Born during World War Two, Margaret Bradstock is a respected veteran of Australian poetry, widely published. Among nine collections of verse, her most recent book Alchemy of the Sun was released by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. In an earlier phase, Margaret was a co-editor of Five Bells, the journal of the old NSW Poets Union. She is an ongoing member of Round Table Poets, a collective that has continuously met in Sydney – once per month – since 1976. Exploring social issues and environmental concerns, Margaret’s poetry has been regarded highly for decades: Catchment thanks her for giving us permission to reproduce two of her poems here online.
Seeing contrasts in Chinese experience on Australian soil, through Margaret Bradstock
by Rodney Williams
Winning the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry for 1999-2000, Margaret Bradstock’s revered collection The Pomelo Tree was published in 2001, after a range of pieces helping to comprise this break-out volume had been recognised in a variety of poetry competitions across the 1990s.
As one of Australia’s most admired poets, Judith Beveridge has observed, ‘I know of no other poet who has written so movingly and convincingly about the Chinese experience in Australia.’
The second section in The Pomelo Tree is called The New Gold Mountain, including pieces dated and denoted as arising from unconscionable experiences forced upon Chinese migrants in Nineteenth Century Anglo Australia.
Offering stark contrasts, the pair of poems to be discussed here – ‘Chinaman’s Luck’ and ‘Market Gardens’ – each come from this cornerstone phase of Bradstock’s book (with the latter piece preceding the titular triptych ‘The Pomelo Tree’, which then concludes that key chapter).
The first work we will consider is followed instead (across a double-page) by a parallel poem addressing one of the most infamous incidents in the early phases of British colonisation of Australia: the massacre of Chinese gold miners at Lambing Flat (near Young, NSW) in 1861.
Students of Australian poetry may well revere a cautionary piece by Mary Gilmore – as haunting as it is renowned – called ‘Fourteen Men’, showing Chinese having been hanged there: it holds up a mirror to our national conscience, spurring us to look back in dismay at colonial prejudice.
Likewise in The Pomelo Tree, Margaret Bradstock’s embittered poem ‘Chinaman’s Luck’ considers an associated atrocity, perhaps less well known, which occurred a few years earlier, down in the Porepunkah area of northern Victoria, adjacent to the high-country village of Bright:
Chinaman’s Luck
Buckland River, 4th July 1857
Chinese driven from the diggings
at Ararat,
& again at the Buckland
2,400 routed
from their own Chinatown,
put to flight across a single log
bridging the river.
A sameness about these accounts
makes them hard to record.
Broken picks & shovels,
battered pots & roofless tents
tell the story,
charred frame of the Joss-house,
emblematic flag hanging
torn & defaced
like a flayed dragon.
Their white wives beaten by the mob,
disparaged & shamed,
ringleaders acquitted.
Border tax, immigration tax,
resident tax, poll tax
put paid to the rest.
Even Henry Parkes noted
that what inspired rage
wasn’t horror at immoral deeds
but envy of their good luck.
Margaret Bradstock, The Pomelo Tree, Ginninderra Press, Charnwood, ACT, 2001, p. 28
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Writing more than a quarter of a century ago, approaching the turn of the millennium, Margaret Bradstock presupposed that her initial readership for ‘Chinaman’s Luck’ would have been conversant with gold-field race-hate riots having occurred in mid-Nineteenth Century Australia.
Seeking a range of effects, her work is still pitched at raising the ire of readers in deploring how a colonial judicial system could have ‘ringleaders acquitted’, despite gross breaches of the law.
So confronting is the reality of what has emerged through research that the poet feels obliged to make a move which is relatively rare in such an authorial context.
Bradstock confesses she has effectively had to step back for a moment from what she has been so deeply immersed in conveying, inserting her presence – her own reactions – before her audience in the process:
A sameness about these accounts
makes them hard to record.
It is a scenario which has indeed had such an effect upon me as a reader too, in learning about how two thousand four hundred people had to risk their safety to escape attack, using a single log to cross a river.
For I had stayed at that small town Porepunkah, on land bounded directly by the Ovens River, close to its junction with the Buckland, without knowing what wrongs against fellow humanity had been committed nearby: becoming aware of this later, through ‘Chinaman’s luck’, left me feeling devastated.
Deft in connoting points of cultural difference seen as threatening at that time, Bradstock uses hard, sharp adjectives to show the savagery involved in how European miners destroyed the possessions of Chinese people – broken, battered, roofless, charred, torn, defaced, flayed…
Such destructiveness had been spurred by more than jealousy about success in finding gold.
Not only were useful tools shown as damaged, along with tents (only ever vulnerable at best).
Symbols of cultural difference had also been deliberately wrecked, in the burning of a Joss-house and in the shredding of an ‘emblematic flag’, akin to a dragon which has been ‘flayed’.
This mythical creature is symbolically renowned for acting as a source of fire, with that being the means by which a place of worship was destroyed in reality; as a reviled motif of a dignified culture; dishonoured in being trashed; its points of difference posing threats in seeming alien.
Arguably it is even more uncomfortable for current readers to appreciate how this poem looks at a further issue which is deeply disturbing (doubtless identified in research): some acts of cruelty from Anglo-Celtic miners were plainly sparked by grievances linked to gender as well as race –
Their white wives beaten by the mob,
disparaged & shamed
Nothing could have been more galling – one imagines – in the eyes of insecure, bigoted males of European origin than seeing Chinese men as stealing both “their” women and “their” gold…
In her conclusion to ‘Chinaman’s Luck’, Margaret Bradstock makes another surprising move, acknowledging a bitter irony.
As a long-serving Premier of New South Wales, Henry Parkes is widely recognised as playing a pivotal role in having Australia’s disparate states become federated into a Commonwealth.
Historians readily go on to note how – in the process – Federation helped to consolidate an Anglo power base (transplanted from Westminster) which furthered the disenfranchisement of Traditional Owners of Country here: shutting them out of constitutional conventions; denying them the right to vote; not recognising them as citizens.
Legislation passed in early Australian parliaments purposefully enshrined another racist marginalisation, through strategic exclusion of the Chinese as a non-European migrant group.
State governments did target them with a swag of imposts, as Bradstock doggedly lists: ‘Border tax, immigration tax, / resident tax, poll tax.’ Repetition in word-choice is as impactful as hoped.
Many readers here will already be aware that a hefty entry tax of ten pounds was introduced in Victoria in 1855, to be levied at the Port of Melbourne.
So captains of ships required “Oriental” passengers to disembark at Robe in South Australia.
Readers of this journal may know that this is a subject addressed in a tanka string called ‘In Retrospect’, written by Marilyn Humbert, as published in an earlier edition of Catchment – https://www.bawbawartsalliance.org.au/bcms/marilyn-humbert-3/
Indeed, as Humbert’s set of tanka concludes, prospective Chinese miners had to walk hundreds of kilometres from Robe, hauling their possessions all the way to the Victorian gold fields.
Despite having been at the forefront of our major colonial administration – with racist bias deep-seated at governmental levels – Henry Parkes is given grudging credit by Margaret Bradstock, for being principled enough to question the hypocrisy inherent in justifying gross mistreatment of the Chinese in goldfield riots, on the basis that they were alleged to be morally questionable.
Such an ethical concern sprang in truth from fear spurred by cultural difference, with the right to take the moral high-ground surely forfeited by miners acting in ways bereft of human decency.
Historical sources also confirm that leaders of goldfield atrocities incited fellow Europeans by fanning flames of envy and distrust, disparaging the “good luck” Chinese had in fossicking through mullock heaps miners had toiled to create, having put gold-bearing soil through cradles, first off.
Careful follow-up work was called theft, once the Chinese found extra gold, till then overlooked.
The third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson is renowned for having said, “The harder I work, the more luck I have”; while a South African golfing champion – named Gary Player, famous in the 1960s-1970s – is widely credited with a similar observation: “The more I practise, the luckier I get.”
Margaret Bradstock herself makes a pointed link between levels of industry and good fortune, from her title of ‘Chinaman’s Luck’ through to her final phrasing – ‘Even Henry Parkes’ was fair-minded enough to rule out ‘immoral deeds’ as a spur which could rightfully have ‘inspired rage’ in European miners: again, such irony, as the Chinese people’s “good luck” turned so bad.
Like Mary Gilmore’s, Margaret Bradstock’s work here deserves both a current readership and genuine reflection, considered through lenses that are not only historic but also contemporary.
Grievances sparking race-based tensions set a precedent seen again at Redfern in 2004; at Cronulla in 2005; and then once more at Bondi, late in 2025.
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In a poem not tied to place and date – without bitter undercurrents, and feeling more modern – Margaret Bradstock gives us a warm, detailed, vivid depiction of an area of endeavour in which Chinese people making a home here have excelled:
Market Gardens
Gardens above gardens,
a sloping ramp of earth,
a row of winter melons
&, here and there, candles
floating on blocks of wood
like tea-lights,
or fireflies at dusk
darting their flame,
to seduce & drown
the white cabbage moths.
Nothing is wasted.
Fermented in tanks & ponds,
night-soil fertilises dry-land crops
or feeds the fish.
Potatoes shelter lettuce, tomatoes,
cucumbers, all growing close.
Horse whims or human treadmills
Drive dragon bone pump & windlass,
lift the waterinto high flumes,
a network of channels.
Wiping the plants gently
or dusting with ash & sulphur
protects against aphids;
caterpillars are picked off by hand.
Weeding’s a rainy-day job,
a reservoir of industry,
the bamboo-leaf cloaks
bent in hooded rows.
Walls of weathered brick,
stone steps, a mango tree,
gardens beneath gardens
the tessellated
surfaces of earth.
Margaret Bradstock, The Pomelo Tree, Ginninderra Press, Charnwood, ACT, 2001, p. 39
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While its fourth line does offer the rare sight of an ampersand followed immediately by a comma (oh for a pair of dashes), ‘Market Gardens’ is otherwise put together adroitly as it builds up an artful account of approaches used in running a large-scale food-producing garden for profit.
From the start, we are given a charming sense of the terraced lay-out of the land, modified in order to furnish greatest levels of yield to market gardeners devoted to their all-consuming toil.
With ‘Gardens above gardens’ offered as a beginning, one of the simple niceties at work here is the way the poetry turns full circle, structurally speaking, with a purposeful reversal of this opening found near its close, in moving on to ‘gardens beneath gardens’. (These italics are mine.)
The ‘surface of earth’ is so carefully managed as to have become geometrical – as tile-like as a mosaic – in being ‘tesselated’, having begun as ‘a sloping ramp of earth’. Matching these visual shows of harmony, the poetry’s language has a musicality also, built on cadence and sibilance.
Strengthening this earthy, visual dimension to Bradstock’s portrait is her eye for beautiful, delicate details which might not be out of place in traditional poetry from an adjacent, interactive poetic culture, namely within haiku.
Having used a Western simile ‘like tea-lights’ (not embraced as a literary strategy in that revered Japanese verse-form), our poet still moves her work forward in a way that a master of haiku like Basho might have admired, disclosing that the enchanting ‘candles / floating on blocks of wood’ have a deadly practical purpose quite outside any atmospheric side-effect.
The real intent behind the floating candles is revealed starkly, ‘to seduce & drown / the white cabbage moths’: a creature universally despised amongst committed gardeners, meeting a sorry end here that is as elegant (poetically speaking) as it is final and effective, horticulturally.
Another insect (ever regarded as magical) has simply been imagined, with the thought thereof adding fleeting beauty to a moment still full of charm: ‘fireflies at dusk / darting their flame’.
After that extended opening passage, multi-part and moodful, Margaret Bradstock cleverly brings the momentum of the poetry to quite a thought-provoking halt, with a clear-cut contrast.
For her next two shorter sentences address a widespread practice capable of prompting discomfort or concern among audience members, both a quarter-century ago and again now:
Nothing is wasted.
Fermented in tanks & ponds,
night-soil fertilises dry-land crops
or feeds the fish.
Rooted in an historic context, these details might perplex younger readers in particular these days, if they are unused to an expression like ‘night-soil’ as a euphemism for human waste.
Long gone is the period when people had to keep chamber pots beneath the bed, for use in the middle of the night, since going to the toilet would have necessitated a trip outdoors in the dark, to a backyard stall with a removable can, changed over regularly by municipal authorities: electric light was not always a guarantee; much less a flushable lavatory within the house.
Bradstock’s inside knowledge of this whole multi-faceted gardening operation extends to giving uncomfortable recognition to the fact that such organic matter ‘Fermented in tanks & ponds’.
This poem’s title leaves no doubt that the vegetables being grown are headed to ‘market’ and therefore to a kitchen: the poet lets it sit as an open question as to whether the fish fed with ‘night-soil’ are kept solely for decorative reasons, or if they are also bound for a dining table.
Not engaging with distaste, Bradstock commends this practice on the basis of sustainability – where ‘Nothing is wasted,’ such a sense of frugality (albeit seen as promoting the risk of disease, in the eyes of some current commentators) receives a strong endorsement here.
With vigor in language, evocativeness in description and vividness in a sense of location, the immediacy of imagery used in ‘Market Gardens’ paints a rich portrait of a burgeoning world.
In a workplace where intensive companion-planting sees ‘Potatoes shelter lettuce, tomatoes, / cucumbers, all growing close’, there is still acknowledgement of drudgery for animals & people alike, with ‘Horse whims or human treadmills’ pumping water through ‘a network of channels’.
Intervention by humanity has points of delicacy in a context where ‘caterpillars are picked off by hand’, with gardeners ‘wiping the plants gently’ – whereas ‘dusting with ash & sulphur / protects against aphids’, it also plays upon the reader’s sense of smell, lending immediacy to the writing.
Beautifully snapped like the sharpest of photographs, set to be viewed admiringly in the mind’s eye of the reader, lies Bradstock’s depiction of a task dreaded by less committed cultivators, yet treated pragmatically in this garden, recognisably Chinese even in its means of giving workers shelter against rain:
Weeding’s a rainy-day job,
a reservoir of industry,
the bamboo-leaf cloaks
bent in hooded rows.
Finding ways to catch her readers by the eye or ear, nose or hand, Margaret Bradstock almost dares us not to savour strong appeals to the senses in this writing.
Whether visual or auditory, olfactory or tactile, the elements she carefully intertwines combine to evoke both a fecund environment and an integrated lifestyle.
In doing so, she heartily applauds the efforts and expertise of Chinese market gardeners, whose traditions in horticulture have been transplanted so fruitfully inside these Australian shores.
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Two exemplary poems of place by Margaret Bradstock each have deep-seated roots in the earth of this country; linked to different riches sought from it by migrant peoples; so distinct from one another; with the Chinese finding pain yet joy in pursuing disparate gains from working ground that is new to them.
‘Chinaman’s Luck’ and ‘Market Gardens’ provide startling contrasts in how that soil beneath a person’s feet can grow multi-levelled, thought-provoking outcomes within a human context – troubling, when the harvest is to be gold; affirming, when the crop is to be food; enriching, ether way, as poetry.
Rodney Williams
Editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place
Baw Baw Arts Alliance
Gunaikurnai Country
West Gippsland, Victoria