By Juanita Kwok Three buildings which are highly significant to the history of Sydney’s Chinatown have been newly heritage listed on the City of Sydney Council’s Local Environment Plan: 1) Goon Yee Tong, Loong Yee Tong and Loon Fook Tong buildings, 50-54 Dixon Street, Haymarket 2) Former Municipal Stores, 90-100 Hay Street, Haymarket 3) Kuo Min Tang building, moveable heritage and archival collection, 75-77 Ultimo Road, Haymarket In late 2023, Hector Abrahams Architects (HAA) were engaged by the City of Sydney to investigate the history and potential significance of the three buildings in Haymarket. HAA worked in co-authorship with Our Chinese Past President, historian Dr Juanita Kwok, who was engaged to conduct research and provide contextual histories of the buildings and advise on their significance and management. Following the development of the historical research reports, HAA was engaged to undertake a heritage assessment of all three sites and recommended that all three sites be heritage listed. On 15 December 2025,...Read More

Was your Chinese ancestor in Australia at Lambing Flat at the time of the riots in June 1861? The Lambing Flat petition of 1864 contains the names in Chinese and English of 94 persons (some representing parties of people) who state they were at Back Creek on 30 June 1861. The names on the petition have now been uploaded onto the Chindex Chinese Name Search. WHAT IS CHINDEX? The Chindex Chinese Name Search is a unique online search system that searches multiple data sets with just one entry.  It is based on the GLAM Name Search by Tim Sherratt. Searching for people with Chinese names is a challenging task. Most people look in national databases such as the Australian Archives and then try state based databases that search passenger lists, births, death and marriages and other government records. Lesser known databases created by smaller organisations or individuals can be also useful but are difficult to discover. Finding and searching these...Read More

Paul Macgregor and Juanita Kwok McCrossins Mill Museum in Uralla Our Chinese Past came about as a result of a road trip around North West NSW that Paul Macgregor and I took on our way back from the AHA conference in Toowoomba in 2019. We first drove through the forgotten northern goldfields of Drake and Tooloom, then rendezvoused in Inverell with genealogist Gill Oxley, who has long been doing family history research in the Bingara/Tingha/Inverell area. Together we visited Emmaville Mining Museum, Inverell Pioneer Village, the Wing Hing Long Museum in Tingha and McCrossins Mill Museum in Uralla. Paul and I also visited Green Valley Museum in Tingha. All of these rural museums have in their collections artefacts from Chinese temples that existed on the northern goldfields and the NSW tinfields. As Kira Brown’s ancestors and Malcolm Oakes wife’s family were storekeepers in Tingha we invited Kira and Malcolm to join us in setting up Our Chinese Past to to...Read More