Category: Websites

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.

Building a DIY Trove list exhibition

One of my projects over the summer has been to create a small online exhibition using Trove lists and a nifty online exhibition framework built by Tim Sherratt.

DIY Trove exhibition screenshot

The list feature in Trove allows registered users to create their own collections of items. They’re a handy thing if you’re researching a particular topic and want to organise the material that you’ve found in Trove, or even if you just want to go back to random stuff that you like. You can keep your Trove lists private, or make them public and share what you’ve found with others.

Tim, who until recently was part of the Trove management team, thought that it would be good to take that sharing to another level — so he’s created a framework that lets you use your Trove lists to create an online exhibition. You can read more about Tim’s thoughts on this process on his blog.

I was keen to give it a try, and decided to make a pictorial exhibition about the Chinese in New South Wales to 1940. I started by making nine lists in Trove, which would serve as topics in my exhibition. Gradually I added a selection of pictures, objects and illustrated newspapers articles to each of my lists. I gave each of my lists a short description and arranged the items in chronological order. Because I’ve included newspaper articles, it would be best if I took the time to correct the OCR text for each one, but I’m impatient and wanted to get onto building the exhibition itself.

Tim’s DIY Trove Exhibition is pretty straightforward to use, particularly if you have some experience (even very basic experience) with web publishing or coding. He’s written clear, step-by-step instructions. The process first involves getting yourself a GitHub account and a Trove API key, and then customising his code to make your exhibition. Customising the code might look scary, but if you follow the instructions carefully you should be okay! There are further ways that you can customise the exhibition — for example, I changed the fonts — but you don’t need to do anything more if you don’t want to.

Once you’ve made the exhibition, you can easily add or take away items, or change your list descriptions, or change the order items appear in a list. Simply make the change to your list in Trove and it will appear in your exhibition after refreshing your browser.

Here’s my exhibition:

The Chinese in New South Wales: A history in pictures to 1940

Hope you like it!

Tung Wah Newspaper Index

Over a decade ago one of the most useful tools for Chinese Australian history research was developed as part of the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project – an English-language index to two of Australia’s early Chinese-language newspapers, the Tung Wah Times and the Tung Wah News. For someone like me, whose Chinese reading comprehension skills were rudimentary at best, the index meant there was some practical way to find relevant material in the newspapers. Articles I located, for example, provided evidence of Chinese Australian attitudes towards intermarriage between Chinese men and non-Chinese women, something that was difficult to ascertain from other sources.

My best find was an article that related to a story I was told during fieldwork in Taishan in 2003. The story told of how foreign wives of Chinese men would give their husbands doses of poison before they made a return visit to China, a poison that could be reversed only if the man returned overseas to his foreign wife within a particular time for the antidote. My informant stated that this was the cause of the death of his uncle, who had been a laundryman in Cuba in the 1920s and was known to have had a Cuban wife. The article in the Tung Wah News provided a second example of this same story, suggesting that it was an urban myth of sorts among the qiaoxiang villages.

Unfortunately, with time the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation website, and the Tung Wah index with it, could no longer be maintained and it was archived by La Trobe University. The index lost functionality in this process, meaning that searches no longer worked and only a certain number of items in the index were browsable.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Thanks to the hard work of Sophie Couchman and Tim Sherratt, the Tung Wah Newspaper Index has been redeveloped and a sparkly new version is now up and running. The index can be searched or browsed, as you’d expect. But Tim has also made sure the index includes Linked Open Data and a basic API and has made the code and data available on Github.

Happy hunting, everyone!

Invisible Australians: A beginning

Over at discontents, Tim Sherratt has recently posted about a new project he and I are embarking on. Called ‘Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy’, the project aims to reveal something of the lives of the thousands of men, women and children who were affected by the racially-based immigration policy of early 20th-century Australia. (You might like to read Tim’s post.)

The Immigration Restriction Act, introduced in December 1901, was designed to limited the migration of ‘coloured’ people to Australia, but it (and other elements of the White Australia Policy) also had an affect on the lives of non-white, non-Indigenous Australians – people of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Lebanese, Syrian, Afghan descent who were either born here, or who had already built lives here after migrating.

To administer the Immigration Restriction Act, government officials implemented an increasingly complex and structured system of tracking and documenting the movements of non-white people* as they travelled in and out of the country. This surveillance left an extraordinary body of records containing information about people who, according to the national myth of a ‘White Australia’, were not Australian at all.

Tim and I hope that, starting with the documentary legacy of the Immigration Restriction Act, we can link together disparate fragments of information about non-white Australians to make their presence in early 20th-century Australia more visible. Many writings comment on how the White Australia Policy resulted in a reduction in Australia’s non-white population over the early decades of the century, particularly in the Chinese community – forgetting, it seems, that there were still thousands who just kept on living here, living their lives under the White Australia Policy.

Our first steps in the project are small ones. Tim is beginning work on a transcription tool that will enable the extraction of information from records already digitised by the National Archives of Australia. And I am going back and thinking about the records themselves, in part to provide Tim with details he needs to develop the transcription tool. I am also putting together a guide to researching individuals in the Immigration Restriction Act records from New South Wales (c.1902–1948) that are held in the National Archives’ Sydney office.

The lives revealed in the Immigration Restriction Act records are, for the most part, not big ones. They are those of market gardeners, labourers, hawkers, farmers, shopkeepers, cabinetmakers – as well as a wives and mothers and children. In many cases they are lives that are documented nowhere else. The documents I’ve included to illustrate this post are examples of two of the types of forms that we will be working with: Form 22, which was used to apply for an exemption from the dictation test, and Form 21, the Certificates of Domicile (CoD) and then Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) issued to those whose applications were successful. I’ll be posting more about these documents soon.

I have written elsewhere of the value of the records, and I marvel at the possibilities they offer for creating connections – between different groups of records, between the people documented in the records (parents, children, siblings, cousins, clansmen, neighbours) and between those ‘invisible Australians’ and their descendants today. Some days I’m a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities, but, for today at least, I’m happy that we’re making a start.

* In this post, and in our discussions of the project more generally, we use ‘non-white’ to refer to the people who crop up in the White Australia records because bureaucrats at the time considered them as something other than ‘white’. It’s not a perfect term, but it’s hard to come up with something that adequately covers all bases, particularly considering the instability of racial categorisation. Among those classified as ‘non-white’ were, for example, people of mixed race who had one white parent (usually their mother). Our use of ‘non-white’ does not include Indigenous Australians as they did not generally come under the restrictions of the White Australia Policy.

US Army topographic maps of Guangdong

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas, has a great collection of online maps of China, both current and historical.

One of the real treasures is the China – Topographic Maps [Scale 1:250,000] (China Series) U.S. Army Map Service, Series L500, dating from 1954. Using a map of the whole of China as a guide, you can click to bring up very detailed maps of particular regions. Place names are given in modified Wade-Giles with some Chinese characters (and it’s kinda fun spotting familiar places – a detail map of Macau, for instance, points past the Portas do Cerco to ‘Chi-Ta 5 km’, which would be Jida, now a bustling and ever-growing part of Zhuhai city).

The Chung Shan map (NF-49/8 on the big plan, and warning, it’s a big file: 6.4mb), shows the western part of the Pearl River Delta, from Kaiping in the west to the border with Hong Kong in the east, from Panyu in the north to Macau in the south. You can see the level of detail provided on the map below.

The maps that are likely to be useful for those interested in Chinese Australian history are the following:

NF 49-4 KUANG-CHOU

    (6.2 MB) [Guangzhou]

NF 49-4 KUANG-CHOU (CANTON) AND VICINITY [verso]

    (3.1 MB) [detail map of Guangzhou city]

NF 49-8 CHUNG-SHAN

    (6.4 MB) [western Pearl River Delta]

NF 49-8 MACAU AND VICINITY [verso]

    (3.9 MB) [detail map of Macau city]

NF 49-12 CH’IH-CH’I

    (4.8 MB) [most southerly bits of Guangdong and lots of sea]

NF 50-1 HO-YUAN

    (6.7 MB) [east of GZ and north of HK]

NF 50-5 HONG KONG

    (5.1 MB) [Hong Kong region]

NF 50-5 VICTORIA AND KOWLOON AND VICINITY [verso]

    (3.5 MB) [detail map of Hong Kong city]

The other very cool thing about these maps is that they correspond to the map references in the Chinese Villages Database. So, for instance, the villages database gives the map reference ‘GQ 4394’ for Shek Kay Chun in Chung Shan (Shiqi in Zhongshan). This means you have to look for the area marked as GQ, find line no. 4 and go in 3/10 of the way to line no. 5, then find line 9 and go 4/10 of the way to line no. 0. A somewhat daggy illustration of how to do this is below (click on the image to get the full-size version). There you can see, circled in blue is Shekki.

Photos from NZ certificates of registration

Archives New Zealand has just put online a small collection of photographs of early Chinese settlers, men who lived in Otago in the late 19th/early 20th century. The online exhibition is called Chinese Portraits.

The photographs were attached to the men’s certificates of registration, the New Zealand equivalent of Australia’s CEDTs (and their colonial predecessors). The original records are held by Archives New Zealand’s Dunedin office.

You can also read about the project in the Otago Daily Times.