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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...
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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...
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[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...
View Article‘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...
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‘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...
View Article‘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...
View ArticleHappy 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...
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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. Best known is Mak Sai Ying, or John Shying, who arrived in Sydney as a free settler in 1818, working first as a...
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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...
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