Work | Leaving & staying | Leisure | Beliefs | Dress | Food

Work

Subthemes: 
gold & tin | pastoral work | market gardens | herbalists | cooks | dressmaking | storekeeping | carpenters

Market gardens

From the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries Chinese market gardeners are remembered throughout regional New South Wales for their contributions to the supply of fresh vegetables.

Chinese market gardens near the brewery, George Street, Deniliquin, about 1917. (Deniliquin and District Historical Society)

As Lister Holland from Young observed: When I was a kid - I'm 90 years old now ... -I lived out on a farm out in the bush, every district had a Chinaman garden. Anywhere where there was a dam or a creek where they could get a bit of water, and they worked damned hard ...They were our main supplier of vegetables. Market gardening was labour intensive and was often undertaken by groups of Chinese men working together.

Quin Chee, market gardener in Tenterfield and district, about 1920. (Private collection)

Many Chinese market gardeners are remembered for their generosity. In 1990, local Tenterfield resident Dulcie Rose recalled:

I remember ... Quin Chee ... what he did for the town and for the hospital... He really kept the hospital in vegetables. He had a garden up there at the hospital and he used to give them a certain amount of money because he was an inmate once and he couldn’t pay them... He was quite a charitable man.

The museum label accompanying this basket reads: 'Basket given to Edie Flood on her 13th birthday 1912 by King Fan, best remembered Chinaman in Narrandera (donated by Edith Davis nee Flood).' (Parkside Cottage Museum, Narrandera)

King Fan worked as a market gardener on the river flats in Narrandera from around the turn of the century until the early 1930s.