STORIES of Ballarat\u2019s Tong Way family are at the heart of a new book by descendant Yvonne Horsfield.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a fairly personal interpretation from 1863 onwards, to around about 1950,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horsfield is connected to the family as her great-grandfather was Reverend John Tong Way.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing the eldest in my family, I\u2019m the only one who remembers him,\u201d Horsfield said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was the last superintendent missioner to the Chinese in Ballarat, on behalf of the Presbyterian Church, and I remember visiting him with my grandmother.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was Chinese, he cooked all the meals, and was a very venerable figure. He made an impression.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horsfield said her mother always believed Ballarat\u2019s Chinese community had never been properly acknowledged for its contributions to the city.<\/p>\n
When Horsfield, now a retired teacher, became Sovereign Hill\u2019s education officer, she said she grew to have the same perspective.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt dawned on me that they hadn\u2019t dealt with the Chinese that well, considering they were nearly a third of the mining community in the 1850s,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore my mother died at the age of 93, she said to me, \u2018I want you to write the story, and I know I\u2019ll never see it, but I want you to write it,\u2019 and I promised her I would,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve also had encouragement from many Chinese families in Ballarat that had not been able to acknowledge their own Chinese ancestry.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout that, I wouldn\u2019t have gained as much as I did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
STORIES of Ballarat\u2019s 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a fairly personal interpretation from 1863 onwards, to around about 1950,\u201d […]<\/p>\n