Book Launch: Sinophone Australia

Sinophone Australia opens a new window onto Australian history by foregrounding Chinese-language sources as a lens through which to reinterpret the nation’s past. Understanding Australian history through sources written in a different language offers a familiar yet fundamentally different perspective on the Australian experience.

This groundbreaking volume brings together a rich collection of primary sources – letters, essays, travelogues – written in Chinese and now translated into English, spanning from the gold rush era of the 1850s to the postwar reflections of the 1950s. Each chapter includes primary sources translated into English and preceded by an academic introduction written by a historian who has engaged with these sources. In this respect, Sinophone Australia revises the Anglo-hegemony of historical writing, providing glimpses of non-English historical documents with the hopes that this will lead to the expansion of Australian history, just as a new multilingual generation of historians stands up to interpret the vast amount of source documents written in other languages.

Beyond its contribution to Australian history, Sinophone Australia positions these narratives within the broader framework of the global Sinophone, addressing themes that resonate across settler colonies and Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. Sharing analysis from historians who have extensive experience working with Chinese-language sources on Australian history, Sinophone Australia invites scholars and readers to reconsider the intersections of language, migration and identity in shaping historical knowledge.

About the speakers:

Craig A. Smith is Associate Professor in the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. He is a historian of modern East Asia and an avid translator. He is the author of Chinese Asianism (Harvard University Asia Center, 2021) and editor of Translating the Occupation (University of British Columbia Press, 2021).

Mei-fen Kuo is a Lecturer in International Studies at Macquarie University. Her research sits at the intersection of Chinese diaspora history, transnational politics, and Taiwan Studies, with a particular focus on diaspora communities as agents of democratic politics. She is the author of Making Chinese Australia (Monash University Publishing) and Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang (Australian Scholarly Publishing). Her forthcoming book is Chwei-Liang Chiou's Unfinished Homeland: Diasporic Leadership and Taiwan's Democratic Becoming (Palgrave Macmillan).

Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Australian history at The University of Sydney. She is a historian of Chinese Australian communities and is broadly interested in questions of migration and belonging. She is the author of Australians in Shanghai (Routledge 2017) and most recently co-edited a special issue of Australian Historical Studies, 'Multilingual Australia' (2024).