What did Chinese people eat on the goldfields?

What did Chinese people eat on the goldfields?

The Chinese ate rice and they learnt how to cook damper and a few Chinese knew what nuts and berries were safe to eat. Chinese sometimes also grew fresh vegetables.

What food did they eat in the gold fields?

The staple food of the early goldfields was mutton stew and damper. Mutton is the meat of older sheep, somewhat tougher than the meat that we enjoy today. Whether single or with a family, the amount of meat served in relation to the gravy and damper would depend on the digger’s success.

What food did the Chinese miners eat?

The Food of a Miner. Miners that earned a “fair” amount would eat bread (which they called damper), mutton (which was sheep’s meat), tea, and homemade churned butter.

What was one of the few fresh foods available on the Goldfield?

Initially, food on the goldfields was heavily based on meat and flour, although these were later supplemented with some canned goods and pickles. Shopkeepers operated out of tents or hawked their wares around the diggings, and many have commented that these merchants often made more money than the miners.

How were the Chinese treated during the gold rush?

Chinese gold miners were discriminated against and often shunned by Europeans. After a punitive tax was laid on ships to Victoria carrying Chinese passengers, ship captains dropped their passengers off in far away ports, leaving Chinese voyagers to walk the long way hundreds of kilometres overland to the goldfields.

What did gold miners drink?

During the California gold rush, miners ate a lot of beans, supplemented by dried pork, boiled potatoes, dried apples, bread or biscuits, and sugar or molasses. They drank water, coffee, tea and sometimes brandy.

What clothes did miners wear in the gold rush?

The men are wearing dark work shirts, pants, and leather boots. Men and women in the mining camps of Colorado mostly wore the kind of clothes they had worn back home. Women wore print dresses, aprons, and bonnets. Men wore work shirts and pants.

What food did China bring to Australia?

The Australian public started eating at Chinese restaurants from the 1930s, or brought saucepans from home for takeaway meals. Chicken chow mein, chop suey and sweet and sour pork were the mainstays.

How were Chinese treated during the Gold Rush?

Chinese immigrants were often treated violently, and the government even supported this behavior. Anti-Chinese riots and attacks on Chinese areas were very common, and in addition, Chinese miners were often violently driven from the abandoned mines they had been working.

What did people eat in the gold fields?

In the Gold Fields The daily diet of a miner was not too different from that of an overland trekker — “…hard bread which we eat half-cooked, and salt pork, with occasionally a salmon which we purchase of the Indians. Vegetables are not to be procured,” is how one miner wrote home about his diet.

Where did the Chinese come to work in the Goldfields?

Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia an24794265 By the early 1850s, news of a gold rush in Australia had reached southern China, sparking an influx in Chinese migration to Australia. It is thought that approximately 7000 Chinese people came to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.

What was life like for the Chinese miners?

The Government and other miners made life very difficult for the Chinese, to the point where they were burning their tents, cutting off their sacred pony tails, stealing their gold and violently attacking them. Most Chinese miners went home once the gold rushes were over.

Where did the Chinese come to in the Gold Rush?

The Californian gold rush was in decline by the 1850s and had become known as ‘Jiu Jin Shan’, Old Gold Mountain. In 1861, there were more than 24,000 Chinese immigrants on the Victorian goldfields of Ararat, Ballarat, Beechworth, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Maryborough.