Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Traces of Wagga's Chinese Past

I recently came across an item on Trove from the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser of 26 June 1954 promoting the opening of the Grand Garage in Fitzmaurice Street.  It was headlined: Old Chinese Joss House is Now an Ultra-Modern Garage and Showroom.  The slick art deco styled facility included petrol bowsers, car display space, a mechanics workshop, a fully equipped kitchen, men’s and women’s showers, a writing room and even a ball room! Long before motorway service centres offered similar comforts, the Grand Garage was designed as a place for road weary visitors to Wagga to refresh, get their car serviced and maybe consider upgrading to one of the flash modern vehicles on sale. The article described the Garage as occupying the site of ‘a Joss house and temple where hundreds of Chinese once met to enjoy opium dreams’. On the same page there appeared an item claiming that ‘Chinese drawings and motives (sic) are still faintly visible’ on the walls of a structure being used as a storeroom at the premises.


Daily Advertiser clipping of 26 June 1954 (source: Trove)

My interest was piqued because I recognised the profile of the building and a Google search revealed that it still stands at 175 Fitzmaurice Street now operating as the Paul Seaman Swift Service Centre. It is something of a rarity in Wagga for a building constructed in 1954 to survive substantially unaltered for 70 years!  I had heard that this part of Fitzmaurice Street was Wagga’s Chinatown but assumed no vestiges remained. I was now on a quest hoping to be proved wrong.  My first move was to post on the Facebook Lost Wagga page to see if anyone knew anything about the ex-storage shed with the Chinese drawings on the wall. No-one did but another post showing the Grand Garage inundated in the 1950 flood elicited photographs and comments from Paul Seaman the current proprietor. I also embarked on my own research…


As it looks in 2024 as the Paul Seaman Swift Service Centre (source: Google)

I found another clipping from the Daily Advertiser dated 26 September 1939 headed ‘Chinese Joss House – Old Wagga Building Being Demolished’.  A complex of buildings ranging in age from 50 to 100 years was to face the wrecker’s ball: the Joss House, a masonic hall known as the Chinese Free Mission Hall and a consecrated Christian church.  No specific reason is given in the article for the demolition but the paper quoted local man Wong (Charlie) Hing as saying that the once ‘elaborately outfitted’ church had not been in use for six years. It was implied that the other buildings had been abandoned for longer.  This was quite significant infrastructure and if the Daily Advertiser was right and ‘hundreds’ of Chinese had once congregated there, when did the location cease to be a cultural hub?  For one poor soul, Ah Get, aged 66, blind with long hair and beard and dressed in rags, the Joss House had remained home. He was discovered by workers during the demolition process (The Age 29 September 1939). His fate after that is not recorded.

 
The service station before redevelopment pictured during regular flooding. The signage and structures suggest the site's Chinese heritage but I have not been able to establish their authenticity (source: Lost Wagga Facebook page).

The Daily Advertiser’s hyperbole notwithstanding, it is unlikely that the Chinese population encamped on Fitzmaurice Street ever numbered in the hundreds except perhaps when swelled by seasonal labourers. In 1883 it was recorded as 223. That figure is drawn from a report furnished by the  Sub-Inspector of NSW Police, Martin Brennan and prominent Sydney business man and philanthropist Quong Tart who were tasked with conducting an enquiry into ‘disturbances’ in the Chinese camps of the Riverina district.

Chinese people first came to Australia in 1828 when colonial administrators thought their migration could help solve a labour shortage.  Land and resource scarcity in China encouraged over three thousand Chinese workers to come to Australia as indentured labourers between 1847 and 1853. The mid-century gold-rush saw Chinese migration increase further and by 1861 there were 13,000 Chinese living in NSW.  When diggings were exhausted or they experienced discrimination that prevented them from continuing to mine many remained to work as labourers, ring barkers, sap cutters and fencers or to establish successful market gardens. There were several Chinese encampments across the Riverina, the largest one at Narrandera, the second largest at Wagga and others at various locations including Adelong, Gundagai and Tumut. In Wagga the Chinese erected basic shanties as tenants on flood prone, poorly draining land owned by white landlords on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in North Wagga and at the northern end of Fitzmaurice Street. In Wagga the areas they rented were mostly owned by Susannah Brown a shrewd property investor who also held shares in the Wagga Wagga Bridge Company.


Map showing historic location of the Chinese precinct on either side of Fitzmaurice Street (Source: Alex Dalgleish, report to Wagga Wagga City Council 1999)

In their review, Brennan and Tart looked at demographics, occupations, quality of dwellings, sanitation, gambling, prostitution, interracial marriage, access to education and prevalence of opium use. The report was published in full in the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser of 8 January 1884. It makes for fascinating reading. While acknowledging the squalid conditions in the camps and the prevalence of opium smoking and gambling, it makes a sincere attempt to examine the causes and contributory factors of crime and unruliness.  Blame is in part attributed to property neglect by landlords and to visiting ‘shearers, shepherds, and disreputable characters’ looking for sex and sly grog. The report points out that opium use gained a foothold in Chinese society having been actively fostered by the East India Company in the 18th and 19th centuries against the wishes of the government to fund the tea trade.

The report characterises the Chinese as ’the most industrious race in the world’ lauding their contribution to vegetable cultivation on the region and listing other occupations as shop assistant,  labourer and lottery house proprietor. There were small numbers of women, almost exclusively European, residing in the camps, some of whom were deemed ‘respectable’ and married to Chinese and others who worked as prostitutes.  The report explodes the ‘white slaver‘ myth stating that almost all the women engaging in sex work were European, hailed from Melbourne,  had an established history in  the profession and expressed a preference for the courtesy and acceptance they found in the environment of the Chinese camps.

Given the stories of racism on the goldfields, the riots at Lambing Flat in 1861 and the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act (White Australia policy) of 1901, it was surprising to learn that inter-cultural relations in Wagga Wagga were mostly harmonious. Tensions did of course arise but for the most part they were far less intense than in urban settings. As Brennan pointed out, some were directly attributable to ambiguities and loopholes in the law as to whether the games of my pow ghong, fan tan and pak ah pu (known collectively as ‘the Chinese lottery’) were in themselves illegal  or whether it was the placing of hefty bets that was the problem. Likewise,  regulations requiring that opium was supplied solely by registered chemists completely failed to cover the sales and use of opium amongst people in the Chinese camps who were vulnerable to prosecution and fines.

Inevitably as the Chinese population of the Riverina dispersed across the district and the wider state, the camps declined.  Some returned to China, intermarried, convert to Christianity, diversified their business interests and prospered, and some anglicized their names. It became increasingly common for Chinese-run general stores to operate alongside pubs and residential cottages in Fitzmaurice Street. With the advent of the automobile, successful Junee business man Tommy Ah Wah opened a service station on the site of the former enclave adjacent to the one remaining building, described as a ‘temple,  and apparently not demolished in 1939. It was this business and site that he later sold to Alf Ludwig and which was transformed into the Grand Garage.


Tracking the Dragon Dr Barry McGowan's highly informative book, published in conjunction with a Museum of the Riverina exhbition of the same name in 2012

According to Dr Barry McGowan's excellent publication Tracking the Dragon,  the temple was ‘beautifully constructed from rich Oregon timbers’ .  Ludwig offered to dismantle it and re-erect it elsewhere as a commemoration of the Chinese who had lived and worked in Wagga but the Council declined his offer. Tracking the Dragon also attributes to Alf Ludwig the story that networks of subterranean tunnels connecting various buildings used to escape police raids existed on the site.


Chinese gaming tokens unearthed in Fitzmaurice Street in 2006 now in the collection of the Museum of the Riverina (Source: Tracking the Dragon)

In 2006 Chinese coins/gambling tokens were discovered in the same area of Fitzmaurice Street. I am still on my quest to find out if there is any other evidence of Wagga’s Chinatown extant.  Next port of call is Seaman’s Swift Service Centre as Paul has shared a drawing of the site that claims Chinese graves were discovered there during levee construction in 1957!

Sources:

https://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/hong-kong-and-the-opium-wars/

https://issuu.com/riversidewaggawagga/docs/mor_waggaessay_lr_web

https://storyplace.org.au/story/once-out-of-view/

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/145648701?searchTerm=joss%20Wagga

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/101928639?searchTerm=Chinese#

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/145648707?searchTerm=Grand%20Garage

Morris, Sherry, Wagga Wagga – A History, 1999, Council of the City of Wagga Wagga

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Christmas Passed

2023 ended with our least harmonious family Christmas ever. We were all tired and irritable. Conflict erupted repeatedly then finally at a level that so shook the dynamic that the rest of the celebrations were aborted. Christmas 2023, in all likelihood, marks the end of my attempts to curate a Kodak Christmas experience. I’m sixty seven, my husband is seventy two, and we have two adult children and no grandkids…  There is something a little forced about painstakingly decorating a tree (actually a conifer branch from the garden), preparing a perfectly stuffed and roasted turkey and recreating our mother’s ‘traditional’ ice cream Marsala cheesecake each December.

It is well known that the pressure to create an atmosphere of ‘comfort and joy’ for the festive season is at odds with how many people are actually feeling. There is also the tension between those who want to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ and atheists like us who cite Yule or, more appropriately for the Southern Hemisphere, the solstice, as the ‘reason for the season’. I went through a phase of eschewing all ceremony and ritual… that is the reason I didn’t go to my first uni graduation and delayed marriage for so long. I do now see, and have for a long time seen, value in coming together to celebrate, but maybe the cause has to be more personally relevant than the mixture of commercialism and sentiment that marks Christmas.

Until we lost my mother-in-law, and my husband’s family dispersed, our Christmas Day was always marked by trying to please both our families. To do this we would have lunch with my husband’s and dinner with mine and end up exhausted.  Once, before the kids were born, we tried asking both lots of relatives to our place for lunch with catering assistance from a friend who was a chef. He did a glazed ham and a pastry cornucopia with hors d'oeuvres spilling from it presented on an upturned mirror. It was more like a hotel function (the context for his training) than a family Christmas and the two groups didn’t mix readily either. I was so fretful that I got more exhausted than our usual shuttle Christmas had left me.

The Christmas dilemma took on new proportions in 1999 when my mother, declining with terminal cancer, was set to come out of hospital to spend the holiday with the family. Instead we got a call in the early hours of Christmas Eve to say she had died. The kids were little so we went – numbly - through the Christmas Day motions. It felt as if we were all treading water until the funeral could be arranged. Some kind friends invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with them in Newcastle, a welcome escape from the rawness and publicness of processing Mum’s death. My husband took the kids down to see the fireworks heralding the new millennium.  I retreated to bed.

The first Christmas after Mum died none of us could face organising a get together. We accepted an invitation from the same chef friend who’d helped us with that attempt at combining families. Needless to say, his catering was stylish but the whole affair felt hollow, adult-centric and overly steeped in alcohol. I missed my sisters and the children were bored and missed their cousins. After that the younger of my two sisters and her newish husband graciously took on the role of hosting for a few years. We became semi successful in balancing our sadness at the anniversary of Mum’s death with enjoying one another’s company and providing fun for the children.  Then that sister moved away for work eventually settling in Tasmania and generally spent Christmas with friends.

It was around then that we started hosting regularly. We always had a real tree whose decorations included remnants of my  mother-in-law’s collection dating back to the 1960s and our own accumulation of many years featuring felt kangaroos and koalas with little bells, a painted toilet roll and tissue ‘candle’ our daughter made at kindergarten, glass baubles, little wooden figurines and various arty trinkets we’d collected over the years. Some of this collection has succumbed to natural attrition but more recently it has been depleted by successive puppies. My other sister, her husband and kids and my grown up niece and her boyfriend usually joined us. When that sister and her husband separated, her two boys went to live with him and his new partner leaving my sister as a full-time single parent and carer for a daughter with severe disabilities. The first Christmas after their split, either through misunderstanding or bloody mindedness, her ex didn’t deliver the boys to our family gathering. A series of increasingly angry and desperate phone exchanges took place, then, furious and distraught, she took her daughter and went home.

We have tried a few times to dispense with all the Christmas palaver. In 2012 we booked a holiday at a farm stay place in Bemboka on the state’s south coast. Our eldest elected not to come so that cast a bit of a pall from the start. We did however have the company of our beloved family dog, whose cautious encounter with a billy goat provided one of the trip’s high points. Others were catching up with old friends in Tanja and visiting Potoroo Palace, a native animal reserve later threatened by and temporarily evacuated during the south coast bushfires. Christmas lunch was to be at a seafood restaurant in Merimbula a short drive from our accommodation. Despite confirming our reservation twice in the preceding months, we arrived to find the place closed. With the local club booked out, we ended up eating at a Malaysian restaurant, one of the few businesses open. The proprietors created a festive mood by draping a potted Dracaena with tinsel and impaling our desserts with little Aussie flags.  Afterwards we walked under sullen skies around the lake along a path of terracotta pavers many incised with decorative designs, some commemorating local identities and businesses. Merimbula followers (if I have any), who is Bernie ‘Poostain’?  His name is forever etched in my memory.

For our next attempt the following year we chose an Italian restaurant in Lugarno that did honour its Christmas lunch reservations. My sister and her daughter joined us and things were a little hairy on our arrival when my niece let out a series of excited shrieks. However, the family-oriented Italian restaurateurs were good natured and reassuring and she soon settled down.  I remember it being a reasonably successful if not overtly festive occasion. That may have been wishful thinking on my part as my sister has since told me she remained tense throughout and I see, looking at photos from the day, that our son was face down on the table at one point, not from inebriation but to avoid his father’s camera.

The first Christmas after our tree change to Wagga Wagga, when to my delight both my sisters came, sans spouse and offspring but with dogs, to our new home, should have gone swimmingly. In fact the swimming pool was a godsend both as respite from the heat and because it proved a useful way to wear out the largest dog. However the mix of four dogs and three cats, most of which were not used to sharing their domiciles, caused chaos. We had to erect a kiddy gate to stop the biggest dog stealing from the kitchen and dining table and all the visiting dogs chased our cats. It was an ambitious experiment that worked best only when we decamped to the Botanical Gardens to give the mutts some exercise and the cats a break. Everyone’s mental health was challenged and the visit was cut short, albeit not as acrimoniously as happened this Christmas just passed.

It is tempting to think we were just all emotionally wrung out. During 2023 my best friend died, my husband’s middle brother died, followed just 5 months later by his wife, our artist friend of over 50 years died, and our 12 month old kelpie pup was fatally hit by a car.  Our first Christmas both as retirees, the time pressure imposed on us to prepare and host was lessened. However our kids were under their own strains, one arrived from Sydney fighting off a virus and spent a lot of time sleeping and the other was preoccupied with work and rental issues. One of my sisters now lives locally but only had two hours between work shifts to spend with us on Christmas Day. This constellation of factors perhaps didn’t provide the best backdrop for tree decorating, turkey preparation and commemorative cheesecake production or for civilized human interaction, but it would be disingenuous to tell myself we hadn’t been here before.

Time to change course.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Murrumbidgee Living

 


We hardly glimpsed

the Murrumbidgee

that winter weekend  

we first checked out the town

the pub bistro and Botanic Gardens donkeys

got our attention

and despite its location

the Tourist Information Centre

didn’t advertise the river’s existence

the only waters we tested

were chlorinated

contained by tiles

 

The promise of a life

where nature and art would combine

brought us here

we were warned of floods

but reassured

by sturdy levees

and would not see

the river swell

‘til two years in

when the full bellied Murrumbidgee

drowned its plastic buoys

roiled around trees

submerged shores

and swallowed picnic shelters

 

When the river receded

debris and dragged tree limbs 

caked in mud

made for an apocalyptic

khaki landscape

and sodden ground

sucked at our feet

 

Now we have seen the Murrumbidgee

in flood and depleted

have fallen under the spell

of its flow

and towering gums

sublime in health

or ashen silhouette

we’ve walked the Wiradjuri track

from Flowerdale to Oura

by remnants of the Hampden Bridge

and relics of the old pumping station

traced the intersecting lagoons

and watched Wollundry turtles

raise their leathery necks and snouted faces

above the water’s surface

glimpsed darting kingfishers

iridescent blue

against light stippled leaves and water

seen inky cormorants

perched on fallen tree limbs

wings outstretched to catch the breeze

watched neat native wood ducks

and their shiny mallard cousins

forage on the river banks

seen the contentious French geese

cross The Esplanade in procession

and always, always

under skies alive

with squadrons of cockatoos

wheeling and calling

 

We have heard

Gobbagombulin's and Pomilgalarna’s story

read Mary Gilmour on the

stinking swan hoppers

coated in evidence of slaughter

seen the Gumi races revived

and Wollundry all lit up

for a local mini Vivid

and know the fate the river’s deep

can bring to those unfamiliar

 

We respect  the Murrumbidgee

 the Murrumbidjeri

our adopted waterway

artery of Wiradjuri country

and draw energy and solace

from our existence

on its banks

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Kings and Queens of Halloween

Halloween combines a plethora of supernatural images and associations

Halloween has its origins in the festival of Samhain (pron. Sow – wane) celebrated by the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland, at least 2000 years ago. November 1st was, in that era,  in the northern hemisphere, considered the first day of the New Year and marked the onset of winter. It was the time of year when animals were brought in from pasture, crops were harvested and land tenures were renewed. During the Samhain festival it was believed that the boundary between the living and dead became blurred and the souls of the dead returned to visit their former homes. Fires were lit to frighten away evil spirits, and people sometimes donned disguises, usually draping themselves in animal skins, to avoid being recognised by ghosts. When the Romans conquered the Celts in the 1st century CE, their festivities of Feralia, venerating dead ancestors, and of Pomona, the goddess of the harvest, were merged with Samhain. Later still in the 6th century AD, Pope Gregory I harnessed the supernatural aspects of these pagan celebrations and superimposed them with Christian rites designating  November 1st All saints Day and thereby making 31st October All Hallows Day Evening, the night before saints were to be venerated. That name eventually morphed into ‘Halloween’. Dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils became part of Halloween from around AD 1000. (Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica & https://www.history.com/).

Promotional poster for the show featuring Jai Normes

Performing in drag for Halloween became part of Wagga Wagga culture in AD 2022 when local café/arts hub The Curious Rabbit hosted the first Hallow’d Queens event on 22nd October that year. By 2023 it had become a firm tradition and Hallow'd Queens expanded to the Riverina Playhouse on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, the show emceed with subtle menace by local drag king Crash O’Byrn. The theme was spooky B&B accommodation with Crash as concierge inviting us to tour the nooks and crannies of an imaginary gothic building.  As we did so we encountered various drag performers enacting spooky scenarios. There was a shrill Janet chanelling Shelley Duval from The Shining and escaping her psychopathic pursuer to the tune of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, her hapless dummy child flailing about in her arms.  There was  Erica d’Hesperus, sporting  a serpentine dress of her own design referencing  Disney’s Ursula performing  ‘I’ll Put a Spell on You’ . There was an ’aesthetician’ (aka mad scientist), Jai Norm
és, mixing chemicals to the strains of ‘Weird Science’  then injecting his hapless victim with luminescent gayness formula to Dorian Electra‘s ‘My Agenda’. Imina Something introduced us to a salacious un-holy  nun with a craving to paint an audience member's portrait and enacted a knife wielding Chucky to ‘Devil Gate Drive’.  


Concierge at the satanic B&B, Jeffree

Jeffree delighted as always with the sheer vulgarity and machismo of his performance to ‘Psychokiller’ offering us a pleasing outline of his modest genitalia and enjoying a literal bloodbath.  Strewth performed both a histrionic version of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with her puppet sidekick Crikey and Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Believe In You’ with reworked Halloween-style lyrics and some disturbing audience interaction.  Other highlights were Nefertiti’s blood-red lit writhing erotic routine to ‘Year Zero’ summoning Baphomet and Jeffree’s showcasing his feminine side to ‘Wuthering Heights’ delivered with more hysteria than even Ms Kate Bush could muster.


Top left: Imina Something as the painting nun and her hapless victim from the audience. Top right: Janet embodying victimhood. Bottom left: Sultry Queen Nefertiti. Bottom right: Strewth & Crikey

The show’s finale was an homage to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ Reservoir Dogs torture scene charitably not approaching cinematic realism but still a wonderfully tasteless rendering of sadism and cannibalism.

The Playhouse’s dimensions and equipment gave the troupe greater scope for staging and lighting than they had last year and they took full advantage with some wonderfully atmospheric effects including a smoke machine and strobe lighting. The technical set up for each sequence was a bit sluggish but the audience of mainly hardcore fans and supporters didn’t seem to mind. Their attire made it clear they had whole heartedly embraced the evening’s themes with costumes that included drag chic of all types, an evil pixie and a Goth nursing mother!

The Hallow’d Queens promise to make this an annual event and it will be exciting to see what their combined creativity spawns in October 2024. In the meantime we have the Wollundry Drag Pageant to look forward to in March.

Disclaimer: Julia Erwin/Jai Normes is the author's offspring.

Saturday, October 14, 2023

There's something great in the neighbourhood

Playwright Lally Katz wrote Neighbourhood Watch as a vehicle for Robyn Nevin;  the lead role of Ana, an ageing refugee from WW2 Hungary, has also been performed by Miriam Margolyes. In SoACT’s production, company veteran, Diana Lovett’s timing and characterisation skills propel this complex and rewarding drama, currently playing at The Basement Theatre, so effectively that I think her performance would stand alongside theirs comfortably. I would also venture that Diana invests Ana with a pathos and ‘everywoman’ quality that might be more difficult for her celebrity peers to achieve.  Her performance is a joy!

Diana is ably supported by a great ensemble cast, standouts being Elena Zacharia as Catherine and Charles Sykes as Ken, the twenty somethings grappling with love, health, friendship and career issues in suburban Australia  

Neighbourhood Watch is set in the year between Kevin Rudd’s election as Prime Minister and Barack Obama’s as US President - a time when its youngest characters dare to find cause for hope. The play depicts two seemingly mismatched neighbours who form a friendship that enables each to heal from past harsh experiences and re-learn trust.

Performed in the round, unusual for SoACT productions, clever use is made of actors' non performing time to assist with prop, set and costume movement.  Ana’s reminiscences of her past, vividly recounted to Catherine, are elegantly and evocatively realised, a tribute to Michael Mitchell’s pacy sensitive direction and to the work of the production team. Michael also ensures that the actors never favour any one bank of audience members (I tested this by changing seats at interval). Some interesting use of musical numbers enhances the narrative and the emotional texture of the play which ranges from broadly comic lines contrasting men who make quiche to those who favour their ‘sausages’ to poignant and frightening depictions of death, near death and injury. 

At over two hours in length, the writer/editor in me would have made a few cuts to the text, but that is a minor quibble as the story arc earns that duration with only a few scenes that might be considered extraneous.

If you’re a Wagga Wagga local I urge you to go and see Neighbourhood Watch for a really rich night at the theatre and to support some of your most talented and creative neighbours. Others may need to hold out for Gillian Armstrong's mooted film adaptation of the play.


Photo source: SoACT's Facebook page