Bathurst’s Chinese Market Gardeners

The next Monthly Muster will feature local historian, Dr Juanita Kwok, talking about Bathurst’s Chinese Market Gardeners.

Despite the popular notion that Chinese people came for gold and then left, there were people of Chinese heritage in Bathurst before the gold-rushes and they remained long after the gold-rushes ended. In this presentation, Dr Juanita Kwok will discuss the findings of her 2019 PhD thesis, “The Chinese in Bathurst: Recovering Forgotten Histories.”

Focusing in this talk on market gardens, Juanita will discuss how in the era before irrigation, refrigeration and rail, Chinese people grew and delivered vegetables to the residents of Bathurst and district. The extension of the rail line to Bathurst in 1876 gave Bathurst access to the Sydney market enabling the growth of a commercial vegetable-growing industry in Bathurst.

Juanita will examine the interconnectedness of the Chinese market gardeners with the Bathurst community through economic relationships, such as land leasing and share farming, and discuss the physical, social and political challenges to their success. Since publishing her thesis, descendants have shared with Juanita their family stories and with their permission, Juanita will be sharing some of these stories with the audience of this talk.

Dr Juanita Kwok is an independent, Bathurst-based historian who specialises in writing inclusive histories of regional Australia. Juanita earned a PhD at Charles Sturt University with her doctoral thesis “The Chinese in Bathurst: Recovering Forgotten Histories.” In 2022, Juanita received the History Council NSW Max Kelly Award for her article, “The Lambing Flat riots and the Chinese Quest for Compensation”. Juanita is President of Our Chinese Past Inc. and Vice-President of Dragon Tails Inc