SMUGGLING CHINESE

Evening Star, Issue 19023, 19 August 1925, Page 12

SMUGGLING CHINESE

BiG SYNDICATE WORKING The somewhat btjated discovery that Chinese are being smuggled into Australia on a wholesale senemo has been made by the Federal Customs authorities, their suspicions being crystallised when a raid on a Chinese store at Earwin, Northern Territory, brought to light incriminating documents (writes the Sydney correspondent of the Auckland ‘Star’), i And it is now issued as an official belief that numbers of Chinese have entered Australia, on birth certificates the owners of which have been dead and buried for years. Amongst the papers seized in the raid were long documents written in Chinese. Local interpreters refused to translate them, but sufficient was deciphered to show that a syndicate with headquarters in Hongkong lias agencies in Singapore and all the southern Australian cities. Officers of the department slate that they have discovered that a _ genuine certificate, suitable for a Chinese between the ages of twenty and thirty, will fetch as high as £250. Customs authorities in Sydney agree that the system has been practised in this State, but they say that to detect the perpetrators of the scheme has boon their ambition for years. At least two individuals in Sydney, Collector Barkley, in charge of the Sydney branch of the Customs Department, states, are suspected of being interested in the syndicate which smuggles Chinese into Australia. The big obstacle the department stumbles against is their inability to prove that certificates are not genuine. ;

One method has been for a Chinese to conic down on one of the many vessels trading from the East, land in Sydney on parole, and have his place taken by another Chinese, about the same ago and description, to whom lias been paid a sum to leave Australia. And when what the Customs authorities consider is a new face, is discovered in a market garden, there are always legions of Chinese who will swear he has been working for them for years. An amusing instance of that kind was afforded only recently, at the Central Police Court, where a Chinese about sixteen years of age was charged with being a prohibited immigrant. A . market gardener entered the witness box, and swore that tho man in tho dock had been working for him for twenty years, or, in effect, he had started work two years before lie was horn. Naturally ho went back to China. Chinese are a secretive race, and they rarely let each other down. Significance is attached to tho fact that, if a Chinese is .charged as a prohibited immigrant, no matter how high tho bail, money is always forthcoming from merchants in tie city. This money, if he wins the case, it is suggested, is hold by the merchant as a payment for his trouble, and there scorns little doubt that there is some very strong secret society behind all the dealings to evade the Customs authorities. The same society deals, too, with the smuggling of opium, in which there are huge profits, and these are used in fighting cases which edmo before the courts. The discoveries at Darwin recall the publication last. March of reproduction. of posters which are pasted in tho Chinese quarters of the city. They were to the effect that £IOO would be paid to any Chinese who murdered any member of their countrymen who gave information to the Customs authorities. They were printed in Chinese, but despite careful police inquiries their orison or their sponsors were never located.