ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on the lives of four individual migrants each of whom departed Zhongshan County, in Guangdong Province, for Australia in the century after 1840. In examining the trajectories of their lives, attention is on the material imprint they left in the places they lived and worked in Australia and on the places they continued to be associated with in China. In reviewing these trajectories, it becomes clear that for these people the act of migration was not conceived as a one-way journey but rather as an extension of their existing lives across transnational space. First-generation Chinese migrants tended to make multiple return visits back to China, some ultimately returned there permanently, and all tended to maintain close relations with relatives in their home villages. It becomes clear that key sites that populated the lifelines of these migrants – whether located in Australia or China – cannot be considered in isolation from each other. The connectivity between them is the basis for thinking of these sites as collectively forming a ‘heritage corridor’ comprising an array of transnationally distributed places.
