Tag: New South Wales

My hunt through SP115/1: day 1

I spent today at the National Archives in Sydney, looking at records for my Paper Trails project. My helpful reference officer, Judith, had warned me that there were 77 boxes in SP115/1, the series I need to look through. On my arrival though she told me she’s miscounted and there were, in fact, about 140. I managed to get through about 28 today. I’ll be there for the rest of the week but I’m not sure I’ll get through the remaining 112 boxes in the next two and a half days!

Series SP115/1 contains documents relating to non-white people – mostly Chinese, but also Syrian, Indian, Japanese and others – arriving into Sydney between 1911 and the 1940s. The series is arranged by ship, with each item relating to a particular voyage. Although I’ve looked at particular items in this series before, this time I’m starting at Box 1 and looking through every file, all 1780 or so of them. You may well ask why.

Although most of the documents in the series are CEDTs, which can also be found in other series (mostly ST84/1), the papers relating to Australian-born Chinese are often unique and unable to be found elsewhere. Details about these individuals might be recorded in the Register of Birth Certificates (SP726/2), but the documents in SP115/1 can include original birth certificates and other statements about identity and family background. One nice find today is the 1902 Hong Kong birth certificate of Harold Hoong, son of Julum Hoong and Rosalie Kinnane, who were living in Yaumatei at that time (NAA: SP115/1, 04/02/1915 – PART 1). Early Hong Kong birth and marriage records were destroyed during World War II, so it’s nice to see one safe and sound. Other records relate to Harold’s Australian-born siblings William, Albert and Frederick.

As well as locating documents about Anglo-Chinese travellers I know about from earlier research, looking through the whole series is yielding people I haven’t encountered in other records. Today I’ve found about half a dozen new subjects – some from families I’d already identified, but others are completely new to me. Exciting.

I’m also making a record of all the Australian-born full Chinese (for my Threads of Kinship project) and any Chinese-born women (for a paper I’m working on about Chinese wives in early 20th-century Australia).

Man Sue Bach, 1790–1862: the ‘oldest Chinese colonist’ in New South Wales

All in all we know very little about Australia’s very earliest Chinese residents. The earliest recorded arrival was a carpenter named Ahuto who came in 1803 on the Rolla (according to the 1825 General Muster List of NSW) – but no more is known about him.

Best known is Mak Sai Ying, or John Shying, who arrived in Sydney as a free settler in 1818, working first as a carpenter with John Blaxland before establishing himself in business at Parramatta, marrying twice to white women and fathering four sons. Family history research papers about Shying and his descendents are held in Sydney’s Mitchell Library.

Histories by Eric Rolls, Shirley Fitzgerald, Janis Wilton and Ian Jack have sketched the presence of a small number of other Chinese men who lived in Sydney at the same time as Shying—sailors, other carpenters, and labourers brought out on contract to work primarily in agriculture.

Sydney in 1820. Australian National Maritime Museum Collection 00000858.

In the 1820s there is record of John Dunmore Lang—Sydney’s first Presbyterian minister who himself only arrived in 1823—employing Chinese carpenters named Queng and Tchiou in 1827, and of two Chinese men (a cook and a carpenter) being among the multicultural labour force employed by the Macarthurs at Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta. The NSW Colonial Secretary’s correspondence shows that three Chinese carpenters—Ahehew, Ahoun and Awage—requested to remain permanently in the colony before 1825. Another man, Achin, was admitted to the general hospital in 1824. And the 1828 census recorded Ahchun, Ahfoo and Ahlong in the employ of a T.G. Pitman in Sydney.

In 1830, there was the remarkable arrival of Ah Nee and three countrymen who landed in Sydney after seven months at sea in a small sailing vessel. As noted by Ian Jack, they were employed as stockmen by Andrew Brown on his substantial grazing properties on the Castlereagh River. (Perhaps even more remarkable is that Ah Nee spent the next 75 years living in central-western New South Wales, where he worked as an agricultural labourer, before he died aged 117 in 1915.)

The colonial shipping news also records the comings and goings of Chinese men—such as the arrival of an unnamed Chinese carpenter on the Nimrod in December 1827; the departure of Yan, Hang and Nee for Mauritius on the Bee in June 1832; and the arrival of four unnamed Chinese labourers on the Regia from Singapore in September 1838.

In my PhD study of Chinese-European marriages in colonial New South Wales, John Shying’s two marriages were the only Chinese marriages I found before the early 1850s. But I now have evidence of at least two or three more (thanks to Trove). One of these was between a Chinese man named James Tame, a Catholic catechist converted by the Portuguese (presumably in or near Macau), and Englishwoman Mary Rapsey, who seems to have been an assigned convict at the time of their marriage in 1839. A family of ‘four Chinese children’ and their parents were reported as living at Goulburn in March 1842 (I’m pretty certain these would be mixed-race children, as I haven’t identified a Chinese mother in the colony before the 1860s). The other early mixed marriage I have come across involved a previously unknown contemporary of John Shying named Man Sue Bach.

The oldest Chinese colonist?

When he died in 1862, Man Sue Bach was 72 years old and had been living in New South Wales for 42 years, suggesting he had arrived in the colony in around 1820. On reporting his death, the Empire newspaper stated that Man Sue Bach was the ‘oldest Chinese colonist’, as he was considered the oldest member of the Chinese race in the colony and had been the longest resident.

(What about John Shying, you might ask. Why wasn’t he the oldest? Hadn’t he arrived earlier, wasn’t he about the same age? Shying was born in 1796, but there is no record of his death in New South Wales. He may have returned to China after the death of his second wife in the 1840s, or there is also the possibility that he married for a third time and died under the name John Sheen in 1880. Does the Empire’s claim to Man Sue Bach’s status as ‘oldest Chinese colonist’ in 1862 debunk the John Shying / John Sheen story? Maybe, maybe not. But as John Shying’s son was an undertaker at Man Sue Bach’s burial, it seems likely that if John Shying/Sheen was living in or around Sydney the claim about Man Sue Bach probably wouldn’t have been made.)

Being something of a curiosity, both the Empire and Sydney Morning Herald reported on Man Sue Bach’s passing in some detail, and their reports were reprinted in papers such as the Maitland Mercury and Launceston’s Cornwall Chronicle. My account of Man Sue Bach’s life and death is based on these press accounts and on the details provided on his death certificates. I haven’t been able to locate other records, but that’s not to say he won’t pop up somewhere else—versions of his name I’ve found are Man Sue Bach, Mum Shou Pac, John Ah Shue Bach, John A. Sue Bach, John Ah Sue and John a Shue. There may well be formal records of his baptism, his marriage and the birth of his children, but I haven’t yet managed to track them down.

A brief sketch of life …

Man Sue Bach was born around 1790 and he was said to have been a ‘native of Hongkong’. Although he could have been born in Hong Kong itself, it is equally possible that his native place was inland from Hong Kong in Guangdong province, as his birth and later departure for overseas ports took place well before the ceding of Hong Kong to the British in 1842 after the first Opium War.

He arrived in Sydney around 1820 from Saint Helena, the tiny British outpost in the mid-Atlantic most famous as Napoleon Bonaparte’s place of exile. Controlled by the British East India Company, Saint Helena was an important stop on the sea route between Britain and India, where ships restocked with supplies, and the majority of its population were African slaves. After Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade, however, the East India Company looked to China to provide a source of labour. From 1810 Chinese workers began arriving on the island, with the population peaking at over 600 men in 1817. Most worked as agricultural labourers and were indentured for contracts of three to five years.

After he arrived in New South Wales, Man Sue Bach travelled inland and eventually settled in the New England region, where he was said to have married and had a family of at least two sons. He also converted to Catholicism. In more recent years he had moved to Sydney where he kept a lodging house on Lower George Street, which was then the city’s fledgling Chinatown. He also made the arrangements for provisioning of ships leaving for China. Between these two enterprises he supported himself, even at his advanced age. The press accounts contain no more detail about his earlier life in the colony.

… and death

Man Sue Bach died on 4 June 1862, at about half past nine in the evening. He had been lying on his bed in his home at 169 Lower George Street when, at about 8.30 pm, he started and cried out in Chinese that he was dying. Dr Wright of Hunter Street was called for, but Man Sue Bach died soon after his arrival. When the news of his death spread, the Chinese storekeepers in Lower George Street and other parts of the city closed their shops in mourning.

In the press reports there is no mention of Man Sue Bach’s wife being present, so it seems probable that she had predeceased him and perhaps even that he had little contact with his adult sons. No details about a marriage or children were given when his death was registered, suggesting that the details were not known to those around him, although the press reported that his sons were still in New England and he had a brother at Lambing Flat.

The Sydney Morning Herald said that Man Sue Bach had been a ‘valued counsellor and friend’ to his countrymen in Sydney and, according to the Empire, they called him by the name ‘Governor’. Having lived in the colony for more than forty years, Man Sue Bach spoke English perfectly and understood how colonial life worked, meaning that many Chinese had sought his advice on ‘their personal welfare or business undertakings’. He also helped them financially, being ‘very ready … to assist them with loans of small sums of money when in distress’. He was honoured and respected by his fellow Chinese colonists, too, because of his old age, and the Empire declared that he would be ‘much missed’.

A notice of Man Sue Bach’s death was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 June (and reprinted on 21 June), and the City Coroner held an inquest at the Prince of Wales Hotel in George Street North the following day. Although he had enjoyed good health during his long life, during the previous few months Man Sue Bach had been ailing, complaining of a pain in the back. Based on the diagnosis of Dr Wright, who attended Man Sue Bach in his last minutes, the coroner found that death was due to an apoplectic fit.

Man Sue Bach was buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery. The funeral cortege that left from his Lower George Street home at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, 6 June, comprised ‘a long string of carriages’, numbering forty-one in total and including four mourning coaches. The funeral was attended by many Chinese, but also by white ‘diggers and others’, who, the Empire noted, ‘seemed to participate in their regret’. The death was registered twice, first by the coroner on 30 June 1862 and then, on 30 August 1862, by the undertaker, Eliza Hanslow. Witnesses to his burial were Thomas Hanslow and John Shying (son of our original John Shying), who was a foreman with the Hanslow family’s firm of undertakers. Several years later John Shying junior set up business as an undertaker with his brother George in George Street South.

References

Alan Dougan, ‘McIntyre, William (1805–1870)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, <adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcintyre-william-4103/text6557>, accessed 11 February 2013.

DWA Baker, ‘Lang, John Dunmore (1799–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, <adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lang-john-dunmore-2326/text2953>, accessed 11 February 2013.

Eric Rolls, Sojourners: The Epic Story of China’s Centuries-old Relationship with Australia – Flowers and the Wide Sea, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1992.

Index to the Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788–1825, State Records New South Wales, <www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/indexes-online/colonial-secretary/index-to-the-colonial-secretarys-papers-1788-1825>.

Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales, 1850–1950, New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishing, Armidale, 2004.

Li Anshan, A History of the Overseas Chinese in Africa to 1911, Diasporic Africa Press, New York, 2012.

NSW death registration for John a Shue, 1862/680.

NSW death registration for Man Sue Bach, 1862/895.

NSW marriage registration for James Jim and Mary Rapley, V1839526 73A/1839 (Presbyterian, Scots Church, Sydney).

Saint Helena National Trust, ‘Some notes on the Chinese connection’, Newsletter, no. 16, August 2007, <www.nationaltrust.org.sh/newsletters/no16/newsletter-16-aug07-4.html>.

Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1997.

Winsome Doyle, ‘Research papers relating to John Shying, a Chinese settler in New South Wales (believed to have arrived in New South Wales in 1818), and his descendants, 198-?-ca. 1992’, MLMSS 5857, State Library of New South Wales.

1915 ‘Died at 117’, Singleton Argus, 7 December, p. 1, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article80175666>.

1865 ‘Family notices’, Empire, 11 April, p. 8, viewed 7 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60569201>.

1862 ‘New South Wales’, Cornwall Chronicle, 5 July, p. 2, viewed 12 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65570088>.

1862 ‘Deaths’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 June, p. 7, viewed 8 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13230520>.

1862 ‘Funeral of the oldest Chinese colonist’, Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, 12 June, p. 3, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18688858>.

1862 ‘Funeral of an old Chinese resident’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 June, p. 4, viewed 8 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13229897>.

1862 ‘Coroner’s inquest’ and ‘Funeral of the oldest Chinese colonist’, Empire, 7 June, p. 5, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60476514>.

1862 ‘Deaths’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June, p. 1, viewed 8 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13229695>.

1842 ‘Goulburn’, Sydney Herald, 26 March, p. 3, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12874371>.

1839 ‘Conversion and perversion’, The Australian, 24 September, p. 2, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article36861109>.

1839 ‘News of the day’, Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 27 September, p. 2 Edition: MORNING, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32165693>.

1838 ‘Shipping intelligence’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 15 September, p. 2, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2551308>.

1832 ‘Shipping intelligence’, Sydney Herald, 4 June, p. 2, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12844633>.

1827 ‘Shipping intelligence’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 31 December, p. 2, viewed 11 February 2013, <nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2189676>.

Happy Valley: Patrick White’s impressions of an Anglo-Chinese family

Today’s Canberra Times features an article by David Marr about Australian novelist Patrick White’s forgotten first book, Happy Valley, ‘the thylacine of Australian literature’. It was written while White was working as a jackaroo at Bolaro (or Bolero) in southern NSW. He took horses to be shod in nearby Adaminaby and there encountered the Anglo-Chinese Yens, who formed the basis for the novel’s Quong family. A review in the Adelaide Mail wrote:

Mr. White has set his novel in an Australian town — but what a town! In the winter it is snowed in; in the summer it is burning hot. Its inhabitants are the mixed lot you find in any town — but what a lot! The sanest and most decent people there seem to be the family of half Chinese, two of whom conduct the general store … (The Mail, 22 February 1941)

The Yens (or Yans) were not the only Anglo-Chinese family who had made Adaminaby their home. For a long time Adaminaby was also home to the Booshang (later Booshand) family, among others, but they had moved on by the time White arrived in the town:

Twin sisters Anastasia and Jane Thomas married John Booshang and Charles Chun Yin, later known as Yen, within a few years of each other at Cooma in the early 1880s. Anastasia and Jane, born in 1864, were the daughters of Cooma residents Thomas Thomas and Johanna Shanahan who had married in the town in 1858. Anastasia and John, who married in 1881, had three children and Jane and Charles had two, before both families moved to Adaminaby in around 1888. Here they settled themselves, opening a store and Jane and Anastasia having four and five more children respectively.

Both families became established members of the Adaminaby community. John Booshang lived there until his death in 1923, at which point Anastasia moved to Sydney to be with her children, dying there in 1934. The Yen family maintained their businesses in the town and were compulsorily moved in the early 1950s when the old Adaminaby township was flooded as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. (Kate Bagnall, Golden Shadows on a White Land, p.131)

Happy Valley was published in 1939 and won the Australian Society of Literature’s gold medal in 1941. Despite this acclaim, White never allowed the novel to be reprinted in English. According to David Marr, this was because:

White could never shake the fear that … [the Yens] … could sue for what he did to them in the pages of Happy Valley. He could not be reassured about this. White went to his grave fearing the revenge of the Yens.

A century after White’s birth and more than seventy years after Happy Valley first appeared, the novel is now being republished, with its release due in August this year. Apparently printed copies of the original version are rare and valuable, but if you can’t wait until August to read Happy Valley, a digitised version is available in the Haithi Trust Digital Library.

Postscript

The Sydney Morning Herald and the Age both published the same article by Marr about Happy Valley. The Herald received a response from a Yen descendent named Laurann Yen, which it published on 30 May 2012. She wrote:

In Happy Valley White does indeed steal my grandparents and report them spitefully: they are without humour, without grace, without respite from the bleak town and their bleak relationship; two dry peas in a miserable pod. But there is wonderful White as well – a sense of place, where every tree, every verandah, every small comforting pretension gets into your bones. I know, more from White than from memory, every person.

The letters page of the Herald on 2 June 2012 also includes a postscript which talks a bit about Marr’s unsuccessful attempts to track down members of the Yen family:

After all these years comes this generous response: acknowledging that White looked on their grandparents with a cold and unforgiving eye but nevertheless wrote a fine book,’ he says. ‘Such forgiveness is rare.’

‘Paper trails’: my presentation at the 5th WCILCOS conference

I’m still digesting all that I heard at the 5th WCILCOS conference and cogitating about the exciting possibilities for international collaborative work that have emerged from it. I’m hoping to pull together some more thoughts about my discussions with folk from Canada and the US about mixed-race overseas Chinese families and children.

In the mean time, though, here are the slides of my talk and the first (and much longer) version of the paper I wrote a couple of months ago: Paper trails: Anglo-Chinese Australians and the White Australia Policy (pdf, 1.9mb).

‘That famous fighting family’

A little article of mine* appears in issue 9 of Inside History magazine (March–April 2012). The article discusses the experiences of Chinese Australians during World War I through the experiences of the Sam family from West Wyalong, New South Wales.

I first came across the Sam family in the file of youngest son, Percy, who travelled with his father to China in 1915. It was noted in their applications for exemption from the Dictation Test that a number of Percy’s brothers were serving in the First AIF – they were, in fact, at Gallipoli. It seemed such an irony that at the same time as his brothers were fighting for their country overseas, Percy was made to comply with the regulations of the Immigration Restriction Act, something that suggested he was less than a true Australian.

The way that Chinese Australians were treated during World War I was full of contradictions. Some young men were able to enlist, others weren’t. I don’t mention it in the article, but Chinese nationals were required to register as aliens during wartime (and afterwards) – so there were also cases of Chinese fathers having to report to the police to register as aliens while their Australian-born sons were away fighting for country and empire.

Unfortunately, I can’t provide a link to an online copy of the article, so if you’re interested you might just have to go and buy a copy of the magazine. 

Access a copy of the article from the link below:

* Kate Bagnall, ‘That famous fighting family‘, Inside History, issue 9, March–April 2012, pp. 37–40.

‘Birth of a Chinese in the colony’, 1865

In July 1865, the Maitland Mercury carried an article announcing the birth of the second Chinese baby in the colony of New South Wales – a little boy named Henry Sydney Ah Foo – or, as recorded in the NSW BDMs index – Ah Cong, son of Sam Ah Foo and Ah Fie (15489/1865):

Some days ago Mrs. Ah Foo, wife of Mr. Ah Foo, storekeeper, of Nundle, to the delight of her husband and every other celestial on the Peel river, presented the former with an unmistakable pledge of love in the shape of a fine healthy son, no half and half affair, but a thorough Mongolian. We are given to understand that this is the second birth in this colony where both parents were Chinese, and is, consequently, well worth mentioning. The Chinese in the neighbourhood have taken the matter up, and elated with joy, have made a present to the parents of £150. On Sunday last, the Rev Mr. Whitfield of Tamworth performed the interesting ceremony of christening the child, which was witnessed by a large number of Chinamen. The youngster’s name is Henry Sydney. Mrs. Ah Foo is said to be an interesting woman.

The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 18 July 1865

I’ve recently started working on a project that has its roots back more than ten years. As part of my PhD research, I started compiling a database of marriages between Chinese men and non-Chinese women in 19th-century New South Wales. A version of it ended up as an appendix to my thesis, but since a lot of time went into the original data-gathering (thanks Mum!) I thought that perhaps this data should now take on a new and exciting life.

I’m therefore extending my original database to include any ‘Chinese’ marriage or birth registered in New South Wales up to 1918 – that is, where either husband or wife, father or mother, were Chinese or part-Chinese. I’m initially working from the published NSW BDM indexes (hence the 1918 cut-off), but I’ll then add information from my piles and piles of other research notes and also hopefully crowdsource further data to fill out the scant details provided by the index. So far I’ve worked through maybe a tenth of the material I have, and I’ve already got over 1000 entries in the database.

You can read more about the database project, Threads of Kinship – and there’s a prize for guessing the origins of the project name and why I chose it.

[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

LJ Hooker’s Chinese roots

His name is known across the country, but until recently the true story of LJ Hooker’s early life was unknown, even to his own family. Now, after five years of research, writing and production, Natalia Hooker has published a lavish biography as a tribute to her famous grandfather. The book, LJ Hooker the Man: The Untold Story of an Australian Icon, is particularly interesting for what it reveals about LJ Hooker’s Chinese roots.

Black and white portrait of LJ Hooker

Until an article in the Sydney Morning Herald published in 1985, nine years after Sir Les’ death, nothing was publicly known, or rather said, about LJ Hooker’s Chinese ancestry. The article revealed that LJ was ‘of Chinese origin’ and had changed his name by deed poll from Tingyou to Hooker in 1925 (Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 1985).

In the preface to her biography, Natalia Hooker explains that there were many theories about the origins of the name Hooker:

The most popular story is that LJ’s Chinese father was a railway engineer named Tingyou who had invented the ‘hooker’ coupling system for rail carriages. Another suggestion was the LJ was an admirer of the American Civil War general, Joseph Hooker, whose statue had been built in his honour in Boston in 1903, the year of LJ’s birth. None of these accounts were particularly convincing. (LJ Hooker the Man, p. 5)

Fay Pemberton, the daughter of LJ’s cousin Sylvia, told Natalia a different and much more plausible story, however. Fay said that Hooker was, in fact, LJ’s father’s name.

LJ’s mother Ellen Tingyou, known as Nellie, was 18 and unmarried when she gave birth to her son on 18 August 1903. As was customary at the time for unmarried mothers, Nellie’s baby’s birth was registered with no record of his father.

Little Leslie grew up surrounded by family though – he and Nellie lived together with his grandfather, Chinese-born James Tingyou; aunts Mary Quan and Rosanna Davis; uncles Chun Quan, John Davis and James Tingyou junior; and his cousins William and Percy Quan and Biddy and Sylvia Davis. It was a household in which Chinese must have been spoken, at least by LJ’s grandfather, James Tingyou, and uncle-by-marriage, Chun Quan.

When LJ’s mother Nellie died from tuberculosis in 1911, at the age of 25, it was this extended family that raised him – in particular, his cousin Sylvia who was only six years his senior.

A mystery half solved

For Natalia Hooker, LJ’s parents were something of an enigma. Other than Fay Pemberton’s comment about the Hooker name, Natalia had no clue as to LJ’s father’s identity; she also knew little about the short life of LJ’s mother, Nellie. After some unsuccessful attempts to track down records of the births of Nellie and her siblings, Natalia approached me to see what I could uncover, particularly about the family’s Chinese connection.

As with much family history research, particularly those with Chinese heritage, the trick was in thinking creatively about names. Natalia knew details of the marriage of LJ’s maternal grandparents, James Tingyou and Rosanna Dillon, but there was no trace of their four children under either of their surnames. It turned out that the births of Mary Alice, Rosanna junior, James junior and Ellen (Nellie) were registered under the surname Harlet, and also that in some of the records their Chinese father was listed as being English. When James and Rosanna were married by Rev. James Fullerton in Sydney in 1874, Rosanna’s age was put up to 22 so that she did not need the consent of her parents to marry. It seems, sadly, that she may have been estranged from her Irish-born parents and siblings and felt the need to lie about her name and her husband’s birthplace.

Discovering the Harlet name led, inevitably, to some more small discoveries. But the real clincher came when I found a death registration for LJ’s mother, Nellie Tingyou, under the name Ellen Hookin. With Fay Pemberton’s comment at the back of my mind, the immediate similarity between Hookin and Hooker was striking! The story got even more intriguing when I saw that the informant of her death was a man who described himself as her husband, Harry Hookin.

From Hook Yin to Hookin to Hooker?

Harry Hookin had arrived in Sydney as Hook Yin, a thirteen-year-old boy whose cabinetmaker father was a long-term Sydney resident and naturalised British subject. Already proficient in English, Hookin attended and did very well at school and, in time, took over management of his father’s business, Sing War & Son in Albion Place. At the time of Nellie’s death he gave his place of residence as Beecroft, where the extended Tingyou family were also living – it is possible that Hookin was one among the tangle of aunts, uncles and cousins with whom the young LJ Hooker shared his home.

Harry Hookin, 1911. NAA: ST84/1, 1911/68/61-70.

After Nellie’s death is would seem that Harry Hookin disappeared from LJ’s life though. Three years later he married ‘again’ (he claimed to have married Nellie Tingyou in 1910, for which I have failed to locate a marriage registration) and there remained no memory of him among the Tingyou descendants.

The obvious question remains, however – was Harry Hookin LJ’s father? As Natalia Hooker concludes, ‘it is impossible to know for sure whether or not Hookin was Les’s biological father’ and a number of facts, such as his age – only 17 when LJ was born in 1903 – perhaps suggest otherwise. But, to quote Natalia again:

the fact that Les, as an adult, chose to change his name to Hooker, suggests that, at a minimum, Harry Hookin was a father figure to Les. (LJ Hooker the Man, p. 42)

Some more records about Harry Hookin have recently come to light, but whether they are able to prove anything is another question! It may well be that this remains one of those mysteries that is impossible to solve.

About the book

LJ Hooker the Man: The Untold Story of an Australian Icon by Natalia Hooker (self-published, 2010) is available to order online: www.ljhookertheman.com. It costs $54.95, free delivery. It is available in bookstores throughout Australia as of February 2011. You can also see a preview of the book.

Birth certificate registers

In October 1913 Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Atlee Hunt, sent a circular to the state Customs departments asking if they kept records of Chinese Australians who used their birth certificates as identity papers when travelling overseas.

Queensland already kept such a register, and Hunt felt that:

Such a register is very desirable to enable a check to be kept on persons claiming admission to Australia on birth certificates, as it is an easy matter for a number of copies of the same certificate to be obtained, and the experience of the past shows that in some instances several Chinese have attempted, sometimes successfully, to land on copies of the same certificate. (NAA: A1, 1913/20069)

An example of the early difficulties that both Chinese Australians and government officials had with using birth certificates as identification can be found in the case of Fred Hong See (see NAA: BP342/1, 13021/357/1903). Fred was born in Sydney in 1885 to Chinese parents who, when he was very young, took their son back to China. Fred’s father later died and, in 1903, Fred returned to live with other relatives in Sydney. When he arrived, Customs officer J.T.T. Donohoe doubted his identity and would not allow him to land. Donohoe’s suspicions were based on the fact that Fred could not speak any English and his feeling that Fred looked older than the age stated on the birth certificate he presented.

Fred was quickly sent on his way back to China, and it was only through the threat of legal action by his well-respected relatives in Sydney and their payment of a deposit of £100 that Fred was permitted to stop at Brisbane for re-examination. With evidence provided by Fred’s relatives, the Brisbane Collector of Customs, W.H. Irving, was satisfied that he was, in fact, telling the truth. After Atlee Hunt’s approval, Fred was allowed to stay.

This is the copy of Fred Hong See’s birth certificate that he presented to officials on his return to Australia in 1903. It can be found with other correspondence about the case in NAA: BP342/1, 13021/357/1903.

In the decade after the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act, the processes for its administration continued to be refined and tightened, primarily to prevent the fraudulent entry of Chinese into Australia. Hunt’s request for the keeping of birth certificate registers came about from a concern that ‘as other channels of fraudulent entry are being blocked, the Chinese will make a determined effort to utilize birth certificates to that end.’

His Customs circular of 1913 set out the details that Customs officers should record to enable correct identification on a person’s return to Australia:

  • name
  • number of birth certificate
  • date of issue
  • date of birth
  • where born
  • date of departure from Australia
  • remarks concerning departure
  • date of return
  • by whom examined, landed or rejected
  • general remarks

The Collectors of Customs responded thus:

  • Victoria reported that had been keeping a register from the beginning of the year (1913), but without the level of detail requested.
  • New South Wales had not been keeping records, but was now ordering a book for the purpose.
  • Western Australia had no special register, but would immediately open one.
  • South Australia said they had not had any need for a register, as there had been no cases of Chinese being admitted on birth certificates there.
  • Tasmania would begin keeping a record, but had only had four cases to date.
  • And the Northern Territory had been keeping record of Chinese arriving on birth certificates since 1911.

It became the practice for birth certificates to be endorsed by Customs officials on a person’s departure. This usually included taking a handprint and attaching a photograph, as well as recording the details in a register. Some people also went through the formality of applying for a CEDT.

The two remaining registers

To my knowledge, only two of the birth certificate registers still exist, those for Queensland and New South Wales. The Queensland register is held in the Brisbane office of the National Archives, and a digital copy is available through RecordSearch:

The first volume, of 16 double pages, has suffered flood damage and can be difficult to read in parts. The second volume, which has 23 double pages, is much more legible. A sample page from the second volume is shown below – this is a left-hand page, with the remainder of the details about each person completed on the corresponding right-hand page.

The single register for New South Wales, held in the National Archives’ Sydney office, is more substantial than those for Queensland, demonstrating the greater amount of travel that occurred from Sydney. The register contains around 150 double pages and includes an alphabetical index at the front. The entries date from 1904 to 1962; those before 1913 were presumably copied from records elsewhere. It is also fragile and difficult to read in places, but it has recently also been digitised and made available through RecordSearch:

The page reproduced below is a left-hand page, with further details about the travels of each person available on the corresponding right-hand page.

Making use of the registers

These registers are valuable sources of information about Chinese Australian families in Queensland and New South Wales, and can provide missing pieces of information for people who did not apply for CEDTs when they travelled overseas (which many Australian-born Chinese did not).

Having them digitised is great, especially for those of us who can’t easily get to the Brisbane or Sydney reading rooms – but what would be even more useful is if the information contained in the registers was in a form that could be searched and sorted. I’m working on a bigger project relating to Chinese families in New South Wales, based around a database of information sourced from marriage and birth records up to 1918. I’m part-way into transcribing relevant details from the published BDM indexes with 1000 entries (out of an estimated 3000–4000) in the database so far!

The information found in the birth certificate registers obviously relates very strongly to this, so I have another crazy plan to also transcribe the information held in the Sydney register. It’s not going to be a quick job – and it’s one that could easily be shared since the New South Wales register is online. So, if you happen to have some spare time and don’t mind deciphering old handwriting, I’d love to hear from you!