Launch speeches: Nadia Rhook, Alison Wong and Grace Yee on Joss: A History
In July 2025, Grace Yee celebrated the launch of her second collection Joss: A History, her first book since winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award the year prior with Chinese Fish. Here we publish the transcripts of launch speeches by Nadia Rhook, Alison Wong and Yee herself. You can view photos from the event at Readings Emporium here.
Nadia Rhook
Thank you Grace, for the deep honour of helping to launch Joss: A History. It’s such a joy to celebrate this richly researched and dazzlingly significant collection.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are now in a place of 50,000 years of storytelling. I express my deep gratitude to speak as a guest on the unceded Country cared for Wurundjeri Woi Worrung and Bunurung people, and pay my respects to Elders, past and present.
Joss draws on extensive archives, oral histories, memorials and life experiences to weave stories of family and of ancestral kin. In part, it honours the estimated 60,000 Cantonese people who migrated to Australia during the mid to late 19th century; people whose lives became enmeshed in the daily fabric of settler colonial urban and rural landscapes. It also honours the connected history of Cantonese settlers in Aotearoa, as Alison will speak about shortly.
The writing and knowledge shared in Joss is beautifully alive to place, offering a history in close conversation with the landscapes in which Chinese Australian diasporic history is shown to be embedded.
‘let’s languish on little bourke street: the longest continuous / chinese settlement in the western world’ (p.37), writes Grace in the poem ‘with two black dates for sweetness’.
Race, so historians Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penny Edmonds have written, seeks to take up ‘a permanent address’ in settler colonial landscapes. In Joss, seemingly prosaic mappings between people and places – including those of this very street, in the heart of so-called Chinatown – are overwritten. These poems shake up racist cartographies revealed to persist through what Grace has described as the ‘stubborn endurance of Orientalist stereotypes’. The poet reflexively undertakes the labour of re-imagining the past.
‘I am learning to / prioritise my heritage in this shiny-buckled civilisation, / where yellow-perilled white men brass the city’s walls.’
While Joss is powerfully located in place, it takes us far. From Sydney to Bendigo, Beechworth, Omeo, Daylesford and Dimboola. In creating a new map for diasporic history, these poems felt like a call to emplace our own memories in conversation with the past. I currently live on Wadawurrung Country, around 11 kilometers east of Ballarat Bird World, so I was drawn to the poem ‘2.8 kilometers west of Ballarat Bird World’. This poem is a list of Chinese gravesites found in the segregated cemeteries of rural Victoria in which are scribed tantalisingly brief biographical sketches; a list that becomes more disturbing with erasure and fragmented memory as it grows. As we move from poem to place to poem, the breath of individual lives billows with a largeness at odds with the finite space they take up on the page.
Joss is full of writing of razor intelligence, yet this wordcraft enacts more than an intellectual exercise. The esteemed Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, taught us that Orientalism is an ‘imaginative geography’ that asserts a contrived duality between east and west, master and servant. Joss shows us that Orientalism as it shapes the history of southeast Australia is a system of oppression that registers both in narratives and in bodies. We’re called to recognise that Orientalism manifests as racialised sickness and health; in the ‘migraines’ and ‘burning hands’ that are ‘shutting down our subjectivities’ (p. 4).
To sit with the history represented here – replete with the violence of binaries and hierarchies – is to want Orientalism to be over right now, and also to know, enragingly, that it isn’t – that imperialism is full of ‘incurable endings’, (p. 4), to echo Grace’s phrase. In a current global context of intensified settler colonial violence, and related issues of borders and belonging, Joss shows us the capacious power of poetry to reckon with the unfinished effects of racist stories, laws, spatial and epistemic segregations.
I wanted to take this moment to notice that Joss is released amidst the rise and rise of archival poetics. As someone who grapples with often unstated yet palpable hierarchies of authority between poetry and longform non-fiction history, it feels important to celebrate Joss as part of a growing body of distinct works, such as by Natalie Harkin, Elfie Shiosaki, Manisha Anjali and Hasib Hourani, which show – as the acclaimed Chinese Fish has – that poetry and history are one. More specifically than this, Grace observes how the scholarly culture of history can, at times, treat stories of ‘anti-Chinese agitation’ as tweetable curiosities without heeding the ongoing ramifications.
‘…in history symposia the… squalor of anti-chinese agitation is / retweeted in 140 characters / or less alongside women’s rights, / car insurance, and, most fervently, the lack of gluten-free options / in dining establishments.’
Many congratulations, Grace, on your transformative work.
Alison Wong
Good evening everyone. Daaihgāa hóu.
I acknowledge with gratitude the Wurundjeri Woi Worrung and Bunurung peoples of the Kulin Nation, traditional custodians of this unceded Country, and I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
Grace has lived here in Naarm for three decades, but like myself, she is a descendant of a longstanding settler Cantonese family in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Australia and Aotearoa have always shared peoples and histories. After gold was discovered in the 1860s, thousands of Victoria’s goldminers flooded Otago. In fact, the first significant numbers of Chinese in Aotearoa were Cantonese goldminers from Victoria. They were invited by the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce to revitalise the economy.
Grace was researching and writing Joss, in turns, at the same time as her first-published award-winning collection. Chinese Fish was set in Ōtautahi Christchurch and yet its polyphonic stories could almost as easily have been set in Australia. Likewise, while Joss mostly tells Cantonese Australian stories, Chinese New Zealanders faced similar xenophobic and exoticising colonialist legislation and practices. In both countries, the past leaks into the present.
Joss includes some distinctly New Zealand and family stories, as always transformed by Grace’s wide-ranging, witty and sharp poetic eye. Some of these poems echo sensibilities of Chinese Fish.
In ‘Tabulations (A Nine Year)’ (p.47), Grace writes: ‘It’s 36 degrees but I am forbidden to swim in the river. / Mother says the current is too cold for girls. The Boy got to / be strong, she says, to pick up refrigerators and car chassis. / I must stay inside and keep detailed notes that correspond / closely to my body parts’.
In ‘What Remains’ (p.77) the aftershocks and shifts are heartbreaking: ‘Every morning he walks a warm apple pie and a / loaf of fresh bread in a brown paper bag damp with steam, newspaper tucked under his arm’, then later she writes: ‘At 4am I recognise his wide-legged gait near the red / brick chapel and I say, No Ba. Go back. The windows may / look pretty but your lenses are opaque and your maculae / degenerate.’
The title ‘my father was not a gardener’ (p.75) instantly dismantles the stereotype of the Chinese market gardener, but keep reading, the poetic mind is delightfully surprising: ‘my father was not a gardener / but he was a handsome widespreading form descended from a / long-lived drought-resistant species.’
Chinese Fish told a rich and layered Cantonese family saga in ‘multi-styled’ verse. While inspired by similar themes, Joss ranges even more widely in subject matter, location, time and poetic style. This is a complex collection brought together by conviction, by play and by meticulous attention to detail, whether in research, artistic vision or craft. Exact ordering, phrasing and juxtaposition; the placement and formatting of text on the page. Nothing is incidental.
Joss is archival, oral, family and social history. It’s literary, social and political critique. All crafted as poetry.
In a recent ABC article, Stan Grant wrote: ‘We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it.’ He said, ‘No one reads yesterday’s headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint.’
May you read Joss and feel it. May you return. Again and again.
Now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you: Grace Yee.
Grace Yee
Thank you Alison, thank you Nadia, for your astute and generous readings of Joss. I am honoured to have you both launch this book.
One of the best things about planning a launch for a poetry collection is getting to choose your crew! I feel very fortunate to have the support of poets, writers and scholars, whose work I admire.
Thank you Ender, Shu-Ling and Xiaole – love your work – I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Thank you Tim, not only the best master of ceremonies, but also, an acclaimed poet, and excellent on-the-ground event planner.
Thank you also to Leigh McKinnon, Sophie Couchman and Paul MacGregor, for so generously sharing resources, knowledge and expertise on Chinese Australian history; thank you to Demelza Wong, for the stunning illustrations – and the photography; to the always excellent team at Giramondo, who took another chance on my work, and trusted me to do it my way. Thank you to Ivor, Aleesha, Nick and Kate.
I’d also like to thank the extremely talented Jenny Grigg for the cover design: as you can see: the sparseness, the sepia toned fingerprints, blue smudge that represents the 21st century lens through which I viewed the archives… it’s perfect.
Back in the early ’90s, soon after I moved here from Aotearoa, I began an arts degree – and one of the first subjects I enrolled in was a unit called ‘Australian History’.
It was a 13-week course: there were one or two weeks on Indigenous History – including discussion about ‘terra nullius’, Mabo and the Native Title Act, which, at that time was in the process of being passed by the Keating government.
There were two weeks dedicated to the topic of immigration. The first lecture focused on the cultural and economic benefits of post-war European immigration. The second lecture, given by a different lecturer, was a string of arguments strongly opposed to immigration. The Chinese presence in Australia was raised in the context of this lecture.
I remember very clearly, the lecturer, who appeared to have very strong feelings, said adamantly: ‘Chinese immigration to this country must stop.’
For context, this was just a few years after tens of thousands of mainland Chinese students and their families were granted residency in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre in China.
This lecturer appeared overwhelmed by the consequences of Bob Hawke’s compassion.
My point is: in this 13-week course titled ‘Australian History’, the only mention of the Chinese presence was couched in terms of exclusion.
That was 30 years ago. I don’t know how the subject of ‘Australian History’ has evolved in that university or at any other tertiary institution since, but it’s still the case that many Australians know very little about settler Chinese history in this country – and the same is true in Aotearoa.
If my forebears feature at all in mainstream histories, they are invariably characterised as: ‘gold-seekers’, ‘market gardeners’, ‘vegetable hawkers’, Chinatown ‘cooks’, and opium addicts.
Their women are bound-feet wives and head-down daughters, all of whom ‘live on the smell of an oily rag’, and ‘take away the profits from everyone else’.
My intention with Joss was to unsettle the stories that perpetuate these tropes and stereotypes, stories that have circulated around the Pacific Rim for over 170 years – and bring to light some of our lesser-known histories.
