By Marilyn Sue Dooley
There is a Chinese Proverb that says a ‘journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. And that is just how I started on my long journey to find my Chinese Australian family history. My mother [Dorothy Jean Dooley nee Munns], a second-generation Australian-born Chinese, gave me the single item to help me take my first step to researching, discovering, and then writing, talking about, and publishing aspects of our Chinese heritage.
The item was a photograph, no bigger than a passport photo. There was no date. Mum had it wrapped in a plain brown envelope with another small photograph. That photo was of my maternal great-grandmother, an Irish woman who, in 1871, had married my maternal Chinese great-grandfather, Ah Yin.
Ah Yin
Ah Yin (c1844 -1885)
Cantonese Storekeeper & Publican of Armagh Farm, Rosewood Diggings, Central Queensland.
Dorothy Jean (Munns) Dooley (1916 – 1996),
Rockhampton, Central Queensland.
Source: Marilyn Sue Dooley.
Source: Marilyn Sue Dooley.
No other image of Ah Yin has emerged in the decades since Mum handed me his photograph, which she had kept for so long. She never knew her maternal grandfather. He died in 1885 at the age of only forty-one.
My mother, born in 1916, a Year of the Dragon, knew my passion for history. She kept newspaper clippings of family happenings, pasted into an old school exercise book first used by my brother. That in itself was a layer of history.
The object lesson here is that Australian-born Chinese can effectively apply our professional and other skills to recover our heritage and make our figures visible in the landscape of Australian History.
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