Post by NZBC on Dec 8, 2012 7:37:39 GMT 12
Repatriated to China June 1914: How fifty-eight elderly Chinese men found their way home from Darwin
Kate Bagnall
Many people living in southern China today have connections to the regions long history of overseas migration. During visits to Hong Kong, Guangzhou and the counties of the Pearl River Delta, I have had the chance to hear stories of these connections. Some tell of fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers who ventured overseas and successfully returned again they were able to send money home, to build new houses for their families and to provide a better future for their wives and children.
Other stories, perhaps more hidden than the successes, tell sadder tales. One young engineer, now living with her husband in Beijing, told me of how her great-grandfather had spent his youth in Australia before returning to China, but that her family never spoke of it because his experience had been so bitter. A late middle-aged man, still living in the rural village where he was born, spoke of how his father had worked overseas as a laundryman and returned home with enough money to begin building a new home for his family, only to die before the house was finished and before his only son was born. A college-educated tour guide told of how his grandmothers father had left his wife and infant daughter while he went overseas to work, never to return home and never to contact them again. They never knew his fate or even which country he had gone to.
Approaching the history of the Chinese overseas from the places they travelled to, like Australia, it is sometimes easy to forget the connections Chinese men brought with them. When you read accounts of the thousands of anonymous men who laboured on the goldfields, or when you see drawings and photographs of solitary vegetable sellers, the families they left behind in China can seem very remote and distant. But to their mothers and fathers, their wives, their children and grandchildren, each one of these men was someone important. Generations on, their lives and experiences in Australia may fade into the distant memory but at home in China these men and their overseas experiences are still remembered.
Researching in the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, I came across a photograph that brought to mind some of the conversations I had had in China with the families of men who had travelled overseas. The photograph, one of dozens in a file somewhat curiously titled Premises owned by Mrs Kirkland condemned by Public Health Board, showed a large group of elderly Chinese men assembled in front of a corrugated iron building. On the back was written Group of aged or decrepit Chinese repatriated to China June 1914. The other photographs were of buildings of various kinds in Darwins Chinatown, ranging from small, falling-down lean-tos to new, sturdy buildings with iron roofs and front verandahs.[1]
www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/jca/issue01/13Bagnall.html