By Juanita Kwok
7 December 2025
The first Chinese men to arrive in Queensland did not come as gold seekers but as indentured pastoral labourers brought to work on the pastoral frontiers from the late 1840s to early 1850s. Margaret Slocomb, historian of the Chinese indentured labourers in Queensland, asserts that “some of the Burnett and Wide Bay Chinese were almost certainly members of the Heaven and Earth Society (tiandihui) known commonly as the Sheathed Sword or Small Sword Society”.[1]
Gold discoveries brought Chinese to the Queensland goldfields, including Bouldercombe, Ravenswood, Charters Towers and the Palmer River, firstly from the southern goldfields and then direct from China. In 1874, gold production in Queensland outstripped the other colonies for the first time.[2]
Source: Illustrated Australian news, [Melbourne], July 2 1877.
According to Noreen Kirkman, historian of the Palmer River, in January 1875, steamships began bringing Chinese from Kwangtung Province and South China ports and by January 1876, the Hopkee Company had established a regular monthly line of steamers between Hong Kong and Cooktown.[3] The arrival of the first Hopkee steamer coincided with the rush to a new gold field on the Hodgkinson River, leaving the Palmer gold-field to the Chinese.[4] When European diggers began to return to the Palmer in early May 1876, the Chinese were in the majority. [5] It was reported of the Chinese on the goldfield:
Controlled and governed as they are powerful by secret organisations, they are doubtless quite alive to the fact that provided they can maintain their advantage against immediate pressure and act upon the defensive, the arm of the law, even if it is not raised to support them, cannot at any rate smite them; that in fact it will not be they who are law breakers, but those who annoy and disturb them. [6]
In 1877, when British Consul to Shanghai Dundas Crawford visited the Palmer, Chinese numbers on the goldfield were officially estimated at 11,000 though Crawford estimated the Chinese population of the field as 12,000 to 14,000.[7] He described the arrival of a shipload of Chinese immigrants arriving at Cooktown to make their way to the Palmer:
They pass through the town in batches of six to ten, in single file but never singly, each coolie carrying his own bamboo pole brought from China … and never stopping carry their straight to the place assigned them, most to the camping ground beyond … a select few to the various accommodation houses, representing branches of the “Sheathed Sword Society” or other organisation.”[8]
Source: State Library of Victoria. Original place published 17 May 1875 in Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers (Melbourne, Vic. : 1867 – 1875) 17 May 1875.
Historian Sandi Robb identified 32 temples in Queensland that existed between 1870 and 1940, the majority of which were in northern Queensland.[9] It is possible that some of these temples may in fact have been lodges.
Both Cathie May and Sandi Robb believe that there were earlier secret societies in Queensland, but they did not become public until the Gee Kung Tong, or Chinese Freemasons Headquarters in Cairns opened in 1908.”[10] By 1919, Chinese Masonic lodges had opened in numerous places in towns in Queensland, including Brisbane, Cairns, Longreach, St George, Rockhampton and Goondiwindi. These will be discussed in a future post.
Images from article by Sandi Robb, ‘Wood engravings of Chinese Miners in Cooktown’, Cairns Museum website.
The content of this post is the intellectual property of Juanita Kwok and may not be reproduced without her permission.
[1] Margaret Slocomb, Among Australias Pioneers: Chinese indentured pastoral workers on the Northern frontier, 1848 to c. 1880 Bloomington, IN, Balboa Press, 2014, 278.
[2] Statistical Register of NSW for the year 1881, (Sydney: Government Printer, 1882), Table 96
[3] Noreen Kirkman, From Minority to Majority: Chinese on the Palmer River Gold-Field, 1873-1876. In: Henry Reynolds (ed.) Race Relations in North Queensland. 2nd ed. Townsville: James Cook University, 244, 249.
[4] Kirkman, 254
[5] Kirkman, 255
[6] Kirkman, 255-56, citing Queenslander 23 April 1876.
[7] Dundas J. Crawford, ‘Notes by Mr Crawford on Chinese Immigration in the Australian Colonies’, 1877. Great Britain Foreign Office Confidential Print 3742. National Library of Australia, Part 2, 21.
[8] Crawford, Part 2, 27.
[9] Sandi Robb, North Queensland’s Chinese family landscape: 1860-1920, PhD, James Cook University, 2019,
[10] Cathie May, The Chinese in Cairns and Atherton: contrasting studies in race relations, 1876-1920, in Paul Macgregor (ed.) Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific. Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1995, 66; Sandi Robb, Cairns Chinatown: A heritage study, Cairns, Cairns and District Chinese Association, 2012.