Tag: Chinese language

Duped!

Recently I’ve been looking at a series of NSW naturalisation certificates held in the National Archives of Australia here in Canberra (NAA: A806). The naturalisation certificates in A806 are ones that were ‘cancelled’ by Customs officers after apparently being used by Chinese to attempt fraudulent entry to New South Wales.

In the 1880s and 1890s Chinese who were naturalised British subjects in NSW were exempt from paying the poll tax on entering the colony (£10 after 1881, and £100 after 1888). After the turn of the 20th century, naturalised Chinese used their certificates to prove their Australian domicile and avoid having to sit the Dictation Test on return from overseas. As a consequence, a trade in naturalisation certificates grew up within the Chinese community, as certificates were sold or passed on to others to use after a man had died or gone home to China for good.

Some of the naturalisation certificates in A806 have layers of hand-written notes on them, most of which are undated, which suggest the same certificates were used several times as re-entry documents – perhaps initially by the legitimate holder of the certificate and subsequently by someone else. A number have ‘£10’ written on the front, suggesting that the Chinese passenger was rejected and made to pay the poll tax to enter the colony. Some have Chinese notations (mostly on the back), giving personal details such as name, age, place of origin and length of time in New South Wales.

NAA: A806 (Chow Hock 1884/30)

A806 comprises three boxes and several hundred certificates, which I’ve photographed and am now working my way through in more detail. Eventually I will marry these certificates with other naturalisation records held in State Records NSW and also in immigration case files in the National Archives.

In some of the immigration cases involving naturalisation certificates I’ve looked at, including those in A806, it’s not altogether clear whether fraud was really being attempted or whether Customs officers were just being super cautious in the execution of their duties.

With one certificate in A806, though, the fraud was obvious – and it wasn’t the Customs officers who were duped.

In June 1915, a Chinese man arriving in Sydney on the Eastern from Hong Kong presented an 1896 naturalisation certificate belonging to ‘James Andersen of Kiama, a native of Finland’. The unfortunate fellow, who presumably didn’t read much English, was returned to Hong Kong on the same vessel.

NAA: A806 (James Andersen 1896/155)

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!

Frances Cogger and Sun Johnson

This post is really a bit of a fishing trip. I’m hoping to make contact with a Daniel Johnson, who contacted the Chinese Australian Historical Society a couple of years ago regarding Sun Johnson (or Sun Junchen). At the time Henry Chan told me of Daniel’s interest in finding out more about Sun Johnson, but didn’t pass on his contact details.

Frances Cogger and Sun Johnson are one of those couples I’ve done a bit of research into, but not much – they’ve always been on my list of people to follow up! Frances was only seventeen when they married in January 1899, and the couple had one son that I know of. They divorced in 1910. Below is their little son’s certificate exempting from the dictation test from 1907 (NAA: ST84/1, 1907/351-360). Note that he didn’t actually leave for China.

The career of Sun Johnson as editor of the first Chinese-language newspaper in Sydney, the Chinese Australian Herald, is discussed in various places including in CF Yong’s New Gold Mountain – but most recently in an article by Mei-Fen Kuo, ‘The Chinese Australian Herald and the shaping of a modern imagined Chinese community in 1890s colonial Sydney’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, volume 2, 2008.

I have written briefly about Sun Johnson’s wonderful wordbook The Self-Educator, published in Sydney in around 1892, in my ‘Across the threshold: White women and Chinese hawkers in the white colonial imaginary’, Hecate, October 2002. James Hayes has also discussed the wordbook in more detail in ”’Good Morning Mrs Thompson!”: A Chinese-English word-book from 19th century Sydney’ in Paul Macgregor (ed.), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne, 1995.

If Daniel Johnson ever reads this, I’d love to hear from him! Just leave me a message below.