In a book titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World Gavin Menzies claims that in the 1420's several fleets of Chinese ships sailed around the world, making contact with many countries before Europeans explored them, including Australia.
James Cook was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, he reached the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered Australia's eastern coastline.
"1421", a best-selling book by Gavin Menzies, a former British naval officer, suggests that the great 15th-century treasure fleets of the Ming dynasty, captained by the famed Muslim eunuch Zheng He, landed in Australia and even as far afield as the Americas.
By the early 1850s, news of a gold rush in Australia had reached southern China, sparking an influx in Chinese migration to Australia. It is thought that approximately 7000 Chinese people came to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.
Bilateral relations
After establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972, Australia established an embassy in Beijing in 1973. The Australia-China bilateral relationship is based on strong economic and trade complementarities and longstanding community and cultural links.
The Chinese name for Australia has four characters (澳大利亚) and is written in Pinyin and pronounced using Mandarin (or “Putonghua”) as Aodaliya.
Makasar traded with Aboriginal people for trepang (sea cucumber), which they boiled down, dried on their boats and traded with China where it is still used for food and medicine. The Makasar did not settle in Arnhem Land but they did have an influence on the Yolŋu people's society and ritual.
According to 2021 national census data there are 1.4 million people in Australia who identify as having Chinese ancestry, of whom about 400,000 were born in Australia and one million born overseas.
The first settlers, the 1820s.
The first wave of actual migration started in 1840, however, about 18 early Chinese settlers had immigrated to Australia two decades before that. The earliest known Chinese immigrant was Mak Sai Ying (John Shying) from Guangzhou, Canton, who arrived in Sydney in 1818.
On 23 December 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act came into law. It had been among the first pieces of legislation introduced to the newly formed federal parliament. The legislation was specifically designed to limit non-British migration to Australia.
The theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia claims that early Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight Australia between 1521 and 1524, well before the arrival of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 on board the Duyfken who is generally considered to be the first European discoverer.
1513: Jorge Álvares is the first European to land in China at Tamão in the Zhujiang (Pearl River) estuary. 1516–1517: Rafael Perestrello, a cousin of Christopher Columbus, leads a small Portuguese trade mission to Canton (Guangzhou), then under the Ming Dynasty.
China was first united as a single state under Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Locally sourced meat, seafood and vegetables were complemented by imported ingredients such as Cantonese sausage, tofu, lychee nuts, black fungus and bamboo shoots. By the late 1800s, about a third of commercial cooks in Australia were Chinese.
The majority of Chinese immigrants to Australia during the gold rush were indentured or contract labourers. However, many made the voyage under the credit-ticket system managed by brokers and emigration agents.
The earliest Chinese contact with Australia appears to have come from fishermen searching the north-western coastline of Australia for sandalwood, bêche-de-mer (trepang) and sea cucumbers. Chinese sources refer to a 1477 map that shows the outline of the Australian continent.
Australia is China's sixth largest trading partner; it is China's fifth biggest supplier of imports and its tenth biggest customer for exports. Twenty-five per cent of Australia's manufactured imports come from China; 13% of its exports are thermal coal to China. A two-way investment relationship is also developing.
Any person born in China whose parents are both Chinese nationals and one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality. Any person born abroad whose parents are both Chinese nationals and one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality.
They had traditional skills at managing water and land. They dug wells and irrigation ditches, introduced vegetables, fruits and crops, and turned desert areas into gardens of plenty. During the days of the goldrush period, some mining towns like Ballarat used Chinese as the second language of commerce.
In 2020, Beijing suspended timber exports from some Australian states by claiming logs were infected with pests. As a result of those suspensions, no exports of Australian timber logs have taken place to China in more than two years, affecting about $600 million in trade.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who suggested the name we use today.