Rupert Henry Builder Sydney

Historian pursued identity for Australian-born Chinese

THE most striking thing about Henry Chan was his drive. He was a scholar of international renown in the history and philosophy of science, a community historian, a tireless partisan in the culture wars, a gifted networker and organiser, an energetic institution builder and a generous teacher. Running through it all was an iron will to secure recognition for Chinese-Australians as Australians, and likewise of Chinese-New Zealanders as New Zealanders. Henry's great-grandfather had migrated to Australia in the 19th century and his son, who took the surname Hunt, started an import-export business in Wellington, NSW, where Henry's father grew up. Commerce between Canton (now Guangzhou) and Australia was strong in the 1930s. The business took his father between the two, in the course of which he married in China. In 1933 he was sent to Auckland to set up a branch of the family greengrocery. They returned to New Zealand in 1975 and the following year Mary took up a lectureship at the University of NSW, where she stayed until her retirement in 2000. Henry worked for a time in the Rare Book Library at Sydney University and in 1986 took up a lectureship in Chinese history at Newcastle University. He stayed there, commuting to Sydney each week, until he retired in 1998 and the Chans moved to Katoomba. Henry Chan knew and loved both Australia and New Zealand, and was passionate about his Chinese ancestry. It bothered him that someone might imagine there was something inconsistent about the mixture, and he spent much of his life showing there was not. He could be impatient with growing signs of a self-righteous "victimisation" mentality among young Chinese in China and Australia, which he felt did credit to no one and fuelled intolerance. His convictions drove Chan at breakneck speed through the years of the Howard government. He organised conferences and workshops, brought together community and academic networks, set up heritage coalitions, developed digital resources, email lists and websites, won funding for heritage projects, and alerted local community historians to wider developments in the country and Australian scholars to international developments in the field. He had a hand in virtually every important event and institutional initiative in Chinese-Australian studies over the past two decades.

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