The above informative book , published in 1996 by the Department of History and Politics at James Cook University, was obtained at the recent Heritage Day in Townsville , when there was a Chinese ship in port from a province which currently has a direct air link with the Northern Territory capital, Darwin .
It is explained that TOPSAWYERS in the book title relates to the days of hand sawing large logs over a pit , the man with the upper handle of the saw being in a superior position ...derived from a quote from a 1908 Cairns Post . It is therefore a tribute to the Chinese .
By Peter Simon
On P9 , Dr May mentioned an old friend of mine , Glenville Pike, the late journalist, author, publisher , historian , artist , editor of the long gone North Australian Monthly and several other North Queensland regional publications .
The associate editor of the North Australian Monthly , poet, journalist and author Jessie Litchfield , living in Darwin , also financed the publication. She met and became engaged aboard ship to a miner , bound for Darwin , while she was making a trip from Sydney to China to see an uncle and family living in Shanghai in 1907, following the divorce of her parents .
On her return to Darwin from China , after six months , intending only to spend three weeks there , she went ashore , married Valentine Litchfield , her first not very impressed view of Darwin harbour included pearling luggers , an old Chinese sampan , Aboriginal dugouts and the Wai-hoi ,"built to the original plans of Noah's Ark", looking like the most ancient craft ever constructed .
With her husband, she moved about the Territory , from mine to mine , bore children along the way, mixed with Chinese ,wrote about them , ended up in Darwin where she became politically active and ran a lending library .
During my contact with Glenville Pike in Darwin , beginning in the l950s, later at Mareeba , Queensland , he spoke , in passing , about the Chinese contribution to the development of North Australia, particularly their involvement in the Palmer Goldfields , Top End railway construction and agriculture . Chinese figured in his book Frontier Territory,which covered the early days of the Northern Territory.
The Chinese also were mentioned from time to time in his long running column in the North Queensland Register .
While telling me how he built up his collection of early North Australia photographs, now in the Cairns Historical Society , I recollect him saying he had , or had seen , a photograph of Chinese junks, sailing vessels, off Cairns .
With his part Malay second wife, a jovial woman , he used to go into Mareeba to do a weekly shop. As a special treat , she would head to a place that served Chinese food ; Glenville went elsewhere for good old steak and eggs, not this oriental stuff . Pike, his mother and aunty had once run a wayside café , Golden Springs , near Katherine , in the Northern Territory, where the truckies only ever wanted a big plate of steak and googs .
I was present when the " Chinese Gods " were installed in Darwin's Chinese temple , it having been ransacked during the war . At the the Northern Territory News , in the old tin bank building , where I worked from l958 to l962, one of the linotype operators was Timmy Forday, with links to the early Chinese community in Cooktown ,Queensland . He became known as Tim the Toy Man , with the Yogi Bear franchise , and a newsagency .
Richard Fong Lim ran the Victoria Hotel and his brother Alec became the mayor of Darwin . From time to time , Richard went to Hong Kong looking for a wife.
While fossicking in the Pine Creek goldfield area , I found Chinese jars , part of the decorated roof of an old Chinese building , it unfortunately lost after Cyclone Tracy . A Chinese coin found in the same area also disappeared.
ENTERPRISING , INDUSTRIOUS CHINESE
Apart from being deeply involved in gold and tin mining in North Queensland, the book details the huge contribution Chinese made to the banana growing industry, some exported overseas . Chinese are shown above loading bananas at Innisfail in this illustration from the Cummins and Campbell Monthly .
They were also sugarcane and corn farms , had vegetable gardens which supplied towns . An appendix provides brief biographical details which present a pen picture of the Chinese community , especially merchants, storekeepers and large farmers, some with Hong Kong connections .
It lists Kwong Sue-doc , a storekeeper and herbalist who arrived in Cairns from Darwin in 1903 , renowned for having four wives and more than 20 children .
There is an extensive tabulated section which analyses press comment on the Chinese in the Cairns district , setting out the bias and preoccupation of newspapers, breaking it up into 14 headings.
Another good read is THE CHINESE IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY by Timothy G. Jones, published by the Northern Territory University Press, l990.
