With the support of the Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria (CAFHOV) a team have come together to host a Victorian version of the ‘Real Face of White Australia’ (RFoWA) transcribe-a-thon (the brainchild of Dr Kate Bagnall and Dr Tim Sherratt, which successfully launched a crowd-sourced transcription website).

Victorian archival records are slightly different to those in NSW and so we’ve had to develop a different data entry system. The National Archives in Australia holds three large registers (B6003) which list non-white Victorians who applied for Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test and provides details of the applicant’s occupation, address, length of time in the Commonwealth and also the dates of their travel and return.

On 5 May 2019 CAFHOV successfully launched our transcription project, ‘Transcribing Journeys of Chinese into Victoria’s history‘ as part of the Australian Heritage Festival. We were delighted to have the support of the Chinese Museum. At part of the launch I presented a paper on the nature and significance of the Victorian CEDT registers that we are indexing, titled: ‘What are these registers and why do they matter’.

Project role: Project leader
Project team: Alan To, Terry Young, Andrew Wong, Jonathan O’Donnell

Register of Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test, Melbourne. NAA: B6003, 3