct a formal investigation. A select committee into the seizure was established by the NSW legislative assembly as a result.Footnote ¹ I show how their findings uncovered settler memories over failed Asian indentured labor schemes in Australia, revealing how the legacies of forced Asian migration continued to shape understandings in the Australian colonies over labor rights and fair taxation well after the cessation of such schemes in the early 1850s. In the process, two populations—Chinese indentured laborers and Chinese gold miners—became closely entwined symbols of a new social order that saw Chinese migrants deeply embroiled in a transitional moment in colonial systems of labor. The petitions of the Chinese and the hearings of the select committee also offer rare documentation of the claims of the Chinese.

In the aftermath of the end of convict transportation to the Australian colonies in 1840, settlers looked to Asian indentured labor as a solution to a perceived labor crisis.Footnote ² Australia's landowners, known as “squatters,” went in search of cheap labor to avoid paying the higher wages sought by free laborers in the wake of convict emancipation.Footnote ³ Squatters occupied large tracts of crown land in order to graze livestock. Initially often having no legal rights to the land, they gained its usage by being the first Europeans in the area. By the 1840s, squatters were granted legal rights to their runs. They subsequently accumulated significant political power.

On the vast squatting runs, which characterized the Australian frontier at this time (many larger than whole English counties), these pastoralists found it increasingly difficult to hold on to their newly mobile workers who were absconding in increasing numbers.Footnote ⁴ Men were “refusing to bind themselves under contract,” “attending to sheep in a slovenly manner,” and “demanding exorbitant wages, and more rations than they could possibly consume without waste.”Footnote ⁵

For an employer class that had been accustomed to a bound, obedient labor force in the form of assigned convicts, the lack of power to retain their employees was more than just alarming; it threatened their very way of life. The Sydney Herald compared the sufferings of employers in NSW who had lost their convicts to that of American sugar planters, deprived first of their slaves and then of free labor from India.Footnote ⁶ Landowners saw Asian indentured labor as a solution to labor shortages. Chinese indentured laborers were believed to be “plodding and submissive … and content on a ration of rice and fish, or garbage,” and, most importantly, “docile.”Footnote ⁷ Even better, these landowners believed they would be willing to serve an indenture of five years for three to five dollars a month, a fraction of the wage of a free laborer. Defending their desires against critics who accused them of “introducing a new slave trade”Footnote ⁸ and of “offending against the spirit of emancipation,”Footnote ⁹ Australia's landowners argued that coerced labor was a necessary evil: “It is absurd to suppose that any colony can advance without forced labor … In every country in the world now peopled, forced labor of the black or white skin had been employed, wherever progress has been rapidly made.”Footnote ¹⁰ Here was the heart of the coolie question in Australia: Was the settler colonial project viable without the indentured convict labor that had underpinned its existence for nearly fifty years?

The Australian colony of New South Wales was at the forefront of the Chinese labor trade in its early years.Footnote ¹¹ Between 1845 and August 1852 it was estimated that 6,255 Chinese indentured laborers left Xiamen (Amoy) under contract: 990 to Havana, 469 to Demerara, 380 to the Isle of Bourbon, 380 to Hawaii, 600 to the Philippines, 350 to California, 420 to Peru, and 2,566 to Australia.Footnote ¹² A total of 3,608 Chinese landed in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia between 1847 and 1853.Footnote ¹³ Given the involvement of Australian contractors at this early stage, Maxine Darnell suggests Australian colonists “laid the basis for a trade that was to assume horrendous and inhumane proportions” while largely escaping blame for these outcomes in the historical record.Footnote ¹⁴ These early experiments in Asian indentured labor have been overshadowed in mainstream Australian history by the anti-Chinese immigration restriction legislation last introduced during the gold rushes, notably the imposition of a poll tax on all Chinese immigrants in 1855.

Thanks to the meticulous research of a generation of economic and social historians, we know a great deal about the processes that underpinned the recruitment and shipment of indentured Chinese laborers to Australia in the 1840s: the signing of often multiple, contradictory contracts; of working practices on squatting runs; of solidarities and conflicts between laborers; and of the extraordinary ways in which these men used the courts to assert their rights against creeping levels of servitude.Footnote ¹⁵ But we know much less about how these schemes shaped debates over the rights of laborers more broadly. After the granting of self-government in NSW and the upheavals of the gold rushes, the coolie question reemerged in the late 1850s, providing a screen for competing visions of the colony's future. In what follows, I trace how the coolie question was put to use in colonial NSW as a cover for a range of other concerns over labor. While lingering support for Asian indentured labor schemes persisted among land-owning interests, counter currents also emerged identifying the rights of working colonists with the rights of the Chinese miners. In public reactions to the mass seizure of gold from Chinese miners in Sydney, we can also see opposition to corruption in the Customs office, outrage over the double standard applied to Chinese and non-Chinese miners by the customs department, lawyers willing and able to defend Chinese interests, and an emerging sympathy for Chinese miners as working men.

Sydney Harbour was the epicenter of commerce and power in New South Wales in the nineteenth century, and ships were crushed into the packed spaces of the harbor's inadequate wharfs. By 1852, after the Australian gold rushes began in earnest, the same ships that had been transporting Chinese indentured laborers since the late 1840s were also bringing in thousands of hopeful Chinese gold miners. These ships docked alongside those unloading new emigrants from Europe, also headed to the gold fields. From Sydney they traveled directly to the northern gold towns, especially Turon, Sofala, and Hill End.

In response to the gold rushes, Australia's squatters warned of a new labor crisis and argued for the importation of even more Chinese indentured laborers, instigating what became known as the “rush of 1852.” This rush saw the market flooded with Chinese indentured laborers and some ships forced to dock for months offshore with Chinese on board, waiting for prospective buyers to be rowed out to inspect them for purchase of their indentures.Footnote ¹⁶ Advertisements for these Chinese filled the colonial press.Footnote ¹⁷ But demand had dropped after several Chinese were tried for murdering or assaulting their overseers, and many began demanding higher wages.Footnote ¹⁸

Meanwhile, in southern Chinese ports such as Xiamen, the intensifying demand for Chinese workers exacerbated practices of kidnapping and coercion on the part of recruiters and also led ship captains to cut rations during the voyages, leading to mutinies and high rates of mortality. Riots broke out in Xiamen to protest the coolie trade in 1852. Conditions were so poor on some ships bound for Australia, such as the Ganges, Spartan, and General Palmer, that outrage in New South Wales prompted pubic inquiries into these voyages; seventy laborers died on board the General Palmer alone.Footnote ¹⁹ During these scandals, the public heard that illiterate Chinese were forced to sign contracts they could not read, that they were kept in shackles, given numbers instead of names, and sold to Australian masters who kept them in debt by charging them exorbitant prices for food and clothing once in Sydney. For a public deeply sensitive to any reminder of its recent convict past, there were clear parallels between coolie transportation and convict transportation. The mutiny on board the Spartan in particular received a great deal of publicity in NSW and turned many in the colony against a continuation of the Asian indentured labor trade.Footnote ²⁰ Outrage was reignited over the Spartan and the trade it represented when news emerged that the body of a Chinese man, with a bag of stones tied to his leg, who was found floating in Sydney Harbour on May 21, 1853, had arrived on the Spartan and had been mysteriously thrown overboard.Footnote ²¹

The gold rushes also signaled a new era of colonial democracy. A semblance of self-government had been granted in 1850, but it was only in 1852 that the four Australian colonies were allowed to devise constitutions. The demand for self-government grew, and a draft constitution for New South Wales was prepared by a legislative council committee headed by William Wentworth, giving the colony control over its revenue for the first time, including customs duties raised from gold export. Legislative councils in the Australian colonies would be two-thirds elected and one-third nominated by the governor.Footnote ²²

Landowners dominated these early parliaments, angering Australia's swelling number of free working men and urban dwellers who feared the squatters would use their political power to further degrade working conditions in the colony. Most members of the legislative council in NSW had used convict or Chinese indentured labor on their runs, and many had been active in the “pro-coolie” associations of the 1840s. William Wentworth was related through marriage to Australia's most notorious coolie trader, Robert Towns (owner of the Spartan, General Palmer, and Ganges) whose wharf in Sydney Harbour—Towns Wharf—was staffed by Chinese indentured laborers.Footnote ²³ Popular unrest centered on this question of Asian indentured labor. Working men feared that powerful landowners, such as Wentworth and Towns, would reintroduce coolie labor and that this would have the effect of lowering wages, impacting the prospects of emigrants who had left the United Kingdom to better their conditions in NSW. The largest public meeting to date in NSW, known as the “anti-coolie address,” had recently been held to protest this issue. Other Australian colonies had banned the use of indentured labor entirely. Victoria, with its capital of Melbourne, had prohibited indenture when it was established as a separate colony in 1851.

By 1855, the new parliament was deflecting criticism that it did not represent the interests of free immigrants, being more concerned with the interests of landowners, and that it was plotting to reintroduce indentured labor to the colony. The new parliament had formed a “Select Committee on Asiatic Labor” in 1854 and called Robert Towns as a witness to argue for the reintroduction of indentured labor.Footnote ²⁴ Throughout the British world, the antislavery arguments of the 1820s and 1830s had been adapted to apply to other forms of unfree labor, including convict and indentured Indian and Chinese labor, and critics of the landowners used such arguments in their political attacks against squatter candidates.Footnote ²⁵ A census in 1856 counted 1,800 Chinese males and 6 females in the colony. Over half of these worked terms of indenture on remote runs doing the hard labor once assigned to convicts.Footnote ²⁶ The rest were gold seekers. So by the late 1850s, two issues—opposition to slave labor and the granting of responsible government—converged in an atmosphere of unrest. “No Coolies” placards decorated public houses, and agitators on street corners denounced supporters of coolie labor.Footnote ²⁷ As one speaker declared, “Chinese laborers were the offspring of that morbid craving for cheap convict labor which cannot be appeased while hope remains that it may be supplied. Chinese emigration is merely an extension of the slave trade.”Footnote ²⁸

On October 16, 1857, two ships sailed into these volatile waters. On a Sunday night, the Ethereal and Mary Douglas, bound for Hong Kong, docked in the harbor to pick up 457 Chinese gold miners from Towns Wharf on their way back to China. Sang Hyo typified the group. He had come to NSW two years before and had worked on the Sofala, Braidwood, and Turon goldfields. His brother in his home village of Heng Seng, one day's boat journey from Guangzhou (Canton), had lent him the fifty-one dollars he needed for the passage to Australia. He had traveled to Australia on the Eleanor Lancaster owned by Robert Towns. The Eleanor Lancaster had been a slave ship, and then a coolie ship, and by the 1850s was taking voluntary Chinese emigrants to Australia during the gold rushes on inflated ticket prices. After two years in the gold fields, Sang Hyo was now heading back to China and sitting on another Town's ship, the Ethereal, ready to set sail. In a large pouch around his waist he carried one hundred and seventy-five ounces of gold “deposited in long strips of linen.”Footnote ²⁹ These were divided into small packages and belonged to himself and seventy-one other Chinese miners, some from his village and some from further afield in South China. Records state that he was to deliver the gold once he arrived back in Guangzhou.Footnote ³⁰ Sang Hyo was one of seventeen Chinese miners similarly charged with responsibility on board the Ethereal that night for the gold of three hundred and seventy other Chinese.Footnote ³¹

The presence of Sang Hyo and his compatriots in Sydney over the days prior had not gone unnoticed. Charles Lockyer, an ambitious young man working for the customs department, had seen a number of Chinese names on the passenger lists leaving Sydney that week. As Lockyer would later tell the select committee, he had watched

Lockyer's opportunistic curiosity would have had little relevance to the life of Sang Hyo had it not been that the fledging NSW parliament had recently assumed control of their customs revenue from the British government. Parliament had passed a customs act in February that year declaring that all gold in its natural state being exported from NSW was subject to duty. If this duty wasn't paid and the gold was declared contraband, it was liable to seizure by customs offices.Footnote ³³

That evening Lockyer took John De Courcey Bremer, customs officer and first tide officer, as well as a number of armed soldiers, onboard the two ships in Sydney Harbour. They searched the Chinese miners on board, and took by force £9,480 pounds worth of gold from them, the equivalent in today's money of £880,000 or around two million American dollars. They did not take down the names of the men from whom they had taken the gold, and they did not differentiate between gold nuggets, gold dust, gold teeth, gold rings, and gold sovereigns. They took all the gold they could find: “We got the gold from the persons of the men,” testified De Courcey Bremer, “some of it was concealed under their arms, and some about other parts of the body … some had a little tied up in a handkerchief or rag, some had large quantities on board … I told them I could not tell their names.”Footnote ³⁴ Although the Chinese miners had likely concealed their gold to protect themselves from being robbed on board by other passengers, the customs officials concluded that they were “deliberately smuggling the gold out of the colony without paying duty on it.”Footnote ³⁵

Lockyer would later claim that some Chinese passengers had resisted the seizure and drawn knives. Sang Hyo would testify that they did not: “I opened my bag and gave it to the customs officer so that I could pay duty,” he said. “[H]e told me he would return the rest to me at 11a.m. the next day. I never knew about the law and the duty.”Footnote ³⁶ Customs Officer Bremer disagreed, drawing on a gamut of racialized stereotypes collected during his time as a soldier in the Opium Wars: The Chinese were “sulky,” he said, “and perfectly aware that they were evading the law. I know the Chinese well, for I was engaged in the first Chinese war some years ago. They are a cunning race.”Footnote ³⁷ It was this purported unwillingness to give up the gold that Bremer used to justify the presence of soldiers: “[T]here was some show of resistance and he had therefore procured assistance … I believe the First Lieutenant sent Mr Napier with a boat's crew and some marines to render assistance, and after that the gold was given up.”Footnote ³⁸

The gold, which, when bundled together, was so heavy that it required a number of men to lift it, was rowed to the home of Collector of Customs Colonel Nathaniel Gibbes at Admiralty House, next to Kirribilli House, now the residence of the prime minister of Australia. It would later be delivered to the Bank of Australia at Customs House in Circular Quay.Footnote ³⁹ Gibbes conceded that this procedure was irregular: “We have not carried out the rules stringently—because this is a peculiar place and I cannot have personal knowledge of everything that goes on.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Lockyer received one-third of the gold as his reward for informing, the Crown another third, and the remaining third was divided between the seizing officer Bremer and the marines who came to his assistance. This was as Colonel Gibbes had distributed contraband when he was Collector of Customs at Jamaica.Footnote ⁴¹ But the gold seizure was far from the end of this story. Rather, it was the beginning of a saga that would last the next year and half resulting in five petitions, the calling of a select committee, and the death by starvation on the streets of Sydney of at least three of the Chinese passengers onboard. It would also have the effect of drawing out public support for the rights of Chinese miners. This support came at a time of growing unrest among working men over the power of land-owning elites in the colony.

Two days after the gold was seized, a petition reached the houses of the NSW parliament. It read:

The petition also alleged that fifty gold sovereigns had been taken from the Chinese as well as their gold. This would be the first of a number of petitions submitted by the Chinese passengers through their lawyer Henry Newbon. Each petition emphasized the Chinese miners’ admiration for British law, and hope that their “moral claim” on the new government would not be ignored. They also stressed the link between industry, perseverance, labor, and wealth. The Chinese had labored for this gold, and it was rightfully theirs.Footnote ⁴³

By submitting these petitions, and by drawing attention to the wholesale expropriation of their gold, the Chinese miners signaled their participation in the burgeoning culture of democracy and protest, which was increasingly defining gold-rush society in the 1850s. Similar forms of resistance existed among Chinese in the Victorian gold fields in reaction to onerous taxation practices.Footnote ⁴⁴ This litigious activity has not received much attention from scholars in Australia. It deserves greater scrutiny for illustrating the strength of the Chinese community networks that supported and initiated such litigation in the period before federation.

By the late 1850s, Chinese miners were protesting in large numbers when constables arrested Chinese for nonpayment of the resident tax, one of the many taxes applied to Chinese in this period. In Bendigo in the colony of Victoria, four thousand people signed a petition to the governor to release those imprisoned for nonpayment of the tax, and in Beechworth and Castlemaine thousands of Chinese offered themselves up for their own arrest. The Chinese acted in a sustained radical protest against unfair taxation—one that was strikingly similar to the legendary protests of European miners at Eureka and one that was arguably more sophisticated and disciplined.Footnote ⁴⁵ In such a way they challenged the racialized perceptions that their communities lacked the aptitude to govern themselves and assimilate into democratic society.

In the incident in Sydney Harbour in 1857, Chinese miners were not simply highly taxed, they were forcibly relieved of all the gold they had found—and the substantial amount of gold they were carrying for many others. The scale of this seizure and its exposure of government inexperience, if not corruption, in customs procedure at a sensitive point in the transition to self-government put politicians to the test. Their response tells us much about the role of labor in a society straining to contain deep class tensions after convict emancipation. The deepening crisis over labor caused by the gold rushes had its sequel in developing political debates over transportation and immigration. The gold seizure scandal animated these twin concerns. But it did more than this. It demonstrated that Chinese miners were perfectly aware of their rights as free miners and ready to advocate for these rights through an emerging democratic system. So the actions of the Chinese miners after the seizure were indicative of a broader culture of revolt by workingmen against landowning interests being played out across the colony.

Although the government remained silent on the petitions for a number of weeks, news of the seizure was soon published in the press, critical of what looked like corruption on behalf of the government.Footnote ⁴⁶ New South Wales readers learned that the Chinese miners were bringing legal proceedings against the government on grounds that the seizure aboard the vessel was illegal. All petitions written by the Chinese were reproduced in full in the Sydney Morning Herald.Footnote ⁴⁷ News had emerged that while the Mary Nicholson had cleared customs, the Ethereal had not. The ship had not been due to sail for another three to four days: “[T]he Chinamen had not even completed laying in their stock of provisions.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The decision to search a ship so long before it was due to sail was therefore highly unusual. In addition, the petitioners argued that they were ignorant of the customs duty as the law had only recently been introduced. News of such a law had only now filtered through to them as they worked in the goldfields. The Evening News emphasized this point:

Letters and articles published in the NSW press show that the Chinese miners were not without support and that members of the Sydney legal profession were willing to advocate for them. A series of letters to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald went further than the Evening News article, urging the government to assist the miners and respond decisively to their petitions, calling the motives of the collector of customs into question: “[I]t must be borne in mind this Collector of Customs is interested in the result, to the extent of 1340 ounces of gold, as his perquisite for taking the gold from the ship to the bank.”Footnote ⁵¹ In the meantime, the Chinese miners had become a highly visible presence on the streets of the city. Some had been seen begging for food. Sang Hyo would tell the select committee when asked what he had been doing in Sydney since the seizure that he had been “begging on the streets of Sydney, and begging from my friends. I might die in Sydney.”Footnote ⁵² For many colonists, these destitute Chinese dramatized the unfair distribution of wealth in NSW. The seizure highlighted the illegitimacy of their new government as well as the plight of miners and workers in the face of a powerful employer class.

In late November 1857, the NSW parliament voted in favor of a formal investigation into the seizure. This investigation, which lasted from December 1857 to August 1858, included the testimony of twenty-eight Chinese men in Australia through three interpreters. The interpreters included Senhor Juanario Jose Lopez, from Portugal, who had once worked for the British East India Company in Guangzhou and claimed he could speak nine Chinese dialects, and Henry Leau Appa and Chin Ateak, both local merchants in Sydney who had taken up the cause of the Chinese miners and allowed some of them to board in their properties. The use of these interpreters was not unusual. In order to accommodate the Chinese in the legal system, the government employed many court interpreters.Footnote ⁵³ The ideological imperatives of colonial law, “that law should be fairly communicated to its subjects and thereby accommodate linguistic difference,” saw interpreters of varying degrees of efficacy regularly employed in courts.Footnote ⁵⁴ Through Lopez, Leau Appa, and Ateak the select committee has left an archival record of rare, albeit mediated, Chinese testimony. This is the first of its kind on the NSW legislative record. This testimony documented life in the villages the men came from, their thoughts about the goldfields, and the impact of the gold seizure on their lives and the lives of their families. So the presence of the Chinese interpreters was key in humanizing the Chinese miners and universalizing their plight across racial divides. If the Chinese miners could have their gold violently seized, then all miners leaving NSW had reason to fear the methods of the customs office.

Henry Leau Appa and Chin Ateak were convincing witnesses supporting the Chinese case against the Customs Office. Their presence indicated the Chinese miners had successfully mobilized the local Chinese community to assist in their cause. Both men were fluent English speakers and wealthy men, well acquainted with the nets of power that underpinned colonial society in Sydney. There was some knowledge of their position among members of the committee who would try to use this information to discredit the men, implying that Appa and Ateak, as “merchants and wealthy men,” had links to an underground Chinese coolie trade. The chairman's opening questions to Ateak were:

While Chin Ateak was from Sydney, Leau Appa was from Melbourne and in Sydney for the hearing. A converted Christian, he was married to an Englishwoman and had been fluent in English for more than seventeen years.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Committee report described Appa as having “exercised considerable influence over thousands of his fellow countrymen who are our fellow citizens, and by whom he was implicitly trusted in the negotiation of the most important matters.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The select committee became public theater. Testimonies were reported daily in the press, and its protagonists became well known to Sydney readers. It brought disparate members of colonial society together. Those on the lower rungs of the Sydney harbor hierarchy, the coxswains and tide waiters, testified after the collector of customs himself, as well as rubbing shoulders with well-heeled merchants such as shipping agent John Black, who worked with the Chinese miners and had arranged their passage on the Ethereal. Meanwhile, Chinese miners, speaking a range of local dialects and hailing from diverse parts of Guangdong's patchwork of districts and villages, came together in the court and elected only those widely respected in the broader Chinese community to speak for them. Assisted by two of the most elite Chinese merchants in the country, Henry Leau Appa and Chin Ateak, their testimony would see the case of the customs office unravel in unpredictable ways. The response of the select committee exposed the limits of the new government's ability to manage the multiracial community of the late 1850s after the gold rushes.

Members of the select committee tried to parry the moral claims of the Chinese miners’ petitions by drawing on the legacies of the coolie trade. The last recorded Chinese indentured laborers were imported into NSW in 1854, three years before the committee was formed. But while indenture had ceased, campaigns to revive an Asian indentured labor trade remained alive. And feeling against such a trade persisted among sections of the NSW workforce. The point I wish to make here is not that the coolie trade persisted in NSW, but rather that settler memories of this trade framed the committee's interrogation of the Chinese miners and, furthermore, that the language of Asian servility, often used to justify the original trade, remained alive in parliamentary vocabulary. Rather than portray the Chinese miners as independent working men, committee members revived the debates of the 1840s over Asian indenture, which had been provoked and challenged by the specter of democracy within the colonies.

This turn of events is not surprising when we consider the professional backgrounds of the men who sat on the NSW legislative committee in the 1850s. The majority of the committee members had used indentured labor at some point on their lands, and a number had been involved in publicized court cases involving indentured workers who had absconded or who had accused their masters of ill treatment. During the elections, the specter of the coolie had been used against landowners by their political opponents. Robert Cooper, a wealthy brewer and exconvict who ran against Wentworth in the elections, decorated his public houses with “No Coolies” placards. Similarly, William Hustler, a barrister recently arrived in the colony, had “Vote for Hustler” and “No Coolies” placards posted on Sydney streets. So, the figure of the Asian coolie was already firmly entrenched in political debate in the colonial legislature before the select committee began its hearings.

While early witnesses for the committee defended the actions of the customs office and insisted the Chinese miners had been intentionally attempting to smuggle their gold, the testimony of Chinese witnesses built a compelling alternative case. The customs office grew more desperate in their attempts to justify the seizure. In a series of letters to the colonial treasury, the collector of customs drew on racial imaginings around Chinese immorality by submitting opium balls as evidence. He claimed these had been found among the Chinaman's belongings when they were seized. He also pointed to the Chinaman's “riotous and drunken” conduct before embarking on the ships as “deserving of great consideration.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Gibbes tried to convince the committee that the Chinese miners were aware of the new customs law by drawing on dockside rumor. Apart from the original informer, Lockyer, Gibbes mentioned another informant, “a respectable young man, the son of the Church of England Clergyman in Penrith and one of his tide waiters,” whose sister claimed to have heard the captain of the Ethereal tell the Chinese that “if they had any gold about them, they had better pay the duty.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Gibbes therefore claimed the Chinese had been aware of the new law. Henry Leau Appa challenged Gibbes by pointing out that Chinese miners were often unaware of English laws because proclamations remained untranslated. “You think the law should be put up in the streets,” the chairman asked him. “[Y]ou think, if it were put up in the Chinese language, the Chinese would know the law very well?” “Just so,” Appa answered.Footnote ⁶⁰

Leau Appa then acted as a translator for Appo from Wyehow, near Guangzhou. Appo had lived in Sydney since the gold seizure and had survived because “some old man gave him food.” When his gold was seized onboard the ship, he had understood it would be returned to him the following day. He therefore “opened his bag and gave it to the gentlemen,” thinking he was paying the duty.Footnote ⁶¹ Ha Hon gave similar evidence, which he relayed through Leau Appa: “[H]e said his gold and other Chinamen's he put around here (the waist). After the gentlemen asked for the gold he took it out and gave it to the Customs House, three bags.”Footnote ⁶²

In their testimony Gibbes Bremer, and Lockyer rationalized the unorthodox seizure on racial shortcomings tied to an antislavery critique. Gibbes’ spoken evidence revealed his belief that the Chinese on the ship were involved in a slave trade perpetrated by Chinese merchants. Some committee members took up this connection in the questions they directed toward the Chinese petitioners, their lawyers, and supporters. Chinese merchants Henry Leau Appa and Chin Ateak found themselves the subject of aggressive questioning from a committee member, Mr Robertson.Footnote ⁶³ “Do you think these men who come from China are good or bad men?” he asked Leau Appa. “[A]re they not criminals—persons who had been put in a prison? Do merchants, or rich men in China, send out Chinamen to this colony? Do they give them so much money to pay their passages, and then contract them to send the money back again?” “No,” Leau Appa responded. “They must pay their own way. They say this country has plenty of gold. English law is very good law. And they come to the country to get gold.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Mr. Cox followed a similar line of questioning:

When Ha Hon was examined he was asked who paid his passage to Sydney and what kind of debt he owed:

The Chinese miners repeatedly asserted their rights to the gold in the context of their familial relationships. “You are holding a great deal of gold in trust for other people?” Mr Cox asked Sang Hyo and Ong Sing. “Did you pay for your passage to Sydney yourself, or did a rich man pay for you? Did the money you take on board—was it to pay your debt to this rich man who paid your passage because you work for him?” “No,” Sang Hyo answered. His brother had paid his way, and much of the money he had onboard was for his family and for his friends’ families.Footnote ⁶⁷ “If these men were to go to China now without their money,” Mr Cox asked, “would there be any danger to them? Would they have their heads cut off for not taking the money for the rich men?” “They could not go to China that way,” Sang Hyo answered. “For another friend send gold to China, perhaps to his Father and Mother, perhaps to his wife, some to his children and he will then write a letter. If he go to China, one man will ask, “Where is the gold my father sent home?” Another woman will ask, “Where is the gold my husband sent?”Footnote ⁶⁸

Ignoring the many thousands of Chinese migrants and settlers in NSW who did not fit the image of debased laborers, the committee focused on the intersection between Chinese migration to Australia and the mechanisms of an imagined “coolie” trade. Emerging at a time of considerable uncertainty about the legitimacy of the new colonial order, the anticoolie, anti-Chinese critique drew together these diverse strands of discontent and forged them in a coherent ideology. “The Chinese are sulky,” De Courcey Bremer said. “The gold will just go to their rich masters to pay their debts.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The portrayal of Asian dependence and servility had the dual effect of reifying white independence—white miners were immigrants and settlers —Asian miners were coolies.

The Chinese petitioners refuted the implications of these questions by refocusing their testimony on the gold itself, the produce of much labor and perseverance, as they put it, and on their social contract with the NSW state. The Chinese asserted that property was subject to political control by the sovereign people. Drawing on deep traditions connected to political virtue and fiscal transparency, they exposed the failure of a democratic government in its infancy to protect their rights and their property from what looked very much like corruption.

Ha Hon assured the committee that he was sure the government would return the gold. “That is why I wait in Sydney,” he said. “English law good law. I wait for the government to return the gold.” “Do you still think they will return it?” he was asked, after so long. “Yes, I still think so,” he said. “How do you survive while you are in Sydney?” “He had not one penny,” he said. “Not one cowrie, he was hungry.” When the Committee offered to give him £10 to help him go to the diggings, he “said a few words in a low tone,” before responding through Leau Appa. “That would not do, would not even cover his debts in Sydney. If he go to the diggings, he may as well be dead.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Two types of labor relations framed questions and testimonies in the select committee. The first involved the individual enterprise of Chinese miners earning money for themselves and their families on the goldfields. The second type was that of a coolie or slave, propertyless, in debt, with all money and profit going back to a “wealthy man” who had arranged passage to Australia. By superimposing the second set of labor relations, of slave and master, onto the first, that of free miner, the committee played to popular politics in the 1850s, which was strongly against the reintroduction of any form of indentured labor and sensitive to any association between free labor and convictism. In comparison, the testimony of Chinese miners focused on the amateurism of the customs office and the human cost of their unorthodox seizure. At a time when hundreds of miners were arriving and leaving through Sydney Harbour every week, the fate of these Chinese miners echoed broader frustrations over government incompetence and unfair taxation. If the rights of free laborers could be contravened in this way, the prospects for representative self-government in the Australian colonies seemed remote. By injecting racial taxonomies of labor into the mix—by figuring the Chinese as “coolies” beholden to “rich men”—the Committee sought to animate existing racial tensions over Chinese labor and mobility in their favor. In order to do so, they reignited the debates over indentured labor simmering just below the surface of political life in the colony. That this argument ultimately failed to gain traction showed how much the coolie trope had changed since the 1840s.

The committee was unsuccessful in its attempt to dismiss the miners’ claims. On August 23, 1858, it handed down its judgement. Although the majority of the gold was deemed unrecoverable, a sizable portion was to be returned to the Chinese miners. The judgement read in part, “The total gold seized was £9,480. One third, £3,160, has gone to enrich the treasury. This amount the Committee recommend should be restored to the Chinese, not as right, but as an act of grace. The other two thirds have been distributed and are impossible to recover.”Footnote ⁷¹ While the fate of the Chinese miners remained unknown, the decision to return to them a portion of their gold is significant. For it shows the receding power of the landowning classes. Their revival of the coolie question ultimately failed to discredit the Chinese miners whose grievances registered with working men. This was not a discussion primarily about race. The debate was more concerned with the colony's existing labor force and the motivations and virtues of wealthy colonial employers. It incorporated complex and contradictory views about colonial society and contrasting possibilities for the colony's future.

Behind the repeated claims of docility, obedience, and pliability, which cannot be understood apart from racist tropes of Asian submissiveness, it is important to recognize the specific social relations of power with which these racist categories intersected. The committee observed that through the system organized by Chinese labor contractors, the Chinese could be “bought like any other commodity, at so much a dozen or a hundred.”Footnote ⁷² The Chinese petitioners repeatedly asserted their rights as free migrants, as bread winners for their families, and, importantly, their rights to the fruits of their labor.

In gold-rush NSW, the concentration of capitalist power and the coolie question became closely tied representations of a new social order, laying bare the contingency of labor rights at a time when landowning interests struggled to maintain their hold on power. Drawing on the ideas and language of antislavery traditions, opponents of coolie and Chinese migration saw their struggle as tied to political democracy. That this purportedly humanitarian rhetoric could be used to navigate the unorthodox application of a customs law shows how the coolie trope sat at the heart of colonial anxieties over race and rights. Within the major social crisis of the 1850s—battles over legal, political, and social standing of servants, ex-convicts, masters, aborigines and whites—the “coolie” was a vexing figure whose contested status would reconstruct Australian identities after the end of convict transportation. In New South Wales the gold seizure scandal became a lightning rod for wider anxiety over the unequal distribution of labor and land and the grossly uneven allocation of access to both. Through this scandal the figure of the Asian indentured laborer shaped the political landscape of the young colony, even as that ghostly figure clashed with real-life Chinese who were not coolies but voluntary emigrants and free miners. The loosely defined figure of the Asian coolie clinched together a set of disparate concerns over the lingering effects of convictism, the viability of self-government, the future of the squatter class, the rights of free laborers, and the legitimacy of the new colonial legal system.