The birth of Bendigo, and a nominee for Aussie iconography…
Christian Asquith began life in one of the poorest, filthiest parts of London, then the world’s biggest city. But it would be his mud-splattered actions on the other side of the world that would help to change the destiny of a new British colony, and lead to many of his grandchildren being half-Chinese. Though Asquith would later state he was born in Wales, when he was christened as a newborn in November 1800, his parents George and Ann were living in Holborn in central London, not far from where they’d married.[1] For years, the area around their home in Field Lane would be notorious for poverty and crime. Contagious diseases, often fatal, were rife. When Asquith was an infant, the area was identified for special attention by the British Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.[2] Charles Dickens would describe it as an “emporium of petty larceny” where the Artful Dodger took Oliver Twist to meet the criminal gang leader, Fagin. (“A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen.”)[3]
It was a struggle for Asquith’s parents to bring up seven children in this miserable area. One of his brothers died as a two-year-old. Asquith grew up a scrawny boy, never quite reaching 150 cm tall.[4] Despite his seedy surroundings, he still managed to learn a trade as a maker of women’s shoes, and kept out of major trouble until he was 19. Then one morning in February 1820, he and a companion, George Smith, were arrested for stealing a leg of lamb that had been hanging on a hook outside a butcher’s shop in a nearby street. At their trial at the Old Bailey a few weeks later, Smith was acquitted but Asquith was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Apparently accepting his fate, his conduct on the Retribution prison hulk for a few months before being sent to Van Diemen’s Land was recorded as “orderly”.[5]
Arriving in Hobart to begin serving his sentence in December 1820, Asquith kept a clean conduct record for five years. Initially, he was assigned to work for various settlers. By strange coincidence, they included Harris Walker, who’d been the captain of the Maria transport ship on which he’d arrived, then quit the sea to remain in Hobart.[6] Perhaps the most memorable year in Asquith’s time as a convict was 1825. In January, he must have feared that his sentence may be extended when he was arrested on suspicion of robbery. Until he was discharged for lack of evidence. Then over the next three months, he was punished twice for being absent without permission. Once he received 25 lashes with a cat o’ nine tails on his bare back after going missing from his work gang. Then it was 50 lashes after being out all night from the prisoners’ barracks.[7] Finally, in August 1825 he became a father when fellow convict Susannah Smith gave birth to a son, John.[8] The first of 22 children that Asquith and Smith would have together.
Smith, the daughter of Napoleonic War veteran Robert Smith and his wife Mercy Erskine, was born in 1801 in Bristol in England.[9] She’d been working as a maid when convicted in 1823 at the Somerset Quarter Sessions of stealing a watch and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. After arriving in Hobart, her conduct record was remarkable for its brevity at a time when many others were lengthy. Her single recorded misdemeanour was being intoxicated and absent for one night from the farm where she’d been assigned as a servant late in December 1827. As punishment, she was returned to government service and served the rest of her sentence in the Cascades Female Factory in South Hobart, which accommodated hundreds of women and their children. In September 1828, 16 months after Asquith completed his sentence and became a free man, Susannah received permission to marry him. They’d have one more child while she was still in the Factory – Caroline, born in March 1829 – with Mary Ann born just weeks after her sentence ended in July 1830.[10]
After Susannah’s release, the couple lived in the rented wooden cottage at No 5 Collins Street, Hobart, from where Asquith began a shoemaking business as soon as he was freed. In January 1832 they suffered a tragedy with the loss of their daughter, Caroline, who didn’t quite make her third birthday.[11] It wasn’t the only shock for the couple that year. Asquith would be arrested for entertaining a fellow Londoner, David Smith, who’d also been transported in 1820. Smith was serving a life sentence for stealing items from a man he accosted in the street. Asquith was convicted of “culpably and negligently” allowing Smith to be in his Hobart home as a convicted “felon” when he should have been in the prisoners’ barracks. He was fined four pounds plus costs.[12]
In November 1837, Asquith was again arrested, accused of stealing a silver watch, a metal seal and other property. At trial this time, he was acquitted.[13] Then he’d be a free man for another seven years, until late 1844, when he was taken into custody on a charge of uttering a forged one pound note. The Supreme Court was told that when the publican of the Ocean Child had challenged Asquith, he’d denied attempting to defraud. He said he’d received the note in payment for work done, and could identify the person who gave it to him. However, the jury didn’t believe he was innocent. He was convicted and sent to prison for two years, leaving Susannah at home to look after a growing family, including a newborn baby, by herself.[14]
As soon as Asquith was released from prison, he and Susannah decided to start afresh in a place where they weren’t known, quitting Van Diemen’s Land forever. In August 1846, they crossed Bass Strait with their children aboard the Julia to Melbourne, then the capital of the Port Phillip District of the colony of New South Wales.[15] After the family settled into in a rented house in Richmond, Asquith continued shoemaking and though they were now approaching 50, he and Susannah produced two more children – Elizabeth in 1848 and Harriet in 1849.
As additions were made to the family, some began to fly the nest. Mary Ann Asquith was the first to leave after the move to Melbourne, marrying in 1847 to Samuel Cartland, a former convict from Bath in southern England. It was a poor choice. Presumably unbeknown to Mary Ann, Cartland had already been married when he was transported for seven years in 1834 for stealing a silver chalice from a church. He’d been punished numerous times for bad conduct during his sentence in Van Diemen’s Land, and had faced court on various charges since his release before crossing the Strait to Melbourne.[16] He didn’t stick around with Mary Ann for long and she was soon in search of a second husband.
In June 1850, at St Peter’s Anglican Church in Melbourne, the next daughter, Ann Asquith, also married a former convict from England, William Steward.[17] His convict story was quite different. Steward had been 15 when his father Samuel died, leaving his mother Catherine to bring up seven children alone on a charwoman’s wages at their home in Leicester.[18] He was 19 when he was convicted of housebreaking and received a 10-year sentence. However, instead of being transported to Van Diemen’s Land, he was selected to be a convict “exile”, a so-called Pentonvillain. It meant that after serving part of his sentence at Pentonville prison in London, he was sent to Melbourne with a pardon, on the condition that he couldn’t return to England for the period of what would have been his sentence. Steward arrived in Melbourne on the Sir Thomas Arbuthnot in January 1847.[19]
At the time of Ann Asquith and William Steward’s marriage, a campaign was intensifying for the Port Phillip District to be made a separate self-governing colony. Within weeks of it achieving success with the establishment of Victoria on 1 July 1851, Melbourne was abuzz with excitement from news that gold had been found in the new colony. One area where discoveries were being made was at Barker’s Creek and nearby Forest Creek (later Castlemaine), about 120 km by road north-west of Melbourne. It wasn’t far from where both William Steward and Christian Asquith had gone to work, leaving their wives at the family home in Richmond. Steward was using the brickmaking skills he’d acquired during his imprisonment in London prior to being sent to Melbourne. The shoemaking business being slow, Asquith had accepted a job as a hutkeeper on the huge Ravenswood sheep station about 30 kms further north.
Gold discoveries were at the centre of a series of events involving Steward and Asquith over the next few weeks. First, Steward and a bricklayer friend, Joshua Norris, headed to Barker’s Creek to try their luck finding gold. They soon decided they needed a wooden “cradle” to help them wash potentially gold-bearing clay. The trouble was, they had no tools to make one. After Steward said his father-in-law had a set of tools they may be able to buy, they set off to find him. When they arrived at Ravenswood in early October 1851, the station owner, Frederick Fenton, was cagey about Asquith’s whereabouts. They assumed because it was shearing time, and Fenton feared they’d take away a worker who’d be hard to replace. But Steward was taken to Asquith the following morning by a shepherd, James Graham. At a waterhole on a creek, close to what was known as the Bendigo Hut where Asquith slept, Steward soon guessed what was happening.
“I wanted to know what the old man was doing,” Steward would later recall. “When I saw him he had on a shoemaker’s apron, and he was spattered with mud. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Digging a water-hole.’ I said, ‘A fine water-hole, no doubt. Have you got gold?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.’ ‘How much?’ I said. I knew Asquith and Graham had not been at the diggings before, and I knew that I knew more about it than they did, and when he showed me he pulled out a small match-box full of gold, nice lovely gold. I said, ‘How many of them have you got?’ and I would not be certain whether he said four or six of them full. I said, ‘You are getting grand gold: I am going to be in among it.”
Over the next few weeks, Asquith and Steward would look for gold together, in a team that also included Graham and another shepherd, Ben Bannister. Norris was also in the vicinity, but operating independently. Washing clay in pans usually used for mixing flour to make bread, the team soon had more than two kilograms of gold, which they sold to Frederick Fenton in the Bendigo Hut at two pounds and 10 shillings an ounce. Their total sales amounted to a small fortune of more than 250 pounds. Split four ways, it was the equivalent of more than two years’ wages for each of them. The team had found the biggest gold deposit in Australia, and one of the biggest in the world.[20]
The team tried to keep their find quiet, but it soon leaked out. Within a month, others had begun arriving at what for so long had been a quiet corner in the vast territory of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. By the end of 1851, there were hundreds of Europeans on the Bendigo field. Within a year there’d be thousands on the site of what would become the town and then city of Bendigo. Dislodged from Ravenswood, Asquith and Steward would prospect for gold in other areas as the Gold Rush continued in Victoria. But their stunning initial success would never be replicated before Asquith died in April 1857[21], leaving 56-year-old Susannah still with several dependent children.
It would take some years before Susannah’s youngest children were old enough to contribute to the family income by working. Even then, at least one would add to the family’s subsistence demands by creating her own dependents without a partner’s support. In Ballarat in 1865 and 1866, Elizabeth gave birth to sons, both registered as having unknown fathers[22]. Despite a high infant mortality rate, Susannah had many other grandchildren. It limited the degree to which she could seek any financial assistance from her married children. And some were struggling so much, they needed help themselves. George, for example, would experience the loss of three infant children and a failed brickmaking business in Western Victoria. A case worker would deem him “a hardworking man” but his English immigrant wife “a drunkard” when their seven-year-old daughter was made a ward of the state because of neglect.[23]
Though the Gold Rush sparked in part by Christian Asquith and his colleagues would start to decline in the late 1860s, it would forever transform the Australian colonies and the subsequent nation they formed. One major catalyst for change was the arrival of large numbers of Chinese. By 1861 there were more than 38,000 Chinese-born people in the Australian colonies. Almost all men, they’d mainly been drawn by the Gold Rush to Victoria, where they comprised almost 7% of the colony’s population.[24] Not all were miners. Chinese storekeepers and hawkers played key roles in maintaining supplies to the goldfields, and in remote parts of the colonies generally. But their presence wasn’t universally welcomed, and there were anti-Chinese riots and many forms of discrimination. Longer term, the presence of the large numbers of Chinese would be a major factor in adoption of the White Australia Policy, used for many decades as an official barrier to immigration by people from non-white European backgrounds.
Immigrants arriving in Melbourne’s Chinatown c1866 (creator unknown)
Nevertheless, certainly not everyone in colonial Victoria was opposed to the Chinese community. And two of Christian and Susannah Asquith’s daughters would be among the first Australian-born women to choose Chinese men as husbands. In May 1869, 20-year-old Harriet Asquith married 23-year-old Wong Ah Gye from Canton (Guangzhou) at the family home in Wellington Street, Richmond. At the time, she was working as a needlewoman. The son of a Canton merchant, Ah Gye was a storekeeper in Melbourne. The marriage certificate recorded that as required by law, the bride’s mother had given her written consent, her father being dead.[25]
Harriet’s slightly older sister, Elizabeth, had been familiar with the Chinese community since she’d worked as a teenage assistant in a clothing shop at the Chinatown end of Little Bourke Street in the early 1860s.[26] But she waited until she was aged 29 before she followed Harriet’s example in marrying 43-year-old Ah Yet in 1877.[27] Ah Yet, also from Guangzhou, had arrived in Victoria 20 years earlier as a gold digger. He’d become a storekeeper in Castlemaine by February 1863 when he’d been convicted of obtaining money under false pretences by selling an alloy of gold, copper and silver as pure gold. The sentence was to work in a prison gang on the roads for one year.[28] Then he was back to Little Bourke Street.[29]
So it was, that years after his death, two of Christian Asquith’s daughters had married Chinese men. And the role that he and his colleagues played in setting off part of the Gold Rush that had brought them and so many others to Victoria may have been publicly forgotten. However, in July 1890 the Victorian parliament set up an inquiry into claims by journalist Henry Frencham that he was the first to discover recoverable gold in Bendigo, which had now grown to the biggest town in Victoria outside Melbourne. There was an indication that the government would be willing to pay 1000 pounds to Frencham if he, or anyone else, could prove they were the first. The reward was enough, for example, to buy a house and land anywhere in Melbourne, even with the crazy prices of an ongoing land boom. Ten rival claimants came forward. They included Susannah Asquith, her son-in-law William Steward, and the widow of Christian Asquith junior, who’d died in 1872, aged 34.
In evidence to the committee, Steward stated his father-in-law had been the first to find gold at Bendigo, weeks before Frencham was even in the area, relating how they’d then worked together with the shepherds James Graham and Ben Bannister to find more. Steward was making the claim individually as the only one of the four still alive. Neither Susannah nor the widow of Christian Asquith junior, Hannah Barnett, gave evidence. Barnett merely wrote a letter stating that she was entitled to “some consideration” as Christian Asquith’s former daughter-in-law. Government jobs for two sons from a second marriage, she suggested. No-one backed her claim. However, a non-claiming independent witness offered evidence in support of Steward and Susannah. John Paton, a former Post Office official and employee of Frederick Fenton, told the committee he was present at the Ravenswood station at the time. Others may have caused the rush by proclaiming the find, he said, but the actual discoverers were Asquith and his shepherd colleagues.
Paton also made a separate written submission to the committee, stressing that he was motivated by “a very natural sympathy” for Steward, even though he’d just seen him for the first time in decades. “He was, undoubtedly, working with the original discoverers before any others were on the creek,” he wrote. “He has been mining nearly ever since, having been for the last 30 years mining at Rushworth, and is still engaged in the same pursuit, though nearly blind. He could not go about the streets of Melbourne without assistance. Although he has reared eleven children, most of whom are married, he, at the age of 66, and as I have mentioned, nearly blind, is still dependent on his daily labour for existence. As no reward appears to have been ever paid for the discovery of Bendigo, one of the richest goldfields in the world, I think that some consideration is due from the Government to the Asquith family, as, in my opinion, there is no doubt that Asquith and Graham were the discoverers.”
None of the other claimants gave dates earlier than October 1851, when Steward said he’d been shown gold found at Bendigo by Christian or Chris Asquith, as he was variously called during the inquiry. And Frederick Fenton, who was also a claimant, admitted in evidence that Asquith and Graham had found gold in “two or three weeks” of digging before he found any. In its report released in October 1890, the committee accepted that the first place at which gold was discovered was where Asquith and his colleagues had been fossicking very close to his hut, at the spot now known as Golden Square. However, it also found that because of the passage of time, it was “most difficult, if not impossible, to decide” who the actual discoverer was. Neither Frencham’s nor any of the rival claims was upheld. There would be no reward.[30]
Hearing the news at his home in Rushworth, William Steward, was ropable. But he was in poor health. It took him a year to gather enough strength for the trip 160 km south to Melbourne with his wife, Ann Asquith, to push again for his claim to be recognised. It was too much for his diseased heart. A week after they took up lodgings in Collingwood, he died. “Yesterday, while standing inside the house at a window conversing with his wife, who was outside, he suddenly ceased talking. His wife hurried inside and found that he had expired,” reported The Age under the headline “Death of a pioneer digger.”[31] A few weeks later, a meeting of the Bendigo City Council was told that a large framed photo had been donated of the various witnesses at the recent parliamentary inquiry. Since the photographs had been taken, Steward had died, the Bendigo Advertiser noted. “This gentleman was the son-in-law of the real first gold discoverer on Bendigo – Christopher Asquith, a shepherd,” it said.[32]
And where was Susannah all this while? She’d live in Melbourne for more than a quarter of a century after Asquith’s death, relying on whatever help her children could offer. It continued to be not much. Ann and William, for example, could send limited funds from his bricklaying and mining income in Rushworth. And her youngest son, Robert, who lived not far away in Collingwood, could provide some support from his carter’s wage. Until he was accidentally shot dead while camping at Sunbury in 1881.[33] The final child to leave home had been Elizabeth, but her proclivity for poor decision-making would be eclipsed by her husband’s. Eventually, Ah Yet’s opium habit would kill him, the inquest in Bendigo being told that he’d left his family “almost starving” back in North Fitzroy.[34]
In 1885, Susan, as she began calling herself, decided to accept an offer to join her youngest daughter, Harriet, who’d migrated to New Zealand with her husband, Wong Ah Gye, now identifying as Charles Wong Gye[35]. Aged 84 and unaccompanied, she boarded a ship in Melbourne and sailed for that colony. Harriet and Wong Gye had settled in the Central Otago district of the South Island, where the goldfields had attracted a sizeable Chinese population since the 1860s, mostly men from Guangzhou. And it would be Wong Gye’s bilingual skills that would provide the main family income. When Susannah arrived from Melbourne, Wong Gye had already appeared in many court cases involving members of the Chinese community, employed as a New Zealand government interpreter. He was also New Zealand’s first Asian-born police officer, a district constable helping to ensure Chinese community members and others were complying with mining licence and other laws.[36]
The soldier’s daughter from Bristol who’d been sent to Hobart as a convict would end up spending many years in the small rural New Zealand town of Clyde. And she’d witness how, while operating a small family dairy farm, her daughter had embraced aspects of her husband’s culture. For example Harriet, who’d been eight when her father died, could apparently still remember the pretty boxes he used when he finished making a pair of ladies’ shoes. For a fund-raising bazaar for the Dunstan District Hospital, she donated two Chinese boxes for ladies’ slippers and a Chinese basket, made with Wong Gye’s help. As Harriet and Wong Gye continued as active members of the small community, Susan would get to know many, becoming known to all simply as “Granny”.[37]
According to the Otago Times, in May 1901 a “wide circle” of Susan’s friends gathered at Harriet and Wong Gye’s home to celebrate her turning 100. “Mrs Asquith is a native of Bristol, England, and being still in full possession of her faculties, she retains vivid recollections of the stirring events which transpired in her earlier girlhood,” it reported. “She remembers the reception tendered to the Duke of Wellington on his triumphal entry into London after the battle of Waterloo, on which field Mrs Asquith’s father served as a commissioned officer.” The Times quoted Susan as having said she’d landed in Hobart when she was aged about 20, and was married a short time afterwards, without mentioning the circumstances. “She and her husband were in Victoria at the time of the first Gold Rush, and her reminiscences of those days are part of her most treasured memories,” it added.[38]
Susan used to tell visitors that one of her grandmothers had lived to the age of 102. She wouldn’t quite manage to equal the record, dying at the age of 101 at the Gye family home in Clyde in July, 1902. For the previous 12 months, she’d been bed-ridden. She still had 17 children alive, all of whom were married and had large families.[39] Long ago, Susan had lost count of how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she had. It was far too big a family for anyone to keep track of. Her eldest son was 79, and her eldest daughter 76. The daughter who’d been married to William Steward, who’d found gold with Chris Asquith at Bendigo five decades earlier, would outlive her for just three years. Ann Steward died in October 1905 in Rushworth. “Deceased who was 72 years of age, had been a resident of 43 years, and was well and favorably known by all,” reported the Rushworth Chronicle.[40]
More than a century after Ann Steward’s death, one of the items on display at the Rushworth Museum would be an old brick purportedly made by her husband. His role was noted as a significant pioneer businessman in Rushworth, and in the Bendigo gold discoveries alongside Chris Asquith. In 2009, the Bendigo Advertiser would publish a letter from a reader questioning why Asquith hadn’t been publicly acknowledged in Bendigo’s written history or for example on a local plaque. “This must be a major oversight, given that the first gold found in Bendigo was just near Chris Asquith’s hut, as mentioned by many witnesses,” wrote Richard Greene. According to Greene, it wasn’t just Asquith’s gold discovery that should be recognised. “He was also making boots on site, and was probably Bendigo’s first tradesman,” he wrote. “How long can he be overlooked in local history and in school reference books?”[41] The plea of a descendant, perhaps? It would be published under the headline “Chris Asquith an early Bendigo icon”. Who would have thought the boy from Field Lane who stole a leg of lamb would end up being described as an Aussie icon?
[1] Christian Asquith christening, Nov 1800, St Andrew, Holborn, Camden, Church of England Parish Registers, 1538-1812; Marriage of George Asquith and Ann Davis, Aug 1792, London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1938
[2] The Morning Post, 16 March 1805 p2
[3] Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, (1838), Chapters XXVI & VIII
[4] England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770-1935
[5] Trial of George Smith and Christian Asquith, 12 April 1820, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Trial t18200412-156); UK, Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849
[6] HO10, Pieces 1-4, 6-18, 28-30, the National Archives of the UK; The Hobart Town Gazette, 25 Feb 1825
[7] Tasmanian Archives: CON31-1-1/CON31-1-1 p28
[8] Tasmanian Archives: RGD34-1-1 p120
[9] War Office: Campaign Medal and Award Rolls 1793-1949 (General Series), the National Archives of the UK; Entry of Death in the NZ Registrar-General’s Office, Folio 1983/1902, Ref No: CR 1310892058
[10] Tasmanian Archives: CON31-1-1/CON31-1-1 p28
[11] Tasmanian Archives: RGD34-1-1 p120
[12] Tasmanian Archives: CON31-1-1/CON31-1-1 p28 & CON31-1-38 p114; Trial of David Smith, 28 Oct 1820, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Trial t18201028-111
[13] Tasmanian Archives: CON31-1-1/CON31-1-1 p28
[14] Tasmanian Archives: CON34-1-1/CON34-1-1 p133 & CEN1-1-13 p115; Colonial Times 21 Jan 1845; The Courier, 23 Jan 1845
[15] Tasmanian Archives: CUS36-1-314 p13
[16] Tasmanian Archives: CON31-1-7 p278
[17] Marriage of Ann Asquith and William Steward, 25 June 1850, Marriage Registers. St. Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
[18] England and Wales Census, 1841
[19] Notification of Exiles, VPRS 89/P0000, Sir Thomas Arbuthnot, p18, PROVic
[20]Report from the Select Committee Upon the Claims of Henry Frencham as Discoverer of the Bendigo Gold-Field; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. (1890). Melbourne: Govt. Printer; Immigration : report from the Immigration Agent upon immigration. (1851). Melbourne: Govt. Printer.
[21] Victoria, Australia, Death Index, 1840-1992; Vic Death Register No 2511/1857 (wrongly registered as Isquith)
[22] Victoria BDM Register Nos 684/1865 & 1235/1866
[23] Advocate, 17 Feb 1877 p15; VPRS 4527/P0000, 15235 – 15780: Girls & boys less than 6 years neglected. Girls Receiving House Book Vol. RH5] 1885-09-11 – 1887-01-31
[24] 1861 Colonial Census
[25] Victoria BDM Register No 2294/1869; Sherwood Young. ‘Wong Gye, Charles’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993
[26] The Argus, 12 Sept 1862 p6
[27] Victoria BDM Register No 3744/1877
[28] Mount Alexander Mail, 19 Feb 1863, p2; VPRS 515/P0000, Central Register for Male Prisoners 5848 – 6593 (1861-1863), ProVic p675
[29] Melbourne Directory (Sands) 1875
[30] Report from the Select Committee Upon the Claims of Henry Frencham as Discoverer of the Bendigo Gold-Field; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. (1890). Melbourne: Govt. Printer
[31] The Age, 18 Sept 1891, p6
[32] Bendigo Advertiser, 7 Nov 1891, p4
[33] The Herald, 19 April 1881, p3
[34] Electoral Roll, 1903, Fitzroy North; Inquest Ah Yet VPRS 24/P0000, 1903/30, PROV
[35] NZ Cemetery Records 1800-2007, Ancestry.com
[36] Southland Times, 12 March 1878, p2; Dunstan Times, 30 May 1879 p3 & 5 April 1889 p2; Archives NZ Records No 1883/213; 1884/216; 1884/2059; 1888/762; Sherwood Young. ‘Wong Gye, Charles’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993.
[37] Dunstan Times, 29 June 1883, p3; Otago Times, 30 May, 1904, p4
[38] Dunstan Times, 29 June 1883, p3
[39] Entry of Death in the NZ Registrar-General’s Office, Folio 1983/1902, Ref No: CR 1310892058; Dunstan Times, 22 July 1902, p4
[40] Dunstan Times, 22 July 1902, p4; Rushworth Chronicle, 20 Oct 1905 p3 (Courtesy of rushworthmuseum.com.au)
[41] Bendigo Advertiser, 6 Sept 2009