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

Work

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

Storekeeping

Chinese owned stores had their Australian origins on the goldfields where they grew in response to the needs of fellow Chinese for familiar goods and services. Many stores came and went with the gold and tin rushes; other stores stayed and some new stores were established. Increasingly, non-Chinese residents became their main customers. Large and small stores were set up in large and small towns across the state. Their growth in the twentieth century was partly triggered by the 1901 Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act which included shop assistants as one group who could be sponsored to enter Australia, at least for set periods of time.

Staff of the Hong Yuen store in Inverell, 1936. (Private collection)

The Hong Yuen store was established in 1899 in a single storey, one block building and with a number of Chinese partners.By 1936, the store occupied a three store frontage, employed around 50 staff, and was owned and managed by Harry Fay (Louie Mew Fay) and his family.The store is still operating in Inverell and is owned and managed by descendants of Harry Fay.

Hong Yuen store, Inverell, about 1900, and 1941. (Private collection)

Sun Tong Lee Store, Gulgong, early 1870s. (Holtermann Collection, State Library of NSW)

The Sun Tong Lee Store allegedly inspired the following lines in Henry Lawson's Christmas on the Goldfields:

Santa Claus is a Chinaman, with strange and delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.

The building which housed Sun Tong Lee is now a part of the Gulgong Pioneers Museum.

Tax returns, store invoices and correspondence, Hong Yuen and related businesses, Inverell, 1929-1949.

Chinese general stores conformed to Australian business practices. They submitted tax returns, paid award rates, issued invoices and bought from travelling salesmen and from warehouses in Sydney. They also bought Chinese foodstuffs for the local Chinese community, provided a support network for fellow Chinese across the state, and kept records in Chinese.

Fong Lee store, Welllington, about 1925. (Oxley Museum, Wellington).

The Fong Lee store in Wellington was well established by the 1880s and, by the turn of the century was under the management of William Suey Ling. The store was owned and managed by W.S. Ling and his family until it closed in 1935.

Account book for Fong Lee & Co., Wellington, 1930-1931. (Oxley Museum, Wellington)

Abacus, late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. (Dubbo Museum and Historical Centre)

This is a traditional Chinese abacus which has two beads above and five below the centre bar.Chinese-Australians used abacuses to calculate and count.Trevor Jack, for example, recalled that his grandfather, Quin Jack, who lived in Tingha did all his sums on the abacus. Bessie Chiu whose father, George Sue Fong, used the abacus to keep the books for his store in Emmaville, maintained that it was 'quicker than a computer'.