The Great Trek to Gold

In the mid-nineteenth century, over 24000 Chinese gold miners landed in Australia seeking fortune. In 1854, the colonial government introduced anti-Chinese immigration legislation, imposing a £10 head tax for each Chinese arriving; consequently, Chinese arrivals were forced to land in South Australia and walk over 500km to the Central Victorian goldfields. Today, this is known as the Great Trek to Gold.

My project attempts to visually reconstruct this history, deemed unworthy of archiving at the time. I will retrace this trek and find the fragments left behind by my ancestors. Using a mixed media approach, I will attempt to fill in the gaps in recorded history. I am to reveal these marginalised experiences through visual narratives roaming between fact and fiction, fragment and totality, virtual and actual. I aim to interrogate the underrepresentation of migrant labour in contemporary culture by establishing visual conjunctions between historical narratives and current socio-political constructs.

The project will take the form of a photographic investigation, mimicking a binder of evidence ready for archiving. In bestowing the look and feel of a formally archived history upon suppressed and under-documented narratives, I aim to subvert the conventional use of photography and scientific archives as a means to legitimise and validate discourses and judgments. Ultimately, I hope to explore ways to legitimise subaltern narratives through the emotional resonances generated by creative depictions of historical events.