The records afforded through grave markers including, as this paper will show, their absence provide wide ranging research potential. Rather than indicating full-fledged ethnogenesis, wherein Australian Chinese developed new cultural practices, these behaviors suggest that ca.1870–1930 was a transitional period, during which extant cultural processes were adapted to meet immediate needs.īurial practices, and the commemoration of the deceased, vary across the cultural divide and are influenced, primarily, by socioreligious attitudes to death, the oft debated concept of an afterlife and, on a less ethereal plane, to practicality and economics. This study indicates divergent approaches to identification and recording of individual graves over time and place. The seemingly meticulous attention to grave identification in some areas contrasts with others where markers are absent. ![]() In an unusual departure from the norm the inscriptions on most identified grave markers rarely indicate date of death. Physical appraisal of each site was undertaken and, where they exist, cemetery records and allied documentation examined. ![]() ![]() This paper evaluates the morphology of grave markers from eight northeast Australian sites and considers reasons for the variations. Diverse approaches were adopted to mark graves, possibly anticipating the subsequent, culturally important, repatriation of their bones. Many nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to Pacific Rim countries died far from their home villages.
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