This is part of a series of articles on non-Anglo/Celtic migration to the Canberra-Queanbeyan district in the 1824-61 period. We have limited the investigation to the early colonial period, prior to the implementation of the Robertson land reforms in January 1862, which brought an influx of free selectors into the Canberra-Queanbeyan district and throughout NSW, dramatically altering the migration story.
PART TWO: The five Chinese shepherds at Cuppacumbalong [1]
The first recorded Asian residents in the Canberra-Queanbeyan region were recruited from Sydney by James Wright, sometime before June 1852, to work as shepherds at Cuppacumbalong.
Wright’s son, the flawed historian, William Davis Wright, recounts events related to these workers on two occasions.[2] The first is in an article on historical events connected to Tharwa, which was published in the Queanbeyan Observer on 29 March 1895. That article was written in response to the interest generated in the district from the opening of the new Tharwa bridge two days prior.[3] The second is in his book, titled Canberra, which he published in 1923, to take advantage of the upcoming opening of Parliament (at that time, anticipated for 1925) and the interest generated in the new national capital.[4]
In his book, William Wright says that the labour shortage in the district in 1851, due to the gold rush, was so severe that his father:
… went to Sydney and brought back five Chinamen to act as shepherds. These were not half bad, and some of them were still with us when Cuppercumberlong (sic) was sold to L. F. de Salis (sic).[5]
Wright goes on to explain how the men worked as shepherds and assisted during the great Murrumbidgee flood of 1852; although, in his earlier account he says it was 1851, as we will see.
In 1852 we had very heavy snow, so deep that the Chinamen were kept busy for several days cutting branches from the trees for the sheep to eat the leaves. The snow was followed by seventeen days’ continuous rain, causing the great Gundagai floods, and we had to turn out of our house – eleven of us – at one o’clock in the morning and walk through a backwater knee deep to find a safe place as well as we could.
The water was over four feet deep in the house next morning, and our refuge was the dairy hut, in which limited space we were huddled together – 24 in all.
For two weeks we had a miserable time, but the water subsided at last and gave us the opportunity of assessing the position. It was indeed a disastrous flood, doing immense and permanent injury to country and rivers.[6]
Further on in his book, when talking about the flight of Long Jimmy from Canberra after his fight with Noolup, he says:
I did not hear of him again, until the time of the great Gundagai floods, when he turned up and helped to rescue a drowning Chinaman.[7]
This latter incident is described in greater detail in his 1895 article, which is quoted below.
One rather amusing incident was: we had five Chinamen in a hut near where the new Tharwa bridge is now building. Four of them came away when the big bell rang for them (as they had been told to do in case the river did come up) about one o’clock in the morning. The other man refused to come and would not be persuaded. He said if the water rose to his bed he would get on the table and if it rose to that he would get on a door that was across the tie-beams and which sure enough he had to do before morning. I recollect when we went down in the morning to look for him the water was about thirty yards out round the Hut and was within eighteen inches of the roof. My uncles who had by this time come from Booroomba, fixed up an old horse trough to go in for him when Long Jimmy the blackfellow, turned up and he brought Mr. Chow out, who did not refuse this time to come.
I recollect there were twenty-four of us, including the five Chinamen, lived in a two-roomed hut at the old dairy station for two weeks. The next year, 1852, we had another flood but it did not reach within a foot of the one the year before. Still we all had to turn out.[8]
Wright is a highly unreliable source and even when what he says seems to be correct, the details are often amiss. However, on this occasion, there is a good range of corroborating evidence, most of it solid. Despite a few questions of detail, it shows that Wright’s account bears up fairly well. Concerning the contradiction in dates, we should probably accept his revision of 1852, given that that year was certainly the worst flood ever recorded on the Murrumbidgee.
But the diluvian tale presents another minor dilemma. Long Jimmy is also thought to have assisted the Gundagai victims during the great flood of 1852.[9] This places him about 160 km away by road at Gundagai, where he participated, it is believed, in the rescue of that town’s citizens with his Wiradjuri friends, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, in what remains Australia’s most devastating flood in terms of loss of life.[10] There is a statue dedicated to the Wiradjuri pair in the main street of Gundagai, such a celebrated act it was. Floods take a long time to subside and the river peaks at different times and in different places, so he could have been helping at both sites. But I think it is more likely to be the case that his connection with Gundagai is a conflation of what he did at Tharwa, and that the tradition that he was one of the Gundagai rescuers is false.[11] Wright does not place him at Gundagai.
The other detail of interest to us in the Wright passages is that the recalcitrant flood victim is named: Mr Chow. He has the distinction, therefore, of being the first named Asian individual living in our district. In this way, Mr Chow holds a special place in our history.
William Davis Wright
From the frontispiece to Canberra, 1923
Further evidence about the Cuppacumbalong shepherds comes from three separate police reports in 1854 of runaway Chinese workers employed by James Wright. The first man is revealed in the court report of the Goulburn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser and the NSW Police Gazette.[12] These documents, from May 1854, show that one of the Chinese shepherds at Cuppacumbalong, Yo Quin (sometimes, Queen), had absented himself without leave from the service of James Wright, had been apprehended in Goulburn, and was sent to Queanbeyan to appear before the Bench of Magistrates, of which, James Wright was one, himself. The NSW Police Gazette even includes a rudimentary description of him.
It could be argued that Yo Quin simply wanted to try his luck on the goldfields or perhaps personal affairs were drawing him home, but I suspect that poor conditions at Cuppacumbalong were also of concern.
We cannot trace Yo Quin any further in the colonial records. But before we leave him, we need to address a chronological question. If the men were recruited to Cuppacumbalong on or before June 1852 (the time of the great Murrumbidgee flood), as I suspect, then legally there could be no valid indenture contract extending beyond June 1854, and Yo Quin must have absconded at the very end of the second year of his contract unless he had signed on for another year as a regular worker or had been recruited separately at a date after June 1852. But this seems unlikely. And as another four men abscond in October (as we will soon see), it would appear that the Cuppacumbalong shepherds had all signed up for another year on regular contracts.
The conditions which George Forbes Davidson was offering his Chinese workers in 1838 (described in Part One), suggest that the terms of the initial contracts were akin to slavery in the first year and were not much better in the second, so there would be plenty of valid reasons for running off, no matter how benign the employer may have been. But let us be clear, James Wright was a callous master known for his macabre interest in personally inspecting the floggings of convicts punished in his service. This is all well documented.[13] And it was not just the convicts who worked for him but also the European employees, who absconded in breach of their contracts. For example, Charles Duming was charged with absconding from the service of James Wright when he was apprehended by the Chief Constable of the district in January 1854, the same year as the Chinese runaways.[14] So, there must have been plenty of good cause for Yo Quin to flee.
As it happens, four more Chinese shepherds absconded from Cuppacumbalong on the night of 20 October 1854. The extract from the entries in the NSW Police Gazette give us their names and descriptions. It was thought that they were headed either for the Monaro or Braidwood, which, if true, may indicate that the motivation was the gold diggings rather than returning home via Sydney.
We do not know what happened to Teh Tsan, See Hock, Ug Moo, and Ko Tsn. After this report, their names (or cognates thereof) have not been definitively identified in the records. Wright does not refer to any issue, and we might infer that the workers returned but, as noted earlier, he is an unreliable source.
It may be possible that Ug Moo is the 22-year-old, Aug Moo, who travelled with 76 other Chinese passengers from Sydney to Geelong in 1852 to work on farms emptied of workers who had left for the goldfields.[15] It may also be possible that See Hock is the See Hok who arrived in Sydney in 1852 and is listed in Darlinghurst Gaol in 1853 along with six other Chinese men on undefined charges.
At least one Asian worker remained at Cuppacumbalong into the 1860s. This is the possible seventh identifiable Chinese worker named, Theak, who is described as a Chinese shepherd buried in the original Cuppacumbalong cemetery on 19 August 1867. The only name with whom Theak might be matched is See Hock, but we can only guess whether they are in fact the same individual. I suspect that they are, as there are only ever listed five shepherds from that one intake in 1851-52. It may be possible that Yo Quin is Ko Tsn, which trims the list to five men. But this is purely speculative.
According to Bruce Moore, Theak was aged 75 and the last of the Chinese shepherds employed originally by James Wright but in the service of Leopold Fane De Salis since he had acquired Cuppacumbalong in 1855/56.[16] Theak’s was one of the three burials swept away by an 1870 Murrumbidgee flood, which prompted De Salis to contract Thomas Tong to move the cemetery to where the raised, circular cemetery is now sited near Cuppacumbalong homestead.
Endnotes
1. Please note that offensive racist terms used in the period are included in this article. This study builds on what I have already written in J. McDonald, Canberra: II. Colonisation (1824-1861), second edition, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 255-6, 290, 319-22; J. McDonald, J. Canberra: III. Pastoral Plutocracy (1862-1906), Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 200-5. That original work benefited from information generously shared by Monica Tankey in 2022-23. I also appreciate the detailed feedback of Ann Tündern-Smith, who is editing the series. Information was also shared by Joanne Maples and Tony Maple on a number of Chinese residents in the Goulburn and Braidwood areas, even though these towns are outside what we have defined as the Canberra-Queanbeyan district.↩
2. Wright’s limited value as a historian is discussed at J. McDonald, Canberra I: From Antiquity to the Invasion, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2023, pp. 307-9.↩
3. For the lavish opening celebration at Tharwa Bridge, see J. McDonald, Canberra: III. Pastoral Plutocracy (1862-1906), Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 147-50.↩
4. For the release of his book and the national curiosity in Canberra in 1923-27, see J. McDonald, Canberra I: From Antiquity to the Invasion, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2023, pp. 306-7. Note that Bruce Moore (Cotter Country: a History of the Early Settlers, Pastoral Holdings and Events in and Around the County of Cowley, NSW, privately published, Yamba, 1999 [2006 reprint], pp. 56-7, 142) combines without acknowledgment both Wright passages for the information he includes on the Cuppacumbalong Chinese shepherds. It appears that he was not using any otherwise unknown source. Also see S. Blair and A Claoué-Long, ‘A Landscape of Captive Labour: Conserving and Interpreting the Evidence of the Convict Era in the Contemporary Landscape at Lanyon in the ACT’, Canberra Historical Journal, vol. 31 (March), 1993, p. 16; N. Brown, A History of Canberra, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2014, pp. 19-20.↩
5. W. D. Wright, Canberra, John Andrew, Sydney, 1923, p. 34. The sale to De Salis seems to have been finalised in May 1856.↩
6. W. D. Wright, Canberra, John Andrew, Sydney, 1923, p. 34. ↩
7. W. D. Wright, Canberra, John Andrew, Sydney, 1923, p. 34. For Long Jimmy see J. McDonald, Canberra I: From Antiquity to the Invasion, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2023, p. 169.↩
8. Queanbeyan Observer, 29 March 1895, p. 4.↩
9. A. Jackson-Nakano, The Kamberri: a History from the Records of Aboriginal Families in the Canberra-Queanbeyan District and Surrounds, 1820-1927, and Historical Overview, 1928-2001, Aboriginal History, Canberra, 2001, p. 92. Cf. Elizabeth McKeahnie in Queanbeyan Age and Queanbeyan Observer, 9 April 1920, p. 2.↩
10 See J. McDonald, Canberra I: From Antiquity to the Invasion, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2023, pp. 169-70.↩
11. It is intend to make this clear in the revised edition of Canberra I planned for release, later in 2026.↩
12. Goulburn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser, 6 May 1854, p. 2.↩
13. See J. McDonald, Canberra: II. Colonisation (1824-1861), second edition, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp: 111-13.↩
14. See the NSW Police Gazette, 2 January 1854.↩
15. See G. Serle, The Golden Age: a History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851-1861, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1977, pp 1-28.↩
16. See B. Moore, Cotter Country: a History of the Early Settlers, Pastoral Holdings and Events in and Around the County of Cowley, NSW, privately published, Yamba, 1999 (2006 reprint), pp. 183, 224.↩
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