Marilyn Sue Dooley
Email: goldensherds9@hotmail.com
There is a Chinese proverb that says, ‘Upon the roots of the tree rest fallen leaves’. Among overseas Chinese communities, there was a cultural and familial obligation to return the bones of the dead to their home villages. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, burial registers and newspapers documented the practice of Chinese exhumations throughout Australia.
My Chinese maternal great-grandfather, Ah Yin, a storekeeper and publican on the Rosewood Diggings gold field in Central Queensland, died in 1885 in the Rockhampton Hospital. Buried in the Rockhampton old town cemetery, his bones were disinterred in 1890 by local lodge leader, Sue Yek, and his bones were exhumed and returned to China. There is no marker for Ah Yin in the old town cemetery.
However, Ah Yin left behind his name and heritage in his marriage to Sarah Jane Stewart Yin, my great-grandmother, and their children. Ah Yin and Sarah Jane buried their infant children, Wah Yin in 1878 and Martha Yin in 1884, in bush graves on the Rosewood Diggings goldfield.
Sarah Jane died in 1934, and the family buried her with Wah and Martha. The ashes of two of Sarah Jane and Ah Yin’s adult children, Walter (Wah Dak) and Ellen, who lived on and worked the family farm ‘Armagh’, were also later scattered on her grave.
That has given the family, now seven generations Australian-born, a site of remembrance with our family graves at the old bush cemetery near Rosewood Diggings and our family Farm ‘Armagh’, a two-hour drive out of Rockhampton.
Since 2007, our family have fenced in the old cemetery, erected a plinth and plaque naming the known burials, and sealed a time capsule. We hold family gatherings out there. In 2022, the Rockhampton Chinese Association visited for Qingming, and we added another plaque to the site in memory of all the Chinese who worked the local gold fields.
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