Summary of his presentation, ‘Memories of Weldborough: stories from the Chinese “camp”’, for the September 2023 Oral History Tasmania seminar.
by Jon Addison
The Chinese have a long history in Northern Tasmania, and particularly in the north-east. The largest Chinese settlement was on the edge of Weldborough, and despite being known as the ‘Chinese Camp’, it was actually an established part of the town. Jan Everett and Rod Chintock are both descendants of Chinese miners and grew up in the north-east – Jan in Weldborough itself and Rod in Derby. Their memories are a unique record of a hybrid and uniquely Tasmanian culture – a group of people who celebrated Chinese festivals, cooked Chinese food and identified as Chinese, but spoke little or no Cantonese. The experiences of Jan and Rod are a tangible link to a local culture that disappeared largely thanks to anti-Chinese immigration policies, and their memories of everyday life give us great insight into the lives of ‘ordinary’ Chinese migrants and their descendants.
Interviews with Jan and Rod focussed both on their own experiences, but also on the stories that they were told by their parents and grandparents. Jan spent a great proportion of her childhood in Weldborough itself, while Rod spent holidays in Weldborough and used to go there every Sunday, for a ‘big nosh-up’. Like Jan, Chinese food was familiar and normal for him.
The interviews have turned up some gems of information. Jan, for example, spoke about the boarding house that used to be in Weldborough. This is something she was told about by her mother, rather than a direct recollection. She had some fascinating stories about Chinese funerary and festival practices, including the Hungry Ghost festival and the practice of exhuming and washing bones from the cemetery to send back to China for re-burial.
Neither Jan nor Rod grew up in the era of intense Chinese mining activity in the area, but they were both connected to it. Rod speaks about his grandfather George Chintock as a ‘tin scratcher’. Despite not being involved in mining himself, Rod was able to give insight into the methods of mining used by George, including the use of sluice boxes, shaker boxes, stamp batteries and blasting with nozzles.
Jan is highly engaged with the local community of Chinese descendants. She has done extensive research into her own Chinese heritage, visited China and her ancestral village multiple times, and learned Cantonese. However, some of the most interesting aspects of her interview concerned life in the north-east – especially pig ovens, and her grandmother’s description of their use.
Some Chinese people feel that terms such as Joss House, and Joss can be offensive, as they are European terms applied to Chinese religion, rather than the correct terms used by its current practitioners. For the descendants of the early Chinese immigrants these terms became their own terminology. The Guan Di Temple at the Queen Victoria Museum was called the Joss House for many years.
It is interesting to note that there is one major area of cultural transmission that appears to be very strong. Both Jan and Rod grew up eating Chinese food, and food appears to be both a very strong marker of cultural identity, and one of the last pieces of distinctly Chinese culture to fade in the face of mainstream Australian western culture. Both Jan and Rod recalled the Chinese names for different types of food, the standard use of cast iron pots for cooking, and the degree of self-sufficiency the north-east community had. Making do was a large theme for them: gardening, hunting and snaring rabbits and possums and selling both the meat and the skins – rural subsistence living.
Another large element of cultural tradition is the importance of gaming – particularly gambling. Jan recalls that although the Chinese gambling game of Fan Tan was no longer being played when she grew up, card-playing was central to the community.
Both interviewees appear visually to be entirely of European heritage, despite their well-documented Chinese roots. As a result, neither of them experienced any direct racism growing up. Jan recalls both large-scale acceptance but small-scale racism: for example, a lady who wouldn’t send her kids to the local school while the ‘Chinks’ were going there.
Most of the Chinese migrants who stayed in Tasmania were those with professions other than mining; professions that could keep them in place despite the vagaries of the tin supply.
What emerges very strongly from these interviews is the sense of community and identity that existed in the north-east during the period when these cousins grew up. Although a sense of Chinese identity was very strong, this was a sense of a north-eastern Chinese identity – something distinctly different from overall Chinese identity. It was something matter-of-fact and intensely grounded in place.
These interviews are a fascinating, if only very initial, record of the end of a period of unique culture in Tasmania: one that encompassed elements of two cultures and combined them into one identity – grounded in a place that forced a sense of shared community, of making do, of ingenuity, and of banding together in both work and play. Weldborough was a place of two communities that eventually became one community, with barriers of culture and language broken down by time.