Two conclusions follow from what I have described: First, religion existed in the Chinese community in Castlemaine and it was an important part of the lives of many if not most of the Chinese who lived there. To make such a conclusion leads us to ponder why it was so completely written out of official documents—including documents based on information collected by Chinese people. Secondly, the events that led up to our minor case in Castlemaine County Court were part of a much larger encounter between Protestant missionaries and the followers of Chinese religions in China and also in the Chinese diaspora. Doubtless, little dramas like the one I have described were taking place across the Chinese world and in all likelihood the dynamic everywhere was much the same. On the one side were usually relatively poorly educated Chinese people whose religious observances were based profoundly on the primacy of efficacy—did worshipping this god produce results in the here and now?—and on the other were generally well educated Europeans who tried to convince them that the way they sought results was not only not efficacious but sinful—a notion entirely novel to Chinese religious traditions.

As we have seen, as far as we can tell from our sources, the Chinese were far from antagonistic to the missionaries—their religious world was plural. Religions based on efficacy are welcoming of efficacious novelties and the history of Chinese religions is one—to a large extent—of borrowings, absorption and acceptance. On the other hand, the religions of the book tend to be exclusivist and uncompromising so it comes as no surprise that the protestant missionaries on the goldfields were not tolerant of the religious practices of the Chinese.

What I think is perhaps more surprising is that this intolerance seems not to be more widespread. The Mount Alexander Mail, for instance, did not attack the Chinese for being pagans or heathens—but rather seems to have adopted the attitude that if they did not understand what was going on, they would refrain from criticism.

This is not to say that the Chinese in Castlemaine were not subject to bigoted criticism beyond the mission. They were subject to all the usual accusations of immorality, profligacy and besottedness that the Chinese across Australia experienced. Indeed, one of the most striking pieces of anti-Chinese bigotry that survives in published form in this period comes from Castlemaine: the infamous ‘Sketches of Chinese Character, Illustrative of their Moral and Physical Effect on the Rising Generation of Victoria’, by ‘Humanity’ published in Castlemaine in 1878. In this short piece, it is the Chinese debauching young European women that most inflames our author:

Could I but write – and by Gods help I’ll try – the scenes of that awful red, blood-red alley or lane off Forest-street, and publish it in England, it would never be believed that our Saxon and Norman girls could have sunk so low in crime as to consort with such a herd of Gorilla Devils, devilish and leprous in feature, and devilish they are in nature also. ^[17]

Taking a step back from the material discussed in this paper, the overriding impression of the encounter between the Chinese and Europeans on the goldfields is one of two communities largely living separate lives, in different languages, eating different food, in distinct places of residence, worshipping different gods in different ways. The missionary encounter was one of the very few sites where one community actively reached out to the other. While the missionaries I have discussed held opinions of Chinese religion (and by extension the non-Christian Chinese themselves) that are at best deeply prejudiced, nonetheless they are also one of the few groups that also reckon them worthy of attention and effort. They also, almost uniquely, preserve the voices of members of this community—‘you preach Christian doctrine very good but why you take away joss?’—even when those voices disagree with them.

To most Europeans, the Chinese were completely and irrevocably alien and I suspect that their hatred of the Chinese was based on those features of their lives the Europeans understood precisely because they were paralleled in their own lives: their mining practices, their use of prostitutes, their use of intoxicants, and the threat that they would take their land by sheer force of numbers. Religion was not such a focus of general bigotry towards the Chinese as it was simply beyond their understanding.