Project Leader
Zhou Xiaoping is a Melbourne-based artist, curator and researcher. In 2019 he was Honorary Research Fellow, Asia Institute University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the Director & Curator of Special Research Projects at the Museum of Chinese Australian History. Since 1988 he has been actively engaged with Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. He has managed and curated several successful projects include ” Trepang: China & the Story of Macassan – Aboriginal Trade ” project in 2009 as well as first Aboriginal art exhibition in China in 1996.
Advisory Group
Professor Peter Yu is a Yawuru man from Broome in the Kimberley region in North West Australia with over 40 years experience in Indigenous development and advocacy in the Kimberley and at the state, national and international level. He is the current and inaugural Vice-President First Nations at the Australian National University. He is a Director of Water Trust Australia, Trustee of Princes Trust Australia, the Deputy Chair of the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance Ltd (NAILSMA).
Kwong Lee Dow AO is an estimable member of the Australian community who has made invaluable contributions to Australian education in his time as a teacher and academic, where he has served as Dean of Education and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Melbourne (1978-2004). He is a recipient of the Sir James Darling Medal and is an Officer of the Order of Australia. He is currently chairman of the Australian Multicultural Foundation.
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book. Her books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. She holds the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker).
Project Coordinator
Mark Wang has been involved in the development of the Museum of Chinese Australian History for over 30 years and is currently its CEO. As a seventh-generation Chinese Australian, Mark has always had an interest in the history, heritage and interaction between the people that make up contemporary Australian society.
Research Team
David Walker AM is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor at Deakin University. From 2013 to 2016 he served as the inaugural BHP Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University. He has written extensively on Australia Asia relations. His most recent book, with co-author Li Yao is Happy Together: bridging the Australia China divide (MUP, June 2022).
Peter and Sheila Forrest have been researching and writing about Australia’s history, including Aboriginal and Chinese histories in the Northern Territory, more than 40 years. They are pre-eminent chroniclers of the people and places of the north and the inland. Since 1978 they have, individually or together, written and published more than 30 major books. Their work has frequently involved them in telling the story of the very distinctive contribution of Chinese people to Australia.
Christine Choo BA, M.Soc.Wk., M Phil (Australian Studies), PhD is a historian with a special interest in Western Australian history, particularly the contributions of Indigenous people, women, migrants, missions, minority groups and Aboriginal-Asian connections in Western Australia, all topics on which she has published.
Dr Sandi Robb is a freelance historian specialising in Queensland social and geographical history with a special interest in the migration and marriage patterns of men associated with the Chinese Diaspora of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is based in Cairns and has lived in Far North Queensland for over thirty-five years during which, she had travelled extensively throughout Queensland researching local and family history.
Tom Gara is a South Australian historian who has specialised in Aboriginal history for four decades. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked with Kaurna people from the Adelaide area and Kokatha and Wirangu people from the Gawler Ranges and the west coast on a range of historical and heritage research projects. Since that time he has worked mainly on native title claims, including 11 years with the SA Crown Solicitor’s Office undertaking historical research in relation to native title claims throughout the state. He has published a number of papers on South Australian Aboriginal history and, with Peggy Brock, edited the book Colonialism and its aftermath: a history of Aboriginal South Australia (2017).