The Mind of a Thief by Patti Miller

Author:Patti Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BIO026000, HIS004000, BIO007000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

During the gold rush the Chinese first arrived in Wellington. Many arrived after the 1861 anti-Chinese riots on the goldfields at Lambing Flat and set up camp along gold-bearing rivers and creeks. Hundreds worked the alluvial deposits along Mookerawa Creek and built a mile-long water race out of stone, which was much admired and envied. The Celestials, as they were called, lived in tents on the goldfields and in town at the bottom of Ward Street where they had opium dens, strange-smelling herbs, paper lanterns and ‘berry-brown’ children. In Ward Street now there is the town swimming pool and a few ordinary houses, nothing that hints at an exotic past.

While Europeans worked individually, many of the Chinese gold seekers worked in large extended family groups, apparently more similar to Wiradjuri than colonial society. Still, others were coolies working for ‘mandarins’ who wore red sashes and rode around on horses strictly supervising the workers. In the evenings the coolies gambled, smoked opium and drank sujo. The local history books say that because they worked harder than Europeans and found gold where others didn’t, and they kept to themselves and sent their gold home to China, there was jealously and ill-feeling towards them. But it seems the Chinese did not keep entirely to themselves, or at least later on they mixed more, because there are Aboriginal–Chinese in Wellington. I remember the Ah Sees and Loosicks; I saw them around town, but I didn’t know them. Even in a small town there weren’t a lot of reasons to cross fine degrees of social difference.

After leaving the library I called in on my mother for a quick goodbye. She began reminiscing about the Chinese in her childhood, market gardeners and shop owners. In the 1920s she started school with a Chinese boy, Henry Ling, who later owned a stock and station store in Wellington and who now lived in one of the retirement units across from her. Her family shopped at Fong Lee’s general store in Percy Street during the Depression because they were the only shopkeepers who let people buy food supplies ‘on tick’ for months at a time. She recalled, too, the Chinese gardeners carrying their vegetables for sale up from the river in swinging baskets carried on a pole across their shoulders. She reminded me there was a display of Chinese memorabilia in the History Museum, but it would have to wait until next visit.

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