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until he was 13 years old. He then returned to Darwin where he attended the Darwin Primary School. At 16 he went
to Pine Creek to work with his father in the vegetable garden.
After the betrothal Nellie was sent to China to live with Tom’s stepmother and stepsister until the marriage.
Her own mother and sister also returned to China and when she was 17 (in 1933) the formal wedding ceremony
was held there. Some months later the couple returned to Australia. They went to Pine Creek where they lived for
the next 16 years. Their first home there was a ‘very old shack with mud floors’.
Nellie’s first child, Margaret, was born in October 1934 at the Pine Creek hospital. The baby was carried in a
traditional sling made for her by her grandmother but she died of meningitis at the age of two months. Joan was
born in 1936 in Darwin and a Chinese midwife, Hung Yuen, attended Nellie. This midwife delivered several of
her children. Nellie herself saw them as ‘modern deliveries’ but some traditional Chinese practices attended the
births. The baby was rubbed with camphorated oil after a bath of salt water and ‘ginger ash’ was sprinkled in
the navel. Traditionally the cord was left to dry out itself, not cut and tied, as was the European practice. By the
time the younger girls arrived the older girls could watch them during the day so Nellie could work in the garden
unhampered by little ones. In this she also followed traditional Chinese practice.
The small house in Pine Creek had limited facilities. There was a cot for each baby in the house but if Nellie
went to work in the garden she used a wooden crate with an inverted padded bamboo hat, small pillow and
mosquito net as a ‘carry basket’ for the baby. By the time her fourth daughter, Eleanor, had arrived she could ‘leave
her at home to sleep with the older girls to look after her’. The family was virtually self sufficient; water came
from their own well. They grew their own vegetables and kept chickens and ducks. Tinned meat and rice came
in 50 lb bags by train. The journey from Pine Creek to Darwin took a day and by the time of arrival ‘you were
covered from head to toe in soot’.
In March 1942, with four young daughters and seven months pregnant, she was evacuated from Pine Creek
after Darwin had been bombed. They were sent on a truck to Alice Springs and Nellie remembers the train trip to
Adelaide as being more unpleasant and crowded than the truck. In Adelaide she at first shared a house with another
family but moved (with her daughters) to Fullarton Home as the time for her confinement drew near. Eleanor was
born in Adelaide. Nellie and her family then moved into a house which had been bought by the Ah Toy family and
which was being used to accommodate 26 Chinese. In 1943 Tom obtained permission to return to the Territory to
grow vegetables and the family were permitted to accompany him. She was probably the first Chinese woman to
return.
They lived comfortably in Pine Creek and received rations, similar to those supplied to officers, from the
Army. The Army also supplied them with blood and bone for the garden and goat manure mixed with ox blood
obtained from the butchery was also used as fertiliser. Nellie commented that the smell lingered for some distance
but the vegetables were an impressive size. After the war ended the family remained for a time in Pine Creek
and Nellie remembers her years there with affection. She particularly remembers that it was cooler than Darwin.
The girls attended the small school, although it was a four-mile walk each way. They had an abundance of fruit
and vegetables and the birth of son, Tom, in 1948 increased her pleasure.
Education is important to the Chinese so in 1950 when Joan was in grade seven Nellie and her husband and
children moved to Darwin. Nellie was then pregnant with her last child, David. She also at that time acquired her
first refrigerator. The family first lived at Stuart Park on the corner of Geranium Street and the Stuart Highway
(near the later RAOB Club) in a Sidney Williams hut. They grew their own vegetables and Tom found work as a
cook’s assistant at the ‘Belsen camp’, quarters for single men close to where the Roman Catholic Cathedral now
stands. As soon as land became available in Fannie Bay they purchased a block and the family home, built in 1951,
was still Nellie’s residence in the early 1990s. The children reached adulthood in this ‘good home, a happy home’.
In 1963 Tom bought a service station at Nightcliff, at the time reached by a dirt road, which later became the
busy Bagot Road. They both worked very hard and repaid their loan within three years. All the daughters, except
Barbara, became nurses.
The family suffered property damage like most other Darwin residents in Cyclone Tracy but no-one was hurt
and Nellie had two weeks ‘rest and recreation’ down south. Tom died in 1980 but Nellie maintained her strong ties
with members of her family of two sons, five daughters, 18 grandsons, seven granddaughters, four great-grandsons
and two great-granddaughters. She attended the functions organised by the Chung Wah Society, also by the 1990s
augmented by the more recently arrived Vietnamese and Timorese Chinese. Apart from her garden she also
demonstrated skills as a creative florist. As she herself said, ‘It’s been a good life!’
F Chan, Cathay of the North, 1992; N Fong, interview, 10 October 1993; Northern Territory Archives Service, oral history interview by
C Patterson, 6 February 1981.
MARY REES, Vol 3.
FONG, SHUACK CHAN: see FONG, NELLIE
FONG, THOMAS (SLIT SCHIN FONG) (1914–1980), businessman, was born on 12 June 1914 at Brock’s
Creek, Northern Territory, to King Gee Fong and his third wife, Ang Gook. His father had already married twice
before he left Canton, China. His first wife had died and his second was left behind in China upon his migration to
the Northern Territory. Fong’s father had first worked as a gardener at Darwin Botanical Gardens but later moved
to Brock’s Creek to open a little shop. It was here that he met and married Tom’s mother.
Fong was only 18 months old when his mother died. He was brought to Darwin to live in the care of Mr and
Mrs Hung Yeun Chin, his godparents, to enable his father to work in his shop in Brock’s Creek. At the age of three