Sharing the Tong Way story

STORIES of Ballarat’s Tong Way family are at the heart of a new book by descendant Yvonne Horsfield.

Chinese Roots shares the history of four generations of the Chinese family and was officially launched last week at the Xin Jin Shan Chinese Library.

“It’s a fairly personal interpretation from 1863 onwards, to around about 1950,” she said.

“People will gain an appreciation of how difficult life was for full-blooded Chinese people coming to live in a community with a White Australia Policy.”

Horsfield is connected to the family as her great-grandfather was Reverend John Tong Way.

“Being the eldest in my family, I’m the only one who remembers him,” Horsfield said.

“He was the last superintendent missioner to the Chinese in Ballarat, on behalf of the Presbyterian Church, and I remember visiting him with my grandmother.

“He was Chinese, he cooked all the meals, and was a very venerable figure. He made an impression.”

Horsfield said her mother always believed Ballarat’s Chinese community had never been properly acknowledged for its contributions to the city.

When Horsfield, now a retired teacher, became Sovereign Hill’s education officer, she said she grew to have the same perspective.

“It dawned on me that they hadn’t dealt with the Chinese that well, considering they were nearly a third of the mining community in the 1850s,” she said.

“There was a lot of emphasis on Eureka and the European side of the gold mining history, but not that much on the Chinese, so I began to look into the history, and offered a lesson on the Chinese when I was working at Sovereign Hill.”

Returning to study, Horsfield completed an honours degree, and a PhD, based on research of her ancestors and other Chinese families, but it was her late mother who inspired her to publish a book on the Tong Way story.

“Before my mother died at the age of 93, she said to me, ‘I want you to write the story, and I know I’ll never see it, but I want you to write it,’ and I promised her I would,” she said.

“I’ve also had encouragement from many Chinese families in Ballarat that had not been able to acknowledge their own Chinese ancestry.

“Without that, I wouldn’t have gained as much as I did.”