Projects per year
Abstract
This article reflects on a joint journey during which three academics, a community historian, and a family historian collaborated in searching for Moon Chow, who is widely narrated as the first documented Chinese immigrant to Western Australia. This experience demonstrates how researchers from various traditions and backgrounds can work together productively despite different initial motivations and agendas. This article presents various Moon Chow stories and narratives that family historians, community historians, academic historians, public entities, and commercial entities have put forward. Rather than judging the soundness and merits of these stories, this article highlights how working with family and community historians results in researchers developing a richer understanding of Moon Chow, telling his story sincerely and sympathetically and preventing the poor scholarship of replacing one oversimplified narrative with another. This article also reveals that family historians may choose to deal with different parts of their family history in different ways to reach different objectives. As a result, their positions, motivations, and identities can be highly fluid, not confined to scholarly paradigms.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 217-236 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Life Writing |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 18 Sept 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Searching for Moon Chow: A Joint Journey'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
-
Chinese West Australians: 1830-2020
Smith, B. (Investigator 01) & Tao, Y. (Investigator 02)
Centre for Language Education and Cooperation
21/07/21 → 21/07/22
Project: Research
Press/Media
Research output
- 1 Citations
- 1 Article in specialist publication
-
This Buddhist sculpture probably won’t ‘rewrite history’ – Western Australia already has a rich Chinese past
Tao, Y. & Smith, B., 27 Mar 2023, The Conversation.Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Article in specialist publication
Open Access