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 apply for funding to translate and research the Chinese inscriptions on the temple artefacts and bring to wider public attention the remarkable collections in these museums of New England and the Northwest. Here’s a photo Gill took of Paul and I in front of part of the magnificent Chinese exhibit at McCrossins Mill Museum in Uralla. More photos of all the museums to come!