Coota Calling

In March 2023 we took a round steam train trip from Junee to Cootamundra to experience the Bethungra Spiral. When we reached our destination we were meant to stay on the platform for twenty minutes then re-embark but I used the time to blitz the local heritage centre and the arts and crafts shop. I ventured no further or would have missed the train. 

Previously I had only seen the station and its immediate environs

Recently I again went to Coota, as the locals call it, this time specifically to see ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ at the Arts Centre Cootamundra in Wallendoon Street. How I heard about this exhibition is one of life’s strange coincidences. I hadn’t talked to my old school friend Robyn, who lives in Tanja on the New South Wales’ South Coast for months and called her to see how she was going. Her husband suffers from vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s and I know her life isn’t easy. Two serendipitous nuggets emerged from our chat. One was that she had secured respite care and would be in Sydney during the same week that I would be later in the month. The other was that her longtime friend, Carolyn Killen, former proprietor of Ivy Hill Gallery, was bringing a collection of works by South Coast artists to the Arts Centre Cootamundra imminently.

Sandwich board displaying exhibition poster

To my delight the exhibition opened just days before my planned Sydney trip which meant I could introduce myself to Carolyn and report back on the exhibition to Robyn. My sister, Belinda, and  I took my yellow MG on the road on the morning of Sunday 22 September passing glowing fields of canola, the carcasses of unlucky roos, flocks of foraging galahs, looming silos and dormant rail yards. We talked incessantly in our private patois which involves assuming the voices with which we endow family pets, many now long dead, and impersonations of colourful characters we encounter in our daily lives. It is not false modesty to state here that Belinda far surpasses me in skill and variety in this endeavor but I am her seasoned stooge.

We needed to re-assume our mild mannered public personae on arrival in Cootamundra.  We did the obligatory loop of the town before realising we had passed the Arts Centre on the way in. It is a reclaimed industrial building that has housed many businesses including a butter factory and an importer/exporter and occupies a whole block. This background and much more was conveyed to us by the delightful Anne Steinke, one of the centre’s management committee, who greeted us and gave us a tour. Carolyn was out but expected back in about an hour. Anne showed us the ‘dirty studio’ a term probably familiar to ceramacists and printmakers but new to me and the meeting room with its eclectic collection of art books and art works. Her greatest pride is the impressive Tin Shed Theatre space that seats 122 and hosts film screenings and live performances. After facing a few funding hurdles the Arts  Centre has forged an impressive presence in the town and offers an amazing range of creative opportunities.

The  Arts Centre, Cootamundra

To the Ivy Hill exhibition itself…

The exhibition poster (see above) showcases one of Karen Sedaitis’s joyful acrylic floral paintings. There are four in the show and they are among the standout works. Botanic motifs also feature in the paintings of Tanja Riese and Veronica O’Leary. Riese’s watercolours impart an ethereal, sometimes apocalyptic mood to plant forms, rainforest and waterways. O’Leary’s bold acrylic still lifes evoke a comfortable bourgeois existence with nods to Cubism and Margaret Preston. Kerry McInnis and Philip Cox have both contributed bold landscapes – it was unsurprising given her palette to learn that some of McInnis’s watercolours share their locations with those depicted in Fred Williams’ work. More abstract in style are the oils and acrylics of Helen Gauchat and the ink drawings of Ivana Gattegno. Gauchat’s display a spareness and luminescence reminiscent of the Heidelberg painters while Gattegno brings an expressionistic writhing quality to her depiction of intertidal land and tree forms.

A Kerry McInnis landscape (image from exhibition catalogue)

Several figurative and landscape works by Penny Lovelock are on show, the former have a whimsical, illustrative quality and include beautifully rendered rural animals, both domestic and native. Livestock are also celebrated in the cattle portraiture of Megan Crane and the delicate porcelain figurines of Anneke Paijmans. The other sculptors and ceramicists included in the exhibition have a diverse range of styles from Jen Mallinson’s sleek stainless steel forms to the fusion of industrial and organic motifs in Mike MacGregor’s pieces to the naïve chunkiness of Jackie Lallemand‘s charming dog and chook sculptures. All works are for sale. The exhibition itself is rewarding as was making acquaintance with this remarkable Cootamundra facility.

One of Jen Mallinson’s more monumental pieces

Post exhibition viewing we asked for recommendations for lunch. Being a Sunday, not much was open. The weather was fine and we wanted to be outdoors. Helen’s in Parker Street has a courtyard so that’s where we went. The courtyard at Helen’s reminded me of those in pre-gentrified Glebe terrace cafés from the 1980s. A jumble of outdoor furniture crammed into an ungroomed space, a concrete path leading to an outdoor dunny. The plastic palm fronds and tin butterflies and birds were the only touches of 2000s aesthetics. Our coffee was fine but our Caesar salads rather disappointing. Next visit to Coota I hope we find somewhere to rival the cafes we’ve found in Temora and Coolamon.

Carolyn Killen with Megan Crane's bovine character studies

We did get to meet Carolyn Killen, albeit briefly, before leaving town.  We congratulated her on the impressive exhibition and asked about the logistics of bringing such a major cache of works overland.  And of course I told her I would be seeing Robyn in a few days and we both wished we could have been experiencing ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ together.

 All photographs except the Kelly McInnes image are mine.

Agenda Dysphoria

This week (and most weeks) the issue of gender identity has featured prominently in the media. It was also a central theme in two of the plays staged as part of Riverina Water’s /SOACT’s Ten X 10 Play Fest (23 – 25 June, Basement Theatre, Wagga Wagga).

On Tuesday night Sarah Ferguson interviewed US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on ABC’s 7.30.  The rationale for doing so was that, unusually for a Republican, Taylor Greene is a strong supporter of Julian Assange and Ferguson sought her comments just moments before the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder set foot on Australian soil again, after 17 years, 14 of them in captivity, self-imposed then state sanctioned. In her responses to Fergusons’ questions, Taylor Greene appeared either to fail to grasp what was meant or to deliberately answer with rehearsed generalised clichés about the importance of ‘freedom of press’ and ‘truth’. Disturbingly, while praising Assange, Taylor Greene snidely insisted on using the name Bradley Manning in relation to the US military insider who provided the 400,000 classified military documents to WikiLeaks despite their transition to the female gender, as Chelsea Manning, in 2010. Taylor Young described that transition as‘parading’ a new identity.   Ferguson took issue with that choice of vocabulary and went on to ask the Congresswoman if her commitment to ‘truth’ extended to accepting as fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 US election, defeating Donald Trump. At that Taylor Greene turned hostile, repeatedly asked what Ferguson’s questions had to do with Julian Assange and, to her off camera team and presumably the viewing audience, asked if Ferguson got ‘her marching orders from the Democrat party’.

I have since read in The Washington Post  that Taylor Green is a full blown gun-toting alt right conspiracy theorist who so terrorised her Democrat opponent Kevin Van Ausdal in the 2020 Georgia Congressional election campaign that his life virtually imploded and he had to withdraw from the race. As Sarah Ferguson said, that indeed makes her a ‘strange bedfellow’ even amongst the diverse ranks of Assange supporters!

Then the next day my news feed featured reports that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has condemned actor David Tennant for his remarks at an LBGT award ceremony whilst accepting a ‘celebrity ally’ award for his LBQTI rights advocacy, Tennant said that he wished Kemi Badenoch, Women & Equalities Minister in Britain’s Tory government, would ‘shut up’ and hoped for a world in which she ‘doesn’t exist anymore’. These admittedly strong comments relate to Badenoch’s reactionary stance on  a number of social issues including denial of the harms of colonialism and the slave trade, repeated criticisms of trans people, and moves to have biological sex deemed a ‘protected characteristic’ under the UK Equality Act. Badenoch, who is of Nigerian descent yet lists Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as role models, seems an odd fit for the role of Minister for Women & Equalities even in a Conservative administration. A bit like Jacinta Price, the LNP’s spokesperson for Indigenous Affairs, leading the ‘No’ campaign for The Voice referendum.

The above are, of course, examples of the so-called ‘culture wars’ where liberal inclusive and traditionalist privileged paradigms clash in the arena of public discourse. That clash was a theme in The Study of Reuben March and The Sensitivity Editor two plays that featured in the recent Ten X 10 Play Fest. The first was a debut play from Imogen Rubi who also took the titular role. It dealt with scientific and sociological assumptions about the identity and sexuality of non-binary people and was an impassioned challenge to stereotyping and applying the wrong lens to others’ lives. A two hander, presenting an interview scenario between an asexual gender fluid person and a scientific researcher, the play set out to disabuse the researcher, and by extension the audience, of their preconceptions. The researcher character had little dialogue, largely serving as a sounding board for Reuben’s educative remarks. His growing realisation that he might himself be gender fluid may have had more impact if there had been some ‘tells’ planted along the way. The play would also have benefitted from creating more dynamic of tension between the characters with less obvious delineation between enlightened Reuben and the wrong-headed interviewer.  

The list of characters listed in the program for The Sensitivity Editor held out the promise of hearing from PL Travers, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare about recent moves to revamp their work to suit twenty first century values. Sadly that opportunity was squandered with declamatory dialogue from the editor character and the same, or mere throwaway quips, from the literary luminaries. The cast did their best but Rod Marsden’s approach was hopelessly reductive and superficial. It showed scant familiarity with the works of any of the authors and resorted to cheap digs at various supposed examples of ‘wokeism gone mad’. These included suggesting that the sooty faces in the Chim Chimmeny number of the Disney version of Mary Poppins had been decried as blackface, and that the demise of golliwogs in popular culture has diminished literature (as far as I am aware none of the writers featured were reliant on golliwogs to propel their plots). Marsden willfully misinterpreted the pronoun debate and sought cheap laughs by lumping it in with anti-monarchist and racist issues. I am not necessarily an apologist for sensitivity editing and the reworking of classic texts. I believe different criteria apply to adult and children’s fiction, with an appreciation of context and history obviously being more accessible to mature readers. The depiction of sensitivity editing in this play as solely about not offending ‘snowflakes’ without acknowledging its role in redressing past cultural dominance is unforgivable when there is such scope for a nuanced and valuable approach to the debate.

A Grand Tour of the Grand Garage

Paul Seaman is a well know Wagga Wagga mechanic who has owned the remnant, central part of the Grand Garage complex in Fitzmaurice Street for over 40 years and trades there as the Swift Service Centre. He lives onsite in the back portion of the building with his partner and their cat, Misty. I made contact with Paul through the Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook Group and we exchanged messages about the garage’s location having been, in the late 19thC, the site of the Chinese camp in Wagga Wagga with original buildings extant until as late as 1954. Paul shared with me some interesting newspaper cuttings, photos and a plan of the site. The latter included a tantalising note saying that Chinese graves were discovered adjacent to the Murrumbidgee river bank during construction of the levee in 1957 and the evidence submerged. Recently I visited him to ask him if he had discovered any vestiges of the Chinese presence on his property and to see what remains of the swanky Grand Garage.

The Grand Garage/Swift Service Centre as in looks today (my photo).

The old Grand Garage building retains the distinctive P&O style curved profile depicted in the Daily Advertiser’s article about its opening and opulence in 1954. Its stucco façade, windows, main door and some external fittings are original and Paul has cleverly incorporated a coffee kiosk that follows the architectural lines.  Inside, the customer service desk and main workshop occupy the part of the structure that once housed the ballroom. It has an attractive timber sprung dance floor which for practical reasons has been overlaid with concrete in some parts.  Paul pointed out small surviving details of the ballroom’s 1950s art deco glory: vents, cornices and a couple of chrome door handles with the style’s characteristic geometric design. He said there was once concealed lighting around the walls.  He must have worked that out from the old wiring as neither he nor I have been able to find photographs of the ballroom, or indeed of any part of the interior, of the Grand Garage.  I mentioned that the parents of a Wagga-born friend of mine attended dances at the Grand Garage and Paul told me that the wife of proprietor, Alf Ludwig, grew tired of attractive single women ‘hanging around’ and put a stop to the dances sometime in the 1960s.

Art deco plaster vent given a touch of gilt by Paul (my photo).

Paul opened one of the doors that feature those art deco handles, it is framed with cream painted timber and has a bubble patterned glass inset, all of which are original. The door leads to the ‘waiting room’ which is how the space is described in a 1954 advertisement in The Daily Advertiser listed along with the garage’s other amenities: ‘hot showers, telephone, writing facilities, boiling water, electric iron’.  It was likely designed as a rest area adjacent to the kitchenette and men’s and women’s showers and conveniences and now serves as a storeroom. Paul thinks it may be haunted as he has felt shivers along his spine when in the room alone at night. I wonder if it is the spirits of Riverina travellers or of Chinese gamblers that are restive in the rest room!

Original door to 'Rest Room' (my photo).

The network of rooms that contained these facilities has been extensively modified and now contains modern toilets and a bathroom, a kitchen and Paul’s living quarters. His bedroom does still incorporate a 1950s fireplace converted to bookshelves but other than that there are not really any hints of Alf Ludwig’s ‘ultra-modern’ facilities for visitors / prospective used car buyers as they existed back in the day.

We looked at the workshop area /lubritorium spruiked in the 1954 advertisement as follows:

Our new lubritorium is in charge of a specially trained man whose job is not only to grease every working part of your vehicle but to report to you any worn part. For 15/- he will check your car thoroughly replace any broken nipples, grease it, inspect gear box and diff and change oil if required.

Still attached to the ceiling are the now non-functioning 1950s lubricating device and compressed air hose that the ‘specially trained man’ would have employed.  Paul, ever the vintage car enthusiast, is currently using the area to restore a couple of 1970s Holdens.

Original 1950s lubricating device (left) and compressed air hose (right) (my photos).

Paul’s office occupies the bow fronted area to the right of the ex-ballroom. It reflects his long tenure in the building with many mementoes and photographs relating both to the business and his family. There are several pictures of his sons, who have both entered motor trades, one is a mechanic, the other, a panel beater. Paul’s collection of historical clippings is in a filing cabinet beside his desk. In  addition to what he had already generously shared with me he gave me copies of images of George Lloyd’s grocery shop, which preceded Knights next door, inundated by 1950s flood waters, and an image of George himself at the counter of his shop. 

George Lloyd's grocery store, now Knight's Deli, marks the northern boundary of the Grand Garage site pictured here during floods in the 1950s. The Grand Garage's bowsers and signage are on the right
(source: Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook page).

Paul told me that originally the garage, its showrooms and workshops, all the customer amenities and several outbuildings covered the area from where the side wall of Knights deli now stands to Meccanico’s café and the Cadell Place development. That explains why the address is given as 167 - 183 Fitzmaurice Street in the old advertisements whereas the Swift Service Centre’s is just 175. This approximately 3000 square metre site is where Wagga’s Chinese camp was situated from the 1860s. We know from newspaper articles that the Joss House/ Free Mission Hall was demolished in 1938 and that a church constructed behind that building to the rear of the site was still in use as a storeroom by the Grand Garage in 1954.  

The boundary of the site as it looks today, Knight's Deli has a similar profile to the grocery store that used to occupy the site (my photo).

Two Chinese businesses existed where Meccanico’s and the rest of the Cadell Place development now are. Foon Kee, herbalist and grocer, had a cottage and store on the site until the 1930s when he departed Wagga after 60 years to return to his home province of Canton for his final years. His next-door neighbour, Tommy Ah Wah, a successful business man who owned property in Wagga and Junee, is credited in Tracking the Dragon with operating the first garage at the Fitzmaurice Street address however according to a Daily Advertiser report of 1927 two ‘NRMA-trained’ mechanics, ‘Messrs. C E Kent and W E Pulsford have opened the Grand Garage in Fitzmaurice- street,  near the Hampden Bridge, and hope, by expert advice, to have a share of the patronage of resident and travelling motorists’  so perhaps Tommy Ah Wah bought it from them or was their landlord.

Foon Kee's cottage and store in the 1920s, he is just visible in the doorway
 (source: Wagga Wagga City Council website).

Back to my tour…

Paul told me that the forecourt area of the building would have originally been lined with used cars for sale as shown in The Daily Advertiser’s 1954 photograph. Now it has a driveway and a row of petrol bowsers as well as parking spaces for Swift’s and visitors’ vehicles. The concrete is heavily crazed and a gravel drive leads out into a back lane that runs beside the new levee completed in 2020. Within the garage site’s boundaries are several ageing structures. Sadly none is the remnant church where Chinese characters and drawings could still be clearly seen in 1954. Paul said he believes that was probably demolished later that decade.

Meccanico’s Café and Cadell Place incorporate some of the older structures on their sites and recently, just up the road, the Prince of Wales Hotel (1865) created a restaurant that includes some of the pub's heritage features. Paul said he would love to see the Grand Garage restored to its art deco grandeur and functioning as a restaurant at some point in the future. The wooden floor would come up a treat and he has already experimented with adding gold lustre to some of the stylish vents. The building is well equipped with a kitchen and multiple toilets and there is ample room at the back to extend the premises. The large curved windows make the interior light and they could look out onto some plantings and statuary instead of the bowsers. It just needs someone with the vision!

Alf Ludwig at Wagga's Gold Cup racing carnival probably in 1999
(source: Wagga and District Historical Society collection).  

Our conversation touched on rumours relating to the Chinese occupancy of the site which still need research, but which will more likely forever remain mysteries. These include the purported graves, the supposed network of tunnels under Fitzmaurice Street and a legendary statue appropriated from the temple. Paul said a man of Chinese descent called by one day and told him an ancestor of his had been buried somewhere on the site. That seems unlikely but not impossible depending upon the year of death. There are Chinese funerals recorded at the Wagga Monumental Cemetery from 1874. A person has posted on the Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook page that there are multiple tunnels under Fitzmaurice Street connected to David Jones, Romano’s Hotel, the Courthouse and, of course, the Grand Garage (he cites Alf Ludwig as his source for that one). Their purposes are variously described as giving a magistrate quick access to his liquid lunch, a route for Chinese gamblers escaping a police raid and use as conduits for WW2 military communications!  However, the only substantiated story of an underground cavern in Wagga Central relates to the now filled in men’s lavatories outside the Union Club Hotel in Forsyth Street. Lastly, the ‘holy grail’, a missing religious statue, possibly gilded, liberated from the Chinese temple.  Paul told me Alf Ludwig lived in hope of discovering gold somewhere on the Grand Garage site. He reached 86 years of age so he had ample time to search, but from what I’ve read he had more success making his fortune taking bets on the horses and as a purveyor of used cars and television sets. Is it just possible that he enjoyed fuelling this urban myth?     

References:

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

McGowan, Barry Dr, Tracking The Dragon - A history of the Chinese in the Riverina, 2010, Museum of the Riverina
Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook Group 

The Fall

Fifteen minutes earlier we’d been admiring the heritage streetscapes of Millthorpe and enjoying coffee and cake in a trendy café.

Sporting my new Middlemost coat and oblivious to what lies ahead in Millthorpe

Then, just one step. One misstep. That’s all it took! Does it happen in slow mo? It definitely absorbs your attention. Descending and landing. HARD. On the floor for far longer than you’re airborne. Then leg buckled under heavy body. Gyrating like a semi turned turtle. Gasping in pain. Lots of hands and lower limbs come into view as people crouch down offering aid. The shop proprietor has to go next door to get a cup of water. Water is a panacea. I gulp down my arthritis meds and take deep breaths between sips. There are ‘Mind the Step’ signs pinned up and fluoro tape edging on the floor apparently; I saw neither. I was chatting to my husband and the owner about a scarf we were buying. I reached out to touch some garments on a stand and fell in a split second. 

The fateful scene (well just adjacent to the fateful scene)

Adrenaline lets me exchange pleasantries with the people who gather around me and I somehow manage to sit upright on the rogue step. A woman says ‘it is dangerous, it isn’t obvious’ and her husband says ‘there’s signs and tape that’s what you’re supposed to do’. The shop owner laments the uneven floors of old buildings. ‘You do need to do something’ says the first woman. An Irish guy wearing a tweed sports jacket with toning scarf asks if there’s anything he can do to help. There isn’t. Then he compliments my husband who is now swathed in the new scarf, on being ‘nattily’ dressed. The proprietor takes my name and phone number. I don’t think to get anyone’s.

Somehow I stumble without yelping audibly to the wooden bench outside the shop and wait while my husband goes to get the car. He’s been assured it is okay to double park. The streets are hardly busy. He returns and I hobble into the passenger seat. My leg and ankle feel like something is ripped. I ring our lunch hosts and leave a pitiful message about having fallen and needing to get to Emergency. 

Triage, Orange Hospital

We drive the 15 minutes to Orange hospital. The staff bring me a wheelchair and fast track me to triage where the kindly nurse with a spectacular inked moth at her throat asks me if I’d heard a ’crack’. I say I didn’t but the impact was undeniable. I hand over my Medicare card. For some reason the medical practice I have been attending for 10 years doesn’t present itself on the hospital’s system three hundred kilometres from home. I give them the number from my phone contacts. They let me keep the wheelchair and bring me an ice pack for my now elephantine ankle. 

Three quick X-rays and the wait begins. Jury finalisation for Trump’s trial is on the small TV screen suspended from the ceiling. The reporter says it has been hard to find anyone without strong preconceived views. I exchange superficial remarks with a thin woman cradling her wrist. ‘I fell off my bike yesterday evening’ she says. ‘I slept with my wrist like this’ she gestures holding it gently to her chest. It is mid-morning and the waiting room is almost empty. That changes over the next three hours as more injured and unwell trickle in. 

Self explanatory

A woman whose name is almost a homophone of mine gets called and I optimistically ask to be wheeled up. Our lunch host returns my call. ‘We’ve just eaten the lasagne and the apple crumble and feel guilty’ he says and wishes me a speedy recovery.

In the consult room the lanky red headed registrar asks me to recount what happened. I do, concluding on the note that I hope it is just a sprain. ’It is broken’ he counters and shows me the image of my fibula with its clean horizontal fracture. He tells us where there is a coffee cart for my husband to get us drinks while we wait for an orthopaedic surgeon to give a ruling. They’re operating so it will be a while. I get chatting to the thin cyclist with what does turn out to be a broken wrist who is waiting to get it set. She is depressed about her general health and talks fatalistically about the future. She doesn’t have a phone so we send her boyfriend a text giving him an update on her progress. The lanky registrar returns and catches my husband trying to look at my x-rays on the laptop and chides him. ‘It’s a breach’ he says as he might see other patients’ records. I apologise and he is cordial. We develop a rapport as I tell him we’re in town to see a show that evening and comment on his striking colouring. He says he’s used to it, that strangers would come up to him and ruffle his hair when he was a kid. 

There’s another hiatus. A nurse checks my blood pressure (still a little elevated) and temperature (normal) again and I drink my take away tea. I brave the unisex accessible toilet relying on my husband to direct the wheelchair to both the loo and the hand basin. That occupies a good ten minutes. Eventually the Registrar comes back and says he’s shown my x-rays to one of the orthopaedic team now. They’ve given the go ahead for me to be fitted with a cam boot and crutches and to be discharged. I learn that he originally trained as a physiotherapist but found the work dull. I remark that he must certainly now get variety in ER. He enjoys it he says. He chooses a medium cam boot and adjusts the crutches to my height then drills me on how to walk with them. I am allowed to place some weight on the foot. ‘Bad foot, crutches, good foot, bad foot, crutches, good foot’ I repeat the mantra out loud and he watches me take a turn about the corridor.

It’s a Saturday and no-one at the hospital back home can take a referral so I need a hard copy discharge letter and treatment plan. While we’re waiting for them the bike rider and I introduce one another properly and chat a bit more agreeing it has been nice to keep company on and off for four hours. I ask my husband to take our photo which we send to her boyfriend and post on Facebook dubbing ourselves ‘The Fracture Sisters’. 

The Fracture Sisters

We leave with the paperwork and a prescription for some strong pain killers which we get filled en route to the guest house. The adrenaline carries me through enough to joke with our hosts who are most solicitous bringing me a footstool and another ice pack. They recount their own experiences with fractures on holidays – a smashed sacrum from falling off a trail bike and a shattered wrist sustained while tugging at potential firewood. My story – tripped while shopping – feels distinctly bourgeois in comparison. 

Although I have missed two thirds of historic Millthorpe and lunch with our friends I have been treated royally by hospital staff and our hosts and had a few laughs with the other ER patients. I will rest now and be able to go to the theatre this evening.

Serendipity Tribute

Introduction

Having just broken my ankle I was unable to attend our Word Play writing session in person this week. Facilitator, Claire Baker kindly sent me the Haibun* exercise they did for me to complete at home.

Write a haibun recording a recently experienced scene, or special moment, use a highly descriptive and objective manner. It may be factual, wholly fictional or dream-like in tone

Then write an accompanying haiku that has either a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompasses or hints at the gist of what is recorded in the prose section.

* A Haibun is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. 

Prose

Like many people I often research what there is to see at my destination before taking a trip. Travelling to England and France in the 1980s I had a ring binder folder full of sights I planned to see. Among them were pre-Raphaelite murals in Oxford and a Lewis Carroll memorial stained glass window in Daresbury neither of which we could find. Often though, just happening upon somewhere, unplanned, can be incredibly rewarding. Like being in Windsor when Frogmore Gardens was open to the public and seeing Victoria and Albert’s lavish mausoleum.  Or visiting Versailles on the only day of the year the fountains were ‘playing’ (it drains the town’s water supply to have them on too often) their grandeur eclipsing the actual palace for me. Or, on a more modest scale,  arriving  at the little 15thC  church in my childhood village, at dusk  expecting to see it in ruin,  but instead a kindly onsite caretaker unlocking  the building and letting me look at the restored building as the sun set - an unanticipated and moving experience.

I recently discovered (see previous blog post) a local automotive business, the Swift Service Centre on Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga, which opened to much fanfare in 1954 as the Grand Garage, the epitome of (late) art deco modern conveniences for travellers. It boasted fluorescent lighting, pastel décor, showers, a kitchenette and even a ball room. While interesting in its own right to a local history and architecture nut like me, I was more fascinated to discover that the building stands on the site of an 1860s Chinese settlement/camp that had included substantial buildings progressively demolished between the 1930s and 50s, one of which contained original art work still visible when the Grand Garage started operating.

An illustration from a Sydney Mail article of 10 July 1935 recounting the Lambing Flat riots  

Researching the Chinese presence in the Riverina and reading about the 1861 racist riots at Lambing Flat where white miners ran their Chinese counterparts off the gold fields, physically attacking and humiliating them, meant that when we drove through Young (as Lambing Flat is now known) recently my attention was particularly alerted to a sign post in the town pointing to ‘Chinese Tribute Garden’. We took the road four kilometres out of the town centre to investigate…

What an oasis of beauty we found. The gardens, constructed in 1992, incorporate the historic Chinaman’s Dam site and an additionally created artificial ‘placid lake’ supporting a wealth of diverse plant life and water fowl. An elegant gently curved bridge spans the lake leading to a pagoda-style green and red triple gateway guarded by a pair of handsome carved marble lions with cascading manes and eerily finger-like digits, one impassive and one with suitably bared fangs.

 
The marble lions and ex-Taronga Zoo gateways (photo Bob Erwin)

Beyond that is a further gateway, a circular opening in a sinuous cream symmetrical curved wall with matching discs featuring painted Chinese dancers flanking the opening on both sides. Reading the signage on arrival I discovered that these structures were part of the temporary panda exhibit at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in 1998. While they may have looked twee there, afforded sufficient curtilage (great word that another architecture buff introduced me to) and surrounded by sufficient plantings in the tribute gardens I think they work. But I love follies, gazebos and rotundas having grown up in the English park tradition.

Plantings include maples, yuccas, conifers and camellias and many other species I didn’t identify interspersed with stone quarried from nearby Boorowa. The paths and gardens hug the sides of a ‘Pool of Tranquility’ populated by water lilies and three sculptures of disparate style: a cairn-style structure of four piled boulders, a rustic waterwheel and a replica of a 1,600 year old Chinese bronze ‘Matafeiyan’ depicting a horse gliding on the back of a swallow and probably the park’s most authentic evocation of Chinese culture. The dimensions of this sculpture,  at 34 .5 cm x 45 cm it is quite small, means it is in danger of being overshadowed by its companion pieces but its wonderful verdigris and dynamic form draw the eye.

On one edge of the pond is a stone and red lacquered wood pavilion providing a vantage point for contemplating the water. There is also a stone mounted brass plaque under a ‘Peace and Prosperity Tree’ planted in 1997 to commemorate Young’s sister city relationship with Lanzhou. The path circles back to the dual gateways affording multiple glimpses of red and green foliage and plump ebony moorhens that seem to thrive in the gardens.

The 'Pool of Tranquility' (my photo)

It was a sunny autumn weekday when we visited and there were few other walkers. One young woman I passed several times seemed to be walking around the park for exercise carrying a take away coffee. A mother and three children sat in one of the picnic shelters adjacent to the carpark. The eldest boy, about six, ran after a bread bag that had blown from their table, retrieved and binned it. I praised him. Less laudable was the action of three flannelette-clad young men carrying fishing gear who emptied their unused bread and sausages onto the grass in front of a group of ducks. Admittedly there were no signs discouraging the practice and based on their builds and swagger I elected not to challenge them. Probably wise as when we stopped briefly to check the sat nav on the road out they hooted impatiently at us from their metallic blue Holden. So not a thoroughly Zen experience...

What remains with me though is that in roughly 140 years Lambing Flat has gone from assaulting and reviling Chinese miners to celebrating ‘the contribution of the Chinese community to the settlement of Young… and the ongoing contributions of the Chinese people to Australia as a nation’ and the means of acknowledging that has provided a calming and aesthetic experience for anyone who visits the gardens. 

 

The Matafeiyan - flying horse balanced on a swallow (source: https://www.goldtrails.com.au/article/youngs-chinese-heritage/)

Haikus

1.

eighteen sixty one

assault and persecution

today some recompense

 

2.

elevated tail

head and three hooves held high

speed on sleek bronze horse

 

3.

feeding sausages

to undiscerning waterfowl

is never okay

NOTE: This short video gives a good summary of the clash at Lambing Flat

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…

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 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 Mei 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 Quong 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.

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