Love across racial boundaries: the true history behind Netflix’s My Brilliant Career

Netflix's adaptation of My Brilliant Career has cast actor Christopher Chung as a Chinese-Australian romantic lead—a change that might seem anachronistic, but isn't. Per The Conversation, intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men were well documented in colonial Australia. Historians estimate more than a thousand legal marriages between white women and Chinese men occurred in New South Wales and Victoria during the nineteenth century—one example being George Gwok Ah Poo, a Chinese immigrant who married English-born Emma Ann Lowe near Sydney in eighteen seventy-five. At the turn of the twentieth century, around thirty-three thousand Chinese people lived in Australia, mostly men, spread across rural and urban communities. Interracial marriage was never legally prohibited in Australia, unlike in fifteen American states at the same time. Historian Kate Bagnall says the Netflix reimagining reflects a reality that previous generations of Australians preferred to forget.

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