Often on the run from poverty, feuding warlords, fire, floods and famine, Chinese emigres had little bargaining power in their homeland, and many continued in bondage long after their arrival. These were not the elite of Chinese society. Few arrived with any capital. Inevitably, their arrivals met with strenuous resistance from indigenous peoples. Tensions were particularly high in the gold-mining districts of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
Chinese sources left by the early settlers, though rare, record their first encounters.
Taam Sze Pui was one of the early settlers who came to Australia for gold in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such perceptions meshed with European visions of terra nullius . This land, which, as virgin , appears to beg for the benefit of both Eastern and Western penetration and mastery, consists, as Taam describes it, of steep cliffs, torrential streams, great plains and high mountains, without roads, shelter, and lacking in food. Facing such a primitive world, every step forward, Taam wishes his readers to believe, is a trial, embodying great difficulties. Apart from hardships caused by the land, Taam s narrative details the danger to the Chinese colonisers posed by the barbaric natives .