Historical Chinese Lane Causing Offence in South Oz

Fleeing famine and poverty in their homeland, tens of thousands of Chinese migrants travelled to Australia in the 1850s, bound for the Victorian goldfields. The journey was arduous, and many of the migrants suffered ill-health, while others died along the way. Interestingly, they used to pass through the small town of Penola, and consequently, the locals named one of their streets Chinamans Lane. And now 150-odd years later, the lane is in the news again. Why? I’m sure you can guess. That’s right! Because the street name is racist! And it probably doesn’t help that it excludes Chinese women.

“Penola resident calls Chinamans Lane offensive and council votes”. Apparently, a new resident of Chinamans Lane asked for the name of the road to be changed, writing to the council, “We live on Chinamans Lane, I’m hopeful the council will consider updating this offensive street name.” A couple of issues here. Firstly, a single person wishing to change the name of their street means they would be forcing everyone else to suffer the practical consequences of such a change, such as updating their address and banking details, maps and directories, legal documentation that references the old name, and so on.

Secondly, is Chinaman even used anymore, derogatory or otherwise? I would argue it’s not used at all in any sense of the word, apart from old historic signage as we’re seeing in this case. Contrast the N-word, for example. Obviously, it’s considered very offensive, but it’s still used, especially in modern rap music and so on. “Should white Australian fans rap along to the n-word at a Kendrick Lamar concert?” Well should black Australians be allowed to rap along with the n-word? If we start saying only people of certain skin colours are allowed to say certain words, then I’m sorry, we’re a long way away from solving racism.

Obviously, we still use words like Englishman, Irishman, Frenchman, and so on. And they’re completely fine. German… No, wait, scratch that. But it seems like the word Chinaman because of its historical connotations, is considered offensive. Although they mark it as “dated”, actually, I would classify the word Chinaman as obsolete. The last time I heard it was on Seinfeld in an episode from 1997 where Elaine and Morty are talking about buying silk. Elaine says, “Well, we could fly some fabric in from our silk factories, for about a thousand dollars a bolt.” Then a shocked Morty says, “A thousand?! I know a couple of Chinamen over there on Forty-third Street, who’ll do it for half that.” Then Elaine corrects him and says, “It’s, ah, Asian-Americans.” So even back then, using the word Chinamen was considered offensive and dated. I’ve not heard this word again since, except interestingly, in the cricket, where it refers to a type of left-arm unorthodox spin bowling, although at around the time of BLM, that term has fallen out of favour, as has the word batsman surprisingly. How dare we call a male batsman a man!

Actually, according to Dictionary.com, although they label the term “offensive”, they also note that “historically, Chinaman was a neutral compound word, similar to Irishman or Englishman”. So its original intent wasn’t to be a racist word. It’s just that it’s become offensive over time.

Personally, I would argue that the word Asian can be used in pejorative way. Does that mean we should cancel the term Asian because some people use it offensively? I’d argue that almost any word can be used to cause offence.

Unfortunately, certain members of our society hold the mistaken belief that if we can just erase all these racist words, then we’ll erase racism. Obviously, that’s a very naive belief. Racism is an attitude. It doesn’t exist because of words. Erasing historically racist terms will not erase racism.

What about Chinatown? Is that not offensive? A single part of the city designated to Chinese people? Actually, I know Chinese people, my wife is Chinese, and they love Chinatown. And they find all this news about Australians becoming offended by street names very amusing. My wife simply said, “Haven’t Australians got anything better to do?” No, apparently we don’t.

Obviously, there’s dozens of place names in Australia that use the term Chinaman, so it would be an absolute logistical nightmare updating them all.

Thankfully, common sense has prevailed, with the South Australian council voting to retain the ‘offensive’ name of Chinamans Lane. “Councillors voted 11–0 to keep the street name at a council meeting”. Mayor Des Noll said, “It was retained unanimously and it’s just part of that Penola history and we need to retain that history within our community.”

Yep, I agree with the mayor. Nobody’s going around using the name in a bad way. We should be learning from the past, not erasing it.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn