Tag: National Museum of Australia

An Australian shovel in Shiquli, Xinhui — research trip update IV

The village of Shiquli in Luokeng, Xinhui (新會區羅坑鎮和平村石渠里) sits at the heart of one of my ongoing research projects. Victorian-born James Minahan (1876-?) spent more than twenty-five years in Shiquli, from the age of about five to thirty-one, when he returned to Australia. Arrested as a prohibited immigrant after failing the Dictation Test on his arrival in early 1908, his case proceeded to the High Court (Potter v. Minahan 1908) and he was eventually granted permission to stay in Australia. Whether he did or not I still don’t know, even after exhausting every lead I have found in the archives in Australia and now visiting Shiquli for a third time.

A two-storey white building with front balconies and a pointed roof
Shiquli’s ancestral hall and primary school, built in 1935, is in great need of repair
A group of people standing in front of old grey-brick houses
Australian huaqiao houses in Shiquli

While I might not yet have uncovered James Minahan’s fate, I have discovered that the tiny village of Shiquli sent dozens of men to Australia from the 1860s into the twentieth century. The earliest were gold-miners, with some becoming storekeepers, but many in later years were simply gardeners. While I was in Shiquli last Saturday, we found a poignant piece of material heritage that reflects this history.

An old grey-brick house
The house of Chen Zhidian, built around 1948 when he returned to Shiquli from Australia
Two small brick buildings, one with bright blue doors
The shed (with blue doors) adjacent to Chen Zhidian’s house where we uncovered a treasure

Stashed away in a shed next to one of the few huaqiao houses in the village — the house of Chen Zhidian 陳稙典 (pronounced Tsun Zek Din in Xinhui dialect), built on his return to the village in 1948 (22°27’08.14″N 112°55’47.93″E) — was an old shovel that was said to have been brought back from Australia many years before. Once the dirt and a bit of the rust was cleaned off, I could just make out the words SAVAGE and SYDNEY underneath an insignia of a six-pointed star in a circle. Bingo!

Men standing around looking at an old shovel
Look! A shovel from Australia!
Close-up of the rusty handle of the old shovel
But can we read what is says on the handle?
A man crouched over cleaning a shovel with a rag
Let’s give it a bit of a clean and see…
Detailed close-up of a rusty shovel handle
Aha! A star and the words SAVAGE and SYDNEY

The shovel has now been acquired by the fine gentlemen of the Kong Chew Chan Clan Culture Research Association (岡州陳氏文化研究會), with whom I was visiting the village, who plan to treasure it appropriately. I promised to find out what I could about the shovel’s origins, so this post is a brief outline of what I’ve been able to find out online from China (honestly, what would we do without Trove?).

IMG_5961
Longman Chen, Director of the Xinhui Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, and Chen Ruihuai, head of Shiquli village, with the shovel
Five men and one woman in front of a large rock with the Chinese characters for Shiquli etched into it
Me with members of the Kong Chew Chan Clan Culture Research Association at the entrance to Shiquli

W. Savage & Co., the manufacturers of the shovel, were originally based in Newcastle, New South Wales. In 1926, a notice was published in Sydney’s Daily Commercial News that a new company, W. Savage & Co., had been registered to acquire the business of W. Savage & Co. at Newcastle. The company were wholesale and retail storekeepers, general merchants, ironmongers and engineers (Daily Commercial News, 12 January 1926). In the late 1920s the company was the Newcastle agent for a range of building and hardware products and machinery, including:

W. Savage & Co.’s involvement in shovel manufacturing began in mid-1928 when they set up a new factory at their premises in Parry Street, Cook’s Hill, Newcastle (Newcastle Sun, 2 July 1928).

A Mr Gaythwaite, ‘an experienced shovel-maker from Cumberland, England’ had, a number of years earlier, come up with a new design for a shovel which he patented under the name ‘Gaylac’. The shovel had corrugations on either side of the handle that were said to strengthen the shovel across the back of the blade and counteract leverage stress. Gaythwaite began manufacturing the shovels in partnership with a Mr Black in around 1926, just in their spare time, and distributing them in the Cessnock and Kurri Kurri districts in the Hunter Valley.

The shovels proved very popular and so Gaythwaite and Black went into partnership with W. Savage & Co. By 1929 ‘Gaylac-Star’ shovels featured prominently in W. Savage & Co.’s advertising (Newcastle Sun, 5 August 1929).

Black and white advertisement from a newspaper
Advertisement for W. Savage & Co., Newcastle Sun, 5 August 1929

The shovels were made in Australia from entirely Australian materials — the billets were made by BHP and rolled by Lysaght’s into sheets from which the shovels were cut. They were then pressed into shape with a machine, tempered in an oil bath, and set and balanced by hand.

By the end of 1931, W. Savage & Co. was based in Sydney. In December that year they were in court arguing over the rent they could charge for the commercial premises they still owned in Parry Street, Newcastle (Newcastle Morning Herald, 23 December 1931). These premises had been for sale in mid-1930 and it seems likely that this was when W. Savage & Co. relocated to Sydney. The business was one of several in Parry Street that were broken into in August 1929 (Newcastle Sun, 24 August 1929), at which time a safe in the W. Savage & Co. offices was blown open and cash and a cheque were stolen.

W. Savage & Co.’s move to Sydney came around the time of the Great Depression (1929-1932), and it seems that it was after the difficult times of the depression that things took off. There aren’t any advertisements or articles about the company in the newspapers between 1929 and 1932.

In 1932 council granted permission for W. Savage & Co. to erect a new brick factory to manufacture shovels in George Street, Erskineville (Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 1932).

In 1934 and 1935, Savage & Co. appeared before the Industrial Commission in a dispute over wages for two ironmongers they employed to manufacture shovels using a ‘specialised process’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 1924, 26 February 1935, 27 February 1935).

By the mid-1930s, the shovels were no longer being advertised as ‘Gaylac-Star’ shovels, but simply as ‘Star’ shovels, part of an expanding range of ‘Star’ products that included forks, scoops and spades. Their high quality was said to come from ‘years of experience in the heat treatment of the best quality Steels — the usage of first grade Handles — and the employment of highly skilled artisans’ (Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 October 1935).

Black and white advertisement with pictures of two shovels
Advertisement for Star shovels, Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 October 1935

In 1940 a fire broke out in the George Street factory caused by a burst oil pipe leading to the furnace. Twelve employees escaped from the fire, but overhead pulleys and other machinery were damaged (Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 1940).

Export manifests show that W. Savage & Co. were exporting their shovels in the 1930s and 1940s to places as diverse as Papeete, Calcutta and Suva (Daily Commercial News, 25 January 1936, 12 June 1946, 30 December 1948).

Advertisements from newspapers around Australia show that Star shovels were sold in Western Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory from the early 1930s to the early 1950s (Western Mail, 16 November 1939; Mercury, 3 September 1942; Argus, 2 August 1932; Northern Star, 20 August 1951; Central Queensland Herald, 1 September 1938; Queensland Times, 11 April 1953; Northern Standard, 15 April 1938).

Black and white advertisement for tools with seven pictures of shovels and forks
Advertisement for Star tools, Central Queensland Herald, 12 January 1939

The National Museum of Australia in Canberra has a Star shovel in its collection. It is part of the Claude Dunshea collection (who seems to have been a miner, judging from other items of his in the museum’s collection). The museum’s shovel has a very short handle, while the one in Shiquli has a long handle as shown in the 1930s advertisements.

Catching up

I’ve been a bit quiet of late, trying to write other things and not distract myself with blog posts. I’m currently based at the Centre for Historical Studies at the National Museum, who are generously supporting me as an Early Career Summer Fellow to work on my book about Anglo-Chinese Australians and the Immigration Restriction Act (well, that’s one variation of how to describe the book…). It’s such a luxury to be able to spend my days working on the book, instead of trying to fit it in around my real job. If only writing my book were my real job. Sigh.

One of the delightful things of late has been that I have had the time to embark upon correspondence with people around Australia, New Zealand, indeed, the world. One of those correspondents is Natalia Hooker, who is working on a biography of her late grandfather, LJ Hooker. Hooker was born Leslie Joseph Tingyou in 1903 and changed his name by deedpoll in 1925. His Chinese background only came out publicly after his death in 1985.

By one of those strange but really not uncommon coincidences, when Natalia shared information about her extended family with me, I recognised the name of one of LJ’s cousins. As the son of a migrant Chinese father and Anglo-Chinese mother, he was someone I’d ‘met’ in the archives and it was interesting to hear a little more about him, including that he’d apparently fathered a child at a rather young age! It is also further proof that everyone is related to everyone else – well, at least as far as the NSW Chinese community was concerned.

Natalia is interested to hear from anyone with LJ Hooker related memories, information or photographs. Her website is www.nataliahooker.com.

A Carlton boy’s big idea

If 8 August 2008 is an auspicious enough day for the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then surely it’s also a good day on which to launch this, my new blog about Chinese Australian history and heritage. And given the current obsession with things Chinese and things Olympic, it seems fitting to begin with a post about a Chinese Australian teenager’s lasting impact on the traditions of the Olympic Games.

The Olympics of 1956 were held in Melbourne – a great coup for our little nation – but international political events threatened the success of the Games before they had even started. The Soviet invasion of Hungary lead to the withdrawal of Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain; Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon pulled out over the Suez Crisis; and at the last minute the People’s Republic of China refused to attend because the Republic of China was being permitted to compete under the name Formosa. These international tensions continued during the Games, most famously during a water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union which came to be known as the ‘blood in the water’ match.

While these events were worrying for Olympic officials, they were also playing on the mind of a 17-year-old Melbourne boy, John Ian Wing. Wing decided that something needed to be done to turn things around, and so wrote to the Olympic committee with a suggestion he hoped would bring the athletes together in a show of unity and harmony.

Wing’s two-and-a-half page handwritten letter, now held by the National Library of Australia, outlined his proposal for a closing ceremony march in which the athletes did not march in their national teams, but rather walked together freely, smiling and waving at the crowd. ‘War, politics and nationality will be all forgotten, what more could anybody want, if the whole world could be made as one nation’, he wrote. Wanting to make a difference, but too shy to even tell his family what he’d done, Wing only signed the letter with an indecipherable ‘John Ian’. The only clue he provided as to his identity was to reveal that he was 17 years old and ‘a Chinese boy’.

Wilfred Kent Hughes, chairman of the Olympic organising committee, was enthusiastic about Wing’s idea and after getting IOC approval, put plans for the march into action. Kept secret until the end, the march was a great success and as one newspaper of the day said, ‘It delighted 100,000 people in the Stadium and probably changed the form of all future Olympic closing ceremonies’. Wing didn’t attend the ceremony, and it was only when the Monday papers came out that he knew his idea had been taken up.

Although calls were put out in the press for the 17-year-old Chinese boy to come forward, he never did so publicly. He decided, however, to write again to Wilfred Kent Hughes, this time giving his full name and address, but asking that his name not be revealed. Several days later, Kent Hughes organised an Olympic offical to visit Wing’s father’s restaurant in Bourke Street, Melbourne, to present him with an Olympic medal as thanks.

For decades, the 17-year-old Chinese boy’s identity remained unknown. A young historian, Shane Cahill, found Wing’s second letter to Kent Hughes during postgraduate research into the Melbourne Olympics, and an article by sports journalist Harry Gordon in Time magazine in 1986 renewed the public search. Wing was eventually tracked down by a radio DJ in London. His contribution to the Olympics could finally be recognised – which it has been, not least by naming a street in the Sydney Olympic village after him!

Here are some links to more on the story, including interviews with John Ian Wing:

John Ian Wing’s website (archived by the Internet Archive)

Article on John Ian Wing – on dimsum.co.uk (archived by the Internet Archive)

John Ian Wing’s Olympic dream – http://english.cri.cn/6066/2008/07/17/1701s382268.htm

John Ian Wing’s story in the Harvest of Endurance Scroll – at the National Museum of Australia (archived by the Internet Archive; current webpage at https://www.nma.gov.au/explore/features/harvest-of-endurance)

Papers of Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes (MS 4856) – in the National Library of Australia, Canberra

Update in July 2024 with some newer resources:

‘Letter from John Ian Wing to the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games Committee suggesting that athletes walk together rather than in teams by countries at the closing ceremony’ – National Library of Australia MS 4856/19/20

John Ian Wing: Methodist Children’s Homes and the Olympics 1956 – article with memoirs by John Ian Wing, on the Kingston Local History (City of Kingston Library)

“There Will Be Only One Nation”: The Boy Who Defined The Olympic Finale – article by Vice