Tag: National Archives of Australia

‘A legacy of White Australia’

You can read ‘A legacy of White Australia’, the paper I gave at the Fourth International Conference of Institutes & Libraries for Chinese Overseas Studies in Guangzhou in May, which has been published on the National Archives of Australia website.

A large part of the paper is about the Poon Gooey deportation case from 1910–13. The photo of the family below was published in the Daily Telegraph on 12 May 1913, shortly before the famiily left Australia. The newspaper article was clipped and placed on the wonderfully rich Department of External Affairs file about the case (NAA: A1, 1913/9139).

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.

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.