Lecture 1 - From Family Story to Australia’s Story: Tim Watts in Conversation with Stephen FitzGerald

From the success of the Chinese Australian History Series 1 in 2020, the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture is very pleased to launch Series 2, with the first lecture entitled From Family Story to Australia’s Story, featuring Tim Watts MP in conversation with Professor Stephen FitzGerald.

Tim Watts’s ancestor was a member of the local Anti-Chinese Committee in the 1850s and involved in lobbying the parliament to impose a poll tax that prevented Chinese arrivals from disembarking in Victorian ports, and that started the Walk from Robe. More than one and a half centuries later, Tim took his four-year-old Hong-Kong-Chinese-Australian son to go through the Walk from Robe as an historical excursion. “This is the Australia of my ancestors, but it’s not the Australia of my family today,” says Tim in his recently published book The Golden Country. In this book, Tim explores the development of Australian identity, including an alternative concept raised by Stephen FitzGerald of Australia becoming a unique “honey-coloured society” to the White Australia.

Tim Watts in Conversation with Stephen FitzGerald will discuss issues of discrimination, inequality, bamboo ceiling and skewed egalitarianism towards Asian-Australians in the context of “investing in a new Australian identity that brings people together in The Golden Country”.

From Family Story to Australia’s Story: Tim Watts MP in Conversation with Stephen FitzGerald AO

Seminar Series

• From Family Story to Australia's Story: Tim Watts MP in Conversation with Stephen FitzGerald AO [Watch Online (opens in a new window)]