Chinese poll tax

The Chinese were invited into New Zealand, and really to work on the gold fields. And then what happened was that people started to get worried about it, and think ‘we’ve got too many of these people’ and so they put on this poll tax. And essentially, somewhere in here I will show you a poll tax, if I can find it… i think this might be it… yes that’s the poll tax. And you will see up on the top right hand corner here it says a hundred pounds. And basically what happened is, any Chinese person who came into New Zealand had to pay a hundred pounds to get in. Now a hundred pounds in those days when the average wage was about a pound a week, so a hundred pounds was like two years earnings. So in today’s terms it would be about 80 thousand dollars, that’s how much an Irish person had to pay, a Chinese person had to pay to get into New Zealand.

And Jock they were the only people who were ever asked to pay a tax to when they came to New Zealand – is that correct? None of the other migrant groups had…?

That’s absolutely correct…and they also suffered a good deal of ostracism. Not far from where we are sitting here today in the middle of Wellington, there was a little area called Haining Street, don’t know if you know where Haining Street is, just off…Tory Street, and that was an area of gambling dens. You know the Chinese were great gamblers, and one day in 1905 a guy called Lionel Terry decided that he was going to go and shoot an Irish, a Chinese person, really because he objected to having Chinese people in New Zealand. So he did, he went down to Haining Street and shot this Chinese man. So the Chinese had a tough time.

But some of the other groups had a pretty tough time. The Dalmatians for example who originally came out working on the gum fields. You know they were thought to be, quite incorrectly, very like Germans. So when the first World War came out, you know the ‘Dallies’ as they were called were often accused of being not patriotic. So they had a tough time too.