as gambling and opium smoking, and the exploits of the ‘fallen’ and often boisterous women who frequented the camps. To many observers, particularly those from the metropolitan cities, the camps were seen as dens of iniquity. A correspondent for the Advertiser, probably visiting the Narrandera camp for the first time, was scathing in his remarks on that camp.207 Some years later, when anti-Chinese feelings were running at near fever pitch, the camps and the Chinese in general came in for much greater criticism. In March 1888, Mr James Potts, a delegate of the Queensland Anti-Chinese League, commented that the small towns of Victoria and NSW were much more seriously affected by Chinese labour than either metropolis. The extent to which the Chinaman has wormed himself into the social fabric is indeed but very partially realised by most people. At Albury I found five Chinamen in gaol for attempting to smuggle themselves across the border. Even at Albury they have their Chinatown. At Wagga Wagga there is a very large Chinese encampment at the end of the principal thoroughfare. The police told me that if it were not for the Chinese they would have a mere nothing to do. I went to the Mechanics’ Institute. The reading room was empty. I went down to the encampment and it was crowded with youths and young men. The Chinese from that camp appear to be employed chiefly on the neighbouring stations - ringbarking, fencing and in some cases shearing. But the largest Chinese camp I ever saw is in Narrandera. It contains many hundred men and I counted as many as 36 bad women... The white people complain that their own fruit rots on the trees for the want of a market. The truth is that the womenfolk encourage these Chinamen. They would rather deal with them than with anybody else. They can beat a Chinaman down in his prices, they can make fun of his talk. He will go to any amount of trouble for them, and where a white man’s independence would revolt the Chinamen only goes away smiling and making presents to the children.208
The comments by a Narrandera correspondent known as ‘Whaler’ were even more damning and prejudicial. He described the Narrandera camp as ‘a perfect inferno, indescribable by any writer who possesses not the power of Dante himself’. Passing through the camp late at night he found Mrs Elizabeth Ah Fee engaged in a dispute with a Mrs Smith; the language from which must have ‘ruffled the placid waters of the Murrumbidgee, as well as the fishes beneath’. Smith’s Chinese husband came to her assistance, Smith in the meantime threatening to tear Ah Fee’s ‘drunken liver’ out. The combatants were later joined by a large woman known as ‘Big Maggie’, Ah Fee retiring inside and ‘keeping up a barrage of foul language’ until the others retreated.209 Whaler’s observations raise an important question often at the heart of much of the anti-Chinese feeling of the day. Lizzie Ah Fee, or ‘Tiger Lil’, as she had been formerly called at the Beechworth Chinese camp, was often before the Narrandera court, and her exploits filled many issues of the local press, helping to bring the camps into disrepute. She was one of the better known camp women of disrepute, and had many sisters in crime.210 At the heart of much of the anti-Chinese feeling at that time was the overwhelmingly male population of the camps which meant that social life was pursued largely outside a family environment. To engage in sexual relations meant crossing the racial and cultural divide, with partners and prostitutes sought from the local non-Chinese population.211 Brennan had quite a bit to say on the European women at the camps. He remarked that there were 37 European women married to Chinese at the five camps
76
207
Daily Advertiser, 24 August 1880.
208
Daily Advertiser, 1 March 1888.
209
Narrandera Ensign, 29 March 1888.
210
Narrandera Ensign, 29 September 1891, 10 March, 15 September 1893.
211
Williams, Chinese settlement in NSW. p.10; Wilton, Golden Threads, pp.55-56.