July 2009

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.

Swings and roundabouts and SP11/6

Sunday, 26 July 2009 in Archives, People, Research help by Kate | No comments

This past Friday I escaped work and a very chilly Canberra to head north to do some research in the Sydney office of the National Archives. I had some particular things I hoped to discover from particular files, but I also decided to order up some records from series I hadn’t looked at before – or so I thought. Fossicking in one box, however, I found photocopy markers with my own name on them, so I guess I had seen them before, how long ago I’m not quite sure! For the most part I actually met with disappointment in the things I had set out to uncover from my visit, as files about Thomas Allen and Sing War were not about my Thomas Allen and my Sing War. Alas. But I had some nice unexpected discoveries, which are really the happiest kind.

Series SP11/6 is described in RecordSearch as being certificates of exemption from the dictation test, which indeed it mostly is. It contains material like what’s in SP115/1 – folders of documents of Chinese and other non-whites entering Australia, with each folder relating to a particular voyage. They date from 1926, 1927, 1928, one from 1912 and some from the mid-1940s. There are lots of CEDTs, with the occasional birth certitificate and passport thrown in for good measure.

I found a couple of new Anglo-Chinese families to add to my collection. There were documents (in Box 1) about Mrs TH Lee, nee Violette Dickson, and her two sons Tom Sam Lee and Thomas Henry Lee who were repatriated from China to Australia by the Commonwealth government in 1927. There was a passport for Tom Sam Lee and ‘emergency certificates’ for Violette and Thomas Henry, which were issued by the British Consul-General in Canton. Here’s a photo.

In Box 5, I came across an Australian passport for Henry Lee Young, who was born in Ballarat in 1862. A very early Anglo-Chinese baby!

The final thing that got me all excited was a book of the first certificates of domicile issued in New South Wales, dating from February to September 1902. It is in SP11/6, Box 3. ST84/1 has later certificates of domicile, but the ones found in SP11/6 are the very earliest! The certificates have photos and some of the men have beautiful plaits coiled up around their heads. Others show signs of just beginning to grow their hair long, no doubt in preparation for the trip home. I was pleased to find a photo of a friend of mine from other files in the archives, George Quin Sing. There are photos of all the Quin Sing family members who travelled in 1902: Mr Quin Sing, Mrs Quin Sing (who is delightfully Chinese in her dress, jewellery and hair-do), their son George and two daughters Eliza and Lizzie (who are delightfully done up in Australian fashions of the day). Here’s the book and Mr Quin Sing’s certificate.

California apologises to Chinese Americans

Wednesday, 22 July 2009 in History by Kate | No comments

On 17 July California passed a landmark bill of apology to the state’s Chinese community for racist legislation of the past. Read more from Ling Woo Liu writing in Time, 21 July 2009.

NT History Grants 2009

Monday, 20 July 2009 in Books, History by Kate | No comments

Two Chinese projects are among those that have been awarded Northern Territory History Grants for 2009:

  • Gordon Grimwade of Atherton: $3400 to research Chinese overland migration between the Northern Territory and Queensland, c1870–1910
  • Claire Lowrie of Wollongong: $3000 to research a history of Chinese and Aboriginal male servants in Darwin, 1870s–1930s

‘A pathetic story’

Sunday, 12 July 2009 in History, People by Kate | No comments

From the Northern Territory Times and Gazette on 14 February 1885 is this moving account of a mother’s struggle to get help for her ailing baby, and of the assistance given to her by an unnamed Chinese man.

On Christmas Day William Cooper, a bush laborer living in a wild part of the Little River district, twenty-six miles from Tumut, brought into town the remains of his infant daughter, six months old, who died from exposure and starvation in the bush. An inquest was held on boxing-day, when a verdict in accordance with the evidence was returned, the jury adding a rider that the mother had done all she could to preserve the life of her child. Cooper was absent at Brendabella woolshed at the time.

On Wednesday, the 17th inst, the mother started for the nearest neighbor’s place, which was four miles off, to get a message to go to Tumut for physic for the sick child. She took with her the deceased and Freddy, a boy six years old, and a dog. Rain came down, and a storm followed, and in the wild mountainous country the woman lost herself. On Thursday, the mother’s milk having failed, she killed the dog to nourish the baby on the blood. She and her son Freddy ate a little of the raw flesh, there being no fire and no other food. On Friday night the baby died. Next day she carried the baby’s corpse as far as she could when Freddy sank down exhausted. She left the boy to watch the corpse near a creek, and wandered on herself very weak and footsore.

On Sunday afternoon she found a Chinaman’s hut and a Chinaman and a European named Taylor went to search. They camped out at the head of Dubbo Falls that night, and next day they found the boy Freddy sitting on a rock beside the corpse of the baby. He was ‘keeping the flies of Cissy.’ The starving lad had been over a day and two nights alone with the dead baby. The Chinaman gave the boy food in small quantities, and then carried him and the corpse five miles to the nearest hut. Afterwards they took the mother and boy home, where two little children (three and two years of age) had remained all the time.

It seems likely that the mother was Eliza Cooper, who with her husband William had eight children between 1875 and 1890, living first at Yass/Patrick’s Plain and then Tumut. This baby, Annie, was not the only child she lost – three years later her five year old son Mark also died.

PM’s Prize for History 2008

Thursday, 9 July 2009 in Books by Kate | No comments

John Fitzgerald’s Big White Lie has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for History for 2008.

First prize was jointly won by Tom Griffiths’ Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica, along with Robert Kenny for The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World.

See the announcement on the ALP website.

Dragon Tails conference website

Thursday, 9 July 2009 in Conferences, Websites by Kate | No comments

The Dragon Tails conference now has a website up and running, and registrations are open. There’s no program online yet, but there is a list of speakers and their abstracts:

http://www.dragontails.com.au/