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through miscegenation; the money-grubbing Chinaman—greedy and cunning, though also a
cowardly furtive thief; the vindictive Chinaman—who is viciously revengeful because, as a
natural heathen, he cannot learn Christian tolerance and forgiveness; and the comic
Chinaman—the most visible of stereotypes, with the wagging pigtail, funny walk and pidgin
English found in the nursery rhymes of the 19 th century as well as adult literature. (Ouyang
Yu, 1995, Bulletin, 139-41) All of these types come together to portray ‘the heathen Chinese
who commit all sorts of crime from gambling, opium-smoking and prostitution to stealing and
spreading disease like leprosy and small pox’ (Ouyang Yu, 1993, 21). They are restricted
usually to a few occupations: as the ubiquitous market gardeners they excel in presenting the
comic Chinaman, illustrated in the following example from Henry Handel Richardson; as
cooks they are sometimes credited for their cuisine, but more often stereotyped as dirty, and
predisposed to eating, and serving to unwitting white diners, dogs and rats (Ouyang Yu, 1993,
22), and, when angered, to urinating in the soup (Ouyang Yu, 1993, 23). Otherwise the
Chinese were pictured as working in the other ‘lower orders’, as laundrymen, diggers,
fishermen, street hawkers, and rubbish collectors, where they maintain the stereotypes of their
race.
Henry Handel Richardson recreated in The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney the kind of
portrait which was so typical in earlier literature, employing many of the old strategies even
though her presentation of the Asian is relatively sympathetic. Mahoney is obliged to bring his
dead drunken neighbour back home one night, and the worst criticism he can lay on the man is
that ‘even a Chinaman rose to impudence about Johnny’s nerves, his foul breath, his cracked
lips’ (FRM, 100). Mahoney’s wife Polly frets later about the unreliable white vegetable man,
who Mahoney insists she buy from, while the Chinese garden farmer is more punctual with his
cheaper and beautiful goods.
Richardson draws on the old tradition, inherited from the English, of Australian writers
who ‘perpetuated condescending antipathy to Chinese in the way they transliterated names and
represented Chinese spoken language’ (Broinowski, 1992, 30). The Chinese gardener’s name
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