Exhibit C: Cartoons
These cartoons featured as part of a larger summary illustration depicting the events of the epidemic in the Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier. Cartoons were an especially poignant vehicle used to forward Sinophobic attitudes in Australia, arguably culminating in the Bulletin's infamous ‘Mongolian Octopus’ cartoon. Here, each one of the 'Mongolian's' tentacles embodied a negative trait or vice Chinese immigrants supposedly harboured: cheap labour, immorality, opium, etc. One of these, of course, was smallpox.¹
The Illustrated Sydney News cartoon on the left very clearly depicts a “policemen keeping guard outside” On Chong’s household.² This exemplifies how knowledge of individual cases - specifically that of On Chong’s child and Won Ping - were widely reported and proliferated through cartoons and the press as a means of channelling popular anger and blame towards specific Chinese individuals, and by extension, the broader Chinese populace. Another such cartoon featured below depicts the dramatic pursuit and capture of Sue Chong; an associate of Won Ping who was suspected of being infected. It pointedly features police officers chasing and beating frightened Chinese men.³ Violence naturally accompanied anti-Chinese sentiments. Chinese men were accosted on the streets and Chinese-owned properties were vandalised. Such cartoons helped legitimise the use of violence against the Chinese both generally and on an institutional level.
Meanwhile, the cartoon on the right subtly incorporates wider fears of cheap labour and unemployment into its discourse. These beliefs regarding the Chinese - that they were a source of competition for labour - were deeply ingrained in the national consciousness amongst the white working classes especially. The caption “Out You Go, John!” - a reference to the international stock caricature of the Chinese labourer ‘John Chinaman’ (anti-Chinese attitudes were not unique to Australia) - and the Chinese man’s stereotypical depiction, complete with his 'queue' haircut, are ostensibly straightforward. In vein with the cartoon on the left, this particular scene could also be a reference to the quarantining of Won Ping - which required “missiles” and “long poles.”⁴ However, historian Ian Welch posits that the clothesline in the background is symbolic of the woman’s occupation, and “a reminder that European widows were among the supposed victims of the Chinese move into laundry work.”⁵ Similarly, the dropped basket of vegetables marks the Chinese man as a vegetable hawker, a profession from which the Chinese were unsuccessfully driven away from. In this way, during the smallpox epidemic cartoons and press entries more broadly could bridge smallpox to the larger anti-Chinese discourse of the time. These cartoons then, helped shape and evolve popular Sinophobic sentiments, conjoining widely held and deeply ingrained beliefs to the recent smallpox outbreak as to intensify anti-Chinese feelings.
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¹ “The Mongolian Octopus - His Grip on Australia,” Bulletin, August 21, 1886.
² “The Case of Supposed Small-pox,” Sydney Daily Telegraph, May 27, 1881.
³ “Discovery of a Chinese Patient at Druitt Town,” Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, July 16, 1881.
⁴ “Smallpox in Sydney,” Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, June 21, 1881.
⁵ Ian Welch, Alien Son: The life and times of Cheok Hong Cheong, (Zhang Zhuoxiong) 1851-1928 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2003), 200.
