Tag: Trove

From the Archive: Uncovering the Everyday Heritage of Chinese Tasmanians

This post, written by Annaliese Jacobs Claydon and Kate Bagnall, was first published on the Everyday Heritage website on 18 September 2024.

Tasmania’s Post Office Directory (Wise’s) for 1904, Wise’s Directories, Hobart, 1904, page 576

It’s a chilly Friday morning in South Hobart, and Anna is looking for Chinese names in Tasmanian post office directories – the early-twentieth-century equivalent of the telephone book. It might sound like looking for a needle in a haystack, but in fact it’s just one of the steps in our research to uncover the ordinary lives and hidden histories of Chinese individuals, families and businesses in the island state.

For our Tasmanian case study, the Everyday Heritage team in Tasmania is using simple yet powerful, freely available digital tools to help paint a historical picture of Chinese communities in virtually every corner of Tasmania.

While some part of Tasmania’s Chinese history is quite well known, we are focusing on the mundane, the everyday, and the commonplace to tell stories of how ordinary people built their lives in Tasmania at a time when Chinese migration was restricted and anti-Chinese sentiment was common.

Our first step was to figure out who we were looking for – to build a list of names and occupations. We started with a preliminary list of Chinese Tasmanian residents gleaned from archival indexes and databases from the Tasmanian Archives and the National Archives of Australia. Naturalisation and alien registration records provided a rich beginning, but we also want to find people moving in and through the state alongside those who settled long term.

Anna spent several months scouring the digitised newspapers in Trove for articles that could help generate further names and unexpected places. Good search strategies are necessary to weed out Tasmanian stories from mainland articles republished in Tasmanian newspapers, and to identify articles that mention a specific person, event, and/or place (and ideally all three).

Screenshot of the Tasmanian project team’s Zotero Group Library showing one of the articles we’ve found about Ah Foo at Fingal

In order to manage the data, we are using Zotero – a bibliographic software that can grab metadata and images from a wide variety of sources, including Trove’s digitised newspapers and many library and archival collections. Once in Zotero, you can highlight, tag, and annotate the records.

The tags are especially important for our project. They function as a growing, searchable index to the material, but they will also be used in the next stage of the project, in which we will digitally map Chinese Tasmanian individuals, families, communities, and businesses over time.

Our research in the digitised Tasmanian newspapers in Trove has not only found some fascinating stories, it has also generated a long list of names and addresses across the state, from Southport in the south, to Fingal in the north-east, to Strahan on the west coast.

Of course, this list from the newspapers is incomplete and problematic. For example, the English spelling of Chinese names varies widely, and newspaper articles tend to focus on burglaries, assaults, gambling, and alleged opium smuggling, capturing the ‘dog whistles’ of anti-Chinese sentiment but not the texture of everyday life.

How can we both acknowledge and filter out that noise?

One way is through the post office directories, which provide names, businesses, street addresses and dates. Several years ago, Libraries Tasmania digitised their collection of Wise’s Post Office Directories from 1890 to 1948. As part of his GLAM Workbench, project team member Tim Sherratt has created an interface to the Tasmanian Post Office Directories that makes them searchable by keyword.

Directory listing for Ah Foo, market gardener, Mathinna, in Tim Sherratt’s Tasmanian Post Office Directories, GLAM Workbench

Focusing on the post office directories helps to compensate for the prevalence in the newspapers of crime and racial language. In the directories, you find fruiterers, market gardeners, launderers, fancy goods merchants, carpenters, and others, along with their locations.

Anna has been creating records of the ‘Chinese’ post office directory listings in our Zotero Group Library, tagging them with individual names, addresses, and occupations, and anything else that looks fruitful. She also spells out the common abbreviations for occupations and names – so  ‘frtr’ is changed to ‘fruiterer’ and ‘gcr’ to ‘grocer’, while ‘Hy’ is changed to ‘Henry’ and ‘Jas’ to ‘James’.

Going through year by year, directory by directory, allows us to see continuity and change over time, growth and decline of neighbourhoods and discreet populations, and family networks. It can also turn up some quite interesting stories!

One is about ‘James Ah Foo, skin dealer, Fingal’ – who appears in a post office directory in 1921. ‘James Ah Foo’ shows up elsewhere, too – there was also a market gardener in Mathinna between 1904 and 1911 who listed his name as ‘Ah Foo’ but also called himself James Ah Foo.

Was this the same person? We’re not absolutely sure, but Anna thinks it’s likely. Newspaper accounts find James Ah Foo back and forth between Mathinna and nearby Fingal, sometimes the victim of crime, sometimes of circumstance, and sometimes falling afoul of the law himself.

Anna found James Ah Foo involved in a major conflagration in Mathinna in 1901, which started at the rear of C.J. Bailey’s butcher shop and extended to the Bulman Brothers general store. The fire spread and claimed two buildings owned by James Ah Foo, where Miss Fitzgerald ran the newsagency and Mr Dunn had a fruit stand.

Parade at Mathinna, c. 1900–1904, Tasmanian Archives, LPIC 147/5/71. This photograph shows C.J. Bailey’s butcher shop and Bulman Brother’s general store, possibly reconstructed after the fire in 1901 that burned them to the ground, and possibly James Ah Foo’s properties next door?

Three years later, James Ah Foo was splitting his time between Mathinna and Fingal, where he prosecuted two men for stealing his skins. He was burnt out again in Fingal in August 1907 while he was on a visit back to Mathinna, and a year later, he was run over by his own bolting horse. Soon after the introduction of the Game Act, he was prosecuted for having excess kangaroo and possum skins out of season in 1909.

James Ah Foo was also fond of horse racing –  at Avoca in 1918, he told a racing correspondent that:

he was 82 years and four months old, had been in Australia 61 years, during which time he had paid only one visit to China. He has been living at Fingal for 20 years, where he follows the calling of a skin buyer, and says he would sooner live in Tasmania than any other country.

Each of these newspaper articles documents one moment when James Ah Foo came to the attention of the public. The post office directory listings help place him in one of the locations where he lived and worked. Together, they help to illustrate his network of associates – his tenants, neighbours, and business partners, people with whom he had disagreements and with whom he was on good terms. Some were Chinese, but many were not.

Beginning with digitised archives, our research is starting to sketch outlines of dozens of everyday Chinese lives in Tasmania – each of whom left their mark on the island, its communities, and its histories.

Bio

Annaliese Jacobs Claydon is a researcher on the Everyday Heritage project and an Adjunct Researcher in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. A historian of empire and exploration by training, she has also worked for many years as a public historian and an archivist.

Kate Bagnall is a social historian best known for her research on Chinese Australasian history. Kate is a Chief Investigator on the Everyday Heritage project and Senior Lecturer in Humanities (History) at the University of Tasmania.

Top 3 tips for Chinese Australian family history research

Here are my ‘top 3’ suggestions on where to start your Chinese Australian history.

(Note: these suggestions are most relevant for New South Wales, and for tracing Chinese ancestors who arrived in Australia from south China before World War II.)

Wedding of Elsie May Chinn and Kum Mow, Sydney, 1917 (Sun, 18 February 1917, p. 16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article221962375)

Top 3 sources

Look here first!

  • Birth, death and marriage records – You can search for and purchase copies of BDM certificates through the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, or get transcriptions through an agent. If you can, get copies of more than just your direct ancestral line (e.g. birth certificates for your grandmother’s siblings as well as your grandmother), since certificates often contain different bits of information. Also see if you can find church or parish registers and family notices in the newspaper.
  • Trove digitised newspapers – Try searching Trove using variations of your ancestors’ names, limit your searches by state or to a particular newspaper, or search more generally using a term like ‘Chinese’ and the place they lived.
  • National Archives of Australia (NAA) – Search in RecordSearch using variations of your family members’ names. The NAA collection is vast, but here’s an example of what you might find.

Top 3 research tips

  • Researching your Chinese Australian family is largely like researching any other Australian family. Some of the records you consult might be different (e.g. immigration, naturalisation or alien registration files), but the principles are the same. Contact your local library, historical society or genealogical society for help.
  • Chinese names were written down in many different ways in Australian records. Few records give people’s real Chinese names. Keep a list of each different spelling of your ancestor’s name you find, to use in keyword or name searches.
  • To trace your Chinese family back to China, you need to know their real Chinese name (preferably in characters) and their home province and district (‘Canton, China’ isn’t enough). During your research be on the look out for anything written in Chinese characters and make a copy.

Top 3 books

  • Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales, 1850-1950, New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishing, Armidale, NSW, 2004
  • John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2007
  • Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese, revised edition, Halstead in association with the City of Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, 2008

Top 3 websites

  • Chinese Genealogy – a really helpful forum that’s especially useful for tracing your ancestral village
  • Chinese-Canadian Genealogy – the specifics are Canadian, but this site provides many ideas that can be applied to Australian research

Building a DIY Trove list exhibition

One of my projects over the summer has been to create a small online exhibition using Trove lists and a nifty online exhibition framework built by Tim Sherratt.

DIY Trove exhibition screenshot

The list feature in Trove allows registered users to create their own collections of items. They’re a handy thing if you’re researching a particular topic and want to organise the material that you’ve found in Trove, or even if you just want to go back to random stuff that you like. You can keep your Trove lists private, or make them public and share what you’ve found with others.

Tim, who until recently was part of the Trove management team, thought that it would be good to take that sharing to another level — so he’s created a framework that lets you use your Trove lists to create an online exhibition. You can read more about Tim’s thoughts on this process on his blog.

I was keen to give it a try, and decided to make a pictorial exhibition about the Chinese in New South Wales to 1940. I started by making nine lists in Trove, which would serve as topics in my exhibition. Gradually I added a selection of pictures, objects and illustrated newspapers articles to each of my lists. I gave each of my lists a short description and arranged the items in chronological order. Because I’ve included newspaper articles, it would be best if I took the time to correct the OCR text for each one, but I’m impatient and wanted to get onto building the exhibition itself.

Tim’s DIY Trove Exhibition is pretty straightforward to use, particularly if you have some experience (even very basic experience) with web publishing or coding. He’s written clear, step-by-step instructions. The process first involves getting yourself a GitHub account and a Trove API key, and then customising his code to make your exhibition. Customising the code might look scary, but if you follow the instructions carefully you should be okay! There are further ways that you can customise the exhibition — for example, I changed the fonts — but you don’t need to do anything more if you don’t want to.

Once you’ve made the exhibition, you can easily add or take away items, or change your list descriptions, or change the order items appear in a list. Simply make the change to your list in Trove and it will appear in your exhibition after refreshing your browser.

Here’s my exhibition:

The Chinese in New South Wales: A history in pictures to 1940

Hope you like it!

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 Herald27 September 192426 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 193612 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 1939Mercury, 3 September 1942; Argus, 2 August 1932Northern Star, 20 August 1951; Central Queensland Herald, 1 September 1938Queensland 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.

Chinese Christmas box

Early on Christmas morning 1879, the residents of Lambie Street, Cooma, received a visit from their neighbour, Jimmy. With a Christmas greeting, he presented them each with a dish of new potatoes and a piece of prime pork, products of his Lambie Street market garden (Manaro Mercury, 31 December 1879). From childhood I’ve loved the sense of history that Lambie Street exudes, with its iron-roofed stone and brick cottages and their snug verandahs. It was Cooma’s first street and Jimmy’s garden would have sat on the low side of the road, an area that ran down to the creek and was subject to flooding.

‘A Chinese Christmas box’, Illustrated Australian News, 31 December 1880

Jimmy’s small act of Christmas cheer was repeated over and again by Chinese hawkers, gardeners and storekeepers around the Australian colonies. European businesses also made gifts of a ‘Christmas box’ to their customers, but the generosity of the Chinese at Christmas was something that lingered well into the twentieth century, continuing on after European traders abandoned the practice. The memory of the Chinese Christmas box lingered even longer. A 1937 article reminiscing about the early days of the Tambaroora goldfield remembered the prosperity of the Chinese stores of Sam Choy, On Ti Kee, Sam Gon Shin and Ah Tye, achieved through the regular custom of the white population. ‘Perhaps it was the never failing Christmas box forthcoming at the Chinese stores that attracted a certain amount of patronage from the whites’, the article suggested somewhat unkindly. White women dealt regularly with the Chinese, particularly with the hawkers who brought high-quality fresh fruit and vegetables to their door each day, and a number of illustrations from the newspapers and journals of the time depicted their congenial Christmastime meetings.

‘A Chinese trader making presents to his customers’, The Graphic, 24 December 1887

The Chinese were best known for their gifts of jars of preserved ginger; it was ‘the very best of its kind, and as such [was] a very acceptable addition to the Christmas Day dessert’ (Newcastle Morning Herald, 28 December 1908). Others like Jimmy of Lambie Street presented customers with fresh produce or nuts, fans or handkerchiefs. In 1917, the civic-minded Chinese gardeners and fruit hawkers of Wagga even presented the district hospital with a cheque for £14/10/ instead of giving their usual Christmas boxes to their customers (Albury Banner, 14 December 1917).