Historical Chinese Australian names throw up all sorts of challenges – from the ubiquity of ‘Ah’ to confusion of name order – but in my recent research on Chinese Tasmanian history, it’s the challenge of matching Chinese and English versions of people’s names that’s been puzzling me.
As part of our Everyday Heritage Linkage project, we have compiled a list of the Chinese names of more than 950 people connected to Tasmania, dating from 1901 to 1936, taken from historical newspapers digitised in Trove.
“專 件 [Special Report]”, Tung Wah Times (Sydney), 18 October 1919, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227016320 – this newspaper article, about the establishment of a Tasmanian branch of the Chinese Anti-Discriminatory and Patriotic Association, includes the Chinese name of Claude Nam ShingTo do this, researcher Brian Tseng located 82 relevant newspaper articles in four newspapers: Chinese Republic News, Chinese Times, Chinese Australian Herald, and the Tung Wah News/Times. Many of these articles are newspaper subscription notices, society membership lists, or lists of philanthropic donations.
In time, our list of names, and the newspaper articles they came from, will be included in our forthcoming Chinese Tasmanian Stories 塔華舊事* website. But for now, they are one of the sources we’re using in researching the stories of Chinese individuals, businesses and places.
One of the individuals we’ve been looking into is Claude Nam Shing.
Claude (or Claudie) Nam Shing, greengrocer / fruiterer / market gardener, left a small but meaningful trace in the written archive in Tasmania, including English-language newspaper reports, post office directory entries (between 1907 and 1936), reports in the police gazette, and an alien registration record.
Given his long residence in Hobart and Glenorchy, we would expect that he also appeared at least once in the donation and subscription lists that we uncovered in the Chinese-language newspapers – but how do we work out what his name is in Chinese characters, beyond an educated / lucky guess?
Claude Nam Shing’s grave in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery, Hobart, January 2026
Luckily, Claude Nam Shing is buried in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery here in Hobart, and, even luckier, the headstone includes an inscription in Chinese. I was alerted to this fact by photographs of the grave in the Find a Grave website. The headstone is much weathered, as many of the old Chinese headstones in Cornelian Bay are, but it is possible to make out some of what it says from these online photographs.
Imogen Wegman and I also payed Nam Shing’s grave a visit to see if it would be easier to read in real life, with the help of rubbings. After some tricky deciphering, I am pretty confident that this is what it says:
CLAUDE NAN SHING
Died 15 June 1940 Aged 76 Years
增城 翁之墓 趙南成 (or another ‘sing’ character such as 盛) 廣東
Armed with these characters for his name, I then looked in our list of Chinese Tasmanians from the Chinese-language newspapers, and, lo and behold, there were half a dozen articles that mentioned 趙南盛 – lists of donations to famine, disaster and food relief, and membership of the Tasmanian branch of a Chinese-Australian community association – dating between 1908 and 1920.
Claude Nam Shing is just one of the hundreds of Chinese people who lived in Tasmania in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We’re making a start at bringing their stories out of the archives, but as Claude’s case demonstrates, the biographical data that is found in Chinese headstone inscriptions is a critical piece of the puzzle of understanding both the Chinese and the Tasmanian sides of their lives. Enough remained of the inscription on Claude Nam Shing’s headstone to make it possible to read it, but this isn’t the case with others, and who knows, in a few years’ time, maybe Nam Shing’s headstone will be similarly illegible.
Transcription of some Tasmanian Chinese headstones was undertaken by researcher Kok Hu Jin some years ago, but perhaps we in Tasmania might look to the model of CAFHOV’s wonderful database of Chinese Graves at Melbourne Chinese Cemetery as an example of what is possible when it comes to documenting this precious aspect of Chinese Tasmanian heritage.
* For those of you who don’t read Chinese, 塔華舊事 is pronounced taap wàh gauh sih in Cantonese and tǎ húa jiù shì in Mandarin, and it means 塔 Tasmanian 華 Chinese 舊事 stories from long ago / echoes of history / traces of the past – you get the gist!
The Everyday Heritage: Chinese Tasmanian Stories project team is made up of me, Annaliese Claydon, Imogen Wegman and Tim Sherratt, with Chinese-language research assistance by Brian Tseng.
If you have wandered past the library on the corner of Murray and Bathurst streets, Hobart, you might have noticed a billboard featuring arresting black-and-white portraits of a young Asian woman in Edwardian dress.
Across the front and side portraits of the woman is an annotation that reads, ‘Tie Cum Ah Chung — 11–9–03 —’.
The caption below the photographs tells us that these 1903 images of Tie Cum Ah Chung come from Hobart Gaol’s Prisoners Records Books, held by Tasmanian Archives.
Billboard in the carpark of the State Library of Tasmania on the corner of Murray and Bathurst streets, Hobart, 7 November 2025. Photograph by Kate Bagnall
In this blog post I want to look into the history of Tie Cum Ah Chung, to see what can be uncovered about her life in Tasmania.
The obvious first place to look for information about Tie Cum Ah Chung is her prisoner record, which can be found through the Tasmanian Names Index (although under a slightly different spelling of her name).
The prisoner record notes that 18-year-old Tie Cum Ah Chung was first imprisoned for a month for larceny in September 1903, and then three months later she was imprisoned for another month for perjury. She was 5 foot 3 inches tall, single, had smallpox scars on her face, worked as a domestic, and apparently could not read nor write. Her native place was recorded as Yokohama, Japan, although the name of the ship that brought her to Tasmania was unknown. (Yokohama had a sizeable Cantonese population and a ‘Chinatown’, and I have come across other records of Chinese in Australia and New Zealand who stated their birthplace as being Yokohama – so this is not impossible!)
The Tasmanian Names Index brings up no other obvious records for Tie Cum, although there are, of course, other records for people with the name ‘Ah Chung’, including naturalisations, births, deaths, marriages and wills. Many of these records relate to the family of Chin Ah Chung and his wife Lily, whose descendants are still in Hobart today.
The next easy place to look for Tie Cum is in the historical newspapers in Trove, to see if there are any reports of her crimes, arrests or trials. ‘Ti Cum Ah Chung’ (in inverted commas) brings up two results, neither of which are what might have been expected – they relate to a shooting in Launceston late one Friday night in February 1906, which Tie Cum witnessed. She had been standing in York Street, near Storrer’s (an undertaker’s), talking to two young men at the time of the shooting, and she reportedly not only saw the victim but was threatened by the shooter and then warned passersby of the danger. Both articles referred to her as ‘Chinese’.
Searching under the variant spelling of her name – “Tie Cum Ah Chung” (in inverted commas) – yields some more results in the historical newspapers, with reports from September and December 1903 about her court hearings, and one further article about the 1906 shooting.
A month after the shooting, Tie Cum gave evidence at the trial, which was held at the Police Court in Launceston on Friday, 2 March 1906. Her evidence was reported under the heading ‘The Chinese Girl’. Tie Cum told the court she was a Christian, and she was sworn on the Bible. There was no mention of an interpreter, and she appears to have given her testimony in fluent English. Her evidence tallied with the earlier press reports of her involvement – she had been standing on the corner of York and St John’s streets with Albert Brooks and Alfred Grant when the events took place; interestingly she also stated that she knew two of the policemen involved in the case, one from her time in Hobart ‘before I came up here’.
A CHARGE of LARCENY. Tie Cum Ah Chung, a young Japanese woman, was again before the Court, charged with stealing 21b of biscuits from Mrs Meredith, of Harrington street. Accused was defended by Mr Davenport Hoggins (Hoggins and Gilmore). After hearing evidence, accused was found guilty and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment. An application by counsel for his client to be treated under the First Offenders Act was refused, Mr Shaw stating that the Act was never intended for persons of accused’s character. She had been before the Court several times under disreputable circumstances, and a short term of imprisonment would perhaps give her time to think over her position and probably—though he was afraid not—lead to her reform. The Court then rose.
PERJURY. Tie Cum Ah Chung pleaded guilty to having committed wilful and corrupt perjury at the City Police Court, Hobart, where, being charged with the larceny of a couple of pounds of biscuits from a shop in Argyle street, she elected to give evidence on her own behalf. Prisoner was defended by Mr C. Davenport Hoggins (Hoggins and Gilmore). Mr Hoggins made a strong appeal for leniency, and said the Salvation Army was prepared to take the woman in hand. His Honor imposed a sentence of a month’s imprisonment.
I also tried searching Trove Newspapers using some other variations of her name (Ti/Tie/Tye/Tei and Come/Chum, as well as just Ah Chung), refining the search using parameters like date range and place, with some further success. My other go-to place for researching Chinese Australians in the early twentieth century is RecordSearch (National Archives of Australia), but no records about her obviously come up under variations of the name Tie Cum Ah Chung.
Most of the other newspaper reports I found about Tie Cum were repeats of the information about her larceny and perjury convictions, and the Launceston shooting, including one that includes a more detailed account of her biscuit theft from Mrs Meredith’s shop. One other that piqued my interest was from the Hobart Mercury in July 1903, three months before the theft:
City Police Court. – On Thursday, before the Police Magistrate (Mr. B. Shaw) and Mr. A. Riddoch, J.P. …Two young women named Elsie Hardwicke and Ti Chum AhChung pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace in Elizabeth-street by assuming a pugilistic attitude. The former was fined 25s., and the latter, who was a first offender, 5s.
The circumstances of Tie Cum’s life as recorded in these few easily found records seem really quite remarkable – from what I am learning about Tasmania’s early Chinese community, there are many remarkable stories of women and families to be uncovered!
‘Melbourne Ghost Signs’ researcher Sean Reynolds has delved into Tie Cum’s history, too – she apparently left Tasmania for Victoria not that long after these events – and for her story in later life (as Sean has been able to piece together), you might have a look at his creatively (flamboyantly?) written blog post, Otherwise, Yokahama, or listen to his Royal Historical Society of Victoria podcast episode of the same name (embedded below). Note that I haven’t closely reviewed Sean’s research, but on the surface it seems to largely hold together; it’s just perhaps a little fanciful about her origin story.
What then of Tie Cum’s early life? How and when did she come to Tasmania? Was she really born in Yokohama? And was she connected in any way to the Ah Chung family that I know?
My first tantalising clue has come in the form of a newspaper report in the Hobart Mercury in May 1898, located in a search for ‘Chinese girl’ in Tasmanian newspapers, which reported an accident in Hobart involving a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl named ‘Tarcum’:
Accident. – Yesterday evening, as a butcher’s waggon was being driven along Melville street, a Chinese girl named Tarcum, aged 14, who was playing on the footpath with some other children, ran on to the road, and got on the vehicle. Just then a sudden jerk caused her to fall, and the hind wheel ran over her. She was severely injured, and subsequent to being called to her mother she was conveyed to the hospital and admitted. The extent of her injuries has not been ascertained.
This Chinese girl, ‘Tarcum’, was aged fourteen in 1898, and Tie Cum Ah Chung was aged eighteen in 1903, which broadly tallies. Could they therefore be the same person? I think it’s a real possibility! If so, she was born in about 1884 or 1885.
The 1898 article mentions that Tarcum was called to her mother after being injured, suggesting that she came to Tasmania with her family; if she was Tie Cum Ah Chung, a Tasmanian childhood would account for Tie Cum’s fluency in speaking English (as suggested by her 1906 court testimony).
So, here is my crazy theory, which makes sense with the limited evidence I have to date.
The only ‘Ah Chung’ family with a Chinese mother that I know of in Hobart in the 1890s was that of Chin Ah Chung (carpenter / cabinetmaker, later fancy goods storekeeper) and his wife Kim Wing aka Lingo, later known as Lily. Kim Wing came to Hobart in about 1892, aged in her mid to late teens, and she was known to have had her feet bound in childhood. She was befriended by white women in Hobart who taught her to speak English, and she was remembered as speaking without an accent.
We know that other Chinese wives coming to Tasmania around that time were accompanied by companions or maids (e.g. Lula Mon Chinn and Fanny Lee Fook). Is is possible then that Tie Cum was a mui tsai or maid who accompanied Kim Wing to Tasmania? She would have been perhaps 10 years younger than Kim Wing, although it’s hard to get a firm grip on their exact ages. There is no family memory of Kim Wing having migrated with a maid servant, but information about her early life is also scant. I think this arrangement would have been more likely than her being Kim Wing’s daughter, as the age difference was too close.
I hope that as time goes on I will be able to make more sense of Tie Cum’s early story in Tasmania in the 1890s and early 1900s, and either confirm or disprove my crazy theory. Whatever her story, it seems she was among the earliest, and most intriguing, immigrant Chinese women to call our island state their home.
UPDATE 14 November 2025: There goes that theory! Today I came across a snippet from the Mercury on 9 September 1903 that reads: ‘Tie Come Ah Chung is nothing to do with Ah Chung in Elizabeth-street whatever.’ This was around the time 18-year-old Tie Cum was getting into trouble in Hobart.
‘Ah Chung in Elizabeth-street’ is Chin Ah Chung, mentioned above. I guess it is possible that the Ah Chungs were distancing themselves from Tie Cum because of her disreputable behaviour, but I think for now I will put aside my theory that she came to Hobart with Kim Wing.
FURTHER UPDATE later the same day: Ha, I was right after all! Tie Cum was associated to the Ah Chung family of Elizabeth Street, Hobart! I came across another little snippet in the Mercury in August 1900, a classified inserted by Ah Chung, that reads:
MRS. QUIN, late of Garibaldi, having been residing with me for three months, went away on Wednesday night last without any cause, taking with her Tie-Com, my servant. I will not be Responsible for their actions or any debts contracted in my name. AH CHUNG, 102 Elizabeth-street, Hobart.
One final find for today is perhaps less exciting, but it does provide one more little clue about Tie Cum in Tasmania.
In October 1905, the complainant in a maintenance case, Emily Maria Deeks, stated that:
when in Hobart she was living in Harrington-street as the housekeeper of a Mr Lung [and going by the name of Mrs Lung]. There were also in the house Mr Bowring, Mr Spurling, and a Chinese woman.
We know that at the time of her arrest in 1903, Tie Cum was working as a domestic (according to her prisoner record) and also that she was publicly disowned by Ah Chung that same year. So it would make sense for her to be the ‘Chinese woman’ mentioned by Emily Maria Deeks as also residing in the house of Mr Lung, presumably working as a domestic. Again, there is nothing concrete here to say this was Tie Cum, but given the circumstances it is very possible.
AND ONE FURTHER UPDATE: Just to document the last piece of evidence I’ve found so far that is possibly about Tie Cum in Tasmania – a search in Trove Newspapers for ‘Ah Chung’ turned up the report of a fire at Ah Chung’s premises at 162 Elizbeth Street on 21 March 1898. The article noted that at Ah Chung’s house, ‘there were four Chinamen, a woman and a girl’. If this was the right Ah Chung (still to be confirmed), then could the girl be Tie Cum? Bear in mind that by this stage Chin Ah Chung and Kim Wing (later known as Lilian Ah Chung) had two young sons: Royden (born 1894) and Tasman (born 1896). It is also unlike the colonial press not to mention the race of the woman and girl if they too were Chinese.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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, ‘ “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.
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).
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.
Note: Terms used in the following population tables reflect the original historical sources and are considered offensive today.
Chinese population of Tasmania, 1881–1947
1881
1891
1901
1911
1921
1933
1947
Chinese
Persons
844
1056
609
529
321
197
111
Male
842
993
536
450
283
160
81
Female
2
63
73
79
38
37
30
‘Full’ Chinese
Persons
844
939
506
427
262
132
68
Male
842
931
482
400
247
117
51
Female
2
8
24
27
15
15
17
‘Half-caste’ Chinese
Persons
_
117
103
102
59
65
43
Male
–
62
54
50
36
43
30
Female
–
55
49
52
23
22
13
Source: Compiled from the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 18, 1925, Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Melbourne, 1925, p. 955; Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1933 and 1947.
An Appendix in the 1901 Census of Tasmania contained specific tables enumerating Chinese and ‘half-caste’ Chinese, as well as ‘other alien races’ and Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
