Notes on the Assimilation of the Darwin Chinese

Milton M. Gordon , Assimilation in American Life , New York, Oxford University Press , 1964, p. 71.

'Chinese' is used here to refer to individuals of predominantly Chinese ancestry, that is, those with more than 50 per cent Chinese blood.

E. Arthur Huck , "The Chinese in Australia", unpublished monograph, Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne, 1966, p. 31. In 1961 the Chinese constituted 3.3 per cent of the total Darwin population.

Using the 1961 Census figures for Chinese, the masculinity ratio for Chinese in Australia was 233 men to every 100 women but in Darwin it was 112 men to every 100 women.

Huck , op. cit., p. 33.

John S. Furnivall , Colonial Policy and Practice , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press , 1948, esp. pp. 304-5, 310.

A number of studies in America have noted the general tendency for large sections of the population not to belong to voluntary associations, for example, Mirra Komarovsky , "The Voluntary Associations of Urban Dwellers", American Sociological Review , 1946, Vol. 11, p. 687.

This figure is not entirely reliable as a measure of intermarriage since some marriages may have been in the Chinese customary form common in pre-war Darwin and so were never registered officially. However, it is unlikely that there were any such unregistered marriages between Chinese and Europeans.

Using the intermarriage ratio A (intermarrieds/ all marrieds) developed by Charles Price and Jerzy Zubrzycki ("The Use of Intermarriage Statistics as an Index of Assimilation", Population Studies , 1962-3, Vol. 16, pp. 58-69) it was found that 32.4 per cent of the Chinese women had intermarried while the comparable figure for men was 20.7 per cent. However, among first-generation Chinese, men (16.7 per cent) were slightly more likely to marry non-Chinese than were the women (11.5 per cent). This, however, was largely a result of the practice of bringing Chinese fiancees to Australia from Hong Kong.

These conclusions on the incidence of intermarriage are not based on the questionnaire findings since, in selecting the sample, the numbers of Chinese respondents who had intermarried was controlled to allow significance tests to be applied to test the various hypotheses as to the effects of intermarriage on other levels of assimilation.

The classifications used are based on those developed by L. Broom , F.L. Jones , and J. Zubrzycki , "An Occupational Classification of the Australian Workforce", Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 1965 , Vol. 1, No. 2 (suppl.), pp. 6-8.

Gordon , op. cit., p. 77.

Ronald Taft , From Stranger to Citizen, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1965, p. 69.

Alan Richardson , "The Assimilation of Assisted-Passage British Immigrants in Australia (1959-66): A Psycho-Social Study", manuscript seminar paper, Dept. of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra, October 1966 , op. 8-10.