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 

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