Photo - R-L:
- the President of the Legislative Council, the Honourable Ben Franklin MLC
- Australia’s first Indigenous Senior Counsel, Tony McAvoy SC
- National Foundation for Australia-China Relations CEO, Gary Cowan
- Our Story project lead, exhibition curator, Zhou Xiaoping
- Robyn Dass - among those whose family histories are featured in the book
- Respected historian, Professor Henry Reynolds
- Jason Wing, among those whose family histories are featured in the book
- Lance O’Chin, among those whose family histories are featured in the book
MC - Osca Monaghan
Book launch 3 -
at Parliament of NSW, 14 October 2025
L-R: Stephen Loo is Noongar man. His Chinese ancestry is through his father’s side.
Barbara Peek nee Yu AKA Dolby, born in Broome. Ancestry – Aboriginal, Chinese, Indonesian and Scottish.
Zhou Xiaoping, born and educated in China. He is an artist, Our Story project lead, exhibition curator and the book editor.
Book launch 2 -
at WA Museum Boola Bardip
11 August 2025
Date and time: 15 May 2025, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room, Sidney Myer Asia Centre,
761 Swanston St., Parkville VIC 3052
Book launch 1 -
at Asialink, Melbourne University, 15 May 2025
03.05.2025
Marcia Langton – Launch Speech for Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia
I have known Xiaoping for many years. We met in the 1990s, sometime at the old Northern Territory University. He was a Masters student in the Fine Arts Department. I was just fascinated to hear about this Chinese man who'd been working with Indigenous artists including the late great Jimmy Pike out in the Western Desert at a seminar, and we heard a rumour that he'd been adopted by Johnny, the late great Johnny Bulunbulun, in Ramingining......
So it's no surprise to me that, really very quickly – I'm amazed at the speed with which you conducted this project, Xiaoping – Xiaoping was able to find and connect with Aboriginal people with Chinese ancestry all around the country.
.....
This is a masterful investigation and highly collaborative with the descendants of these families. And it makes me proud to know Xiaoping and many of the people who are involved. I want to congratulate you and the entire team. It's a very special book, because there is no other like it – nobody has ever attempted this before, although the topic was screaming out for the kind of attention that you've given it. We talked about this early on, when you started to think about the project and I suggested some historians who had written about Chinese Aborigines or Chinese people in the Northern Territory. And you know, it's very clear to me that you’ve done the best job that anybody could do – by far the most excellent work ever in the history of documenting Chinese people in Australia and their relations with Aboriginal people. So huge congratulations to you and to everyone involved. I wish you the best of luck, because it's been a great honour working with you.
17 March 2025
Our Story is the outcome of a research project that focuses on the period after the gold rushes of the 1850s, when it was more common for First Nations people to come into contact with Chinese arrivals. Both groups largely lived on the margins of White Settler society and were often subject to much disdain and discrimination.
The historical information collected in this book consists of two levels. One is the history of people, places and events that have been documented and affirmed over periods of time. The historians have compiled this material, and their work provides a backdrop to the second level of information: family stories.
The book also includes contemporary views by eight artists, including seven Aboriginal Chinese artists, and one Chinese Australia artist. It provides personal stories about how descendants identify themselves and what they think of their family history.
The editor and the contributors have produced a superbly crafted book that combines high-quality scholarship with personal reflections, insights and historical content. The book is brilliantly edited connecting the academic overview with the voices of families and individuals, and with narratives found in contemporary art and photographs.
This book beautifully captures the voices of contemporary families of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage that tell of this important history that will not be silenced.
-- Professor Peter Yu
"Our Story allows us to do three important things: it helps us retrieve the Chinese contribution to the development of colonial Australia; it will enlighten the general community about the almost unknown story of Chinese – First Nations relations; and more broadly, it will bring back into national consciousness the multicultural nature of colonial Australia.” --Henry Reynolds
Zhou Xiaoping's 35-year commitment to Aboriginal art and culture was more than theoretical. He lived in the remote camps with desert artists like Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man, and Ganalpingu artist John Bulun Bulun from Arnhem land, and supported them in so many unacknowledged ways...This is a pioneering project being arguably the first and largest body of work on this subject to date.”
-- Margo Ngawa Neale
The editor and the contributors have produced a superbly crafted book that combines quality scholarship with personal reflections, insights and historical content. The book is brilliantly edited connecting the academic overview with family and individual voices as a coherent and compelling narrative.
Howard Pedersen
LATEST NEWS
O' CHIN Story
May, 2024
As of December 2023, the research work that lasted nearly three years has come to an end.
The research results will be compiled into a book.
Exhibition planning has begun and is expected to be completed in 2024, and the exhibition tour plan will be launched in 2025.
December 2023
Chinese Aboriginal connections explored in new heritage project
By Vanessa Mills on Kimberley Breakfast
Artist and social researcher Zhou Xiaoping is no stranger to outback Australia.
He has also been intrigued for many years by the family heritage and connections of Aboriginal people to China, through relationships formed by early migrants to Australia.
A sweeping history and arts project has begun, to map the Chinese-Aboriginal families and maybe even trace their links back to China.
And Broome's multi-culturalism continues to be a focus of Zhou's work.
Duration: 6min 59sec
Broadcast: Tue 29 Mar 2022, 9:35am
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/kimberley/programs/breakfast/chinese-aboriginal-connections/13817364
Project Launch
Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese people in Australia - A new research and arts project will explore Aboriginal Australians' family connections to China. Across Australia, there are many Indigenes families with Chinese heritage, and this project tells their stories.
The project was officially launched at the China Museum in Melbourne on March 26, 2022 by Peter Yu. More than 70 people attended the event, including speakers Mark Wang (CEO of Chinese Museum), Rodney Carter (CEO of Dja Dja Wurrung Group), Professor Peter Yu (Vice-President First Nations ANU), Dr Mathew Trinca (Director of National Museum Australia), Zhou Xiaoping (Project Leader), Kwong Lee Dow (Chairman of Australian Multicultural Foundation), Margo Neale (Senior Indigenous Curator & Principal Advisor to the Director at the National Museum Australia), followed by a research lecture with speakers Fred Cahir (Researcher at Federation University Australia), Stephen Loo (one of families from WA), and David Walker (Historian of University of Melbourne. There were about 80 people from across Australia who watched the event live online. The Australian newspaper, ABC Kimberly, SBS Mandarin TV and radio broadcasters also reported the event.
Project Launch Lecture
March 22, 2022
Chinese Museum
PART 1
PART 2
On Saturday 9th of July 2022, the progress of Our Story was presented through a panel
discussion mediated by Mark Wang, CEO of the Chinese Museum. Present for the panel discussion were Zhou Xiaoping, Jenna Lee and her father Chris Lee, both of Aboriginal Chinese descent, and Professor Fred Cahir of Federation University.
During Saturday’s event, Xiaoping spoke extensively about the two years of research he and his team have so far undertaken, during which they have ranged across Australia interviewing descendants of Aboriginal Chinese people. Professor Fred Cahir, a specialist in early Aboriginal Chinese history and a researcher on Our Story, reinforced Xiaoping’s comments from the perspective of his historical field of study. Xiaoping signalled his intention, ultimately, to follow Aboriginal Chinese familial lineages into China – as well as to present part of his findings in the form of a contemporary art exhibition that will directly engage modern Australians and peoples of Chinese heritage.
Chris Lee spoke from a deep wealth of experiences about the interaction between Aboriginal and Chinese peoples in his own life. In respect of Saturday’s inclusion in events associated with NAIDOC week, it was especially important to hear present Aboriginal Chinese voices remembering and speaking to personal knowledges. Jenna Lee followed her father to speak about her artistic practice.
In the Q&A section, audience members were especially interested to better understand the present cultural experiences of Jenna and her father and to ask about ways that Chinese Australians can contribute to efforts aimed at deeper intercultural understandings and to reconciliation between the wider Australian community and First Nations peoples.