04 | Shooting the Past | Alien Nation

Clare Wright explores the story behind a studio portrait of an Edwardian family, and raises some tricky questions about citizenship, the Australian constitution and the subtle art of belonging.

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  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past, where every picture is worth at least a thousand words, if not a whole history.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  I never went in for those family portraits you can get at the large retail emporiums. You know, the ones where you doll your kids up in their newest outfits to take a picture. But I have friends whose fridges and walls are covered in such photos, taken year after year, an illustrated guide to a family's progress, like pencil marks on a door frame. And maybe that's why I'm so drawn to this photograph, taken in 1912. In it, a mother sits in the centre of her brood, four young children and a lap baby. It's a fairly standard image of Federation-era respectability. The family is all dressed in dark, well-tailored clothing. The children's little leather boots are polished.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  The mother's hair is set in a fashionable pompadour. Her eyes are downcast, so far so Edwardian.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  But there are three elements of this photo that have me spellbound and perplexed. First, there's no family patriarch. Second, the well-heeled family are Chinese. And finally, there is the question of the writing that's scrawled around the margins, and at the bottom, a signature, Detective Inspector Gleeson. There's a story here, I'm sure of it. The missing father, the marginalia, the detective. Who are these people? And why do they appear to have come to the attention of the authorities?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  My first port of call is curator and historian Dr Sophie Couchman. What Sophie's about to reveal to me is that this photograph is so much more than just a family portrait.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  The first thing that you see is the kind of brutal hole, puncture hole, in the corner, which tells you that it has an administrative function. So this photo and the annotations, you can, you very quickly see that it's related to immigration. You can see Jay Gleeson's signature down the bottom, Detective Inspector. He's a man who's associated with a lot of immigration files because he was in charge of monitoring the movement of Chinese in Victoria. It's talking about holding a copy of the photograph and it talks about the arrival of Alice and Ethel Tong on a particular ship in a particular, on a particular day.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Okay, so from those annotations down the bottom, you can tell that we're looking at an immigration photograph. What about the annotations around the edges, the marginalia there, that with a rather crude line drawn to the heads of the children?

• 3:36Speaker 05

  The annotations there are identifying the people in the photograph. So we've got Ethel, Alice. But then when we get to mother and Phyllis, we, we see they're both died in China.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's what that says.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  And then Elsie died in China. And then Willie stated to be alive in China.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  So can you hazard a guess at what the photograph was used for? What's the purpose of this photograph?

• 4:05Speaker 05

  Well, this photograph was actually held in a file in the National Archives, held as part of the Department of Customs, which was the precursor to the Immigration Department. And so we can tell from the context of the file around it, in conjunction with the annotations here, what was going on.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Sophie, do you know who the family is in this photograph?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  They're the Chin Tong family. Chen Tong, who was the father, was a storekeeper. And they lived in a very tiny little house in Cohen Place, off Little Burke Street in Melbourne. And the five children were all born in Melbourne. They're born from sort of 1900 onwards, the children. And Chen Tong, who's the father, who's absent from the, from the image, died in 1912. After his, his death, actually only two months after his death, the family get onto a ship and head to Hong Kong and then to China.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  So Sophie, you think this photograph was taken in 1912, just before the family went back to China?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Yes, I do. The darkness of the clothes suggests that maybe they're wearing funery morning wear. And I think it was specifically taken because they were going back. And one of the reasons we know this is because I found another copy of the photograph. It's exactly the same photo and it's held in a private collection, which is where you might expect a photo like this to be, to be held, by the descendant of another Chinese family who lived in Melbourne's Chinatown. And what I think that they did before they left was that they gave copies of the photo to various friends and acquaintances.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Like a keepsake?

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, like a keepsake. But they were also being very pragmatic in giving the photos out because even though they were leaving to go back to the village, they did intend to come back.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  What Sophie's told me makes it clear that this is a photo with a dual purpose, a private keepsake, but also a public travel document. But I'm still confused. The original studio copy is dated 1912. But the copy that Sophie found in the immigration archives has 1916 handwritten on it. Why the discrepancy?

• 6:39Speaker 05

  What you've got here then is Ethel and Alice returning back to Melbourne after being in China for four years.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Only Ethel and Alice?

• 6:48Speaker 05

  That's right. As you can tell from the, the marginalia, the mother and the baby both died, as did the second daughter.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Okay, so if we read all of these margin notes together, we actually get a story about what has happened to this family over this four-year period.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  So mum and five children go over in, in 1912 and only two come back.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Two come back and then eventually Willie also comes back. And I think they knew that there might be difficulties getting back into Australia.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Why do you think that?

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Because the, the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act had a clause in it that, that the administrators used to block non-white immigration. It was a dictation test. They could choose who they gave it to and they could ensure that those people failed that test.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  So this is part of the mechanism of the white Australia policy?

• 7:52Speaker 05

  That's right. And the difficulty with this is that when people are getting off the ship and the authorities are getting, you know, are, are checking them out, how are they determining who comes in and who doesn't? They're doing it based on how people look. Now, if you're Australian-born Chinese, like these children are, they look Chinese, but they were born in Australia. So they're travelling on their birth certificates. Now, birth certificates then, as now, don't have a photo attached to them.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  So effectively, this family photograph, a studio portrait, is being used as an identification photograph in lieu of a passport or other visual way of identifying the family?

• 8:37Speaker 05

  That's right. So, you know, these children, when they came back, Alice was interviewed, friends of theirs were interviewed before they were identified and allowed to land.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  And were there instances that you're aware of where, say, an Australian-born person like Alice Tong was trying to come back to her home in Australia and was not allowed entry because somebody at Customs couldn't match her face to a photograph?

• 9:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was another girl, Suey Lan, who also came and her father was in WA and he had to hot-foot it from WA all the way to Melbourne to identify her on the ship. And that made the papers.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  So Sophie, would you say that the Tongs were victims of a repressive immigration system and, and possibly an imprecise ID system? Or, or did they actually successfully negotiate the system to their own advantage?

• 9:36Speaker 05

  I think they're both. Alice and Ethel, when they arrived in 1916, sat on the ship for two days while authorities worked out who they were and proved their identity. But in the end, they did prove their identity. Former teachers identified them and remembered them quite fondly. And they then became, came back to Australia and, and part of the community in Australia. Systems evolved and it was around this time that authorities started keeping a register of people who were travelling on their birth certificates. So authorities were as keen to avoid the two young girls on a ship situation for two days as the Chinese were.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  The bureaucracy got more tangled and more evolved. You had to have two photos and front and side and all this business. But at the same time, you did have mobility and provided you jumped the hoops, you could come and go.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  I want to know more about Mrs Tong, the demure-looking woman who understood the immigration system so well that she distributed copies of her family portrait to other community members as an insurance policy against being barred entry to her own home.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  I'm in Melbourne's Chinatown at the location of the old Tong family home in Cohen Place. I've arranged to meet the descendants of Mrs Tong in the busy Chinese teahouse that now occupies the site.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  I'm Christina Law. I'm the granddaughter of the oldest girl that's in the photo, Alice.

• 11:16Speaker 07

  Julie Crawford. And as Christina said, we're cousins. And Alice was our grandmother.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  The copy of the photograph that I have here identifies this woman, your grandmother, as Alice. How did you know her?

• 11:33Speaker 07

  Nana, we called her. But everyone else called her Auntie Yuki, which is Jade. So she was Bo Yook.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  I think, you know, within the family, they referred to each other as their Chinese names.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  But anyone else in the community, and officially, I think they use their English names.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  So on all their official documentation...

• 11:56Speaker 07

  And Willie was always Uncle Sing to us.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  Yes, that's right.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Uncle Sing.

• 12:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Can I ask you, what do you see when you look at this photograph?

• 12:07Speaker 06

  I just see my great-grandmother looking very sad, I think. And the four daughters also looking sort of sad and weary,

• 12:20Speaker 06

  bearing in mind that they've just lost their father and they're about to embark on a trip to the children, at least a foreign place. And, but curiously, their brother, Uncle Sing, looks quite happy.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  So Julie, what do you see when you look at this photograph?

• 12:37Speaker 07

  Well, strangers, really. It's nice to see how they were as young people.

• 12:47Speaker 07

  But it's sad that they all didn't come back.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  That's true. It's sad. It has its sad overtones because three of the six people there didn't survive for very long.

• 12:59Speaker 07

  And they're all dressed in black. So they're still in mourning for the father. So I guess that's another reason why they're sad, except for Uncle Sing, who would be difficult to suppress, I imagine.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  He's now the man of the family.

• 13:13Speaker 07

  Yes, that's right.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  And how much of your grandmother's story has been passed down to you?

• 13:20Speaker 07

  None, really. She never, ever spoke of when she was a child, not even going back to China or anything.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  No.

• 13:30Speaker 07

  She came back when she was 16 because the guardian herbalist arranged a marriage with someone from an influential family up in Bendigo. And so she was only 16, got married. And when she was 19, went back to Hong Kong for this big birthday party. And my father was born over there. He's the only one in the whole family born outside of Australia.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  So you two are fourth-generation Australians? If your great-grandmother, who is the mother in the photograph, if she's the first to come out, that makes her first generation.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  So Alice and Ethel and the siblings are second. So your parents are third.

• 14:23Speaker 07

  Yes, so we're four.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  So you're fourth, so you're fourth-generation Australian-born?

• 14:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  And there was certainly no expectation that you would marry, even within the Chinese community?

• 14:34Speaker 07

  Well, they would have liked it, but...

• 14:36Speaker 06

  Yes, that's true. There was nothing they could do about it.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  So you didn't, you married out, as they say?

• 14:43Speaker 06

  No, not even married.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Right, there you go. Sorry, terrible assumptions on my part. And so how do you identify as Chinese-Australians or as Australian-Chinese or just as Australians?

• 14:59Speaker 07

  Fundamentally as Australians. But because we look Chinese, when you go overseas, people are astonished that you've got an Australian accent. They can't really picture it. You know, you speak to people on the phone and they think that you must be just an ordinary Aussie.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  So the appearance is still a really strong visual clue for people as to how to place you?

• 15:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. I remember when I was younger and at school, people asking me, "Where are you from?", which always puzzled me. And when I said I had Chinese background, they'd say, "So have you been back?" And I thought, "Back where? This is where I was born. This is all I've known."

• 15:49Speaker 07

  Seven men from seven different countries intend of their own free choice to become Australian citizens in a country which they believe and which we believe endeavors to give equal opportunities to all of its citizens, regardless of race or of class or of creed.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Those words were spoken by Minister for Immigration, Arthur Corwell, in 1949 at the very first Australian citizenship ceremony. But Alice and Ethel Tong were Australian-born, and yet they still had to prove their bona fides. So were they citizens in law, if not in appearance? I must admit, I'm still grappling with the question of why the Tongs had to jump through so many administrative hoops. It's time to find an expert.

• 16:37Speaker 07

  My name is Professor Kim Rubenstein, and I'm a professor at the Australian National University in the law school there. And my particular area of expertise is in Australian citizenship.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So, Kim, you are the perfect person for me to speak to now, at this stage in my journey with this photograph. Because I have to admit, I'm pretty confused about a number of concepts that have been raised. So can you start off by telling me, what does it mean to be a citizen of Australia?

• 17:09Speaker 07

  Well, the reason why you're struggling is because of the historical evolution of membership in Australia. And I'd say you're not the only person to struggle. High Court judges are also struggling with that concept. But to give you a sort of a broad sense of what it means to be a citizen, when you talk about someone being a citizen, it means that they are the fullest member of that community in the legal sense. So that if we think of the community, the relationship between the state and the individual. So we live in the state or the nation of Australia. And the term being an Australian citizen is the fullest strength of membership that you can have. But the reason why you've come across all these other terms

• 17:51Speaker 07

  is that term was not around as a legal term in 1901, when Australia was formed.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  So when did it become possible to become an Australian citizen?

• 18:02Speaker 07

  In 1901, the Constitution actually refers to members as British subjects or as residents in any of the territories. And so that reflected part of the common law's development in legal terms of membership in Australia. So anyone born in Australia in 1901, anyone born in Australia was a subject of the Crown. And the opposite of subject status at that time was alien. So the term alien becomes really important.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Right, so you're either a subject or you were an alien.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Correct. All of those British subjects who were born in Australia became Australian citizens on the 26th of January, 1949. So up until that date, we were solely British subjects. And then from that date, we became both British subjects and Australian citizens. We didn't lose British subject status. There was this real desire by the Australian community in the parliament to not see that move to citizenship or recognizing citizenship as to any dilution of their identity as British subjects.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  So when did we lose that particular neurosis?

• 19:13Speaker 07

  We didn't lose that until 1987. And it was after the British lost British subject. So Australians were British subjects longer than the British. They moved to the term British citizen and so lost British subject status in the UK before we in Australia lost it.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  So Alice and Ethel Tong, who were Australian-born at the time of this photograph in 1912, would have been British subjects?

• 19:39Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Non-alians?

• 19:41Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Maybe casually referred to as Australian citizens, but not legally?

• 19:46Speaker 07

  I think casually, they wouldn't have been referred to as Australian citizens. And this is a broader discussion. Many people who were actually subjects were referred to as aliens because they picked up the discourse of alien as other rather than the formal legal term alien as someone who is not a subject of the Queen. So there were many subjects like this family who regular members of the community may have looked across at them in the street and thought of them as aliens, even though they were formally, legally, subjects.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  And that distinction would have been made purely on their looks?

• 20:20Speaker 07

  Yes, I think at that particular time. And in fact, not only purely on their looks, but picking up the discourse of the politics of that time.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  So prior to 1949, if you immigrated to Australia, what did you become? An Australian?

• 20:36Speaker 07

  No, you didn't. You became a British subject resident in Australia. Of course, everyone did refer to each other as Australians. And even in the convention debates in the 1890s, when they were looking at drafting the Constitution, there was a discussion about whether they would include citizenship. And this is quite an important point for this photo because part of the reason why they chose not to include citizenship was a desire to continue to discriminate as to who came into the country. There was a recognition that if they went to the effort of actually putting citizenship into the constitution, they'd have to be more explicit about defining who was allowed in and out of the country.

• 21:15Speaker 07

  Whereas if they kept British subjects status, there was less transparency about the fact that they wanted to continue to discriminate against non-white British subjects. So some British subjects were being discriminated against through the Migration Act or the Immigration Act. So British subjects resident in Hong Kong, who they may wish to be able to prevent coming into the country.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  And so was Chinese immigration to Australia in the 19th century central to the development of citizenship laws?

• 21:49Speaker 07

  Exactly. In my view, it was pretty fundamental to the foundations of our constitutional document, that there was this conscious desire to be able to continue to preclude certain British subjects from coming into Australia. They were concerned about maintaining that legal power to exclude non-white, specifically Chinese, immigration.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Think of the white Australia policy. Well, I think it's good and they should really have it and keep out the coloured races. I think it's a little bit late for that. I think we should take Asians in. Because the coloured races, when they get into a white country, then they want to intermarry and I don't think it's fair on the children. White Australian policy? I think it's very good. Same, I wouldn't like to see the place overrun by all this other nation. So Kim, would it be true to say that fear and antagonism towards so-called aliens, whether legally or visually conceived?

• 22:45Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Especially the Chinese?

• 22:47Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Fostered a particularly Australian sense of nationhood?

• 22:51Speaker 07

  In a way, our whole history, which just starts exactly as you've just described, is about defining ourselves by who we are not, rather than who we are. So we've defined ourselves through the concept of alienage, rather than defining ourselves through a holistic sense of who we are as a nation. And I think that that has been fundamental, that legal foundation and the lack of capacity to address that in our constitution to this very day, provides that continuing illness that persists in influencing the public discussion about questions of membership. Each of the changes, significant changes along the way with the Citizenship Act have

• 23:36Speaker 07

  arguably been through an interest around immigration policy and who we allow in and out of the country. But of course, citizenship is not just about regulating immigration. Citizenship is also about, well, birth in Australia. But in 1984, the Citizenship Act was amended to say that birth in Australia is no longer enough to become an Australian citizen. You need a parent who is a permanent resident or an Australian citizen to automatically become an Australian citizen by birth.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  So it really seems that this, the murkiness of the way that laws were created at the turn of the century at Federation, still has a very far-reaching consequences for the way that we understand ourselves, not just legally but culturally as Australians today.

• 24:26Speaker 07

  Absolutely. And in fact, if you even think through a move to a republic, we're saying we want an Australian citizen as a head of state, but there's no legally protected concept of Australian citizen in the constitution. And part of that is because of those very origins that you're talking about. So it does, it has had a far-reaching effect on legal concepts, but on broader public understandings of membership in Australia.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Kim, where do Indigenous Australians fit in to this whole conundrum of citizenship?

• 24:55Speaker 07

  Indigenous Australians fit into this story in a way that clearly shows the disjuncture between legal status and rights. Indigenous Australians are of course born in Australia. So by being born in Australia from the time of colonial experiment, they were British subjects by virtue of being born in British territory. And the reason why people are confused is because even though they were citizens, they didn't necessarily have the rights that we associate with citizenship.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Like the right to vote, for example?

• 25:32Speaker 07

  Like the right to vote. They didn't get the right to vote in the Commonwealth until 1962. So that even though they were citizens, it's a reminder that citizenship doesn't necessarily lead to an equality of rights. And so in the same sense, you could say here that those natural-born members of this family were full members as British subjects and would have become Australian citizens on the 26th of January 1949. But it was certainly constitutionally possible for the Commonwealth to legislate to treat them differently, even though they were Australian citizens.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  So George Orwell might have said that not all citizens are created equally.

• 26:07Speaker 07

  That's right. And Australia is actually a very unfortunate example of that being the case. There is not a clear sense in our constitution to protect against that discriminatory practice.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Kim, as a legal scholar, what do you see when you look at this photograph?

• 26:25Speaker 07

  I'm looking at this as a sixth-generation Australian Jewish woman, rather than as a legal scholar. So there's no adult man, and that's one of the first things that I see. I see that very formal framework of those traditional family shots. But it doesn't really tell me anything other than an attempt to be like the norm of the time, of sitting in a photo in a way that would have been a traditional photo, I imagine, at that time.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  And do you think that attempt to fit into the image of the Edwardian family is part of the necessity to not look alien?

• 27:02Speaker 07

  Putting that into the context of knowledge of the time, I think that there was no question that they knew that they would continue to be seen as other despite their legal status. And so that does make sense, to think that they were trying to show the community that in every other respect, they were like the mainstream British subjects.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  And do you have Chinese names yourselves?

• 27:30Speaker 07

  I don't. Mine is Yukyip, which is Jade Leaf. And I have a twin sister and she is Golden Branch, because she was five minutes earlier than I.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  And how do you say Golden Branch in Chinese?

• 27:45Speaker 07

  Oh, I've forgotten. Yes.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  My thanks to guests Christina Law and Julie Crawford, Dr Sophie Couchman and Professor Kim Rubenstein. Shout out to the hospitable staff and management at The Tea House in Chinatown. This episode of Shooting the Past was produced by Michelle Rayner with production assistance by Sophie Couchman and sound engineering by Angie Grant. And don't forget that to view the photograph from today's episode, you can head over to ABC Listen. Shooting the Past is an ABC Radio National production, recorded on unceded war-ungery land. Until next time, go on, make history.

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