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In 1924, Chin Loong Tang moved his family to Emungalan and started a tailoring business and general store
with relatives to cater for the needs of the young settlement. When the Katherine River road bridge was built the
business moved across the river into Katherine itself.
By 1935, the family had returned to Darwin. Lizzie Yook Lin looked after the four children and the cafe
business in Cavenagh Street with the help of her mother, Lee Toy Kim, while Chin Loong Tang visited Hong Kong.
In 1938, Chin Loong Tang purchased a block of land at the corner of Henry Street and the Stuart Highway. The war
and the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 intruded and Chin Loong Tang followed his family, who had been
evacuated from the town earlier, to Alice Springs and Adelaide. Undaunted by the disruption of the war he opened
a fruit shop in Adelaide’s Chanson Street (now Poultry Street) and set about supporting his family. After the eldest
son Ronald joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1944, the family moved to Sydney to be near relatives. It was
in Sydney, after the birth of her ninth child, that Lizzie Yook Lin died.
The end of the war saw Darwin in ruins and the family returned to begin again. The opportunity offered by
the bombing to start from scratch with a new town plan was seized with gusto by the new civil administration in
Darwin and the Australian government. All of the land in Darwin was acquired and steps were taken to see that
Chinatown would not rise again. Landowners were compensated block for block but the new blocks were only
half the size of the pre-war blocks and were to be held on a 99 year lease rather than as freehold. Chin Loong
Tang had therefore lost about half the acreage he had owned before the war as well as some of the buildings on
the land. He began again by opening C L Tang’s store on the Stuart Highway block, half of which he had retained;
the other half was granted to his mother-in-law, Lee Toy Kim, in recompense for her chicken farm at the Police
Paddock. The cafe in Cavenagh Street was reopened and served some of the best Chinese food in Darwin well into
the 1960s.
Chin Loong Tang was not only an adroit businessman. He was, all of his life, a worshipper at and an elder of the
Chinese Temple in Darwin. A traditionalist, he continued to keep an altar in his home and to venerate his ancestors
and the gods. With his mother-in-law, he attended the various Chinese festivals and the thirteen gods’ birthdays
during the year.
Chin Loong Tang died on 23 March 1979, of cancer. He was interred at the Macmillan’s Road cemetery.
He was survived by his widow Chin Wing Yee and, at the time of his death, 11 children, 33 grandchildren
and 16 great-grandchildren. With his death, a link with Darwin’s pioneering past and with China was severed.
His contributions to the Darwin community were several. He aided the growth of the town as an economic entity
through his business acumen and, while nurturing the traditional values of Chinese culture, society and religious
beliefs, he also helped to give Darwin residents who knew him a tolerance and cultural awareness of the Chinese
community in their midst.
R Chin, Oral interview with A F Hannan, 1985, NTA; Darwin Star, 14 June 1979; A K F Hannan, ‘All Out! The Effects of Evacuation and Land
Acquisition on the Darwin Chinese, 1941–54’, Thesis, 1985; Northern Territory Affairs, vol 8, no 2, 1974.
AGNES HANNAN, Vol 1.TARKIERA: see TUCKIARTERRY, MICHAEL (1899–1981), explorer, was born in Gateshead, England, the son of Arthur Michael Terry,
army officer and engineer, and his wife Catherine, nee Neagle.
Terry served in the First World War as a driver with the Royal Naval Air Service in Russia, before being
invalided, and discharged from the army. He journeyed to Australia arriving at Fremantle in 1919. After working
for some time as a mechanic in Perth, he left the city, and travelled up the Western Australian coast. After a while,
he began to head eastward, picking up work along the way when he needed it. In Sydney he formed a business
partnership, under the name of the New State Transport Company, and began servicing the outback areas of New
South Wales.
In 1922, he travelled by road from Longreach, Queensland, to Katherine, while his new friends, Hudson Fysh
and Paul McGuinness, travelled the same route by air. The next year he travelled from Winton, Queensland, to
Broome, Western Australia, with Dick Yockney, and so the pair became the first people to travel east-west across
the continent by car.
During the next year, Terry travelled to the United States and Britain in a bid to gain sponsorship for a proposed
expedition from Darwin to Port Hedland. Success finally came with a commission from the Royal Geographical
Society 500 United States Dollars for a piece written for them, entitled ‘Across Unknown Australia’. The Society
also awarded Terry a Cuthbert Peel Grant, agreed to provide all the necessary equipment for the trip, and arranged
for a cameraman to accompany the expedition. Thus, in 1925, Terry’s second expedition was carried out and was
recorded on film. The same year, his first book, Across Unknown Australia was published (not to be confused with
the article of the same name, which Terry wrote for the Royal Geographical Society).
In 1928, after receiving further sponsorship from within Australia, Terry carried out a third expedition, up
the Western Australian coast, across to the Northern Territory, and then to Adelaide and Melbourne. Over the
next seven years, Terry went on 11 major expeditions, many of them in an unsuccessful search for gold. These
expeditions carried him well into the Tanami Desert, and as far north as Tennant Creek. In 1932, Terry went on
his first expedition using camels as the only transport, followed by a second in 1933. On the first expedition, Stan
O’Grady, a member of the three-man party, discovered an ancient man-made well in a corner of Lake Mackay.
The well was named O’Grady’s Well. The party also discovered Alec Ross Range, so named in honour of the
last surviving member (at the time) of the exploring parties of Ernest Giles. On the second expedition, the party
narrowly missed being attacked by Aborigines, and went on to discover what Terry always regarded as his ‘Golden