People of Chinese Heritage in Australian National Memory

摘要

National biography is a kind of national memory. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is an Australian national memory and has been the great repository of the Australian identity. In order to measure the position of people of Chinese heritage in the Australian national memory, this paper surveys the people of Chinese heritage in the ADB and figures out its proportion. Compared with the proportion of Chinese people in Australia historically and presently, this ethnic group, as a very important part of Australians, is both omitted and under-represented in the ADB, totally or individually. As a national memory, this kind of negligence will affect construction of Australian identity and the image of a "real" Australia.