Chinese Australians
As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.6% of those nominating their ancestry at the 2016 census and numbered 1,213,903. At the 2016 census, 509,555 people declared that they were born in Mainland China, 86,886 declared that they were born in Hong Kong, while 46,882 declared that they were born in Taiwan. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
History of Chinese Australians
The Royal Commission after the Eureka stockade also looked into the Chinese situation as another one of the miner's grievances. In 1855 the Victorian parliament passed the Immigration Restriction Act in an effort to restrict Chinese immigration. This forced Chinese arrivals in Victorian ports to pay a £10 head tax. It also mandated that there could only be a certain number of Chinese travellers per tonnage of shipping. This put a dent in the ship masters coffers. Cost of passage was already high. This Act did appear to limit the numbers of Chinese arriving in Victorian ports. Official Victorian records show over 10,000 Chinese arriving in Victoria between 1853 and 1855 but only a few hundred in the next two years. However, numbers of Chinese on the Victorian goldfields continued to swell through overland routes. To avoid this Act, many ships travelled to South Australia. Between 1855 and 1857 thousands of Chinese landed in the Port of Adelaide and the port town of Robe, South Australia. In fact thanks to these migrants the town of Robe's population doubled overnight and it developed into the main port of call for Chinese arriving in Australia. It was then a long overland route to the Victorian goldfields.