In Darkest Queensland: A Comparative Zooarchaeological Analysis of Chinese and British Migrants in Frog’s Hollow, a Nineteenth-Century Brisbane Neighborhood

Abstract By the late nineteenth century, Queensland was the most ethnically diverse Australian colony and the most severely racially exclusionary. Despite this, to date no zooarchaeological studies have investigated how food choice reflected and reinforced these social dynamics in Queensland or elsewhere across post-European settlement Australia. This study presents a comparative and contextual zooarchaeological analysis of two late nineteenth-century deposits in Brisbane’s "Frog’s Hollow," an ethnically diverse and working class area in the colony’s capital city. This study illustrates the social embeddedness of food choices, and highlights how local influences shaped emerging group identities relating to these choices. The Chinese residents were actively choosing familiar and culturally important foods such as pork, poultry and fish, even enthusiastically consuming expensive pork over the cheaper mutton and beef, while taking advantage of marine resources likely supplied via a Chinese-run fishing village on the outskirts of town. Similarly, the British residents were enthusiastically supporting a local European-run oyster industry, while focusing predominantly on meat-dense cuts of mutton. Mutton was a familiar and affordable source of meat with increasing cultural significance to the predominantly British and Irish population of the colony, and Australia, as a longstanding source of economic success via the colonial wool industries. Here I argue that familiar foods were important for both cultural groups to (re)construct and maintain a sense of cultural and social identity. However, the evidence also shows experimentation, the aspirational associations of a meat-centric diet, and how social networks, communities, and local availability can influence food choice.