From 1855 there were Chinese fishermen working on the Victorian coastline. They mostly worked in teams of 10 or a dozen and each team came from a specific family or clan.
The technique they used was simple effective and ecologically bad. They used seine nets, taken out from the shore in an arc and then with both ends drawn up the beach until the catch was exposed, including rare fish, juvenile fish and crabs.
Some of the catch would be dried in the sun on racks, or salted down, sometimes in trenches. Some would be pickled, They seem to have never smoked the fish, for some reason.
The earliest camps in Victoria were those at St Kilda, St Leonards and Schnapper Point (Mornington) but there were several camps on Gippsland's coastline, sending dried fish back to China but also selling large amounts on the goldfields as well.

The Gippsland camps I know about were at Warneet (and hence Chinaman Island), Cowes, Metung, several in the Corner inlet area (Hedley, Port Albert, Drum Island, Port Welshpool), one at Shallow Inlet and three on the Promontory, at Long Chinaman's Beach, Johnny Souey Cove and Sealer's Cove.
Probably because much of its coastline is rugged there were few, if any, fishing camps in Western Victoria.
The camps were fairly primitive and little physical evidence remains. There might well have been quite a few more but there was nothing official about the camps so no detailed records exist.
We know there was a fish-drying camp at Shallow Inlet in 1866 because the authorities were told the Chinese were using nets with mesh that was illegally small. That was not true and no offence had been committed. That was reported in the Gippsland Guardian of January 19 of that year. This seems to have been a small group who caught their own, as I don't think there were fishing boats in Waratah Bay,
There was almost certainly a camp at Fahey's Point, west of Nine Mile Creek, and there is some physical evidence in three trenches that have survived – these were almost certainly used for salting fish.
The camp at Metung (Rosherville) was apparently run by one Ah Sing, and it is important to note that though one man would be appointed manager, these camps were co-ops, with the profits shared. If a man returned to China another man from his clan would replace him.
Port Albert grew to sudden importance shipping cattle, tallow, wattlebark, etc, to Melbourne and across to Hobart and Launceston. It 'boomed' in a small way, with 24 residents in 1845 but 211 by 1857. There was at least one cargo boat a week. In 1886 the resident population had dropped to 36 and the coastal fleet were going to Lakes Entrance, Sale and Bairnsdale.
By 1865 the cattle trade was almost gone and Chinese buyers of fish were crucial to Port Albert's survival. At the same time the number of Chinese on the Omeo goldfields had risen to about 600, providing a ready market for the Chinese at Port Albert. The dryers had come in 1860 though it is hard to prove that.
In March 1884 the Gippsland Guardian reported that Port Albert fishermen had sold the Chinese processors five tons of fish at six pounds per ton after some good hauls. Cleaning, splitting and drying or pickling six tons of fish before it went bad would have needed a good few men. This also shows the importance of the Chinese to Port Albert's fishermen as a ready cash market with no transportation costs.
The Chinese had pretty much left Port Albert by the turn of the century. There was a decline in the Chinese population at Omeo in 1894 who lived in the Chinese 'camp' at Omeo, separate from the township, and there might well have been 500 people in that camp. By 1911 the only resident were a few elderly folk who could not get back to China. That reflects the collapse of the fish-curers' markets.
I don't know anything much about the other camps. Without being rude, the smell from the Chinese fish-drying would have been incredible. I remember a village on the Saigon River north of Vung Tau that dried fish – and I'd love to forget the smell.
Some of the camps were quite small, and they were the ones that simply cured or salted the fish, or, sometimes, pickled them. Where the Chinese also fished the teams could be 15 or 16 strong but if they were not doing their own fishing there might be only three or four of them. I read that there were at least a dozen boats and up to forty fishermen catching schnapper to sell to the Chinese who were processing them.
There were three camps on the Promontory so that means there were only three of the 11 Gippsland sites of which I know that were not in the general area of Corner Inlet, still an angler's delight today.
Long Chinaman Beach is on the north of the Prom, more or less opposite Yanakie. The local story is that it was named after a fishing tragedy in which six Chinese drowned. Johnny Souey Cove and Beach were named after the long-term manager of the fish-drying camp there, of which there is no sign now. Johnny Souey Cove is sometimes called Miranda Cover after a ship lost there.
We overlook the fact that the Chinese bought fish from the local fishing boats. By doing that they were making a real impact on the viability of the fishing industry in places like Port Albert and Port Welshpool, especially before the railway was built.
Because the Chinese mostly kept to themselves and "among their own kind" much of their history in Gippsland has been lost. Most of what we are working on and with now are the recollections of people telling us what their fathers told them.
In places where they were present in large numbers they suffered very significant and very racist attacks so one can understand why the large Omeo Chinese camp was outside the township, albeit nearby (Omeo was not, so far as I know, the site of any such issues). There is a story about Chinese crossing over Mt Hotham toward Omeo who were waylaid and suffered dreadfully. Perhaps it is just a story. Perhaps it is not.
It is an inescapable conclusion that the Chinese played a bigger part in our history than we generally realise.