Tag: family

In memoriam

On 18 June 1888, the following in memoriam notice appeared in the Newcastle Morning Herald:

LABBAYU.—In loving memory of my dear mother, Mary Ann Labbayu, who departed this life June 17, 1887, after a long and painful illness; aged 43 years.

It is just twelve months ago to-day
Since my dear mother passed away,
Since I stood by my mother’s side
And saw her breathe her last.

She faded like some southern flower
Parched by cruel rays;
And now beneath the dark, cold sod,
My dear mother lays.

Inserted by her loving daughter, Aggie Hop War, Newcastle.

According to her death certificate (NSW BDM 11450/1887), Mary Ann Labbayu, age 42, died at Watt Street, Newcastle, after suffering cancer of the uterus for three years. She was buried in the Catholic section of Sandgate Cemetery at Newcastle (Portion Catholic 1, Section D Com, Plot 389).

Mary Ann’s death left her two daughters, Sarah and Mary Agnes (Aggie), aged 21 and 19, parentless.

Four years earlier, on 6 September 1883, they had lost their father, Thomas Labbayu, in a riding accident near their home at Greta. Thomas’s accident and the subsequent inquest received a long write-up in the local Matiland newspaper. Thomas was buried at Branxton Cemetery, with a handsome headstone erected by his daughter Aggie and her husband. Mary Ann inherited her husband’s estate.

Thomas Labbayu’s death certificate (NSW BDM 8600/1883) gives some interesting particulars about his life. It says he was aged 46 at the time of his death (meaning he would have been born around 1837), he was originally from China, and had been in New South Wales for 20 years (so would have arrived around 1863). He had worked as a contractor.

But this information doesn’t quite tally with the details given at the time of his naturalisation a decade earlier, in January 1874, and it’s these earlier details that are probably more accurate.

Thomas’s naturalisation certificates states that he was from Armoa, China (presumably Amoy), that he arrived in New South Wales in 1853, and that he was aged 30 in 1874 (meaning he would have been born around 1844). In 1874 he working as a carpenter and fencer at Greta, near Branxton, and had purchased land (NSW Certificate of Naturalization No. 74/12, in the name Thomas Labbayn).

Mary Ann Coyle and Thomas Labbayu married in the manse at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, East Maitland, on 17 February 1868 (NSW BDM 2561/1868). At the time of their marriage they were living at Buttai and Thomas was working as a woodsplitter. Mary Ann had given birth to a daughter, Sarah, two years earlier (NSW BDM 10383/1866, registered under surname Coyle), and in the year of her marriage to Thomas, they had another daughter, Mary Agnes (Aggie) (NSW BDM 11567/1868). 

When their mother died in 1887, Sarah and Aggie Labbayu were both already married. They had married young: Aggie was sixteen when she married James Sydney Hop War, and Sarah was eighteen when she married James J.H. Ah Chee, both marriages taking place at Greta in 1883.

Sarah married again in 1886, presumably after the death of her first husband, to a man named William Coulton — it was ‘Sara J. Coulton, daughter of the deceased’ who was listed as informant on her mother’s death certificate.

With William Coulton, Sarah had two children, Herbert and Mary, born in 1887 and 1888 (NSW BDMs 30336/1887 and 31671/1888). I haven’t immediately located the birth of any children with her first husband, James Ah Chee, but an immigration file from 1909 mentions a ‘half-caste Chinese’ man named Ah Chee who was the nephew of Aggie Hop War (NAA: SP42/1, C1909/2915).

View down Watt Street, Newcastle (Cultural Collections, University of Newcastle)

More can be discovered about the Hop War family. James Hop War was a successful cabinetmaker in Newcastle, where he and Aggie established a home in Watt Street. They had four daughters: twins Eveline and Florence (b. 1884), Agnes Amy (b. 1887) and Gertrude (b. 1889). James Hop War was naturalised in 1882. His naturalisation certificate stated that he had arrived in New South Wales on the Isle of France in 1870 at the age of 17. In a letter to the newspaper in 1891, after certain accusations were made against him, James Hop War declared, ‘I have been a resident of Newcastle for 17 years, have a wife and four children dependent on me for support’. He appears to have been a prominent presence in the local Chinese community and acted as government interpreter.

Birth certificate of Gertrude Hop War, Newcastle, 1889 (NAA: SP42/1, C1909/2915)

James, Aggie and their children left New South Wales for Hong Kong in 1892. Some time after, James and Aggie’s marriage fell apart and James returned to Sydney in January 1904 while the rest of the family remained overseas (NAA: SP42/1, C1909/2915).

Versions of the family name that appear in the records are: Labbayu, Labbayue, Labbayn, Labayu, Labbayer, Lavyu.

Ah Yin family of Adelong, c.1897

Every time I poke around in series NAA: SP42/1, I find something new and interesting that I hadn’t noticed before.

Today’s find is a photograph of the family of Ah Yin (or Ah Yen), who was a storekeeper at Adelong in southern New South Wales, and his wife, Ah Hoo (or Ah How). The family, with six children, left for China in 1897.

The file NAA: SP42/1, C1916/7308 PART 1 relates to a request for one of the Ah Yin daughters, Sarah (b. 1890), to be permitted to return to Australia in 1910.

More on Sarah Ah Yen’s return to Australia from the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April 1915.

Seeing the women and children

I’ve been thinking further about the possibilities of Tim’s wall of faces as a finding aid, as something to help both locate archival documents and to understand their context.

The series we used in our test (ST84/1) was one in which we knew there was a very high percentage of photographs. Each item contains ten certificates, most of which have both a front and profile portrait attached. There is a small amount of other paperwork included in some files, but not a whole lot. We therefore knew what sorts of things we were going to get back.

But what about if we apply the same facial detection technology to a series in which we aren’t so sure of the photographic content? Unfortunately, Tim’s current laptop isn’t up to the task of doing all the grunt work (donations, anyone?), but here’s what I reckon might happen when we are able to move on to other series.

With series like SP42/1 and B13, which hold applications for CEDTs and similar records, I know that there are photographs in many, even most, of the personal case files. (B13 is complicated because it also contains other Customs files that don’t relate to individuals and don’t relate to the administration of the Immigration Restriction Act.) Because files might hold applications for a family, or a parent and child/ren, or an uncle and nephew, or siblings, you don’t always know from the item title exactly who the file relates to. Also, those who were Australian born did not necessarily apply for CEDTs since they could travel using their birth certificates as proof of their right to return, meaning that they don’t appear in CEDT series like ST84/1.

It was usual practice, though, to supply photographs of each person who was travelling (whether on a CEDT or not), and so by extracting those photographs, you would be able to have a better impression about who files related to. Of course, for files that are digitised (or even not) you could go through each one individually (which I’ve done, believe me…), but think how much more fun it would be to scroll through a wall of beautiful faces!

With B13 it would also be useful because there is no separate series of CEDTs; they are mixed in with the application/case files. Facial detection could be a way of extracting the forms themselves from the larger files.

My main research interest is in families, and women, and children – and we know that women are often hidden in archives because of bureaucratic systems which gave priority to the men in their lives. Although there are many White Australia records which relate to individual women and children, they can be lost in files organised and catalogued under the names of husbands and fathers. But scroll through a wall of mostly male faces, and the women and children just leap out at you!

I’m feeling a bit impatient, really, about running SP42/1 and B13 through Tim’s facial detection script. There are so many, so very interesting possibilities.

[Family group] [picture]

One of the first things I learnt in my training in arrangement and description was the meaning of those neat square brackets—they tell you that the archivist has, heaven forbid, used or added something other than the record’s original title. This is often done to assist with searching for the item in a collection database, particularly if the original title is a bit obscure, or non-existant. So it was that I came upon an item in the State Library of Victoria’s catalogue titled:

[Family group] [picture]

As the catalogue description notes, this photograph shows a:

Family grouped in front of picket fence, woman seated with two little girls, and possibly a little boy in short petticoats, beside her, two men standing on either side of her chair, a little boy standing beside man on left. Weatherboard house in background, tiled roof, and pergola, vines growing along roof line of porch.

What isn’t noted (except in the subject keywords) is that this family looks to be Chinese. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that the woman was of mixed heritage.

The photograph comes from the John Etkins collection, a private collection of around 2000 portrait photographs donated to the library in 2004. Inscribed in pencil on the back of the photograph is ‘[…] Wang in (?) Govt. Office / Inverell’. It is dated somewhere between 1880 and 1910.

Not much of a clue as to the family’s identity, but perhaps one day I’ll stumble upon something that tells me who they are.

  • Description: 1 photographic print on cabinet card : albumen silver ; 10.7 x 16.6 cm.; 1 photographic print : albumen silver ; 9.7 x 13.9 cm.
  • Identifier(s): State Library of Victoria, Accession no(s) H2005.34/103.
  • Persistent link: http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/45774

NSW History Week 2011: EAT (Chinese Australian) History

The theme for this year’s NSW History Week is EAT History – the edible, appetising and tasty history of food. Not surprisingly there are a number of events highlighting the connection between Chinese Australian history and food. It may not be possible to attend them all, but here’s a listing of all the ‘Chinese’ events.

Saving the La Perouse Chinese Market Gardens

Organisation: Chinese Heritage Association of Australia Inc
History Week Event Type: Talk/Lecture
The heritage-listed Chinese Market Gardens at La Perouse have been producing food for over 150 years. The adjacent Eastern Suburbs Cemetery Trust wants these seven hectares of Crown Land for extra graves. For the past three years there has been a battle to retain the Chinese Market Gardens. Guest speaker Christa Ludlow, National Trust (NSW) Landscapes Advocacy Committee member.
When: 3 September 2011
Open: 2:30pm
Close: 4:30pm
Where: Sydney Mechanics School of Arts
280 Pitt Street (between Park & Bathurst Streets)
Sydney, NSW 2000
Australia
Cost: $10.00
Members/Concessions $5.00.
Refreshments included.
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Website: http://www.chineseheritage.org.au
Name: Kathie Blunt
Email: dblunt@bigpond.net.au
Phone: 9449 2453

King Fong’s Chinatown Food Tour

Organisation: Chinese Australian Historical Society Inc.
History Week Event Type: Tour
Cross generational merchant, King Fong, will take you through the streets, eateries and grocery stores of Chinatown to showcase the different types of Chinese cuisine and imported delicacies which marked the growth in richness of Sino-Australian food culture. Join King Fong afterwards for Yum Cha at a local restaurant. Bookings essential, 30 places available only.
When: 6 September 2011
Open: 10:15am for 10:30am start
Where: Sydney’s Chinatown
Corner Dixon and Hay Streets
Haymarket, NSW
Australia
Cost: $5.00
Optional lunch $18.00
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Website: http://cahs.wordpress.com
Name: King Fong
Email: clifford.to@kellogg.ox.ac.uk
Phone: 9452 3761

The Chinese Market Gardens of Ryde in the Early Twentieth Century

Organisation: Ryde Library Service
History Week Event Type: Talk/Lecture
Before we can EAT History we have to grow history. This illustrated talk will examine the story of the Chinese market gardens and gardeners from the earliest references to them in this area in the 1890s through to the middle of the twentieth century.
When: 6 September 2011
Open: 1:30pm
Close: 3:00pm
Where: Ryde Library
Corner Pope and Devlin Street
Ryde, NSW 2112
Australia
Cost: Free
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Website: http://www.ryde.nsw.gov.au
Email: rydelibrary@ryde.nsw.gov.au
Phone: 9952 8352

From Canton to courage: Australian Chinese in Parramatta and beyond – exhibition floor talk and seminar

When: 6 September 2011
Open: 9.15am
Close: 1.00pm
Program: Daphne Lowe Kelley, ‘The Chinese Australian experience: an overview’
Jack Brook, ‘Nineteenth-century Chinese Australians in Parramatta’
Brad Powe, ‘Sharing family stories’
Carloynne Wark, ‘Sharing family stories’
Where: Parramatta Heritage Centre, 346A Church Street, Parramatta

From Canton with courage 6 September 2011 (pdf, 389kb)

Potatoes in the Rice Cooker: Oral Histories of Asian-Australians Cooking at Home, Work and Play

Organisation: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
History Week Event Type: Workshop
History Week comes alive with a workshop focused on real experience and oral history. Potatoes in the Rice Cooker will include short lectures on histories of Asian-Australian food encounters and the sharing of personal stories, objects, belongings, photos and recipes to do with the dynamics of the kitchen and the table around the preparation, cooking and eating of food in families, workplaces, recreational and community spaces.
When: 7 September 2011
Open: 9:30am
Close: 1:00pm
Join us for lunch at a local restaurant afterwards!
Where: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology
Building 10, 235 Jones Street, Broadway
Ultimo, NSW 2007
Australia
Cost: Free
Participants are invited to lunch at a local restaurant at their own cost.
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Name: Dr Elaine Swan
Email: Elaine.Swan@uts.edu.au
Phone: 9514 3819

The Sydney Markets

Organisation: City of Sydney
History Week Event Type: Talk/Lecture
Allen Yip’s family has been associated with the Sydney Markets dating back to the 1880s. Join Allen as he talks about the history of the markets and his personal experience of this unique part of Sydney. Allen’s talk will be followed by a screening of the short film Out They Go, which beautifully captures the Sydney Markets in 1975 before it moved to Flemington. Presented with the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia Inc.
When: 7 September 2011
Open: 12:00pm
Close: 1:00pm
Where: Haymarket Library
744 George Street
Sydney, NSW 2000
Australia
Cost: Free
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Email: library@cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au
Phone: 8019 6477

Chinese Food Trail

Organisation: Marrickville Library and History Services
History Week Event Type: Talk/Lecture
King Fong, President of the Chinese Historical Society, will explore the history of Chinese settlement since the 1850s. His talk will explore the significance of food in this history, from market gardens to Chinese grocery stores.
When: 8 September 2011
Open: 11:00am
Where: Marrickville Library
Corner Marrickville & Petersham Roads
Marrickville, NSW 2204
Australia
Cost: Free
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Email: info1@marrickville.nsw.gov.au
Phone: 9335 2174

Robert Ho on Cantonese Cuisine in Sydney

Organisation: Chinese Australian Historical Society Inc
History Week Event Type: Talk/Lecture
Early Chinese migrants came mainly from Canton and brought with them the distinctive Cantonese style of cooking. Cantonese cuisine has therefore become the symbol of Chinese food to westerners. Drawing on his life experience, Chinatown Master Chef Robert Ho will talk about Cantonese cuisine in Sydney since the 1950s. Attendees will also make history – the traditional village style “Poon Choi” (Basin Feast) will be served first time in Sydney!
When: 11 September 2011
Open: 11:30am
Close: 1:30pm
Where: Hingara Chinese Restaurant
82 Dixon Street
Haymarket, NSW 1240
Australia
Cost: $25.00
Are bookings essential?: Bookings essential
Name: Anna Lee
Email: annalee@workready.com.au
Phone: 0412 334 398

Going against the grain

I’ve just begun writing a book chapter about the travels of white wives of Chinese men from Australia/NZ to China in the period 1880 to 1930. It’s a topic that I’ve been gathering material on for years and years, but now it’s down to actually writing something concrete and (hopefully) intelligent, it’s proving difficult to work out how exactly I’m going to frame their stories.

What’s troubling me most right now is the overwhelmingly depressing tales that emerge from the sources, like this one that I found this morning, titled ‘Harbor Bridge Suicide’  from the Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 17 January 1933:

Sydney, Tuesday.

At the inquest yesterday into the death of Mary Anne Mee Hing (62), who jumped off the Harbor bridge on January 5, it was stated that she was an Australian woman who had married a Chinese store-keeper with whom she went to China.

Her husband’s people disowned her, and she returned to Australia, where her parents refused to have anything to do with her. She returned to China and found her husband married to a young Chinese girl.

The woman thereupon came back to Australia, where she took to drink and subsequently ended her life.

The coroner returned a verdict of suicide.

I will see if I can get the full records of the inquest, in the hope that there are more subtle shades to the story, but The full records of the coroner’s inquest into Mary Anne’s death no longer exist, and from the other little bits and pieces I’ve found about her, it seems quite possible that Mary Anne’s life was as full of disappointment and heartbreak as this short report suggests. So many reports tell of marriages that have broken down, of women returning to Australia in financial and emotional distress, of illness, death or separation from children. The nature of these sources is something that I’ve tackled before, in my work on Agnes Breuer’s visit to China with her husband in 1933, but as I look over the bits and pieces I’ve assembled I now wonder if I’m wrong in wanting to assert that the difficult and unhappy times related in the sources are not a fair representation of how white wives experienced China.

At the heart of my response to the sources is my own response to life in China, most particularly as part of a Chinese family there. I went to China more or less on a whim, and it overwhelmed my life, both personally (I fell in love and married there – a relationship that, like many of my subjects’, has not endured) and intellectually (it sparked my passion for Chinese Australian history). There were and are aspects of life in China that I love, and aspects that I find so very difficult to deal with. It is a place where I have been both my happiest and my most unhappy.

If you caught me in the right mood I could paint a picture of my time as Chinese wife and daughter-in-law that was as sensational or pathetic as any that appear in my 19th and early 20th century sources. From seemingly small things, like not being allowed to wash my hair on feast days or to use a needle and thread while pregnant, to bigger things, like the idea of letting my parents-in-law raise my baby or meeting women in the village who had effectively been bought by their husbands. There were many things that contradicted my own (university-educated, Western, liberal, feminist) sense of how the world should work and ultimately how I wanted my own life to be.

At the same time though, spending time in China both as an independent entity and as part of a family has brought me a richness of experience and knowledge, a strength of character and sense of self, and many memories and stories that I would never had if I had stayed safely home in Australia. So if you asked me on another day, I might rave about how wonderful China is and how much I miss being there.

Couldn’t this also be the case for my white wives of a century ago? I know of wives who made short uneventful trips (happy holidays, even?) to China with their husbands and children. And I have scant detail about perhaps half a dozen white wives who stayed living in their husbands’ south China villages for long periods, like one who was described by New Zealand Presbyterian missionary Alexander Don as being ‘far more important in [the] Chinese village than she would have been in her own country’ (Otago Witness, 11 April 1906).

I don’t want the focus of this chapter to be on the biases and prejudices of the missionaries, newspaper reporters and government officials who recorded the experiences of my white wives, rather I want to think about the lives of the women themselves. But with a growing amount of evidence to suggest that my sources are going to remain weighted to the negative, I’m going to have to think about how or if it might be possible for them to reveal a more balanced account. If ever were a time for reading ‘against the grain’, I think this might be it.

A transnational Chinese-Australian family and the ‘New China’ – Melbourne Chinese Studies Group

Date: Friday, 6 August 2010
Time: 6pm
Admission: $2
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets)

Topic: A transnational Chinese-Australian family and the ‘New China’

Speaker: Pauline Rule

Chung Mow Fung arrived in Melbourne in 1857 as a single man and left nearly forty years later in 1895 to settle in Hong Kong together with his Chinese wife and a large family of eight surviving colonial-born children. Twenty-five years of constructing a family in country Victoria had seen Chung Mow Fung and his wife Huish Huish negotiate between Australian and Chinese culture and between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ values especially in the area of gender roles. Settlement in the complicated liminal space of Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong allowed the family to identify to varying degrees with the different parts of their cultural formation. Their Australian background was acknowledged and their life-style was largely westernized but some members of the family became involved in the Republican era in the struggle to change aspects of Chinese culture, especially the role of women. This paper will examine how the Australian childhood of the family members played some part in how they, especially the women, lived out their adult lives while also retaining a strong commitment to their Chinese heritage.

Pauline Rule undertook postgraduate research on the Bengali intelligentsia and then the social history of Calcutta during the period of the British Raj. She worked in both the curriculum and assessment areas of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and its prior manifestations. She has also researched and written extensively about the experiences of Irish women in nineteenth century Victoria. As part of this research she has examined marriages between Irish women and Chinese men in colonial Victoria and the outcomes for some of these families. This has lead to an interest in those Chinese women who came to Victoria in the colonial period.

Talk followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.

Nomchong building in Braidwood destroyed

The Canberra Times this morning is reporting the destruction of an 1850s building that was once used by the Chinese family, the Nomchongs. The single-storey wooden building stood in the main street of heritage-listed Braidwood, near Canberra and was demolished apparently in error. The Canberra Times says that the demolition was approved by the local Palerang Council, but there had been a mix-up over the address of the building.

The Nomchong brothers first settled in Braidwood in the 1860s–70s, and the descendants of one of the brothers still live and run businesses in the town today. The first Nomchong in the Braidwood area was Sheong Foon Nomchong (his name was spelt in a range of ways), who established a business at Mongarlowe and then Braidwood, and married Ellen Lupton, a woman of Irish-English descent. As his business grew he called for his brother Chee Doc to come to Australia from California. It is Chee Doc’s descendants who remain in the area today.

Read the Canberra Times article:

Historic Braidwood building’s ‘appalling’ demolition by Megan Doherty

More on the Nomchong family:

Shoon Foon Nom Chong from the Golden Threads database

Chee Doc Nom Chong from the Golden Threads database

Golden Threads also lists objects and sites associated with the Nomchong family in the Braidwood area.

The National Library of Australia holds the Nomchong family photograph collection (PIC/7659), the photographs from which are digitised and can be viewed online. The NLA also has oral history interviews with Nomchong family members.

The National Archives of Australia has a range of records about various members of the Nomchong family, including war service records, naturalisation applications and files relating to migration to Australia and travel out of Australia. Some of these can be found in the RecordSearch database by doing a keyword search for ‘nom chong’ or ‘nomchong’.

The Braidwood Historical Society has a collection of Nomchong family material, including the ‘Nomchong Room’ at the Braidwood Museum (Wallace Street, Braidwood).

And more generally on the history of the Chinese, including the Nomchongs, in the Braidwood area, see the extensive work of Dr Barry McGowan.