A VISIT TO THE CHINESE QUARTERS IN SYDNEY.

Evening Post, Volume XVI, Issue 284, 30 November 1878, Page 1 (Supplement)

A VISIT TO THE CHINESE QUARTERS IN SYDNEY.

4 SHOCKING DISCLOSURES. At tho Anti-Chinese meeting held in Sydney last week, Mr. Cameron, member of the Legislative Assembly, doscribed what he saw on the occasion of a vi*it of inspection he made among the Chinese about midnight ono Saturday night. This is the story :— " The first houso they wont into was not a houso of what you would call a low Chinaman, it wa« the house of a Chinese merchant, ono of tho class who got a Syduey merchant to write an apologetic letter for thorn in the Herald some time ago — (hear, hoar)— one of the class who could shake hands with a director of the misorablo, greedy, grasping company who wero trying to supplant your labour— (loud cheers)— ono of those who could mix with the beads of a company, a member of which tho working men had rejected and told to go at tho last West Sydney election. (Cheers ) They knew him as well a<3 ho could tell thorn. 11 ever thoy did a good deed in their life, it was sending that man to the right-about. (Cheers). But in this house he saw twenty-two men and one woman. He saw three children of a European Wuman who they said was dead, and who was lying on a miserable pallet constructed out of two or three chairs. He went to another house, and he found six Chinamen sitting in a room upstairs. Two of them were stupefied through smoking opium, and lying in the midst of the six was a woman, with a baby by her side. The fumes of the place were such as would make any ordinary man sick. The gentleman who was with him (and lot it be borne in mind that some of tho heads of tho Legislative Assembly doubted ovidenco of this kind when thoy heard it from Mr. Inspector Seymour) asked the girl, "Why do you come here ? Why do you not tear yourself away from such an existence as this ?" " Oh," she said, " what am I to do ? If I went to service they would follow me, and in their broken English say I was a Chinaman's woman, and I should be turned out at once." That woman's eyes were bloarod red with smoking opium. He met another next door. Anyboiy might know where the place was— a place on tba rocks called Kendall-streot. Ho met a woman thoro with her hair cropped short, every hair being no longer than throe-eighths of an inch. She was asked why she was in the condition in which ho saw her. "Oh," she said, "I like my opium like othor people;" and yet men who had had the suffrages of the working men, and appeared before them as representative men with all their tinsel and show, wrapped their black coats round them, and said, " It is a libel on our British sister." (Cheers and laughter.) It existed to-day in the City of Sydney to an extent that ought to make evory man rise and utter a loud and vigorous protest against it. We were cultivating a low, filthy, degraded class of people in our midst; and if we asked those who wanted them why they should be here, what • was thoir answer? They were fine market gardeners ! (Laughter.)