Chinese expatriates come together as family to celebrate Chinese New Year in regional Australia

But for expatriates living in rural or regional Australia, it can be hard to celebrate their Chinese New Year customs.

The date of the Chinese New Year is determined by the lunar calendar, falling on the second new moon after the winter solstice on December 21. This year it falls on January 22.

During Chinese New Year, an estimated 130 million people travel domestically around China to their hometown to be with family.

Traditionally, the tables would be piled high with food, including a whole fish - connected through a wordplay to the term 'abundance' - and a whole chicken similarly symbolising, through wordplay, good luck.

Children receive red pockets full of money from their elders, and decorations are hung on the door and walls bringing good luck to the home and the coming year.

At midnight on New Years Eve, the family would all eat: dumplings in the north, sticky rice balls in southern China. Both foods represent the importance of unity and family.

"The sticky rice ball is many parts all wrapped together, symbolising the family coming together unified as one," Mim Li said.

She's from the southern province of Sichuan in China but has been living in Tomakin on the NSW south coast for 10 years, and said it was important to celebrate Chinese New Year however one could.

"Anything goes as far as tradition, as long as everyone is together," Ms Li said.

"Everybody returns to their ancestral home - if you can."

However Ms Li cannot return home to China every year, and must deal with the challenges of trying to celebrate Chinese New Year while living in regional Australia.

Just 7 percent of the 1,390,637 Australian residents who identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry in the 2021 Census live outside a capital city.

The Chinese community makes up less than one percent of the Eurobodalla population, and yet forms a close-knit family. They come together despite their different personal family traditions, different customary foods and even different language dialects to celebrate Chinese New Year, because it is all they have.

"We are like a big family," Rosedale resident Yulan Wang, originally from the northern Chinese province of Shandong said.

"We are from different places, but we spend more time together than with our families.

"We grew up with the tradition of New Years as children. When we can't go back to China, but gather here together, it is so good."

Ms Li arrives at Ms Wang's home with a mandarin cake.

The preparation for Chinese New Year is a family task, and everybody knows their role.

Ms Wang is already labouring in the kitchen with her mother, rolling out dough for noodles. Ms Li's niece Quinghui Wu begins dicing the garlic, then cucumbers. Ms Li boils the kettle for traditional Chinese green tea. She heads to the vegetable patch to pick bok choy, broad beans and shallots.

"There are heaps of challenges [to celebrating Chinese New Year] down here," Ms Li said.

"You can't buy lots of things."

Some ingredients required for traditional foods are difficult or impossible to source fresh in regional areas, only available by travelling to a capital city.

She needed dry bamboo leaves to wrap around a dish she was making. She asked the owner of a local Chinese Shop who had sourced some recently whilst in Sydney.

If they didn't have it, she would have asked around the Chinese community in the area. Normally somebody has been to Sydney recently enough to have the thing required. If not, she has to go without.

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Ms Wang overcomes this problem by growing as many herbs and vegetables, such as garlic chives for her traditional dumplings, as she can in her backyard.

Eventually the meal is ready. The friends-cum-family gather around and share a meal of homemade 'oily noodles'. They share about their family overseas, about their health and about their different childhood traditions.

Ms Wang said her childhood family was very poor, and she would look forward to the delicious feast of Chinese New Year because it was the only time her family could afford to make the food they ate.

As they sit around the table sharing noodles and stories, there is no place these expatriates would rather be than with each other at Chinese New Year.