Journal of Chinese Australia, Issue 2, October 2006

After the gold is gone: Chinese communities in northeast Victoria, 1861-1914

Cora Trevarthen

The only thing that we do that's a Chinese idea is when we go to visit my grandparents graves, Nanna always instilled in us that you have to take the biscuits, like they take the rice… and supposedly you share it with the spirits. Often, we still do it. Joan and I go over and take the biscuits and we sprinkle it on the headstones as they do in Sydney where they take the rice and have a meal. Sometimes we go over and we've only got the plain biscuits and we say 'sorry Nanna, we've got nothing real nice today, we've only got the plain biscuits.' That's about the only thing we still carry on with today.

Wilma and Joan Conroy's remembering of their grandparents at the old Chilton cemetery is possibly the last social ritual still undertaken by the once extensive Chinese population of northeast Victoria. That it survives at all is testimony to the tenacity of Chinese tradition in the region.[1]

The size, the dimensions and the character of this community—or series of communities—is barely remembered. The mention of Chinese in northeast Victoria conjures up images of the burning towers at the Beechworth Cemetery and possibly a vague reference to the anti-Chinese riots in the Buckland Valley. Both of these belong to the first decade of the discovery of gold; Serle's 'Golden Age'. The influence of Serle's research has perhaps worked to the disadvantage of the Chinese. Greater attention has been paid to those early, alluvial years while less to the ensuing decades. It is possible that this has tended to reinforce the image of Chinese as short term immigrants, as sojourners, when in fact for a considerable number of Chinese, the opposite is true.

This research paper is a reconnaissance. By considering aspects of the Chinese occupation of northeast Victoria, it seeks to move beyond the familiar stereotypes of gold seeking, store keeping and market gardening. While these remain important, this paper seeks to identify broader social and economic patterns within the Chinese community of Victoria 's northeast. If significant numbers of Chinese did remain in Australia, where did they live and work? Are the stereotypes of prospector, store keeper and market gardener adequate for the communities surviving outside the colonial capital cities? Similarly, do these communities conform to the model of self-employment these occupations imply or were work patterns more complex? In seeking initial answers to these questions, as well as identifying possible directions for future research, this paper looks at the distribution of Chinese and their livelihoods in northeast Victoria between the discovery of gold in 1852 and the outbreak of war in 1914.

This paper has three major elements. First, beginning with Beechworth as the earliest Chinese settlement in the northeast, the paper seeks to identify basic patterns of internal movement and migration. Secondly, it begins to describe something of the economy of these Chinese settlers and the range and nature of employment and the occupations that sustained them. Finally, by using the Wahgunyah community as a case study, this paper begins to define more complex forms of employment than have previously been acknowledged, in particular an organised wage labour economy based on Wahgunyah and Rutherglen vineyards in which Europeans as well as Chinese were both employees and employers.

A small Chinese community had been established at Spring Creek in Beechworth by 1854. By November 1859, it had grown to 1901 Chinese, and survived in attenuated form until after the First World War.[2] The Chinese community of Beechworth made a significant cultural and social contribution to the life of the town. To raise funds for two key institutions, the Ovens District Hospital and the Beechworth Benevolent Asylum, a consignment of costumes, banners and ceremonial weapons was imported from China. Following lengthy preparations, these were worn and carried by one hundred and fifty members of the Chinese community as the highlight of the Carnival Procession held in Beechworth on 13 November 1872.[3] The Chinese contributed more generously than any other part of the community to these two regional medical institutions for many years.[4]

While Beechworth is not the central focus of this study, this brief description raises two issues of significance to a broader analysis of Chinese occupation of northeast Victoria. Firstly, there is evidence that Chinese from as far afield as Rutherglen and Wahgunyah supported the Ovens District Hospital; it may well have served as a hub for a wider community. Secondly, the description of the community's ceremonies and celebrations reflects community practices across the northeast and similarly suggests symmetry between the dispersed Chinese communities of that region.

Image 1. Movement of Chinese in northeast Victoria, 1852-1910.

From Beechworth, Chinese joined the rush to the rich Buckland Valley diggings in 1856-57. At its height the population there was estimated to be 3000 Chinese miners, outnumbering Europeans by at least five to one.[5] Driven out both by racist violence and by the decline in alluvial gold, many returned to Beechworth. Others, however, moved further up the valley to the Bright diggings, forming solid communities in Bright, Wandiligong, Germantown and Harrietville.

The first Chinese on the Howqua, Woods Point and Jamieson fields travelled over the range from the Buckland Valley, although it is more likely that the greater number of the Chinese who subsequently worked the Dry Creek fields and moved deep into Gippsland, travelled by way of Wangaratta and Benalla.[6]

There is also evidence of the movement of Chinese miners between the Upper Ovens fields and the Omeo goldfields on the far side of the High Plains, but migration from the Buckland Valley was more complex than simply the movement of miners to new prospects. As will be discussed below, Chinese families moving out of the Buckland Valley also became prominent in the tobacco and hop industries.

Other victims of the Buckland riots never forgot their debt to the Phelan family, Irish Australian storekeepers who sheltered a number of Chinese at the height of the riots. For many years during the late nineteenth century, numbers of Chinese from the Bright district would travel over the High Country to undertake seasonal agricultural labour for the Phelan family on property they had taken up at the headwaters of the Dargo River.[7] From Beechworth, Chinese also moved north to the Yackandandah goldfields and later to the rush in the Black Springs on the northern margin of what is now Albury.

In terms of Chinese settlement, Beechworth—on its high plateau above the Ovens River —is balanced by the settlement of Wahgunyah, to the north west on the Murray River. During the crucial formative years of the goldfields, Wahgunyah was the riverboat port through which many of the northeast goldfields supplies moved. This mid-nineteenth century line of communication between Wahgunyah and Beechworth, running northwest-southeast, is now largely forgotten, overshadowed by the north-south lines of the Hume Highway and the Melbourne-to-Sydney rail line. And yet many of the communities that marked staging posts on this old transport route became significant centres of Chinese population.

Whether Wahgunyah or Beechworth represented the major point of arrival for Chinese in later years is as yet unclear. What is beyond dispute is that Chinese travel along this line resulted in a series of long-lived and at times noteworthy Chinese communities. Prominent amongst these were the settlements at Eldorado in the Woolshed Valley, the Indigo goldfields (a complex of settlements variously known as Cornishtown, Christmastown, Indigo, Chiltern Valley and Durham), at Rutherglen and at Wahgunyah itself. From the Indigo communities employment was found in the vineyards to the north while communication was maintained with Melbourne via traders shipping goods from Springhurst, ten miles to the south.[8]

However it was at Wahgunyah that possibly the most long-lived Chinese community was established. Chinese were employed on the riverboat trade, the first regular reports of settlement date from the early 1860s at about the time that gold was discovered.[9] While the employment of this community will be dealt with in greater detail later, at this stage, three points can be made.

First, some of the most complex patterns of employment between Europeans and Chinese developed in this area. Second, as late as 1903 large teams of Chinese from Wahgunyah were undertaking both station work and land clearing as far afield as Deniliquin in the Riverina. Finally, this community remained in close contact with Melbourne 's Chinatown both in terms of economic contact and social/cultural organisations.

Recent historiography has begun to fill out the categories of employment and the trades followed by the Chinese in Australia. Economic historians such as Warwick Frost have begun to describe the nature of Chinese farming and the Golden Threads project, a collaboration between a number of museums, has used surviving artifacts and photographs to identify an increasing range of employment amongst Chinese in eastern Australia. Both provide important information; both have limitations. In the case of the Golden Threads project, the work is heavily defined by the random pattern of surviving artifacts and other material. The project provides remarkable insights without conveying any sense of overview or completeness. On the other hand, Frost's work remains a general survey, often relying on secondary sources. This paper shares with both these projects a sense of reconnaissance. The paper will identify the range of agricultural, rural and trading pursuits that sustained the Chinese communities of northeast Victoria well into the twentieth century.

Storekeepers were part of the Chinese community as early as miners, and many of their stores became the centre of community activity and communication. Wilma and Joan Conroy's Chinese grandfather, George Shing, and his Irish wife ran such a store in Cornishtown on the Indigo fields up until the mid-1930s:

Well that's where they all were and our grandfather had a general store at Cornishtown and they would get their goods from Springhurst and he used to sell all these things to Chinese who were all living in humpies and things.[10]

Image 2. William Ah Poy's Fruit and Confectionery Store, Chiltern. Undated, c.1880s.

[Courtesy, Rex Fuge, Secretary, Athenaeum Museum, Chiltern]

However, the purpose of this paper is to move beyond storekeepers and market gardeners to seek evidence of a wider range of occupations in the regional economy that, following the gold rushes, was predominately agriculturally based.

Whilst Chinese participation in market gardening was significant, particularly in the Wahgunyah, Albury and Mansfield districts, 'market gardening' may have been a convenient catchphrase for broader Chinese participation in agriculture. Evidence points to ‘mixed farming' practices throughout the district. Pan Ah Shin and his sixteen-year old son, Henry Thomas Ah Shin, moved from the Buckland Valley to Edi (then known as Hedi) in the King Valley in 1879. They set up a small farm and grew oats, tobacco and hops in their first year and then adding potatoes and wheat over the next five years.[11] Chinese were involved in such mixed farming throughout the northeast region. In Wandiligong, lifelong resident Agnes O'Donnell (whose family moved to the district in the 1870s) recalls growing up with Chinese mixed farming practice 'like most people here':

We've still got families in 'Wandi' whose great grandfather was a Chinese miner. They settled there and farmed and they were great friends of our families. I sort of grew up with them.[12]

As well as being integrated into the local mixed farming economy, Chinese were pioneers of the hop industry. Agnes O'Donnell also recounts the tale of the Pan Look boys who established the major hop farm known as Rosstrevor, which was later purchased by Henry Jones Ltd and ultimately by Carlton and United Breweries:

Oh the miners moved around. There's quite a story about the Pan Looks because they were three really young boys. Their father died I think and these three young teenagers actually set all that up.[13]

Chinese farmers also played an important part in the establishment of the tobacco industry. Their early success with this temperamental crop ensured the region was well positioned for major expansion following World War Two.[14]

On the Murray River, the port of Wahgunyah provided a focus for much Chinese employment from the 1860s on. The discovery of gold at Wahgunyah in 1862, together with a major expansion in the district's wine industry, complete the list of major industries in the region. All provided employment opportunities for the Chinese community. It is significant, too, that employment in the wine industry parallels employment in the mining industry from the mid-1860s; it is not a case of failed miners simply turning their hand to agricultural pursuits.

The significance of multiple sources of employment is evident from mining registrars returns from the 1860s. Between September 1864 and March 1865, the number of Chinese miners on the Indigo fields (including Rutherglen and Wahgunyah) collapsed by seventy-five per cent. While some ground was later regained, at no time in the future did the number of miners approach the 1132 Chinese working the fields in mid-1864. This collapse destroyed a number of the smaller Chinese communities such as Durham. It is significant though that half a century after that collapse, a Chinese community in Wahgunyah could provide nearly fifty employees for the All Saints vineyard. The Chinese community of Wahgunyah is a community that had moved beyond dependence on gold.[15]

There are brief references to the employment of Chinese deckhands employed by Smith and Banks on their paddle steamers from the early 1870s.[16] At the same period, surviving records date the seasonal employment of Chinese by European vignerons from the mid-1860s. The long term patterns of employment that emerged on vineyards such as All Saints will be discussed in detail below. Seasonal employment on vineyards was not confined to Wahgunyah. In addition to Mount Pryor vineyard, the Graham vineyard and Brastche's 'Coblenz' vineyard (all in Rutherglen), Morris' Fairfield vineyard (thirty-five kilometres away to the east of Rutherglen), also employed up to forty Chinese labourers during the 1870s and 1880s. Oral tradition suggests that Chinese employment survived, albeit on a vastly reduced scale up until the Second World War.[17] The vineyards provided not only employment opportunities for Chinese labourers; surviving vineyard records show that Chinese were also employed as cellar hands and coopers.[18]

Image 3. Pruning contract between J.R.E McPherson and Sun Low Kee and Ah Wah, Bontherambo, 25 June 1903.

[Courtesy, Rex Fuge, Secretary, Athenaeum Museum, Chiltern]

The large flour mill established by John Foord on the banks of the Murray at Wahgunyah provided further employment opportunities. By the early 1870s, Chinese contractors had supplanted Europeans in supplying timber to fuel the mill's boilers. Regular entries in Foord's account books over a period of at least five years demonstrate a long term commercial arrangement between the 'Chinese Woodcutters' and the mill. The contractors supplied large amounts of timber (generally about eleven cords at a time, but occasionally even more). For example, from January to December 1873, payments totaling £137/16/7½ were made to the 'Chinese Woodcutters' for twenty-four deliveries of wood on a regular, fortnightly basis.[19] This employment also marks a maturing commercial relationship between Chinese and the European employers. Foord's account books contain three broad categories of entry: named individual accounts for European customers; a generic category 'strangers' for cash transactions with Europeans and a third, separate, category for Chinese dealings (in addition to the ‘Chinese Woodcutters', there are also irregular references to other 'Chinamen' engaged in small scale trade with the mill). The long term transactions with the Chinese Woodcutters begin as purely cash payments but over time it appears from surviving records that the Chinese contractors maintained a standing account with Foord and opened their own bank accounts with the Bank of Victoria.[20] Foord's records also reveal further subsidiary employment for Chinese as charcoal burners, traced through a small number of enigmatic references in his account books to payments to the 'Charcoal Chinaman'.[21]

It may be significant that long term employment in vineyard maintenance and cropping does not seem to have resulted in significant numbers of Chinese becoming vine growers in their own right. The definitive list of Victorian vine growers compiled in 1891, lists nine Chinese vine growers in Victoria out of a total exceeding 400. Of these, only two grew grapes in the northeast. Joney R Huey farmed fifteen acres of vines at Benalla while Fong Kay had three acres of grapes at Indigo.[22]

Examples of employment provided so far describe relatively settled communities or limited movement in search of work. However, there are a number of references to Chinese labourers travelling from the Cornishtown settlement about seven kilometres north to the Fairfield winery for employment. However, there are also examples of more migratory employment in the region. For example, Chinese from the Upper Ovens migrated over the high country to the headwaters of the Dargo River for a number of years in the nineteenth century as seasonal labourers for the Phelan family.[23] At a later date, and on a larger scale, gangs of Chinese labourers, organised by their own headmen and contractors, operated from Wahgunyah far out into the Riverina on casual work such as ring-barking, scrub clearing and general farm labouring. On 26 February 1892, for example, a local storekeeper advertised, offering 50 men for ‘clearing, grubbing, scrub cutting and ring-barking…', while in 1903 Sen Loo Kee and Hin Wah, again local storekeepers, could advertise the labour of '100 men' for similar work.[24]

While the range of employment and occupations is more diverse than previously recognised, some of the characteristics of this employment are equally revealing. Alluvial mining, storekeeping and market gardening emphasise self-employment, yet this was not the case for many Chinese.

The nature of employment in the northeast has other characteristics that suggest a more complex and integrated relationship between Chinese and Europeans, extending well beyond the sale of vegetables and access to Chinese stores. For example, the Chinese woodcutters relationship with John Foord was obviously a long term, well established contract involving large sums of money running to more than £120 annually. So, too, were some of the grape picking and labouring contracts at All Saints and on neighbouring properties. At All Saints, a number of Chinese (for example, labourer and cellar hand Ah Sue between 1877 and 1882) transcended seasonal employment as they became full time employees on the property.[25] As already noted, the commercial relationship of the Chinese woodcutters ultimately involved standing accounts with the mill, multiple accounts at the Bank of Victoria and forms of credit that go far beyond simple bartering or exchange.[26]

The emergence of a number of Chinese as wage labourers for European employers also resulted in a series of benefits extending beyond simple cash payments. For example, All Saints paid the hospital bills of Ah Sue and routinely enabled him to also take wine at wholesale prices in lieu of wages.[27] Commercial arrangements such as these mark a more permanent, public set of economic and employment circumstances than has previously been recognised. Most of these examples are drawn from the wine and milling industries of Wahgunyah, which warrant closer examination.

The pattern of employment of Chinese in northeastern Victorian viticulture mirrors the pattern of Chinese migration and timing of gold discoveries in the district. It reflects the movement of Chinese away from the gold-focussed community of Beechworth as they followed other gold discoveries and also sought to make a living from a wider variety of occupations. In the Indigo mining region, for example, the availability of regular seasonal work in the rapidly expanding viticulture industry conveniently offset the seasonality of mining Indigo's 'dry leads'. This convenience of seasonal labour enabled some Chinese to relinquish any association with mining and become settlers in their own right.[28]

By the mid-1860s the pattern of Chinese employment throughout the wine district was well entrenched. In his book Better Than Pommard, David Dunstan refers to the exclusive use of Chinese labour in 1864 by Hugh Fraser on his Olive Hills vineyard as 'setting a trend'.[29] An additional reference to more than forty Chinese working the Morris' Fairfield vineyard as cellar hands and labourers at its peak, many 'more expert than…English labourers', reveals the Chinese, like the wine industry itself, were successful in consolidating a regional presence.[30]

The relationship between Chinese settlers and the development of viticulture was one valued by many employers. Given the labour-intensive nature of vineyard maintenance and the reliability and high standards of Chinese workers, their labour was preferred by many:

…without their assistance the steady prosecution of the industry would be attended with considerable difficulty, owing to the scarcity of European labor [sic], and the unreasonable demands of those who are willing to accept employment. The Chinamen, who do their work by contract, are sober, persevering, industrious, and trustworthy, and the vigneron is perfectly well assured that they will fulfil whatever they have undertaken to perform; whereas the white man, who looks down upon him and resents his intrusion into a labor market of which he, the European, considers he should have full control, is very apt to go upon the 'spree' or to strike for higher wages, at the very moment it is most essential that the operations of the vineyards should be pursued without an hours intermission.[31]

Evidence suggests that Chinese were not necessarily hired because they were cheaper. Surviving records from All Saints dating back to the 1870s suggest that European labourers might have enjoyed a small margin, but one smaller than might have been anticipated. The inability to directly compare the hours and nature of work of Chinese and Europeans in the vineyards makes a definite conclusion difficult to make. In a number of cases, though, individual Chinese were earning fully comparable rates of pay to their European counterparts. Ah Sue, already mentioned, is one example.[32]

The archival collection of All Saints winery at Wahgunyah established by George Sutherland-Smith and John Banks in the late 1860s records 'Chineymen picking grapes' in 1870.[33] A survey analysis of cheque butts of five vintage seasons from 1877-78 to 1912-13 demonstrates a mature and long term employment pattern existed between European employers and Chinese employees over a period spanning five decades.

The All Saints archives clearly detail direct economic relationships between Chinese and Europeans that have not been detailed elsewhere. The cheque butts reveal the nature of this relationship differed markedly from the 'contracting gangs' of Chinese agricultural labourers, in that payment was made directly to individuals rather than to 'headmen'. In fact, the enduring, mature relationship with his Chinese workforce was conceivably one of the reasons that enabled Sutherland-Smith to confidently expand All Saints following Banks' death in 1878 from 30 acres in 1876 to 300 acres under vine in 1894.[34]

Image 4. Harvest at All Saints showing at least two Chinese grapepickers. Undated, c. late 1870s – early 1880s.

[Courtesy Peter R. Brown Wines, All Saints Winery, Wahgunyah]

Table 1. Chinese employment at All Saints on a seasonal basis

Key to occupations/work

P = Pruning V = At vines or in the vineyard

AV = At vintage C = Cellar work

GP = Grape picking T = Tending vines

Pa = Packing VG = Vegetable growing

CT = Cutting ties B = Blacksmithing

Source: Cheque butts for seasons 1877-78; 1892-93; 1897-98; 1909-10 and 1912-12, All Saints Collection, University of Melbourne Archives.

Table 1 demonstrates that Chinese were not only involved in the routine, seasonal round of vineyard labouring tasks such as pruning, tying, tending vines, grape picking, at vintage and packing but were also engaged sporadically for specific purposes such as cellar work, vegetable growing and blacksmithing.

As evidenced by the construction of a specific 'Chinese dormitory' on the property, considerable numbers of Chinese were employed at All Saints over many years, never falling below twenty-one individuals in the years surveyed. The number of workers receiving more than one pay cheque per season ranges from approximately five percent up to almost fifty percent of the Chinese workforce with a number of employees acting as virtually permanent staff over long periods.[35]

Image 5. Chinese Dormitory, All Saints. Constructed c. 1870.

[Cora Trevarthen, 2005]

Image 6. Chinese Dormitory, All Saints. Constructed c. 1870.

[Cora Trevarthen, 2005]

Image 7. Chinese Dormitory, All Saints. Constructed c. 1870. Interior view showing brick fireplaces.
[Cora Trevarthen, 2005]

Ah Sue and Ah Lung are two such long-term employees. A labourer and cellarman, Ah Sue worked at All Saints from December 1877 to December 1882. Between December 1887 and December 1888 he was paid £36-£37 at a weekly rate of 16/1½.[36] Ah Sue was mostly paid in cash, but also could be paid in kind—Sutherland Smith would pay other debts such as his annual hospital subscription of 5/-, for hay, bread, beef and wine at 10/- to 10/6 for two gallons. Ah Lung worked in the fields between April and November 1878 and was clearly a long-term casual who was employed on the vines, at pruning and in ‘the vintage' workforce. His payments totalled £22/16/3, revealing a pro-rata rate similar to Ah Sue's.

Table 2: All Saints: Indicative Patterns of Chinese Employment (by season)

Source: Cheque butts for seasons 1877-78; 1892-93; 1897-98; 1909-10 and 1912-12, All Saints Collection, University of Melbourne Archives.

As is the case in all agricultural pursuits, seasonal cycles determined the timing and type of employment. Table 2 demonstrates that the core pattern of Chinese involvement at All Saints varied very little over the period, except when seasonal factors dramatically reduced the crop. After falling heavily in the first decade of the twentieth century, All Saints' reliance on Chinese labour had returned by 1912 to the level first established in the 1870s. The nature of work also determined the nature of payment. The vintage and vineyard labouring work appears to have largely been paid on hourly rates whereas the accounts covering tying and pruning tasks suggest piece work or contract rates were payable for these repetitive, manual tasks.

Collaboration between vineyards extended Chinese employment while providing vignerons with the certainty of secure contracts for harvesting. Records from 1911 reveal a sophisticated contracting and subcontracting arrangement between Sutherland Smith, Ah Nam and another grape grower, Mr Howard. Ah Nam was the headman contracted to oversee Chinese and European grape pickers to pick and deliver the grapes from All Saints and Mr Howard's vineyard. The archival material provides further evidence of the variety of ways in which the Chinese were employed on the vineyards. It does not reveal the internal dynamics of these gangs, but the preponderance of evidence, including that from season 1912-13 suggests that while gangs may have been centrally organised payment continued to be made to individual pickers or labourers.

Although it has been suggested that many Chinese communities were in steep decline by the late 1880s or early 1890s as a result of immigration restrictions, the case of Wahgunyah is not so clear cut.

In the decade prior to war in 1914, this community was not only continuing its fifty year involvement in the wine industry, but was also offering the services of large gangs of labourers for ringbarking, scrub clearing, grubbing and suckering in the Riverina. Some local historians have suggested that local Chinese were engaged in this work from 1859, but evidence is scanty. It is clear that the Chinese were engaged in large scale clearing of the Riverina for squatters from the 1870s onward, particularly from bases in Deniliquin, Narrandera and Wagga Wagga. Local histories of these towns locate the decline of the Chinese community to the 1880s or early 1890s. In each case, the decline is so precipitate that none of these communities could maintain the gangs of up to forty labourers that had previously been the case.

On the eve of the First World War it is evident that the Chinese community in Wahgunyah was still capable of providing a workforce for the vineyards. The 1901 census reveals that the Chinese population in Victoria had declined only marginally in the previous decade. The largest community was that of Melbourne, concentrated in La Trobe Ward's Chinatown followed by a community of 420 at Ballarat East. The Rutherglen local government area, including Wahgunyah, was the third largest community in the state, with a population of 230. Most of this population was concentrated in the agricultural parts of the district, not in Rutherglen itself. The historically larger populations of Beechworth and the towns on the upper Ovens River (Bright, Harrietville) that had continued to rely heavily on mining were significantly smaller.[37]

Why had the Chinese of the northeast, and the community around Wahgunyah in particular, survived so long, outliving the original gold rush generation seventy years before and surviving the decline of alluvial mining? Part of the explanation seems to lie in the significant role Chinese played in a diverse suite of occupations and industries. A further explanation lies in the economic relations forged with local European employers, particularly in the viticultural, milling and pastoral industries. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, Chinese contractors from Wahgunyah and Rutherglen could continue to advertise the availability of large gangs for work on Riverina properties. Both the date of such advertisements and the size of the gangs suggests not only the survival of a larger community in Wahgunyah but also indicates the possibility that these Wahgunyah gangs had taken over work previously done by Chinese in the Riverina towns of New South Wales. The stability offered by long term employment arrangements with local winegrowers may provide a partial explanation for the endurance of the Chinese in northeast Victoria, but the market opportunity offered by the establishment of a tariff-free, single market following Federation gave Wahgunyah's Chinese the chance to expand to meet the needs of Riverina squatters and farmers.

There is another explanation. Wahgunyah's population grew during the bitter decade of 1891 to 1901. Rutherglen Shire enjoyed the largest population growth in northeast Victoria.[38] The diverse economy and multiple employment opportunities there provided an economic and social niche for the Chinese. Such diversity was never the case in the valleys of the Upper Ovens or around Beechworth, which historically had larger Chinese populations. Economic diversity, links with European employers and even perhaps individual friendships such as those enjoyed by Jimmy Ah Chen, combined to consolidate and sustain that community. We know more of its economic vitality than we do of its social and cultural life. It was a thriving community well into the twentieth century—as shown by the construction of twin burning towers in the local Carlyle cemetery in 1897 and a local paper report which noted, with disapproval, the damage caused to the Melbourne ‘dragon' by enthusiastic Chinese youths when it came to Rutherglen for the Chinese New Year festival in 1905.[39]

Image 8. Twin burning towers, Carlyle Cemetery, Wahgunyah. Constructed c. 1897.

[Cora Trevarthen, 2005]

War after 1914 reshaped Australia. It also seems to mark the end of organised Chinese employment in rural and viticultural industries in northeast Victoria. Technological innovation, returning ex-servicemen and a new generation of (Italian) migrants are just a few of the new pressures that weighed down the small Chinese community. By the time of the 1930s depression it appears from anecdotal evidence that the sense of community had gone and the traditions of that community had devolved on to individual families.

Acknowledgements

It would not have been possible to produce this paper without the kindness and contribution of residents of northeast Victoria and fellow researchers. The author is grateful for the assistance of:

Glenda Campbell, Curator, Federation Musuem, Corowa

Rex Fuge, Secretary, Atheneum Museum, Chilton

Joan and Wilma Conroy, Corowa

Agnes O'Donnell, Wandiligong

Dr David Dunstan, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University

Sheila Hutchinson, Mansfield

Wendy Jubb-Stoney, President, Mansfield Historical Society

The Hon. Graeme Stoney MLC, Member for Central Highlands

Diann Talbot, President, Bright Historical Society

Dr Mark Richmond, University of Melbourne Archives

Martin Tobin, All Saints Vineyard, Wahgunyah

Notes

[1] From transcript of 24 April 2005 interview with cousins Wilma and Joan Conroy who are descended from Chinese Cornishtown storekeepers. This transcript is now held by the Federation Museum, Corowa.

[2] Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 26 November 1859.

[3] Vivienne McWaters, Beechworth's Little Canton: The History of the Spring Creek Chinese Camp and its Residents, Beechworth, 2002, pp.68-69.

[4] Rob Kaufman and Andrew Swift, The Chinese Camp, Bright NE Victoria: A Concept Proposal for an Archaeological Dig, Bright, 1997, p.2. Kaufman and Swift cite the 1860s as a period when the Beechworth Mining District regularly topped the Chinese population lists. For example, in June 1862 there were 3000 Chinese in Buckland Division, 2700 in Fryers Creek, 800 in Spring Creek (Beechworth), 988 in total in Kangaroo Flat, Eaglehawk etc (Bendigo) and 300 in the entire Ararat District. The camp at Beechworth serviced the Upper Ovens fields which were for a number of years, ‘overwhelmingly an outpost of Asian culture, operating under European laws' with the Chinese population vastly outnumbering Europeans on the Harrietville and Buckland Valley fields.

[5] Kaufman and Swift, The Chinese Camp, p.2.

[6] The Chinese wave of immigration to Victorian goldfields was a ripple by the time the Goulburn River and Gippsland fields were opened up in the early 1860s. The census of 1861 estimates population on the Upper Goulburn and Jamison fields at seven hundred, of which ten were Chinese. A Chinese presence possibly did increase at times on these fields and scattered place names acknowledge a semi-permanent presence or at least a degree of impact. 'China Flat' was southeast of Louisville at the Dargo River (Brian Lloyd, Gold at the Ten Mile: The Jamieson Goldfield, Wangaratta, 1978, p.49); ‘Chinaman's Point' was a settlement of possibly two hundred on the Jordan River below Jericho, based on alluvial mining and market gardening (Luke Steenhuis, Secrets of Ghost Towns of the High Country, Launching Place, 1998, p.45); and, 'Chinaman's Flat' was between Kevington and Ten Mile on the Upper Goulburn (Lloyd, Gold at the Ten Mile, 'Plan of land holdings at Ten Mile and Kevington'). These are small figures when compared with the presence of Chinese on the Buckland or Mt Alexander fields. Prospectors originally ventured from the Buckland and Upper Ovens Valleys from the north but according to Lloyd these smaller Chinese communities soon forged direct links with Melbourne via Mansfield and Yea. In the case of Mansfield, links went back to Benalla to the north and skirted the Dry Creek diggings where the Chinese had a presence, including three stores, on the fields for at least a decade from 1869 (Sheila Hutchinson, History and Heritage on My Doorstep, Maindample, 1999, pp.12-17). It is possible, even likely, that these Chinese diggers came from the northeast. If so, the settlement at Chinaman's Point and the market garden further south at Walhalla represent a southern margin to their regional migration. However, these were transient communities conforming as they did to the transient mining, store keeping and market gardening thesis. Unlike the long standing Chinese presence in Wahgunyah, Chinese settlement in the Goulburn River and Gippsland regions was ephemeral, like the mining boom that stimulated the opportunity.

[7] From interview with Diann Talbot, President of Bright Historical Society, Bright, 8 April 2005. The transcript of this interview is in the possession of the author.

[8] From transcript of 24 April 2005 interview with Wilma and Joan Conroy.

[9] See cheque butt dating from 1873 in the All Saints Collection, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA). I wish to thank Dr Mark Richmond for this reference.

[10] Interview with Wilma and Joan Conroy, Corowa, 24 April 2005. In the same interview the cousins refer to their grandfather driving his dray to Springhurst to collect supplies railed up from Melbourne. Springhurst lies to the south, and is more than ten kilometres further from Cornishtown than Chiltern. No explanation was suggested as to why George Shing travelled this extra distance. Was it possibly because he had customers in Chiltern Valley—another, smaller Chinese camp to the south of Chiltern proper—or was it because a rival Chinese store, run by 'Billy' Poy, was already well established in Chiltern proper?

[11] Jocelyn Groom, Chinese Pioneers of the King Valley, Wangaratta, 2001. See Chapter entitled 'Pan Ah Shin and Catherine Martin'.

[12] Interview with Agnes O'Donnell, Bright, 24 April 2005.

[13] Interview with Agnes O'Donnell, Bright, 24 April 2005. An undated newspaper clipping (c.1960s) held at the Burke Museum, Beechworth provides a slightly different version. In this article, by Cliff Chamberlain, Pan Look eventually moved to Melbourne, from where his four sons ultimately returned to the Ovens Valley in 1890 before buying their own tobacco and hop farm. Both accounts agree that the brothers made a great success of this venture, eventually building their farm to about 1500 acres and devoting production solely to hops.

[14] Groom, Chinese Pioneers of the King Valley.

[15] See Quarterly Reports of Mining Surveyors and Registrars, Melbourne 1864-1868.

[16] All Saints Collection, UMA.

[17] Interview with Wilma and Joan Conroy, Corowa, 24 April 2005:

Wilma: There was this Lulu. We don't know why we called him Lulu and we didn't know him by anything different to Lulu. Well naturally we were so small, but he ended up staying at Nanna's. He did end up working down the road at the vineyard at Fairfield. He worked in the vineyard until he was too old. He was a very popular old man. They used to tease him down at Fairfield which was the Morris vineyard back in those days and they loved him. But they used to tease him and put lizards in his lunch bag didn't they?

[18] Cheque butts, 1877-78 season, All Saints Collection, UMA. A few references have been found to this practice of Chinese contract employment in vineyards beyond the Rutherglan/Wahgunyah region. The Athenaeum Museum in Chiltern holds a copy of a contract for pruning between JRE MacPherson and Sun Low Kee and Ah Whah on the Bontherambo run on the Ovens River north of Wangaratta in 1903.

[19] Folios 6, 153, 166, 200, 210, Account Book 1872-1874, John Foord Collection, UMA.

[20] The Bank of Victoria account for the Chinese woodcutters was in the name of Ah Kit. See folio 180, Account Book, 1874-1875, John Foord Collection, UMA.

[21] See entry, 18 March 1867, Cash Book, 1866-1867, John Foord Collection, UMA.

[22] [Royal Commission on Vegetable Products], Handbook on Viticulture for Victoria, Melbourne 1891, pp. 149-69. There are a number of scattered newspaper references to other Chinese involvement in vineyards. For example, a cutting from the Corowa Chronicle dated 21 February 1925 held by the Corowa Federation Museum refers to Chinaman Ah How who worked in the Riverina at one stage (undated) having 'a vineyard on a portion of Collendina', a location about thirty kilometres down the Murray from Corowa.

[23] Interview with Diann Talbot, Bright, 8 April 2005.

[24] See Corowa Free Press, 26 February 1892 and 13 March 1903. Refer to the 1903 advertisement, above the names Sen Loo Kee and Hin Wah, 'storekeepers and contractors' for the services of 'a large number of men: up to 100'. There is some debate about the number of Chinese involved in this sort of employment. In his 2002 article in the Australian Economic History Review, Warwick Frost refers to up to five hundred engaged in this way when employed by the Wahgunyah merchant and headman Jimmy Ah Kew Chen (or Ah Chen) (See Warwick Frost, 'Migrants and technological transfer: Chinese farming in Australia, 1850-1920', Australian Economic History Review, vol.42, no.2, pp.113-131). This figure had previously been challenged by Lancashire (see Rod Lancashire, 'European-Chinese economic interaction in a pre-Federation rural setting', Rural Society, vol.10, no.2, 2000, pp.229-41). The figure of 500 is unsustainable. The figure of 500 originated in a letter written on 23 July 1945 by one of Chen's children, George Wing Dann, to Eileen Brown, a Wahgunyah resident and correspondent for the Albury Border Morning Mail. Brown repeated this figure in her 13 August 1945 article in that paper, from where it was picked up by C.F. Yong and published in his 1977 volume The New Gold Mountain (C.F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901-1921, Raphael Arts, Richmond SA, 1977). Presumably this is the source for Frost's incorrect reference. George Wing Dann's letter is now held in the Doris Schofield Collection, Federation Museum, Corowa.

[25] See entries between 1877 and 1882 in Journal 1861 to 1887, All Saints Collection, UMA.

[26] See entries between 1877 and 1882 in Journal 1861 to 1887, All Saints Collection, UMA.

[27] See entries in Journal 1861 to 1887, All Saints Collection, UMA. It is significant that the medical payments were to the Beechworth Hospital. The Smith family had played a major contractors role in the construction of this hospital, which was also notable for the degree of support it received from the Chinese community in Beechworth and, apparently, elsewhere.

[28] Brian Burton notes that the Chinese came to the Rutherglen district from other fields when gold was discovered in 1859. His assertion that they 'tended largely to stay on when gold ran out' indicates access to alternative forms o f employment that were unavailable to Chinese 'sojourners' who quickly moved on from other fields when gold ran out. Brian Burton, Flow Gently Past: The Story of the Corowa District, Corowa, 1973, p.40.

[29] David Dunstan, Better Than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1994, p.110.

[30] Dunstan, Better Than Pommard, p.168.

[31] 'Among the Northern Vineyards' reprinted in the Albury Border Post, 13 January 1888 from an article by 'J. S.' from the Melbourne Argus as cited by Kenneth W Young and Bruce Pennay, All Saints Winery: Conservation Analysis and Management Plan, Historic Buildings Council, Department of Planning and Housing Victoria, 1994.

[32] Chinese rates of pay also rose and fell with economic times. Ah Sue was earning a weekly rate of about seventeen shillings a week at All Saints in the mid 1870s. A decade later at Morris' Fairfield Vineyard, Dunstan speaks of Chinese earning up to twenty five shillings a week.

[33] Young and Pennay, All Saints Winery, p.6.

[34] Young and Pennay, All Saints Winery, p.8.

[35]) The construction of the Chinese dormitory has been dated to about 1870, relatively early in the period of Chinese employment in the wine industry and indicative of the date at which Chinese employment became significant enough to make specific provision for them. The dormitory contains two main rooms facing each other and built around a large, dual fireplace/cooking range that serviced both rooms. The rooms were spartan, reflecting the basic facilities offered to most rural workers at that time. The building is unlined and built of corrugated iron. The floor was a mixture of earth and brick. With one side of each room occupied by the fireplace and small hanging spaces, the other three walls were occupied by double level bunks each wide enough to sleep two men, suggesting a capacity of approximately 50 men when both rooms were fully occupied. For the number of workers receiving multiple pay cheques see Table One.

[36] Entry 6/6/78 ' £3/4/6 equals 4 weeks wages', All Saints Collection, UMA.

[37] Government of Victoria, Census of Victoria, Australia, 1901, Melbourne, 1902-1904, p.20; 108. See also Appendix One for further comments on these statistics.

[38] Census of Victoria 1901, p.20.

[39] Corowa Free Press, 18 February 1905.

About the author

Cora Trevarthen is a post-graduate history student at the University of Melbourne.

Discussion

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13 November 2006

My research has found that the scope of Chinese activity in North-Eastern Victoria is more extensive than described in the above article.

1. Support for the Beechworth Benevolent Asylum came from far afield, including Melbourne. For example the local newspaper reported that my great grandfather Ham Hoy Ling, who lived in Melbourne, made donations to the Asylum.

2. Chinese also joined the mainstream farming community in the King Valley, near Edi and Yackandandah, where my great uncles grew tobacco and shipped it to Brunswick in suburban Melbourne to be cured and marketed through Chinatown and mainstream markets prior to WWI.

Jon Kehrer
(Private Researcher)