What is an "archive of grievance"? And did the Chinese miners get to keep their gold?

How was it really?

In the first episode of HWIR, Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson talks about how people remember, and how nations forget. We learn how Sophie's own experience as a young girl in Beijing inspired a lifelong fascination with history, and how her interest in both China and Australia led to the rediscovery of a forgotten injustice.

About Sophie Loy-Wilson - Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Australian history at the University of Sydney. Sophie’s research and publications all seek to read Australian history through non-Anglo lens, with a particular focus on Asian-Australian and Chinese-Australian visions of Australia’s past. This has led her to economic history, and she has researched widely in Chinese Australian business history and social history, especially in her work on Chinese shopkeepers and the Kwok family business empire; focusing on business history reveals a ‘shadow economy’ of Chinese Australian social life previously kept hidden from view. Together with Hannah Forsyth, she has called for a ‘New Materialist’ approach to Australian history in a co-written article in Australian Historical Studies (2017).

Recent books and articles include a study of Chinese Australian Daisy Kwok and her life in China before and after the 1949 Revolution in Julia Martinez and Kate Bagnall edited collection, Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia, and a Special Issue of Labour History co-edited with Hannah Forsyth on the New History of Capitalism in Australia entitled ‘Getting the Politics Right.’ Article Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Coolie Alibis: Seizing Gold from Chinese Miners in New South Wales’, International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (ed 2017): 28–45, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547916000338.