Lambing Flat Riots (1860 - 1861)
Sun Jun 30, 1861
Image: An of-the-era white interpretation of what happened at the Burrangong goldfields, "Might versus Right", by Samuel Thomas Gill, c.1862-1863. Photograph: Samuel Thomas Gill/State Library of NSW [theguardian.com]
On this day in 1861, the worst violence of the Australian Lambing Flat Riots occurred when a mob of 3,000 white people attacked 2,000 Chinese miners and drove them off the Lambing Flat, destroying and looting their encampments.
The race riot came out of more than a decade of ethnic tensions between Chinese and European-born miners in Australia, tensions that became systematic violence the previous few years.
The violence was in part triggered in part by the Australian government rejecting a proposed restriction on Chinese immigration, as well as a false rumor that a new group of 1,500 Chinese people were en route to the area.
Despite the government's initial reject of an anti-Chinese immigration bill, the Lambing Flat Riots led the New South Wales government to pass the Chinese Immigration Act in November 1861, severely limiting the flow of Chinese people into the colony.
- Date: 1861-06-30
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.britannica.com.
- Tags: #Riots.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org
Interesting questions, and I don't have any answers, only some opinions.
Marxism defines classes, within a historical context, and in relation to the ownership of the means of production; being a paid and/or subordinate relationship it's important, but it's not the key concept of the Marxist definition. For example, digital platform workers (Glovo, Uber...) are members of the working class, regardless of whether they use their own means (car, bicycle...) and regardless of whether they are paid by the platform or the end user. Since they do not own the digital platform.
I do not know the historical context of colonization and mining in Australia in the 19th century. From the Wikipedia article, it seems that there were people who acted individually, people in groups (apparently communally) and wage earners[^1]. One of the Wikipedia references seems to relate it to the working class: “Miners' Rights: explaining the 'Lambing Flat' riots of 1860–61” in Curthoys, A & Markus, A (eds) Who are our Enemies?: racism and the working class in Australia, Sydney, 1978.
There are articles that are published that are not directly related to the working class, especially linked to anti-colonialism, feminism, LGTBIQA+… I think it's good that they appear here.
[^1]: > Europeans tended to work alone or in small groups, concentrating on rich patches of ground, and frequently abandoning a reasonably rich claim to take up another one rumoured to be richer. Very few miners became wealthy; the reality of the diggings was that relatively few miners found even enough gold to earn them a living. The Chinese generally worked in large organised groups, covering the entire ground's surface, so that if there was any gold there, the Chinese miners usually found it. They lived communally and frugally, and could subsist on a much lower return than Europeans.
I disagree with your interpretation of Marx. Gold rush era Australia is not an example of a stage where workers owned the means of production, Gold is a raw material not a value-added product. Under Marx it's "value-adding", labour, that gets exploited by the Capitalist class. That was his main usage of working class.
"Working class" has a culturally colloquial meaning of "anyone who works". Over the years the colloquial meaning has expanded to include areas of cities which are poor or culturally poor. This would include all sorts of people Marx (and many other class systems) wouldn't define as working class.
ahh so this community isn't strictly about the working class calendar, got ya.
None of this matters as I've already unsubscribed. Thanks for your work modding, and good luck with your mix of calendar dates of what you've decided qualifies as important dates about, "working people" doing things including occasionally historical massacres.