Hidden women of history: Hop Lin Jong, a Chinese immigrant in the early days of White Australia

The family of Hop Lin Jong (who is pictured on the far left) at the wedding of her daughter, Ruby (third from right) in 1924. Ruby was murdered by her husband the following year.

Antonia Finnane, University of Melbourne

In a new series, we look at under acknowledged women through the ages.

There are “hidden women” in history who deserve to be known for the same reasons as we know about “great men”. The film Hidden Figures showed us a few of them: African-American women who did the mathematics for the first US space program.

And then there are the rest of us: ordinary people who at first glance look more like products than producers of their times. Hop Lin Jong was one of these, or should I say one of us: a turn-of-the-century immigrant whose arrival in Western Australia in 1901 was remarkable only because she was Chinese. Her life might have passed in obscurity if her daughter Ruby had not been murdered in 1925.

Hop Lin Jong was born in Guangzhou according to immigration records, but arrived in Australia on the S.S. Australind, which plied the Singapore-Fremantle route. Singapore was a hub for human trafficking from China, a multi-million dollar business that linked villages in South China to the world. Hop Lin Jong may have been a victim of this trade.

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The year of her birth is uncertain: 1884 in the family genealogy, 1886 in her residential documents. When she disembarked in Fremantle she was somewhere between 15 and 17 years of age. Her surname was Jong or Jung. In Australia she was known as Lin or Lucy, or more formally as Mrs Lee Wood, for on arrival she was wed to James Lee Wood, butcher, merchant and a prominent member of the local Chinese community. The instability of names resulting from poor English rendering is typical for this generation of Chinese migrants.

Lin arrived at the very dawn of the White Australia era, when restrictions directed mainly at preventing Chinese immigration had just been brought into force across the country. How she crossed this colour line is unknown, except that minors were treated differently from adults. Her youth may have been a factor.

Life in early 20th-century Perth

Lin’s wedding photo, published on the Chinese-Australian Historical Images site, shows a well-dressed young woman in a ruffled blouse and tailored skirt. Ruffles must have been all the rage then. A second family photo shows her older daughters, May and Ruby, aged around two and three, dressed identically in ruffled dresses and little boots. She had five children in all, born between 1902 and 1910.

At that time there were few Chinese women in Perth. Census figures for 1901 show 18 women of Chinese nationality in the whole of Western Australia. But the European wives of Chinese men and their children added to the size of the local community. Lin undoubtedly knew Elizabeth Gipp, the wife of Charlie Ah You, and mother of the Gipp boys of Anzac fame. (George, Leslie, and Richard Gipp all served in the First World War.) These women must have supported each other during confinements: this was before the age of hospital births.

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The Chinese community of Perth was centered in James St, Northbridge. The Chung Wah (Chinese) Society, established in 1909, had its premises in James St, and Lee Wood’s butcher shop occupied the ground floor of the same building. In 1914, the Lee Woods bought a house in Tiverton St, not far away. Family social and economic life appeared to have operated between the two poles of Tiverton and James Streets. There was a primary school in James St that was attended by the Gipp children. It is possible that the Lee Wood children, too, went there.

Lin Lee Wood, 1948.
National Archives of Australia

Lin was a seamstress, and took in sewing. She may have passed her skills onto Ruby, who became a dressmaker. She also worked when needed in the butcher shop. The marriage, however, was not happy. By the 1920s, she and Lee Wood were living apart, she in Tiverton St and he at the shop. Yet as an economic and social unit, the family remained intact. There were family photos, and family notices in the local newspaper. Both parents were involved in the marriages of the children: May’s to local merchant Timothy Chiew in 1922, and Ruby’s to recent immigrant Leong Yen in 1924.

Death of a daughter

Ordinary life with its ordinary problems changed forever in the middle of 1925. On the morning of 13 July that year, a Monday, Lin was working in the shop when Ruby called in to leave the house key with her. That night, when her daughter failed to return home, Lin knew immediately that something must have happened. On the Thursday she went to the police. On the next Thursday again, Ruby’s body was pulled from the harbour in Fremantle.

Coverage of Ruby Yen’s murder in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1941.
National Library of Australia

There followed a coronial inquest, the arrest of Leong Yen for the murder of his young wife, and a trial presided over by Chief Justice Robert McMillan. The case meant an unusual degree of public exposure for a Chinese-Australian family. Newspaper reporting was detailed, giving close to verbatim accounts of the evidence. Perth was glued to the events. During the trial, the public gallery was packed, with women making up a large percentage of onlookers.

From the court records we learn that a local Chinese pharmacist, George Way, had served as matchmaker for Ruby’s marriage; that Leong and Ruby had lived with Lin after their wedding in 1924; and that at one stage Lin had thrown him out of the house. We know from the forensic report that the marriage had not been consummated, and from Leong’s evidence that the couple did not share the same bedroom. Perhaps due to these facts, the all-male jury felt sorry for Leong and while finding him guilty of manslaughter, recommended leniency. The judge obliged, with a sentence of two years hard labour. On expiry of the sentence, Leong was deported.

In later decades, the press periodically revisited the case in salacious and sometimes imagined detail (“as the taxi rattled towards Fremantle, thunder rumbled and rain lanced down in swirling flurries”). Quite recently, The West Australian carried a report on the “chilling coincidences” between the current “body-in-a-suitcase trial” centred on the death of Annabel Chen and the trial of Leong Yen more than 90 years ago.

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After Ruby

Between the obscurity of life as a Chinese working-class woman in a small Australian city and the glare of publicity surrounding her daughter’s death, Lin is just dimly visible to history. At only five foot high, she was smaller than any of her Australian children. The West Australian reported on her appearance in court, describing “a slight, frail woman, in deep mourning and weeping quietly.” But she was stalwart. According to her grandson Bill Chiew, she “used to work like hell.”

She was barely if at all literate, finding it difficult to sign her immigration papers. Her spoken English, however, was quite good, according to immigration records. In middle age she spent much time minding her grandchildren. Her English may have benefited from time with these second-generation Australians, who could hardly speak Chinese at all; and she may have taken comfort from them.

From the public record we can see that she was swept along in the course of Australian history. With the outbreak of World War II, her youngest son, William (“Boy”), joined the army. In the post-war years, the family enjoyed upward mobility. Granddaughter Irene graduated from university in 1952. And by the time Lin died in 1970, the White Australia Policy had effectively been dismantled. Citizenship had become possible for someone like her.

The last photo of her in the public record is attached to her application for renewal of residential status in 1948. It shows a woman in the ordinary dress of the post-war era, a button-through frock, her hair parted in the middle and done up at the sides. Her birthplace is given as Canton and her nationality as Chinese. By then she had lived in Perth for nearly 50 years. Not surprisingly, she looks Australian and Chinese at the same time.

Antonia Finnane, Professor of Chinese History, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australian politics explainer: the White Australia policy

The ‘White Australia’ ideology was commercialised and used to sell things from soaps and games to pineapple slices.
Multicultural Research Library

Benjamin T. Jones, Australian National University

The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has repeatedly claimed that Australia is the world’s most successful multicultural nation. While the sentiment has bipartisan support today, for more than half a century after Federation Australia boasted not of multiculturalism, but of its monoculture.

In 1925, Prime Minister Stanley Bruce reassured a worried public that Australia’s racial makeup was 98% British and that this was unlikely to change. The means of maintaining this racial and cultural homogeneity is loosely termed the White Australia policy.

Immediately following Federation in 1901, policies were designed to keep Australia white and British. Non-racial language was used to minimise international condemnation, but the xenophobic concern was plainly evident. Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, explicitly stated his belief in white superiority:

There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races – I think no-one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior.

The White Australia policy was in place for seven decades after 1901 and had a profound impact on the newly federated Commonwealth.

What happened?

The White Australia policy was not a single government directive but a series of acts with a common goal: to achieve and maintain a white, British national character. The Immigration Restriction Act, Pacific Island Labourers Act and the Post and Telegraph Act (all passed in 1901) formed the initial legislative foundation.

The Immigration Restriction Act in particular epitomises the spirit of the White Australia policy, and its hypocrisy. It never mentioned the words “white” or “race”, but the parliamentary debates – and its application – make clear it was a tool of racial exclusion.

The act’s most infamous feature was a dictation test. Migrants could be asked to write 50 words in any European language. Officers could manipulate the test to exclude any undesired person.

The most famous example was Jewish communist Egon Kisch. Fluent in several European languages, he was arrested after failing to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Scottish Gaelic.

Between 1901 and 1958 (when it was dumped), only around 2,000 people ever took the test. Despite the non-racial terminology, its purpose was understood. As a direct result, non-whites largely avoided coming to Australia, and overseas shipping companies did not issue tickets to people likely to fail the test.

The White Australia policy received bipartisan support, but was gradually dismantled by both sides. Conservative governments introduced the Migration Act in 1958 and its significant modification in 1966.

Driven partly by the “populate or perish” doctrine, non-Europeans were allowed to come to Australia based on skills and suitability rather than race. Eventually they were offered the same pathway to citizenship as Europeans.

The progressive Whitlam government symbolically buried the last remnants of the White Australia policy in 1973. The Racial Discrimination Act made it illegal to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone because of their race. Those words are from Section 18C of that act, which the current government is seeking to amend.

What was its impact?

The legal mechanisms of the White Australia policy were tied to a widespread belief in the superiority of British civilisation and the white race generally during this era.

The masthead of the popular Bulletin magazine read:

Australia for the White Man.

The object of the White Australia board game was to:

… get the coloured men out and the white men in.

There were White Australia theatre productions, songs, pins and badges, soaps, and even a White Australia brand of sliced pineapple in syrup. It was as much a cultural as political phenomenon, and it could not be simply extinguished with an act of parliament.

The acceptance of large numbers of Vietnamese refugees under the Fraser government was seen as a litmus test of whether the White Australia policy was really gone.

The White Australia Game was registered in 1914 and was popular throughout the 1920s.
Migration Heritage Centre

What are its contemporary implications?

Both major parties have endorsed multiculturalism for nearly half a century. Even in this era of Trumpian populist politics, it is inconceivable that Australia would ever return to race-based immigration policies.

But if the White Australia policy is dead, has the White Australia ideology survived?

In the 1980s, the Garnaut report made the economic case for greater Asia literacy. However, the region was – and still is – viewed by many with suspicion. In 1996, Pauline Hanson warned parliament that Australia risked being “swamped by Asians”.

In the lead-up to the 2001 election, Norwegian container ship the MV Tampa rescued 438 asylum seekers and attempted to enter Australian waters. Prime Minister John Howard refused to accept them, causing a tense diplomatic stand-off. The widespread support for Howard, which arguably helped him secure election victory, has been seen by some as evidence of a lingering White Australia mindset.

Academics James Jupp and Gwenda Tavan have argued that the White Australia ideology is still shaping Australian immigration policies in the 21st century, especially in regard to refugees. The bipartisan commitment to offshore processing and the re-emergence of Hanson’s One Nation party following the 2016 election lend some weight to this view.

The dictation test was undoubtedly political spin to justify a racist agenda. A century later, similar charges have been levelled at the “stopping deaths at sea” defence, which is used to justify the current “harsh” treatment of predominantly non-white asylum seekers.

As a policy, White Australia is gone. But as an ideology, it arguably lingers on. There certainly is a minority who want to “reclaim” an imagined idyllic Australia of yesteryear, with its white monoculture.

An overwhelming majority, however, agree with the prime minister. Multiculturalism is here to stay.

Benjamin T. Jones, Australian Research Council Fellow in the School of History, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.