Blog

My name is Malcolm Oakes and I am a member of Our Chinese Past.
I’m the historian in the family, but my wife Beverley is the connection to Chinese history. Bev is Australian born Chinese.

Our English name “Our Chinese Past” was selected to reflect our view of Australia’s Chinese history as an integral part of Australian history, something that belongs to all of us as Australians

My name is Ely Finch and I have the honour to be the translator for the first Our Chinese Past project. I hail from a sheep farm in far western Victoria and have an abiding passion for Chinese languages and traditional Chinese literature. At present, I am working full time as a historical Chinese linguist […]

This is a section of a long carved and gilded panel on display at McCrossin’s Mill Museum in Uralla. It was part of the decorations on the front of an altar in one of the Chinese temples in the New England North West.

Emmaville was once known by the name “Vegetable Creek” because of the large number of Chinese market gardens that were established there to provide fresh food for the mining population

In 2015 I was searching for a member of my own family who had gone missing from Nundle 1868. Her name was Catherine Hibbet. She was 15 years old when she vanished.

I inherited a substantial collection of family memorabilia, which sparked an interest in researching my Chinese heritage. I’m a 5th generation descendant of Chinese migrants to Australia dating back to the gold mining era of the 1850s. I have identified four Chinese-born ancestors in Australia whose lives and families became linked after they arrived in […]