Boon Juat Lee

Former Chinese seaman Boon Juat Lee served in both the Australian and US armies in WW2, but he was refused citizenship despite having an Australian-born wife and two Australian-born children.

In July 1942, with the Australian mainland coming under regular Japanese attack, Boon Juat Lee and his fellow Chinese crew members on the Gorgon passenger-cargo ship refused orders to take to sea from Fremantle.

Their contracts with the ship’s British owners, the Blue Funnel Line, had just expired, and they wanted a pay rise that included wartime bonuses that recognised the increased dangers they were now facing.

The Gorgon’s crew knew the dangers first-hand – just a few months earlier their ship had come under heavy Japanese aircraft bombing off Singapore.

As it sailed for Australia with hundreds of evacuees on board, it was hit three times – two of the bombs starting serious fires.

The fires were brought under control and the Gorgon managed to safely reach Fremantle as Singapore fell, with the capture of more than 130,000 Allied troops, 15,000 of them Australians.

Under WW2 regulations, the Gorgon, which normally operated between Fremantle and Singapore, was like other merchant ships with Chinese crew in the area, now in compulsory Australian military service.

Hundreds of other Chinese crewmen in a similar position had recently gone on strike in Fremantle and Sydney, winning substantial pay increases. After one clash in Fremantle Australian military guards shot dead two of the strikers.

When Boon Juat Lee, 24, and his fellow crew members refused to sail, the immediate response of Australian authorities was to arrest them and place them in an internment camp.

Lee’s record of internment describes him as being a seaman-printer, born in China, with an address in Singapore. His personal effects amounted to the substantial sum of $US97, plus almost nine pounds, two suit cases, one type-writer, and one mandolin.

However, within about three months, instead of being a Chinese seaman, he was temporarily an Australian serviceman.

Like other former Chinese seamen who’d gone on strike in Fremantle, he’d been enlisted in the Australian Army’s 7th Employment Company, which the Army used for tasks requiring a high degree of manual labour.

Boon Juat Lee served in the Australian Army for eight months until August 1943, when he and other former Chinese internees were transferred to a large site operated by the United States Army’s Small Ships Division in the Brisbane suburb of Bulimba.

There, hundreds of Chinese were recruited by the US Army to help build small landing craft to carry US and Australian troops to be used in a planned counter-offensive against Japanese forces in New Guinea.

Lee was in the US Army as an assistant foreman from August 1943 until just after the end of WW2 in October 1945, when the services of the Chinese were obviously no longer required.

The Australian government had no intention of offering post-war residency to the seamen, and arrangements were being made to repatriate almost all of them to China.

But Lee wanted to make his way to Sydney, where during periods of leave he’d found romance with Australian girlfriend, June Merle Baker, who’d recently given birth to a son, John.

He was among those listed to be taken on board a ship that left Brisbane, bound for Hong Kong, in December 1945. Instead, he got himself another three-month job in a US Army camp in Brisbane, in charge of a 10-man crew of Chinese cooks catering for hundreds of soldiers waiting to be demobilised.

Then he made his way to Sydney, to begin several precarious years trying to avoid deportation.

In 1947, he became part-owner of a fish shop in the western suburb of Granville, hoping this business interest would be enough to show his commitment to Australia.

It wasn’t good enough for Labor’s Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, who instead set a date in 1948 by which he had to leave Australia.

That date turned out to be just three weeks after the birth of Lee and June’s second child, a daughter, Marlene.

He managed to convince the Immigration Department to give him a further temporary exemption from deportation, by being classified in Australia as an “overseas trader”.

Meanwhile, on the advice of the Department, Calwell signed “as a precautionary measure in case he is required to leave at a later date” an order for his deportation under the War-time Refugees Removal Act, 1949.

In June 1950, Lee was granted a Certification of Exemption from deportation under the Immigration Act for a further five years – a decision that would be twice renewed, extending the exemption up to June 1965.

In January 1961, Boon Juat Lee – by now having lived in Australia for 19 years – formally applied for permanent residency status.

An Immigration Department clerk who interviewed him, AL Hall, recorded that he was living in the inner Sydney suburb or Leichhardt, as the proprietor of a fish shop that opened six days a week.

“Mr Lee is of good appearance and his carriage and features tend more towards European than Chinese,” Hall observed.

Other personal details included that Lee wore the badge of the Australian Legion of Ex-Servicemen on the lapel of his safari-type jacket, and he had a “fair knowledge of local affairs” but was “not interested in government”.

His recreational activities, according to Hall, included playing table tennis, tennis, and visiting Chinese and Australian friends.

“Mr Lee speaks fairly good English and his assimilation has evidently been better than average because of his long association and marriage to an Australian citizen, and by the birth of his two children in Australia,” Hall added. “He is classified, therefore, as taking a full part in Australian life.”

There was only one problem: Hall’s report mentioned an objection to his permanent residency from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO.

The objection was based on Lee’s membership of the Chinese Youth League in Dixon Street, Sydney, viewed by ASIO as “the most important and active Communist-controlled organization among Chinese communities in Australia”.

Declassified ASIO reports record Lee regularly attending mainly social functions at the Chinese Youth League, often with his family, with Marlene putting on occasional tap dancing performances.

There were screenings of Chinese films, and singing, and meals – but none of the reports refers to anything that could be viewed as subversive, let alone illegal.

“Boon Juat Lee is described as being ‘very interested’ in the Chinese People’s Republic,” stated one ASIO report in 1958. “It has been noted that if anyone speaks against the Republic he will argue his point of view vigorously.

“His moral character is described as exemplary,” it added. “He drinks only on occasions, does not smoke, and has very few close friends in the Chinese Youth League.”

In considering Lee’s application for permanent residency, the secretary of the Immigration Department, Tasman Heyes, considered the ASIO objection against it.

However, he accepted alternative advice from a senior Departmental officer who concluded that despite the ASIO report, his record didn’t look serious enough to preclude him from permanent residency.

Marlene Lee says her father liked meeting fellow members of the Chinese Youth League, and visitors to the Chinese Seamen’s Union which shared the same premises in Sydney – and it had nothing to do with politics.

“Any time any sailors came into Australia he always wanted to meet them and ask ‘What is the latest news? What is the happening in my small village? Does anyone know? Is everybody OK? Have there been any tragedies lately?’,” she recalls.

“When he became a member of the Chinese Youth League, it was more to keep in contact, to speak his own language, and to sort of have friendships with people. It’s like when you leave home, you always like to know how things are going. Whereas today we have internet, email, Skype, Facetime, you really don’t feel like you’re away from home. But in those days there was absolutely no communication whatsoever, so how do you get to know what was happening?”

In 1964, ASIO Secretary-General Charles Spry made a further objection to Lee being granted a re-entry permit so he could make a trip to China to visit his sick 76-year-old mother.

This time, his advice was accepted, despite the new Immigration Department secretary, Peter Heydon, admitting Australia could now be regarded as Lee’s “place of normal domicile” and he had an Australian-born wife and children.

“Even though it may not be possible to prevent Lee’s return should he leave without securing authority to come back here, I consider we should not facilitate his travel,” he wrote.

Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman agreed, prompting Lee to up the ante by applying for naturalisation, but the same advice from Spry was used to reject this as well.

Opperman was unswayed by numerous testimonials speaking highly of Lee, who’d now been living in Australia for 22 years – almost half his life – and was employed as a meter repairer with the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board.

Federal Labor MPs also appealed in vain on his behalf, ironically including Opposition Leader, Arthur Calwell, who as Minister himself had signed the unimplemented form ordering Lee’s deportation 15 years earlier.

In 1969, again hearing his mother’s health had deteriorated, Boon Juat Lee applied for a Certificate of Identity, to use as a travel document to visit her.

This time, the Australian authorities relented, and finally he was able to travel home to his remote village on Hainan island for the first time in 40 years, taking his daughter, Marlene, with him.

“When we arrived at the village, everyone came rushing up to the car, because they were so excited, because there was an anticipation that we were arriving,” Marlene says.

Decades of emotion welled up inside Boon Juat Lee as he walked the final steps towards the family home, carrying gifts for the mother he’d last seen when he left the village as a young man.

“But when we got to the front gate, there was a person who stepped out and they were crying and we were wondering why,” says Marlene. “And the person looked at my Dad and said ‘I’m sorry, you’re too late. Your mother just died’.”

In shock, Boon Juat Lee ended up eating a bowl of Hainanese chicken and rice his mother had cooked for him and Marlene earlier that day.

“It seems as though she had been cooking a meal every single morning because she didn’t know when was the exact day he was arriving,” she says.  “But she had cooked a meal for him every morning in anticipation of his arrival.  It was really difficult to eat a meal knowing it was your last from your mother. It was almost like he thought that everything was in vain. To think that he could see her, but she couldn’t see him. He had missed the one thing in his life that he’d really wanted.”

“It’s something I’ll never forget because then we had a three-day mourning period, and they all dressed in white, and people came and visited the house, and every two or three hours they start crying and it’s like a very harsh cry and it’s a mourning for her. So, I went there to experience a funeral.”

For some years after his return to Australia after his mother’s funeral, Boon Juat Lee continued to operate a business selling foodstuffs and groceries, which he’d opened in 1966.

In 1974, he re-applied for citizenship and theoretically, this should have been quickly approved – Labor’s policy then was to not withhold citizenship from known or suspected Communists.

But in Lee’s case, ASIO prevaricated in giving its final clearance and when the Labor government was dismissed in November 1975, then lost the subsequent election, Lee’s application was still outstanding.

In 1978, Lee was called into the Immigration Department offices in Sydney for another interview on his application, then asked again to wait.

The final entry in his Immigration Department file says that early in 1982 – 40 years after he first arrived in Australia, and 18 years after he first applied for naturalisation – the application was deemed to have lapsed, contact with him having been lost.

Marlene Lee says her father continued to travel from time to time until his death in 1994, and she’s not sure if he later made contact himself to arrange a citizenship ceremony, and an Australian passport.

After his death and cremation in Sydney, she divided up her father’s ashes and took part of them to Hainan island for a three-day ceremony.

“There was a television channel there waiting to see us, and the reason is that my father donated money towards the village so that they could have fresh water and they showed us three or four of the water wells that he had helped to build, and money for a school room, and wash rooms – you know, just helping people who lose everything, every time there’s a typhoon,” she said.

“So if he sent money home it wasn’t for any political reasons, it was to help people who were destitute and who had absolutely nothing and needed help.”

(Originally published by SBS as part of a series called ‘Unwanted Australians’, produced by Kristina Kukolja and Lindsey Arkley).

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