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.
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…
The Grand Garage 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 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.
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, converted 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.
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.
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
