Laughing at or laughing with? – Ted Dyson’s humorous treatment of Australian Goldfields Chinese

Abstract

Humour directed at immigrants can be ambiguous in intention and tends to reduce tension and suspicion rather than to inflame racism. Joking and humour directed at foreigners has been widely collected and studied. As Christie Davies has argued, nationalism or bigotry are not the ruling characteristics; rather, the temper of the humour largely depends on context and delivery and cannot be gauged simply from the written text. “Sketches of life on the Australian goldfields” by Ted Dyson (1865-1931) include humorous stories about Chinese diggers that contrast with other writers’ anti-Chinese racist postings in the Australian periodical, ‘The Bulletin’. The well-referenced survey by Ouyang Yu of the treatment of Chinese in Australian literature focussed on ethnocentrism and anti-Chinese sentiment, but Dyson’s stories do not belong in this category of works. Dyson aimed to ameliorate antipathy and to arouse empathy with ‘the other’. His humorous descriptions of Chinese worked to establish some respect and kindred feeling with Chinese people and their culture, forming a kind of middle ground in race relations.