The story of the handprint

This is the handprint of 12-year-old Charlie Allen, the son of a Chinese father and white mother, who grew up in Surry Hills in inner-city Sydney. The handprint was taken by government officials before Charlie travelled to China in 1909. He spent six years with his father’s family in Shekki, inland from Hong Kong, before returning home. The year after Charlie returned home to Sydney, he enlisted in the Australian army to fight in World War I. 

This evocative trace of the past was retrieved from the National Archives of Australia by the Real Face of White Australia, a digital history project by Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall that highlights the experiences of men, women and children whose presence in Australia was questioned under the notorious White Australia Policy.
 
Originally a tool of surveillance enacted upon his racialized body, Charlie’s handprint can now trigger our engagement with an individual from the past. As an everyday aspect of human existence, the handprint enables us to imagine a physical presence – Charlie’s palm stained with sticky, black ink and his mother’s efforts to wash it clean, perhaps – and it touches us as poignant evidence of his lived experience of racism under White Australia.