‘To his home at Jembaicumbene’: women’s cross-cultural encounters on a colonial goldfield

In January 1869 the Sydney Morning Herald and several other colonial newspapers reported the arrival of a Chinese woman on the Braidwood goldfields, reprinting an article that had earlier appeared in the Braidwood Dispatch . 1 The article told how a local Chinese storekeeper had ‘just returned from Melbourne with a Chinese lady whom his parents selected for him in his native land and sent out to him to become his wife’. They had been married then gone together ‘to his home at Jembaicumbene’, a bustling mining settlement 10 kilometres south of the town of Braidwood along the Major’s Creek road.