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THE TIGER’S MOUTH
Thoughts on the history and heritage of Chinese Australia
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30 September 2024
FROM THE ARCHIVE: UNCOVERING THE EVERYDAY HERITAGE OF CHINESE TASMANIANS
This post, written by Annaliese Jacobs Claydon and Kate Bagnall, was first
published on the Everyday Heritage website on 18 September 2024.
Tasmania’s Post Office Directory (Wise’s) for 1904, Wise’s Directories, Hobart,
1904, page 576
It’s a chilly Friday morning in South Hobart, and Anna is looking for Chinese
names in Tasmanian post office directories – the early-twentieth-century
equivalent of the telephone book. It might sound like looking for a needle in a
haystack, but in fact it’s just one of the steps in our research to uncover the
ordinary lives and hidden histories of Chinese individuals, families and
businesses in the island state.
For our Tasmanian case study, the Everyday Heritage team in Tasmania is using
simple yet powerful, freely available digital tools to help paint a historical
picture of Chinese communities in virtually every corner of Tasmania.
While some part of Tasmania’s Chinese history is quite well known, we are
focusing on the mundane, the everyday, and the commonplace to tell stories of
how ordinary people built their lives in Tasmania at a time when Chinese
migration was restricted and anti-Chinese sentiment was common.
Our first step was to figure out who we were looking for – to build a list of
names and occupations. We started with a preliminary list of Chinese Tasmanian
residents gleaned from archival indexes and databases from the Tasmanian
Archives and the National Archives of Australia. Naturalisation and alien
registration records provided a rich beginning, but we also want to find people
moving in and through the state alongside those who settled long term.
Anna spent several months scouring the digitised newspapers in Trove for
articles that could help generate further names and unexpected places. Good
search strategies are necessary to weed out Tasmanian stories from mainland
articles republished in Tasmanian newspapers, and to identify articles that
mention a specific person, event, and/or place (and ideally all three).
Screenshot of the Tasmanian project team’s Zotero Group Library showing one of
the articles we’ve found about Ah Foo at Fingal
In order to manage the data, we are using Zotero – a bibliographic software that
can grab metadata and images from a wide variety of sources, including Trove’s
digitised newspapers and many library and archival collections. Once in Zotero,
you can highlight, tag, and annotate the records.
The tags are especially important for our project. They function as a growing,
searchable index to the material, but they will also be used in the next stage
of the project, in which we will digitally map Chinese Tasmanian individuals,
families, communities, and businesses over time.
Our research in the digitised Tasmanian newspapers in Trove has not only found
some fascinating stories, it has also generated a long list of names and
addresses across the state, from Southport in the south, to Fingal in the
north-east, to Strahan on the west coast.
Of course, this list from the newspapers is incomplete and problematic. For
example, the English spelling of Chinese names varies widely, and newspaper
articles tend to focus on burglaries, assaults, gambling, and alleged opium
smuggling, capturing the ‘dog whistles’ of anti-Chinese sentiment but not the
texture of everyday life.
How can we both acknowledge and filter out that noise?
One way is through the post office directories, which provide names, businesses,
street addresses and dates. Several years ago, Libraries Tasmania digitised
their collection of Wise’s Post Office Directories from 1890 to 1948. As part of
his GLAM Workbench, project team member Tim Sherratt has created an interface to
the Tasmanian Post Office Directories that makes them searchable by keyword.
Directory listing for Ah Foo, market gardener, Mathinna, in Tim Sherratt’s
Tasmanian Post Office Directories, GLAM Workbench
Focusing on the post office directories helps to compensate for the prevalence
in the newspapers of crime and racial language. In the directories, you find
fruiterers, market gardeners, launderers, fancy goods merchants, carpenters, and
others, along with their locations.
Anna has been creating records of the ‘Chinese’ post office directory listings
in our Zotero Group Library, tagging them with individual names, addresses, and
occupations, and anything else that looks fruitful. She also spells out the
common abbreviations for occupations and names – so ‘frtr’ is changed to
‘fruiterer’ and ‘gcr’ to ‘grocer’, while ‘Hy’ is changed to ‘Henry’ and ‘Jas’ to
‘James’.
Going through year by year, directory by directory, allows us to see continuity
and change over time, growth and decline of neighbourhoods and discreet
populations, and family networks. It can also turn up some quite interesting
stories!
One is about ‘James Ah Foo, skin dealer, Fingal’ – who appears in a post office
directory in 1921. ‘James Ah Foo’ shows up elsewhere, too – there was also a
market gardener in Mathinna between 1904 and 1911 who listed his name as ‘Ah
Foo’ but also called himself James Ah Foo.
Was this the same person? We’re not absolutely sure, but Anna thinks it’s
likely. Newspaper accounts find James Ah Foo back and forth between Mathinna and
nearby Fingal, sometimes the victim of crime, sometimes of circumstance, and
sometimes falling afoul of the law himself.
Anna found James Ah Foo involved in a major conflagration in Mathinna in 1901,
which started at the rear of C.J. Bailey’s butcher shop and extended to the
Bulman Brothers general store. The fire spread and claimed two buildings owned
by James Ah Foo, where Miss Fitzgerald ran the newsagency and Mr Dunn had a
fruit stand.
Parade at Mathinna, c. 1900–1904, Tasmanian Archives, LPIC 147/5/71. This
photograph shows C.J. Bailey’s butcher shop and Bulman Brother’s general store,
possibly reconstructed after the fire in 1901 that burned them to the ground,
and possibly James Ah Foo’s properties next door?
Three years later, James Ah Foo was splitting his time between Mathinna and
Fingal, where he prosecuted two men for stealing his skins. He was burnt out
again in Fingal in August 1907 while he was on a visit back to Mathinna, and a
year later, he was run over by his own bolting horse. Soon after the
introduction of the Game Act, he was prosecuted for having excess kangaroo and
possum skins out of season in 1909.
James Ah Foo was also fond of horse racing – at Avoca in 1918, he told a racing
correspondent that:
> he was 82 years and four months old, had been in Australia 61 years, during
> which time he had paid only one visit to China. He has been living at Fingal
> for 20 years, where he follows the calling of a skin buyer, and says he would
> sooner live in Tasmania than any other country.
Each of these newspaper articles documents one moment when James Ah Foo came to
the attention of the public. The post office directory listings help place him
in one of the locations where he lived and worked. Together, they help to
illustrate his network of associates – his tenants, neighbours, and business
partners, people with whom he had disagreements and with whom he was on good
terms. Some were Chinese, but many were not.
Beginning with digitised archives, our research is starting to sketch outlines
of dozens of everyday Chinese lives in Tasmania – each of whom left their mark
on the island, its communities, and its histories.
BIO
Annaliese Jacobs Claydon is a researcher on the Everyday Heritage project and an
Adjunct Researcher in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. A
historian of empire and exploration by training, she has also worked for many
years as a public historian and an archivist.
Kate Bagnall is a social historian best known for her research on Chinese
Australasian history. Kate is a Chief Investigator on the Everyday Heritage
project and Senior Lecturer in Humanities (History) at the University of
Tasmania.
0
* Everyday Heritage
* History
* Research help
* Tasmania
* Websites
* Chinese in Tasmania
* digital methods
* Everyday Heritage
* National Archives of Australia
* post office directories
* Tasmanian Archives
* Trove
19 September 2024
CHARLIE ALLEN’S HANDPRINT
In this post, I tell the story of the boy whose handprint became an emblem for
the Everyday Heritage project. The post was originally published on the Everyday
Heritage website on 9 July 2024.
Back of Charlie Allen’s Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test, which was
issued before his departure from Sydney for China in June 1909. National
Archives of Australia (Sydney): ST84/1, 1909/22/41-50
This handprint belongs to a 12-year-old boy called Charles Albert Allen.
Charlie, as he was known, was born in Surry Hills, Sydney, in 1896. His mother
was Frances Allen, his father Charlie Gum.
Charlie was raised by his mother, but in 1909, at the age of 13, he was taken
‘home’ to China by his father.
Charlie Gum returned to Sydney soon after, leaving his son in China. Young
Charlie lived with relatives in the Cantonese village of Chuk Sau Yuen for 6
years.
Charlie was homesick, but he had no means of getting back to Australia. His
mother attempted to enlist the help of the Australian Government but to no
avail.
Charlie finally returned in 1915 at the age of 18.
The following year Charlie enlisted in First AIF, the first of three attempts to
serve his country. He was discharged as medically unfit each time.
Charlie married Maud Gordon in Surry Hills in 1917, and they had two daughters
soon after. Charlie returned to China in 1922 for 7 months.
Charlie Allen died in 1938 as the result of an industrial accident at the
Bunnerong Power Station where he worked. He was 41.
Charlie Allen’s handprint is found on the back of an identification document
called a Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test.
The certificate was issued by the New South Wales Collector of Customs in 1909
under Australia’s infamous Immigration Restriction Act. Today it is held in the
National Archives of Australia in Sydney.
Front of Charlie Allen’s Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test. NAA
(Sydney): ST84/1, 1909/22/41-50
Charlie’s certificate, with its photographs and handprint, is one of tens of
thousands of similar documents that were issued to ‘non-white’ Australians when
they travelled overseas in the early twentieth century. These certificates
allowed them to return home to Australia without sitting the infamous Dictation
Test.
Every one of these certificates could be used to tell a story of how the
everyday lives of Australian were affected by the White Australia Policy.
Among these many possibilities, the story of Charlie and his mother, Frances,
particularly struck me, and I’ve written about them in an article that draws on
methodologies of biography, microhistory, and family history. As well as his
1909 CEDT, the files in the archives include photographs of Charlie, and
handwritten letters from him to his mother and from his mother to the Australian
Government.
Charlie’s letters home from China are particularly significant. They provide a
rare glimpse into the experiences and emotions of an Australian boy living in
his own migrant father’s homeland. While many hundreds of young Australians of
Chinese descent spent time in China across the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, first-hand accounts like Charlie’s are rare.
In 1910 Charlie was homesick and a long way from home. ‘Every minute I think of
you, and long for a piece of bread and butter this tucker is not doing me well’,
he wrote to his mother, before signing off with a flurry of kisses.
In 1911 Florence was missing her son dearly but was unable to get him back. In a
letter to the Australian Government, she wrote: ‘Try and do your best to get my
son returned back, to me, to Australia … do your best for his mother as I am
nearly heart broken about him’.
Kate Bagnall and friends on the steps of Chuk Sau Yuen School 竹秀園學校, Chungshan
中山, Kwangtong 廣東, an Australian ‘diaspora-funded school’ built in the early
years of the 20th century, March 2019
Beyond the National Archives, I was able to trace the lives of Charlie and his
parents, his wife and his children, piecing together fragments of their stories
from written records – including birth, death and marriage records; shipping
records; war service records; and newspapers – and visiting places significant
to their lives, such as Chuk Sau Yuen village where Charlie lived in China, and
his grave in Botany Cemetery.
Charlie Allen’s is one of the many ‘small lives’ that can be found in the
archives. Telling the stories of lives like his – which are both ordinary and
extraordinary – works to counteract dominant narratives – of who belongs and who
matters – that continue in our nation’s history and heritage today.
These stories also touch the lives of everyday Australians. Charlie’s great
grandson recently told me that memory of Charlie had almost faded within his
family. But, having found the archival paper trail and my writing about
Charlie’s life, they could now work keep his memory alive.
FURTHER READING
Kate Bagnall, ‘Charlie Allen’s mystery aunt’, The Tiger’s Mouth (blog), 5
January 2021, https://chineseaustralia.org/charlie-allens-mystery-aunt/.
Kate Bagnall, ‘Writing home from China: Charles Allen’s transnational
childhood’, in Paul Longley Arthur (ed.), Migrant Lives: Australian Culture,
Society and Identity, Anthem Press, London, 2017. Open access version available
at: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10846849.
Kate Bagnall, ‘Anglo-Chinese and the politics of overseas travel from New South
Wales, 1898 to 1925’, in Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (eds), Chinese
Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, Brill, Leiden, 2015. Open
access version available at:
https://chineseaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Bagnall_Anglo-Chinese-and-the-Politics-of-Overseas-Travel_Chapter-7.pdf.
Kate Bagnall, ‘ “I am nearly heartbroken about him”: Stories of Australian
mothers’ separation from their “Chinese” children’, History Australia, vol. 1,
no. 1, 2003, pp. 30–40. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2003.11828254.
1
* Archives
* China
* Everyday Heritage
* History
* People
* Real Face of White Australia
* ancestral village
* Anglo-Chinese
* Archives
* CEDTs
* children
* family history
* Immigration Restriction Act
* National Archives of Australia
* New South Wales
* Photographs
* Sydney
* White Australia Policy
9 February 2024
‘JOSS AND CHINESE FESTIVITIES’ – WELDBOROUGH, TASMANIA, 1884
Kung hei fat choi! 恭喜發財! Happy new year!
As we enter the Year of the Dragon in 2024, here’s a look back at how the
Chinese community in the tin mining settlement of Thomas’ Plains (also known as
Weldborough), Tasmania, celebrated New Year in 1884 – one hundred and forty
years ago.
The report by ‘Miner’, published in the Hobart Mercury on 6 February, 1884,
includes a mention of the joss house at Weldborough. This temple was only newly
opened at the time of writing, and it remained in use until 1934. Today, its
contents, and those of five other nineteenth-century joss houses from the
north-east of Tasmania, make up the Guan Di Temple (關帝廟) at the Queen Victoria
Museum & Art Gallery in Launceston.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘On first pitching my tent within the margin of this sunny oasis of the forest,
I little thought eight years hence its echoes would be awakened by the
discordant jinglings of a Chinese orchestra; but so it is, and the year 1884 of
the Christian era, and the ninth year of the reign of Tsai-Tien, Emperor of
China, leave an established epoch in the history of Weldborough.
Wooden plaques either side of the entrance to the Guan Di Temple in Launceston,
which originally came from the joss house in Weldborough (QVM.1990.H.0193 and
0195; photograph by Kate Bagnall, September 2020)
Like most mining settlements, we, too, have passed through a series of
perplexing ups and downs since the year 1875. So great, indeed, are the changes
through which we have entered as to make us often somewhat doubtful of our
position. Many who came here as the pioneers of our tin mines have retired from
the field, some to rest upon their gains, and others, to toil afresh in pastures
new; and some, I regret to think, are numbered with the past. What with births,
deaths, and marriages, and earthquakes, we are induced to review the principles
of cause and effect.
Both morally and physically we indicate a transition : the Celtic and Saxon
blendings are fast yielding to the strongly-marked tendencies of the Mongolian.
This is seen in all our public and festive gatherings, but strongly so in the
large brood of almond-eyed, olive-cheeked urchins attending our day school. If
there is any truth in the tenet advanced by many of our philosophers, touching
Nature’s fiat on the ‘surviance of the fittest’, John, here, may be said to be
in the ascendant, since he has driven the European from the field, and is now
master of his position. …
We are now in the midst of the high festivities of their new year. There is one
continual round of feasting, music, fireworks, and Joss ceremonials. There must
be fully 300 men congregated within the camp, all living in the highest state of
enjoyment, for the time being all things seem to be held in common, even the
barbarous European is present again and again to partake of their dainties,
consisting of pork, fowls, and rice, with oceans of oil and other celestial
condiments.
There is one very noticeable feature brought out in John’s feastings, he does
not forget his god. The inevitable pig is roasted whole, and borne as an
offering to the altar, amid the burning of incense, the clashing of cymbals,
prostrations, prayers, incantations, and a crackling blaze of fireworks, after
which it is returned to render a more substantial service, as the sacred
tit-bits of another feast.
Whatever may appear the architectural frailties of our Chinese dwelling places,
which may be said to consist for the most part of palings, poles, and rice-bags,
they have spared no expense in embellishing and decorating their Joss House,
which may be said to glitter with adornments. The altar-pieces, and symbolical
carvings, and gilding, and painting on glass, show much artistic skill and
cleverness; but, alas! to what strange purposes employed. …
Yours, etc., MINER
Thomas’ Plains, February 1, 1884.’
2
* History
* Tasmania
* Chinese in Tasmania
* Chinese New Year
* joss house
* Launceston
* mixed families
* Tasmania
* Weldborough
18 January 2024
SO YOU THINK YOUR ANCESTOR MIGHT COME FROM SHUNDE?
Over the past few years, I’ve been contacted by a number of family historians
who believe that their Chinese ancestor came from Shunde, Guangdong. While this
is entirely possible, this post issues a word of warning to those who might be
relying on a family tree from Ancestry.com as the source of this information.
The Chinese Exchange (Num Pon Soon Society Building), Little Bourke Street,
Melbourne, 1863, State Library of Victoria,
http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/74198
The district of Shunde (順德), or Shuntak in Cantonese, is located directly south
of the provincial capital of Guangzhou (廣州, Canton, C: Kwangchow) and today is
part of the city of Foshan (佛山, C: Fatshan). Together with Nanhai (南海, C:
Namhoi) and Panyu (番禺, C: Punyu), Shunde was one of the Three Counties or Sam
Yup (三邑, M: Sanyi), from where many early Cantonese emigrants left for
destinations in South-East Asia and around the Pacific, including the Australian
colonies.
Shunde was known for its silk production and for its wealth, and Sam Yup people
were dominant among the merchants of 19th-century overseas Chinese communities.
Those of you familiar with Melbourne’s Chinatown might know of the historic Num
Pon Soon Society Building in Little Bourke Street – the ‘Soon’ in ‘Num Pon Soon’
refers to the ‘Shun’ (順) in Shunde. The Num Pon Soon Society (南番順公司 or 會館) was
the native place association for people from the Sam Yup.
Given the numbers of Sam Yup men in the Australian colonies, we would expect
there to be some descendants in Australia today. But here’s where I think some
family historians might be coming unstuck re Shunde in their search for their
ancestors’ Chinese origins.
We know that many historical records give the place of origin of Chinese
immigrants as ‘Canton’ – a somewhat vague term that could mean either the city
of Guangzhou or the province of Guangdong (廣東, C: Kwangtung).
However, Ancestry.com.au, in their standardised list of place names, suggests
‘Canton’ as a city that is part of ‘Shunde’, as shown in the image below:
‘Canton, Shunde, Guangdong, China’. This follows a similar hierarchical format
as other places, where it lists City, County, State, Country, or suchlike.
This isn’t such an issue when searching for digitised records, but when you
create a family tree and enter ‘Canton, China’ as a place (of birth, for
example,) Ancestry prompts you to use their standardised place name, as in the
image below.
If you choose this standardised version of the place name, and then view the
person’s LifeStory, the place is then given as ‘Guangzhou, Guangdong, China’, as
in the second image below.
So, through this process, the vague historical place name ‘Canton, China’
(probably meaning the province) becomes translated to the much more precise
place names of Guangzhou (city) and Shunde (county). It is then very easy for an
unsuspecting family historian to come across this information and assume that
these details are correct, and that the person came from Shunde and/or
Guangzhou, when they might have actually come from a very different part of the
province of Guangdong.
The moral of my story is the usual one – always check the original source of the
information! And unless there is concrete evidence to support it (like a
headstone with Chinese characters), I would always be a bit suspicious of an
Acnestry family tree or recent family history that says a Chinese ancestor was
born in Guangzhou or Shunde.
If you’re interested in knowing more about the Cantonese origins of Australia’s
early Chinese communities, have a look at my short article ‘Cantonese
connections: The origins of Australia’s early Chinese migrants’ (Traces, issue
6,
pp. 43–45), which gives a brief overview and includes a glossary of place
names. You might also like to read my 2017 blog post on ‘Finding your Chinese
roots‘, which includes a map of the Pearl River Delta.
4
* China
* History
* Research help
* ancestral village
* Ancestry.com
* family history
* qiaoxiang
15 January 2024
UNCOVERING THE STORIES OF CHINESE AUSTRALIAN FAMILIES
Video, transcript and slides of a talk on ‘Uncovering the stories of Chinese
Australian families’, presented at Libraries Tasmania in Hobart on 8 August 2023
When I began researching the history of Chinese Australian families more than
two decades ago, the sources I first came across, including accounts by
politicians and journalists, focused on an absence of ‘real’ family life among
the colonial Chinese population.
Despite this, other sources provided tantalising hints at the presence of a
small number of Chinese women as well as a significant number of families made
up of a Chinese father and white mother.
In this talk, I share how I, alongside a growing number of family historians,
have gone about uncovering the stories of Chinese Australian families and
consider how their transnational lives are an important part of the history of
connection between China and Australia.
You can watch the video, or read the text of my presentation below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIDEO
Video also available on the Libraries Tasmania YouTube channel, and audio only
is available on the Libraries Tasmania SoundCloud.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT AND SLIDES
Over the past couple of decades, a number of Australian and New Zealand writers
have produced works of historical fiction featuring romances between white women
and Chinese men.
One of the best known is the ongoing and somewhat illicit liaison between Kerry
Greenwood’s lady detective, Phryne Fisher, and Lin Chung, the Cambridge-educated
son of an elite Victorian Chinese family of silk merchants, whose progenitor had
first arrived in Australia with the gold rushes.
Lin Chung first appears in the seventh book in the Phryne Fisher series, Ruddy
Gore, published in 1995, and while he is an intermittent character across the
two dozen novels, he – along with a string of other lovers – is central to the
portrayal of Phryne’s liberal attitude towards life and obvious pleasure in
flaunting the social mores of respectable 1920s Melbourne.
A few other examples are worth mentioning, too.
There’s Neridah Newton’s The Lambing Flat, published in 2003, which won the
Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Author in 2002. It follows
the intertwined lives of Ella, born and bred on a Queensland cattle station, and
Lok, who arrives in Australia as a boy and experiences the violence of the
Lambing Flat anti-Chinese riots of 1861, before heading north to Queensland. He
finds work on Ella’s father’s property, and the love story progresses from
there.
There’s also As the Earth Turns Silver, by New Zealand author Alison Wong, which
won the Janet Frame Fiction Award in 2009. Set against the backdrop of racist
white working-class Wellington in the early twentieth century, the book tells
the ultimately tragic story of a secret love affair between widow and mother of
two, Katherine McKechnie, and Wong Chung-yung, a greengrocer.
Then there’s Deborah O’Brien’s Mr Chen’s Emporium, and its sequel The Jade
Widow, which are aimed more at the ‘book club’ market. Mr Chen’s Emporium plots
a fairly predictable romantic path to the marriage of Amy Duncan and Charles
Chen in a small New South Wales goldfields town in the 1870s – and their
relationships, once again, ends tragically. While not great literature, Mr
Chen’s Emporium is nonetheless pretty spot-on with its history.
As a historian I’ve spent much of my career looking into the lives of white
women and Chinese men who formed intimate relationships in the past, women and
men like the protagonists in these novels.
This research has been part of my broader interest in the histories of women,
children and families of Australasia’s early Chinese communities – and a caveat
here, the ‘Chinese Australian families’ I’ll be talking about today are
predominantly those made up of a white mother and Chinese father.
So, it interests me very much to see stories of Chinese-European couples being
told again through fiction in the twenty-first century, in television as well as
the novels I’ve mentioned – some of you might have watched, for example, the
2021 SBS mini-series New Gold Mountain, which touches on the tangled lives of
Chinese men and white women on the Victorian goldfields.
I say ‘again’ because more than a century ago, in the 1880s and 1890s, intimate
relationships between white women and Chinese men were not an uncommon subject
in popular Australian fiction.
Typified by Edward Dyson’s ‘Mr and Mrs Sin Fat’, published in the Bulletin in
1888, or William Lane’s novella ‘White or Yellow? The Race War of 1908AD’,
published as a serial in the Boomerang in 1887, late nineteenth-century stories
tell a very different tale of interracial relationships, of their dangers on a
personal and societal level. Such stories both drew on and fed accounts that
appeared in popular newspapers such as the notoriously salacious Truth.
I want to suggest, however, that the telling of these two very different
narratives of love and sex across racial boundaries have something very much in
common. And that is that their meaning, their power as stories, comes from their
acknowledgement of not just the possibility, but the reality, of intimate
relationships between white women and Chinese men in Australia and New Zealand
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The scare power of stories like those published in the Bulletin and the
Boomerang came from an understanding that all around the Australasian colonies
white women and Chinese men were getting together. Yes, in opium dens and
brothels, but also through contacts at church, at the store, across the
threshold of the home, in the neighbourhood. These stories presented a
threatening future of racial mixing in Australia that was made more real by the
presence of mixed-race couples and their mixed-race children in colonial
communities – they were simply there.
Estimates carefully calculated by historians like myself put the number of legal
marriages between Chinese men and white women in the Australasian colonies in
the nineteenth century in the thousands – but of course there were many other
relationships not formalised through marriage and many children born out of
wedlock.
While official statistics are unreliable in giving the true number of children
born to white mothers and Chinese fathers, they do give some indication of their
significance in the Chinese Australian population overall.
Here, for example, is a breakdown of the birthplaces of Chinese people in New
South Wales in 1901, where you can see (in blue) that a total of 1,223 were
Australian born (in New South Wales and other Australian states), and of them
1,028 – about 9% of the total Chinese population – were so-called ‘half-castes’,
which in this case meant people of mixed white and Chinese heritage.
What about Tasmania, I hear you say!
Looking at 1901 again, the Chinese population of Tasmania was 609, of whom 103 –
or about 17% – were of mixed Chinese-European parentage.
Over the course of the twentieth century, though, the obvious presence of
Chinese-European couples and their families faded for various reasons – within
families themselves, in popular memory, and in historical accounts. The
perception that lingered was that interracial relationships between white women
and Chinese men were bound up with prostitution, alcoholism, opium addiction and
so on, and that only ‘a few illiterate Irish girls’ were desperate enough to
marry themselves to Chinese men.
What was forgotten were the thousands of Chinese-European couples who, mostly
unremarkably, met, formed relationships of different kinds (for shorter or
longer periods of time), had children, and raised them together or apart.
Families like that of Hannah Maria Mason, who was born in Launceston in 1844,
and her Amoy-born husband, William Edward Oram Chi.
Hannah and William married in the Wesleyan Parsonage at Newtown, Sydney, in
1865, four years after William was baptised as a Christian. After the stillbirth
of their first child in 1866, Hannah and William went on to have another son and
five daughters. William was naturalised as a British subject in 1868 and the
family became part of the community of Scone, in central New South Wales, where
they made their home.
It has only really been in this new century, over the past 25 years or so, that
early Chinese-European families like the Chis have been remembered and
recognised on a broader scale. The historical novels I mentioned are one
manifestation of this.
Alongside the work of academic historians like myself, it has largely been the
growing interest in family history that has shifted our understanding, as family
researchers have pieced together often-hidden parts of their own histories.
These same family historians, and local and community historians, are
increasingly visible online, creating their own blogs and websites, making
family trees in Ancestry.com, and participating in family history forums and
Facebook groups. They are publishing memoirs and family histories, they are
presenting at history conferences, and they are collaborating with researchers
in universities and GLAM organisations, particularly museums.
If you’re an avid viewer, you might also have noticed stories of
Chinese-European families pop up in the television series Who Do You Think You
Are?
In 2018, there was the story of actor John Jarratt’s 2 x great grandparents,
Martha Hamilton and Ah Yot, who lived at a little place called Jembaicumbene on
the Braidwood goldfields in New South Wales, and more recently, in 2021, there
was the story of musician Jeff Fatt’s 2 x great grandparents, Elizabeth Wright
and Lee Young, who lived at Ararat and Ballarat on the Victorian goldfields.
When I first began researching Chinese-European couples back in the late 1990s,
the most common question I was asked about my work was ‘why?’ In particular,
‘why did these white women choose Chinese partners? – the implication being a
slightly different question, I think, and that was ‘Wasn’t there anyone better
(i.e. white) for them to marry?’
The decisions made by mixed-race couples in their choice of partner can seem
extraordinary for their time, but they may in fact have been very simple ones to
make, based around love, sexual attraction, the desire for companionship, or due
to circumstance, convenience, or economics.
Despite some failings in historical accuracy, one of the things I like most
about seeing Chinese-European relationships portrayed in contemporary fiction is
the way that fiction can present historical possibilities that, it seems, are
still often hard for many of us to imagine.
Once you start looking for it, though, evidence of Chinese-European couples and
families is abundant and, with the digitisation of more and more historical
materials, that evidence is increasingly easy to find and access. The historical
newspapers available through Trove, from the National Library, are a
particularly rich source for Chinese Australian family history, and one that I
didn’t have when I started my research way back when!
Here, for instance, is a graph of references to the term ‘half-caste Chinese’ in
the digitised newspapers in Trove for the period from 1860 to 1920, created
using a nifty app called QueryPic, created by digital historian Tim Sherratt.
The articles that come up through this search range from invectives in major
city newspapers about opium and smallpox and ‘the Chinese Question’, to reports
in small country newspapers on all manner of moments in the everyday lives of
Chinese Australian families and individuals.
As a historian, I’m lucky that race was mentioned in such articles, as it marks
these articles as immediately of interest to me. But, of course, personal names
can also be traced through time in the newspapers, in a way that was near
impossible before.
Trove, and its New Zealand counterpart Papers Past, give us the ability to
easily uncover small stories of ordinary lives and this helps break through a
barrier in thinking about the prevalence and place of Chinese-European couples
and families in colonial Australasia.
Our understanding of the history of Chinese Australian families has come a long
way in the past twenty-five years.
When I started my research in 1998, the available historical literature said
little that was of help to me about Chinese Australian family life, particularly
in understanding these families within the context of Chinese migration.
Most histories overlooked the presence of migrant Chinese women and their
daughters in colonial and post-Federation Australasia, and those few that
discussed Chinese-European families in any detail framed their lives as stories
of ‘pioneers’ or of ‘assimilation – unusual exceptions to the dominant story of
the sojourning gold-seeker living a lonely life, working to make his fortune and
return home to China.
Many Chinese Australian family histories are easily slotted into these sorts of
narratives, and it can make sense to tell them in this way – particularly for
descendants, community activists, and historians of many kinds struggling to
assert Chinese people into a national story that still remains one predominantly
about white people. They are keen to stress how people of Chinese heritage,
whether migrant or Australian born, have contributed to the building of this
nation particularly through agriculture, mining, and business.
However, when I started looking closely into the lives of Chinese-European
couples and their children, the pioneer or assimilationist frameworks did not
fit so well with evidence I found about the mixing of language and cultural
traditions within the home, and about the ongoing connections mixed families
fostered and maintained with local Chinese communities and with China itself.
For example, the Australian-born mixed-race daughters of Chinese settlers
commonly married migrant Chinese men, sometimes men as old as their own fathers,
creating networks of kinship ties and often drawing young Australian-born women
towards their Chinese, rather than European, heritage.
This picture, for example, shows Emma Lee Young with her husband, the Rev.
Joseph Tear Tack, and four of their children – Elizabeth, Joseph, Laura and
Josiah, who born between 1886 and 1892. As featured in Who Do You Think You
Are?, Emma was Purple Wiggle Jeff Fatt’s great-grandmother.
She was born in Ararat, Victoria, in 1865, and at the age of 20 married
China-born Joseph Tear Tack, who was about 17 years her senior. With Joseph’s
church work, the family moved from Ararat in Victoria to the Inverell district
in New South Wales, and then to Darwin and eventually to Cairns.
Numbers of Chinese-European children were taken or sent to China to help them to
‘become Chinese’ by receiving a Chinese education and/or being raised within
their extended Chinese families.
White wives, too, went to China, where some encountered for the first time the
unhappy reality that they were not their husband’s only wife – for according to
Chinese custom, men were able to take multiple wives and concubines. Other white
wives said goodbye to children and husbands who left for China and never
returned.
These practices didn’t fit neatly with the idea that Chinese men who formed
relationships with white women, who fathered mixed-race children, were simply
assimilating, turning their backs on their own ancestry and heritage and
abandoning an identity as Chinese for themselves and their children – even when
it might have seemed on the surface that that’s what they were doing.
Quong Tart, the well-known Sydney tea merchant, shown here with his wife
Margaret and their three oldest children in Hong Kong in 1894, is an interesting
example of this.
We know Quong Tart best as the dapper businessman and philanthropist, anti-opium
campaigner and friend to Sydney’s elite (and coincidentally, my
great-grandfather, Harry Bagnall), the beloved husband of Lancashire-born
Margaret (née Scarlett) and father to a brood of handsome children who were
educated at some of Sydney’s finest private schools.
Yet Quong Tart’s business interests were reliant on ongoing contacts with Hong
Kong and China, and it seems he remained close to his family, returning to China
three times, including in 1894 to introduce his young family to his elderly
mother. Research by Chinese historian, Mei Weiqiang, and information gathered
within the family, also suggests that Quong Tart was married by proxy, in
absentia, to a Chinese woman and that one, perhaps, two sons were adopted to
carry on his name in his hometown in Toishan.
How to reconcile all this in a man known as the ultimate ‘assimilated’ Chinese?
An article by US historian Adam McKeown, published in 1999 (nearly 25 years ago
now!), on ‘Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion‘, suggested to
me that there was an alternative way of viewing these relationships, an
alternative explanation for why Chinese men ‘outmarried’ (that is, partnered
with non-Chinese women), and a real way of understanding these families within
the context of Chinese migration.
McKeown was among a number of scholars who have outlined the family strategies
used by Cantonese in the sending districts of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong
province in southern China, from where most nineteenth-century Chinese migration
took place.
Central to the Cantonese family was the patriline, the ongoing line of descent
from father to son, father to son.
Cantonese families in the sending districts of the Pearl River Delta undertook
economic strategies to ensure their survival and prosperity – such as
establishing sons in different occupations or sending them to different overseas
locations, such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. They
also developed strategies to ensure the continuation of the family line when
more usual patterns of family formation were not possible due to the often long
absences of men overseas.
Most common was the ‘split’ family, where a man lived overseas for shorter or
longer periods, while his wife remained at home in his ancestral village, often
living with her in-laws or other members of her husband’s family. When a man had
left unmarried and was not easily able to return, he could be married by proxy
in absentia to a woman who then took up residence in her parents-in-law’s home.
Sons could be adopted to ensure the patriline continued, even if husband and
wife never met due to his continued residence overseas.
Non-Chinese women were drawn into this when they formed relationships with
Chinese men – and it was not uncommon for Chinese men to already have a wife,
and sometimes children, at home in China when they formed relationships
overseas.
Chinese families could be opposed to men taking foreign wives, out of fear that
his interests and energies would be redirected away from the ancestral home and
his filial obligations there. (In the early decades of the twentieth century,
there were also warnings by Chinese community leaders overseas against
relationships with non-Chinese women, fearing that patriotic sentiments towards
a new China might dissipate).
But children born to non-Chinese women in places like Australia and New Zealand,
Hawaii, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica and Peru still counted as
‘Chinese’ and as part of their Chinese families. Their paternity (biological or
adoptive), not their maternity, mattered. The evidence for this is in the number
of children of mixed race who went to China, for a period of education or more
permanently, a practice that was happening in the Australian colonies from early
as the late 1850s.
The National Archives of Australia holds thousands of documents that trace the
journeys of young Australians of Chinese and part-Chinese heritage to China and
back over the early decades of the twentieth century – after the introduction of
the federal Immigration Restriction Act in 1901. Included among those who went
to China were a small number of children of mixed Chinese-Aboriginal heritage,
as well as a few white stepchildren of Chinese men.
You might, for instance, have heard of Tasmanian Senator Thomas Bakhap – the son
of Margaret Hogan and stepson of Gee Bak Hap of Lottah in north-eastern
Tasmania. There is debate about whether Thomas Bakhap had Chinese heritage or
not, but he became fluent in Cantonese and, according to Adrienne Petty, ‘had
spent several years in China, some as a young child and later in his early
teens’ (‘Deconstructing the Chinese Sojourner: Case Studies of Early Chinese
Migrants to Tasmania’, PhD thesis, UTAS, 2009, p. 124).
Before I conclude, I’d like to share one more family story, that of the Gan
family, pictured here in Melbourne in 1917. There is Edward Chung Ah Gan,
usually known as ‘Teddy Ah Gan’, who was naturalised as a British subject in
Tasmania in 1891, his Victorian-born wife, Annie (née Harris), and their four
children – Dorothy, George, Ruby Elizabeth and Frederick.
The family left Australia for Hong Kong in 1917, where Teddy found work at the
Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company, and Annie was busy with her growing family –
she gave birth to three more children in Hong Kong. In 1925 and again in 1933,
the family attempted to return to Australia, but this request was denied due to
Teddy’s extended absence from the Commonwealth, and there is nothing on file to
indicate that they ever did come home.
Placing the history of Chinese-European families within a transnational
framework, like that suggested by McKeown’s ‘transnational overseas Chinese
family’, allows us to see the parts of the story that took place beyond
Australian shores.
Chinese migration to Australia wasn’t a simple one-way trip – economic, cultural
and legal factors meant that Australian Chinese were highly mobile, travelling
back and forth between Australia and China, and between colonies and states,
too. The formation of families followed a similar path, and limiting our
definition of ‘family life’ to the ‘geographically localized nuclear family’ (to
use McKeown’s phrase, p. 100) ignores a range of experiences and choices made in
the process of migration, sojourning and settlement.
So, to conclude let’s go back to those historical novels, where we can also see
aspects of the transnational overseas Chinese family:
* Lady detective Phryne Fisher sees her lover Lin Chung married to a young
Chinese woman, Camellia, in an arrangement that benefits both Chinese
families, if not themselves.
* In As the Earth Turns Silver, Katherine McKechnie’s Chinese lover has a wife
and child in China, while his brother works for years to be able to bring his
wife to live in New Zealand too.
* In The Lambing Flat, Ella has to confront Lok’s yearning for his homeland and
his ultimate decision to return home. He asks her to go too, and some of my
favourite passages in the book describe Ella’s feelings as she contemplates
whether she could leave her home and go with him. In the end, though, she
doesn’t.
What these imagined life stories suggest, and other real life histories
demonstrate, is that there is not just one neat framework into which we can
place the history of Chinese-European families in Australasia, and beyond that
the history of Chinese Australian families. This history is messy and complex
and sometimes hard to untangle – but for me, this messiness and complexity is
also what makes it so fascinating.
5
* History
* Marriage
* Talks
* Tasmania
* Anglo-Chinese
* families
* family history
* intermarriage
* New South Wales
* overseas Chinese family
* Tasmania
* White Australia Policy
* women
31 December 2023
2023 IN REVIEW
My life over the past 18 months has been radically shaped by the effects of long
COVID.
At my very low-key lunch celebration of the publication of ‘Subjects and
Aliens’, Hobart, 21 September 2023
I never fully recovered following my initial COVID-19 infection in July 2022,
which was followed by two subsequent viral infections in August and September
2022, and I reduced my work hours in early 2023 me to help me ‘cope’ with my
ongoing fatigue. I had COVID-19 a second time in April this year and, after the
acute infection passed, my long COVID symptoms worsened, eventually resulting in
a period of severe ill-health in late August which resulted in 6 weeks off work.
During this time off, I came to understand more about the nature of my illness
better, including by reading The Long Covid Handbook, by Gez Medinger and Danny
Altmann. I also have found science journalist Ed Yong’s writing on long COVID to
be some of the best there is, if you want to understand more about it all,
including the struggles ‘long haulers’ like me face.
Reflecting on what led me to this severe long COVID crash, I came to understand
how the demands of academic life were not allowing me the time and space to
begin to feel well again. With the support of my GP, I have now reduced my work
hours to four mornings per week, and I have become very strict in policing my
boundaries. This means that many, many things that I would like to be doing have
necessarily been put aside – perhaps for now, perhaps forever. One of those
things is my book on Chinese naturalisation, which at present I just don’t have
the physical or mental capacity to contemplate. I am also stepping back from my
role as coordinator of the Family History program at UTAS in 2024.
My long COVID symptoms include fatigue, post-exertional malaise (PEM), cognitive
dysfunction (‘brain fog’, including issues with memory, word recall and verbal
processing), orthostatic intolerance (including inability to stand for more than
a few minutes and lightheadedness), exercise intolerance, insomnia, muscle aches
and weakness, autonomic dysfunction, tinnitus, and more. Some days are better
than others, but my symptoms are always worse when I do not pace myself and get
sufficient rest, or when I am even remotely stressed. Alongside these physical
symptoms have come a whole gamut of emotions – particularly grief and guilt
about all the things I cannot do, but a lot of sadness, anger, frustration and
boredom, too.
While my symptoms are not as bad as many with long COVID, and I’m not currently
bedbound or housebound, my world has now shrunk very small. And every day is a
tiresome balancing act of things that must be done, things that I’d like to do,
and things that my body can cope with.
So, with all that said, I look at the list that follows with some amazement –
how have I have managed to do all of this? (See my point above re the punishing
demands of academic life.) Next year will necessarily be different, and I’m
quite looking forward to that.
THINGS I’VE DONE IN 2023
Course coordination of the UTAS Diploma of Family History and the Undergraduate
Certificate in Family History, including course administration, marketing,
student recruitment, and outreach work, such as:
* Judge, Lilian Watson Family History Award, Tasmanian Family History Society
* Judge, UTAS Society of Australian Genealogists Scholarship (for study in the
Diploma of Family History)
* Judge, UTAS Genealogical Society of Victoria Scholarship (for study in the
Diploma of Family History)
* UTAS Family History Referencing Guide
* UTAS Family History Newsletter, distributed to UTAS Family History students
monthly
* Hosting visit by Professor Melanie Méthot (University of Alberta), February
2023
* Radio interview with Mel Bush, about studying Family History at UTAS, ABC
Breakfast (Hobart, 30 June 2023
Unit coordination and tutoring in HAA108 Migrant Families and HAA003
Introduction to Family History
Preparation and delivery of learning materials (‘lectures’) for 5 weeks of
HTA206 Australian History in a Global Context
Preparation of my new staff profile (still a work in progress):
https://discover.utas.edu.au/Kate.Bagnall
Everyday Heritage Linkage project, including research administration, team
meetings, our conference and workshops in Sydney in July, and research and
planning for publications to come
PhD supervision, including primary supervision of Elizabeth Walsh at UTAS, and
external supervision of Emma Bellino (University of Wollongong)
Peer review for ARC Discovery Projects Scheme, Manchester University Press (book
proposal), International Journal of Heritage Studies (article)
THINGS I HAVEN’T DONE IN 2023
I declined a whole heap of invitations, including to review a book manuscript
(HKU Press), journal articles (Ethnic and Racial Studies; Race and Social
Problems; History Australia) and ARC Discovery Projects Scheme applications;
media interviews and to be interviewed for a PhD project; to examine
postgraduate theses (MRes at Macquarie University, PhD at James Cook
University); to present my work at conferences and give public talks; and to
contribute to publications (including book review for History Australia; book
review for Asian Studies Review).
RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
‘Cartoonlets’ from ‘The Bulletin’, 20 June 1896, p 7, including one (bottom
left) that refers to the use of identification photography in Chinese
immigration administration in New Zealand. This was the subject of Sophie
Couchman and my 2023 article in ‘Australian Historical Studies’.
Kate Bagnall and Peter Prince (eds), Subjects and Aliens: Histories of
Nationality, Law and Belonging in Australia and New Zealand, ANU Press,
Canberra, 2023, http://doi.org/10.22459/SA.2023.
Peter Prince and Kate Bagnall, ‘Australia’s “alien races” meet New Zealand’s
“race aliens”’, in Kate Bagnall and Peter Prince (eds), Subjects and Aliens:
Histories of Nationality, Law and Belonging in Australia and New Zealand, ANU
Press, Canberra, 2023,
https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n11134/pdf/ch01.pdf.
Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall, ‘Identification photography and the
surveillance of Chinese mobility in Colonial Australasia’, Australian Historical
Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 299–329,
https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2022.2162094.
BLOG POSTS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
2023 in review, 31 December 2023
Family history research worksheets, 12 June 2023
Maisie Fook: ‘A Chinese, born and living in White Australia’, 26 May 2023
A naturalized Chinese Tasmanian: Ah One from Hobart, 20 February 2023
Remembering Coohey Fue, 3 January 2023 (Everyday Heritage)
‘Studying Family History at the University of Tasmania’, The Ancestral Searcher
(Family History ACT), vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 64–66
TALKS
‘Chinese Australian Family History Research’, Chinese Australian Research
Interest Group, Society of Australian Genealogists, 25 March 2023, via Zoom
‘Chinese Australian Family History Research’, Members’ Meeting, Family History
ACT, 4 July 2023, via Zoom
‘Uncovering the stories of Chinese Australian families‘, National Family History
Month 2023, Libraries Tasmania (Hobart), 8 August 2023
REVIEW OF MY WORK
Liew, Zhen Hao, ‘Julia T. Martínez, Kate Bagnall, eds. Locating Chinese Women:
Historical Mobility between China and Australia. Crossing Seas. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2021. viii + 277 pp. $72.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-988-8528-61-5′, H-Migration, November 2023,
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58708.
CITATIONS TO MY WORK
Arnold, Taylor and Lauren Tilton, Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of
Digital Images, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2023,
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5674/Distant-ViewingComputational-Exploration-of.
Bellanta, Melissa and Lorinda Cramer, ‘The comfort of things in White Australia:
Male immigrants, race and the three-piece suit, c.1901–39′, Australian
Historical Studies, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2022.2161587.
Berthiot, Marine, ‘Representations of girlhood trauma in Aotearoa, New Zealand
literature written by women’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2023,
https://hdl.handle.net/1842/39741.
Byrne, Denis, Ien Ang, and Phillip Mar (eds), Heritage and History in the
China-Australia Migration Corridor, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2023
– my work is cited in the following chapters:
Ang, Ien and Denis Byrne, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–24
Williams, Michael, ‘Villages of the Fragrant Hills’, pp. 21–51
Byrne, Denis, ‘A heritage of lifelines in the migration corridor’, pp. 52–74
Ang, Ien, ‘(Un)making transnational identities: migration and Chineseness’, pp.
75–105
Wong, Alexandra, ‘Diaspora tourism and homeland travel’, pp. 106–132
Byrne, Denis, ‘Making heritage in the migration corridor’, pp. 240–262.
Cotton, James, ‘Chungking follies: The supporting case of the Chungking
Legation, 1941–42’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol.
109, part 2, December 2023, pp. 187–209.
Cutter, Nat, Rachel Fensham and Tyne Daile Sumner, ‘The slipperiness of name:
Biography and gender in Australian cultural databases’, Gender &
History, 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12699.
Indelicato, Maria Elena Indelicato, ‘Neither black nor white: Colonial myths,
Irish women, and Chinese men’s quest for respectability, Interventions, vol. 25,
no. 4, 2023, pp. 448–467, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099946.
Jones, Mike and Alana Piper, ‘Digital History: A state of the field review
essay’, Australian Historical Studies, 2023, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2267586.
Kong, Vivian, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45,
Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Marston-Pattison, Aaron, ‘Un-Australian? White Australia’s visions of identity
and the racialisation of the Pacific War’, Australian Historical Studies, 2023,
pp. 1–19.
Merrell, L. Y, Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario during
the Long Nineteenth Century, PhD thesis, Indiana University, 2023. (Retrieved
from ProQuest:
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/settler-colonial-fatherhood-new-south-wales/docview/2846778547/se-2).
Rerceretnam, Marc Sebastian, ‘Quong Tart’s neighbours: Cycling around the
boundaries of exclusion and racism, 1880s-1900s’, Journal of the Royal
Australian Historical Society, vol. 109, part 2, December 2023, pp. 141–164.
Rizvi, Fazal, ‘China-Australia tensions and international higher education’,
Beijing International Review of Education, vol. 4, no. 4, 2023, pp. 610–628,
https://doi.org/10.1163/25902539-04040007.
Simmonds, Alecia, Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law, La Trobe
University Press in conjunction with Black Inc., Melbourne, 2023.
Smith, Evan, ‘The Bureaucratic Limits of a National Security Agenda: The Winding
Road of Alien Registration in Interwar Australia’, Australian Historical
Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 2023, pp. 24–43,
https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2022.2125544.
Tarchi, Andrea, Building the Intimate Boundaries of the Nation: The Regulation
of Mixed Intimacies in Colonial Libya and the Construction of Italian Whiteness
(1911–1942), PhD thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2023,
https://doi.org/10.5463/thesis.93.
Tao, Yu, Benjamin Smith, Petra Mosmann, Kaylene Poon, and Betty Walker,
‘Searching for Moon Chow: A joint journey’, Life Writing, vol. 20, no. 1, 2023,
pp. 217–236.
Thatcher, Louise, ‘Maritime workers, desertion, racism, and labour mobility in
early 20th-century Australia’, Australian Studies Journal / Zeitschrift für
Australienstudien, vol. 37, 2023, pp.
13–29, https://doi.org/10.35515/zfa/asj.37/2023.02.
Xiong, Xiao, Haunting in Chinese-Australian Writing, Springer Nature Singapore,
Germany, 2023.
Zhang, Jiasheng and Baoqi Lin, ‘Images of Chinese in Australian nationalist
literature’, Neohelicon, 2023, pp. 1–16.
8
* History
* Year in review
* 2023
* Tasmania
* year in review
12 June 2023
FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH WORKSHEETS
Family history charts and worksheets can help you plan and organise your
research process, and record and visualise the information you uncover about
your ancestors. They can be used instead of, or alongside, genealogy software or
websites to document your research. Charts and worksheets are particularly
useful to use as a ‘working copy’, where you add information as you go along.
I developed the charts and worksheets below to use in my family history
teaching. You can download them in both Word or PDF format. They are provided
with a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, so you can share and adapt them as you like.
TO RECORD INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ANCESTORS
* Ancestor chart – for recording your direct ancestors
* Ancestor chart (Word)
* Ancestor chart (PDF)
* Family group record – for recording information about a couple and their
children
* Family group record (Word)
* Family group record (PDF)
* Biographical outline (or timeline) – for recording events in an ancestor’s
life
* Biographical outline (Word)
* Biographical outline (PDF)
* Family member information sheet – for recording research on living relatives
or 20th-century ancestors
* Family member information sheet (Word)
* Family member information sheet (PDF)
TO PLAN AND KEEP TRACK OF YOUR RESEARCH
* Family history research plan – for working our what you want to know and how
you’re going to find it
* Family history research plan (Word)
* Family history research plan (PDF)
* Note-taking form – for taking notes from archives, books and other sources
* Note-taking form (Word)
* Note-taking form (PDF)
* Research log – for keeping track of sources you look at
* Research log (Word)
* Research log (PDF)
* Correspondence log – for keeping track of research requests and people you
contact
* Correspondence log (Word)
* Correspondence log (PDF)
* Research repository checklist – for recording information about an archive,
library or museum you plan to visit
* Research repository checklist (Word)
* Research repository checklist (PDF)
3
* Research help
* Resources
* family history
* family history charts
* family history forms
* family history worksheets
* free resources
* genealogy
* Resources
26 May 2023
MAISIE FOOK: ‘A CHINESE, BORN AND LIVING IN WHITE AUSTRALIA’
In 1968 and 1969, Maisie Fook from Sydney had three ‘reader’s stories’ published
in Australia’s best-read women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly. The
first of these told the story of her recent adoption of two Korean orphans, the
second recounted the story of her obstetrician brother Ted’s rise from ‘grocer
boy to star doctor’, while the third was a reflection on what it was like to be
‘a Chinese, born and living in White Australia’.
Maisie Fook, 1968. Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 July 1968,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article46443217
Maisie Fook was born in Tenterfield in northern New South Wales in 1924, the
ninth of eleven children of Cecilia (Cissie) Wong See and Harry Gee Hon. As she
noted in her story, Maisie had an ‘Australian’ childhood, growing up in a
country town where there were no other Chinese children. ‘At school I lived
Australian, spoke Australian, thought Australian, and after the initial contact
was accepted as Australian by Australians,’ she wrote.
But life at home was different. Her Cantonese father, ‘a proud Chinese’, had
migrated to New South Wales as a young man, ‘determined to improve his lot and
that of his impoverished relatives’. Her mother, Cissie, born in Sydney in 1887,
was the daughter of Cantonese migrants, Ah Sam (mother) and Wong See (father),
and had married Harry Gee Hon in Shekki in 1905. Maisie recalled that as a child
at home in Tenterfield her family enjoyed Chinese food eaten with chopsticks,
her parents ‘spoke Chinese frequently to each other’, and her father instilled
in her ‘his idea of the superiority of the Chinese race’.
Although Maisie’s story was framed as an exploration of her identity as Chinese
and Australian, a third element – her Christian faith – was also central to the
story. Maisie told of her involvement with a Chinese church, where the
congregation was mainly ‘Chinese Chinese (born in China)’, and of the
communication difficulties she had. ‘I could understand neither their Chinese
nor their Chinese-accented English. They could understand my English, but my
attempts at Chinese were hilarious.’
By contrast, she told of spending time with a group of ‘Christian Australians’,
women she had never met before but in whose company she ‘felt suddenly “at
home”‘. It was through such a lens of language and religion that Maisie also
mentioned her mother and maternal grandmother, writing:
> Eighty years ago my mother was born in Sydney. Her mother was so Chinese and
> so heathen that she conducted a joss house. My mother speaks Chinese and
> English fluently, and has a remarkable understanding of heathenism, but she
> has been a Christian for 50 years.
As mother to a young and growing family in rural Glen Innes, Cecilia Gee Hon had
become interested in the teachings of the Seventh-day Adventist Church through
the kindness and friendship of an Adventist neighbour. By the time the family
moved to Tenterfield in the early 1920s, Cecilia was a baptised member of the
church.
In time, her husband, Harry, and her nine surviving children also became
Adventists, and from the late 1930s they closed the family store, Sun Sun & Co.,
on the usually busy trading day of Saturday to observe the Adventist Sabbath.
Maisie continued her mother’s Christian outreach through her work with the
Chinese Adventist Church in Strathfield in Sydney, where she and husband Denis
Fook were foundation members, and through the charity Asian Aid, which she
founded in the early 1960s. One of Maisie’s outreach activities at the Chinese
Church was its weekly ‘Creative Activities’, held on Tuesday morning – my mother
taught crochet there for many, many years and I can still taste the vegetarian
fried wontons Mum would bring home with her!
In her Women’s Weekly story Maisie Fook concluded that ‘Surely, I am Chinese,
but, just as surely, I am also Australian’.
In the lives of Maisie, her mother, Cecilia Gee Hon, and her grandmother, Ah
Sam, we see three generations whose lives characterise the history of Chinese
Australian women over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
From the mid-1800s, Cantonese women like Ah Sam travelled out from the Pearl
River Delta counties in Guangdong through Hong Kong to Australia, usually
following paths forged by fathers or husbands. Some of these women, and those
born overseas like Cecilia Gee Hon and her daughters, also returned to Hong
Kong, Shanghai and the Cantonese home villages. Other women were mobile beyond
Australia and China, taking part in the multi-sited networks and circulations of
Cantonese across and around the Pacific and of British subjects around the
Empire.
For more of their stories, see Kate Bagnall and Julia Martínez (eds), Locating
Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia, Hong Kong
University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1wd02mp.
SOURCES
John Y. Chan, Amazing Stories From My Two Worlds, Palmer Higgs Pty Ltd, 2011
[preview available in Google Books].
Jan Fook, ‘Maisie Fook (1924–2002)’, Adventism in China [website],
https://www.adventisminchina.org/individuals/3-lay-persons/fookmasie. [View PDF
of article]
Maisie Fook, ‘From a land of many orphans’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 July
1968, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article46443217.
Maisie Fook, ‘From grocer boy to star doctor’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 27
November 1968, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48080574.
Maisie Fook, ‘What is is like to be… a Chinese, born and living in White
Australia?’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 February 1969, p. 42,
http://nla.gov.au/nla-news-article51384523.
John Hammond, ‘Asian Aid’, Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists [website],
2022, https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=4JBZ.
Richard A. Schaefer, ‘Hon, Edward Harry Gee (1917–2006)’, Encyclopedia of
Seventh-day Adventists, 2020,
https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=D9I2.
Janis Wilton, ‘HON, Harry Gee’, Different Sights – Immigrants in New England
[database],
https://hfrc.une.edu.au/heritagefutures/neimmigrants/main.php?area=ppl&ID=P367&form=&RecNo=2&ImgNo=&IDFlg=1&fileLetter=P.
[View PDF of database entry]
Jill Wong, ‘The Asian Aid miracle’, Thornleigh Church Online Magazine, 44,
December 2011–January 2012,
http://www.thornleighadventist.org.au/onlinemag/edition_44/asian_aid_miracle.htm.
[View PDF of article]
New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, 2005/180624, birth
registration of Cissie Wong See, Sydney, 26 March 1887.
There are also various records in the National Archives of Australia (Sydney)
about the Wong See and Gee Hon families.
1
* History
* New South Wales
* philanthropy
* Seventh-day Adventist
* White Australia Policy
* women
20 February 2023
A NATURALIZED CHINESE TASMANIAN: AH ONE FROM HOBART
While visiting Canberra in January 2021, I looked (again) at a collection of
Tasmanian naturalization certificates held in the National Archives of Australia
in series A804. Here’s one of the stories found in these records – which I
tweeted at the time but have reproduced here for posterity.
Let’s have a look at one of the Tasmanian naturalization certificates from NAA:
A804 to see what we can find out. This one caught my eye because it was
witnessed by Andrew Inglis-Clark, and it has no annotations related to travel
(NAA: A804, 706).
The certificate was issued to Ah One, a gardener from Hobart, on 21 September
1897. He was 38 years old, a native of Canton in the Empire of China, and had
lived in Tasmania for seven years. He had applied for naturalization on 17
September 1897.
On the back of the certificate we can see that Ah One swore the required oath on
24 September 1897, before a Commissioner of the Supreme Court of Tasmania, and
this was ‘enrolled and recorded’ the same day by the Supreme Court Registrar
(No. 706, Bk 5, page 247).
Tasmanian Archives holds colonial naturalization records for Tasmania, so more
information about Ah One’s application can be found there – using both the
Tasmanian Names Index and the information provided on the certificate.
A search of the Tasmanian Names Index led to Ah One’s naturalization application
(memorial) and correspondence about it (CSD22/1/3/56 pp 216–218,
https://stors.tas.gov.au/CSD22-1-3-56$init=CSD22-1-3-56-P216).
The memorial gives more information about Ah One: he was born at Canton on 1
February 1859; he arrived at Hobart on the Southern Cross in 1890; he could sign
his name in English; and his application was endorsed by JG Davies, JP and Mayor
of Hobart.
The accompanying correspondence shows that Ah One was one of nine Hobart
gardeners who applied for naturalization at the same time through Tinning &
Propsting Solicitors, all endorsed by the Mayor of Hobart.
The nine gardeners were: Ah Doo, Ah Look, Ah Now, Ah One, Ah Koon, Hie Mane, Kie
Sung, Sing Gin, and Sing None.
The approval process took four days and issuing their naturalization
certificates cost the applicants 2s 6d each.
On the back of Ah One’s naturalization certificate in NAA: A804 is the
annotation ‘No. 706, Bk 5, page 247’ – which refers to Tasmanian Supreme Court
series SC415, which contains copies of denization and naturalization
certificates. A copy of Ah One’s certificate is found on pp. 247–8 of Book 5
(SC415/1/5, https://stors.tas.gov.au/SC415-1-5-P247).
Under s 7 of the Aliens Act 1861 (Tas), a copy of each naturalization
certificate had to ‘be enrolled for safe custody as of record in the Supreme
Court’.
Almost 600 Chinese people were naturalised in Tasmania up to December 1903.
Tasmania stopped naturalizing Chinese people after the new Commonwealth
Naturalization Act 1903 came into force from 1 January 1904. By contrast, New
South Wales and Victoria stopped naturalizing Chinese in the mid-1880s.
4
* Archives
* Chinese naturalisation
* Everyday Heritage
* History
* Tasmania
* Chinese in Tasmania
* citizenship
* Everyday Heritage
* National Archives of Australia
* naturalisation
* naturalisation certificates
* naturalization
* Tasmania
* Tasmanian Archives
3 January 2023
REMEMBERING COOHEY FUE
CONTENT WARNING: This blog post mentions suicide.
Coohey Fue (c. 1875–1920) worked as a market gardener in Devonport in northern
Tasmania. He died by suicide on 10 April 1920 (Advocate, 12 April, p. 2;
Tasmanian Archives SC195/1/86 Inquest 14257) and was buried by his compatriots
in the Latrobe General Cemetery on 12 April (Advocate, 12 April 1920, p. 2; 13
April 1920, p. 2). Coohey Fue was said to have a wife and three or four children
in China at the time of his death.
Coohey Fue’s life and passing are connected to two white marble monuments in the
Latrobe General Cemetery – but as these memorials only have inscriptions in
Chinese there is nothing obviously linking them to ‘Coohey Fue’.
The two white marble monuments to Coohey Fue in the Latrobe General Cemetery,
Latrobe (near Devonport), Tasmania (Photo by Kate Bagnall, December 2022)
THE MONUMENTS
The two monuments appear to have been made from the same materials at the same
time, although one is in somewhat poorer condition than the other. The text on
them differs only in the deceased’s name, and I believe they were both erected
following the death of the man known in English as Coohey Fue.
Searching the Chinese-language newspapers in Trove brings up a few articles that
mention the names given on the monuments:
* 林舉富 (Lam Kui Fu): ‘美利濱中華公會捐賑廣東水災彙録’, Tung Wah Times, 21 August 1915, p. 8,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226737771 [list of Melbourne donors to
Guangdong flood relief; includes 林舉富 and another man who is presumably a
brother/cousin 林舉羨]
* 林舉章 (Lam Kui Cheung):
* ‘他省發起維持禁例會簡章’‘, Chinese Republic News, 5 October 1918, p. 7,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226019302 [mentions 林舉章 and another man
who is presumably a brother/cousin 林舉豪]
* ‘他省華僑维持禁會’, Chinese Australian Herald, 30 November 1918, p. 2,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168567884 [mentions 林舉章 and the same man
as the article above 林舉豪]
* ‘他省華僑禁會’, Chinese Republic News, 30 November 1918, p. 6,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226020240 [mentions 林舉章 and the same man
as the article above 林舉豪]
* ‘他士免耶省華僑維持禁例會紀事’, Tung Wah Times, 7 December 1918, p. 6,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227013328 [mentions 林舉章 and the same man
as the article above 林舉豪].
The text on the monuments includes a number of Chinese cultural terms that are
difficult to translate directly into English, including: 公 (Cantonese: gūng,
honorific, for a male person), 府君 (Cantonese: fú gwān, honorific, for a person
who has died), 庚申 (Cantonese: gāng sān, one of the 60-year cycle/stem-branch
cycle).
TAMIOT (the Tombstone and Memorial Inscriptions of Tasmania database) provides
the following details about the monuments:
* LAM Kui Cheung. Native of: Guangdong Taishun Chung Fa Tsui Village. Monument
erected in 1920 – LATROBE CEMETERY, GENERAL SECTION – LATROBE – DEVONPORT –
LT04/0865
* LAM Kui Fu. Native of: Guangdong Taishun Chung Fa Tsui Village. Monument
erected in 1920 – LATROBE CEMETERY, GENERAL SECTION – LATROBE – DEVONPORT –
LT04/0866
LAM KUI CHEUNG 林舉章
> 廣東台山縣松花咀村
> 民國特贈舉章林公府君坟墓
> 192千歲次庚申年吉月吉日立
>
> This headstone is in memory of Kui Cheung Lam, of Chung Fa Tsui, Toishan,
> Kwangtung.
>
> Erected on a lucky day and a lucky month, 1920, Gang San Year, during the era
> of the Republic of China.
Monument for Lam Kui Cheung, Latrobe General Cemetery, Tasmania (Photo by Kate
Bagnall, December 2022)
LAM KUI FU 林舉富
> 廣東台山縣松花咀村
> 民國特贈舉富林公府君坟墓
> 192千歲次庚申年吉月吉日立
>
> This headstone is in memory of Kui Fu Lam, of Chung Fa Tsui, Toishan,
> Kwangtung.
>
> Erected on a lucky day and a lucky month, 1920, Gang San Year, during the era
> of the Republic of China.
Monument for Lam Kui Fu, Latrobe General Cemetery, Tasmania (Photo by Kate
Bagnall, December 2022)
COOHEY FUE’S ANCESTRAL VILLAGE
Coohey Fue’s family name was Lam (林) and he came from Chung Fa Tsui, a Lam
village in Toishan, Kwangtung, China. Chung Fa Tsui (or Songhuaju in Mandarin)
is about 25 kilometres south-west of the county capital of Taicheng 台城 and about
the same distance to the north-west of the coastal town of Guanghai 廣海.
廣東省 / Kwangtung / Guangdong (province)
台山縣 / Toishan / Taishan (county)
新安鄉 / Sun On / Xin’an (village)
松花咀村 / Chung Fa Tsui / Songhuaju (hamlet)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Lyn Phillips, and Kelli Schultz, who alerted me to these
two Chinese monuments in the Latrobe General Cemetery. Kelli pointed me to a
query from Lyn about the memorials that Lyn posted on the ‘Tasmanians Finding
their Past – Genealogy Group’ on Facebook on 21 October 2022. I used Lyn’s
photographs to transcribe and translate the text; my thanks to Mei-fen Kuo
(Macquarie University) and my UTAS colleague Lucy Li (and her father) for their
assistance in teasing out the nuances of the text’s meaning. I’d also like to
acknowledge that the information above from TAMIOT was posted by Suzanne Griffin
in response to Lyn’s post to the Tasmanians Finding their Past Facebook group.
In October 2022 I did some initial digging in Trove and the Tasmanian Names
Index to identify who Lam Kui Cheung / Lam Kui Fu might be, and I was able to
stop off in Latrobe just before Christmas to photograph the headstones for
myself.
2
* History
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* cemeteries
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ABOUT THIS BLOG
This is Kate Bagnall’s blog. I mostly write about my research into Chinese
Australasian history and heritage.
I’m interested in: legal histories of nationality and citizenship; histories of
women, children and the family; Chinese communities in the Tasman world; the
White Australia policy and colonial Chinese restriction policies; transnational
lives and qiaoxiang ties; Chinese Australasian documentary heritage.
I am Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Tasmania in Hobart,
Australia. I also am Coordinator of the UTAS Family History program.
WHERE TO FIND ME
Mastodon: @baibi@hcommons.social
Twitter: @baibi
Email: kate.bagnall@gmail.com
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