Dunolly life
The Harrops
“This ship’s whistle was “toot-tooting,” so grandfather walked down the gangway and at the last minute, he called to me and filled my little hands with pennies.
I thought I was the richest boy in the world. The ship was cast off… I was sad to see my grandfather grow smaller in the distance as we all waved him goodbye.”[7] – Job Harrop, 1856.
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Fig. 3. Illustrated News of the World, The ship "Shalimar," 1859.
This was the beginning of seven-year-old Job Harrop’s life-altering journey from Barrowshaw Farm in Oldham, England, to the colony of Victoria. On board the Shalimar in 1856, Job went on a three-month voyage to Australia with his parents, Daniel and Betty Harrop, along with his twenty-year-old cousin Job Lees in tow.[8]
Arriving at the port of Melbourne in early August 1856, the Harrop family would spend many years together travelling between Victoria’s diggings seeking gold and financial security, eventually arriving in the central Victorian town of Dunolly.[9] Daniel Harrop (1826–1881) and his nephew Job Lees (1835–1888) displayed a strong commitment to gold quartz mining in the district of Maryborough and the town of Dunolly. From the “great excitement” of the late 1850s until his death in 1881, Daniel “obtained splendid patches of golden quartz” on the ‘Little Chinamans’ diggings among many others,[10] co-founded the Dunolly Antimony Company,[11] and notably discovered a gold reef known as ‘Harrop’s Reef.’[12] Local regard extended to the entire Harrop family, who were “prominent here in [the] early days, and enjoyed the cordial esteem and respect of the entire community.”[13] It is clear that his father’s mining activities, along with a childhood spent on the goldfields profoundly shaped Job, as he also took up gold quartz mining in Dunolly and, even after he moved to Melbourne, Job returned frequently. As his obituary in the local Dunolly newspaper stated, Job “retained his strong faith in the gold resources of Dunolly, and not very long ago came here and stayed for months prospecting.”[14]
Notably, mining was not Job’s only vocation. As “schooling was out of the question on the Diggings,” Job lacked a formal education or trade, and taught himself to read using his family’s bible.[15] Thus, at age seventeen he became indentured for two years to an early pioneer of Dunolly, Robert Ritchie (1833–1912) (fig. 4), a man who taught him “the Boot and Shoe Trade.”[16] Likely influenced by his uncle William Harrop (1824–1871) who joined them from California’s goldfields and became a boot-maker in nearby Maryborough (fig. 5), Job pursued boot-making from 1865 right up until his death in 1917.[17] He established at least one boot-making business in the Dunolly area and later, several shops in Melbourne involving his four sons.[18]
Job Harrop’s youthful recollections of living in mid-nineteenth century Victoria were fortunately later recorded by his first-born son, John Charles Harrop, in an unpublished family manuscript called, ‘Little Job The Digger.’[19] These recollections, expressed in an autobiographical style, include Job’s first impressions of Melbourne, close run-ins with violent “bushrangers” on the road, and detailed stories of life on the goldfields.[20] Intriguingly, many of these stories feature the Chinese people he met and established friendships with.
While Job lived alongside other European settlers, he was in frequent contact with the Chinese who lived in self-sufficient and segregated “camps” with their own supply stores, Joss Houses (temples of worship), restaurants, gambling saloons, tea-houses, and theatres.[21] Historian Pauline Rule contends that these “Chinese camps” should be viewed as dynamic “contact zones” between Europeans and the Chinese.[22] Job’s encounters support this contention. He showed a healthy interest in the festivities and traditions involved at Chinese New Year celebrations, remembering that “the camps were noisy with crackers, and varieties of roast pig and other celestial dainties could be smelled being prepared and roasted for the feasts.”[23] Indeed, Argus investigative reporter J. A. Patterson, who spent months on the goldfields with the Chinese reported that, “they observe the new year with feasting and hospitality to Europeans, as well as to each other.”[24]
Fig. 4. Victorian Patents Office,
Robert Ritchie (detail), 1895.
Fig. 5. Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, William Harrop,
Boot Maker Advertisement, August 22, 1864.
Fig. 6. J. A. Patterson, The Gold Fields of Victoria in 1862
(facsimile, detail), 1862.
Beyond their hospitality, Job also recounted a significant life moment in his contact with Chinese miners.[25] As a child, he had fallen down into a mine shaft, and while he managed to grip onto the shaft’s sides, he was gradually slipping down to his likely death, yelling for help.[26] After a daring rescue by three Chinese miners, Job later recounted, “From that moment, I always had a kind regard for
the Chinese.”[27]
Indeed, Job’s kind regard for the Chinese people he met included a “young Chinese boy” named “Willie” who he recalled fondly as a friend.[28] One day they were trekking through the bush to deliver Willie’s dad a billycan of fresh water. Job remembered how they stopped to capture a large goanna. The hefty goanna soon became too heavy to carry so they “tied his tail to the billy handle. This held him captive and we produced our marbles and started a game. All at once we heard a clanking of the billy and looked up. Willie shouted, “There goes my old man’s billycan and his dinner up the tree!”, as the goanna swiftly scrambled up to the top branches of the gum tree. He was too high up and we worked it out that the only way to get him was to cut the tree down. No doubt Willie was reprimanded for losing the billycan.”[29] Although Willie raised the ire of his Chinese father many times, including when he ran off with a travelling circus, and resisted wearing his hair in traditional pigtails, Job observed that Willie’s father “was desperately fond of…his only son.”[30]
Job Harrop’s testimony is one of very few that indicates the presence of a shared humanity, an acceptance of cultural differences, and genuine expressions of friendship between the Chinese and Europeans.[31] Prevailing accounts by settler Europeans instead reveal either an obstinate indifference towards, or clear racial prejudices against the Chinese in colonial Victoria.[32]
Fig. 7. Hugh George in The Australasian Sketcher, 'Our Chinamen' – racial stereotyping in Melbourne's press, February 21, 1874.
It is clear Job’s progressive views and values were influenced by his faith. An “earnest member” of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Dunolly from the early days of the 1860s,[33] Job Harrop was a “lay preacher”[34] and reportedly “assisted in founding a mission to the Chinese.”[35] Although the main Methodist mission to the Chinese was established in Castlemaine in 1858,[36] it is most likely that Job assisted in founding the local Dunolly mission in 1876.[37]
While the Christian missionising project was broadly unsuccessful across all denominations with few Chinese going through the rigorous process to become baptised,[38] Dunolly’s Methodist project was seen as “a very successful mission.”[39] Baptism records throughout the 1880s confirm it was a standout statistically.[40] Perhaps most remarkably, from 1884 Dunolly’s bilingual Cantonese catechist Thomas Mak Quong (fig. 9) was “allowed to minister to a combined Chinese–European congregation at Dunolly and did so quite successfully. The local people accepted him fully and that in turn drew more Chinese to the congregation.”[41] This exceptional story of cross-cultural exchange may in part explain the Dunolly mission’s success over other areas where ethnic segregation of services and ministers was common.[42] Given Job’s progressive views and relations with the Chinese, it is likely he would have facilitated and encouraged such an inversion of social and cultural power.
Fig. 8. Aimé Marchand, Wesleyan Methodist Church, Dunolly, 1866, Dunolly Museum.
Fig. 9. Willets, Ballarat, Portrait of Thomas Mak Quong, Dunolly's catechist from the Wesleyan Chinese Mission Victoria (detail), 1883, Museum of Chinese Australian History.
While these occurrences were rare in missions to the Chinese,[43] they were not rare in the township of Dunolly, as will be told through the story of William Wong Ying, a prominent and widely respected Chinese figure in the community.
Fig. 10. "Shane," William Harrop's gravestone, Dunolly Cemetery, Dunolly, Victoria, 2021.
Fig. 11. "Wayne," Job Harrop's gravestone, Brighton General Cemetery, Caulfield South, Victoria, 2021.
Citations
[7] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 10.
[8] Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), VA 606 Department of Trade and Customs, VPRS 947/P0000, p. 120, Inward Overseas Passenger Lists, Arrival of Daniel, Betty, and Job Harrop, and Job Lees on ship “Shalimar,” June - September, 1856, https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/3AFF8885-F96C-11E9-AE98-4994E0429BCA/content?image=120#.
[9] John Charles Harrop, “Harrop Family History” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1940), typewritten on paper, 3.
[10] Obituary, Dunolly and Betbetshire Express, September 7, 1917, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article152641146.
[11] “Dunolly Antimony Company, Dunolly,” Ballarat Courier, February 1, 1870, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/191562609.; Mines Department, Reports of the Mining Surveyors and Registrars: Quarter ending 30th September, 1869 – Dunolly and Tarnagulla Divisions, W. G. Couchman (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1869), 38, https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/papers/govpub/VPARL1869No74.pdf.
[12] John Charles Harrop, “Harrop Family History,” 4.
[13] Obituary, Dunolly and Betbetshire Express, September 7, 1917, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article152641146.
[14] Obituary, Dunolly and Betbetshire Express, September 7, 1917.
[15] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[16] John Charles Harrop, “Harrop Family History,” 6. This is confirmed in “Mr J. Harrop,” Prahran Chronicle, September 22, 1917, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article88463656.
[17] John Charles Harrop, “Harrop Family History,” 3; “Advertising: William Harrop, Bootmaker,” Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, August 22, 1864, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/253533903.
[18] Job Harrop is listed as having a “bootshop” on Glenferrie Road, Malvern in 1892, and a “fancy goods” store on Rutland Road, Box Hill in 1893. John Sands and Dugald McDougall, eds., Melbourne Directory 1892 (Melbourne: Sands and McDougall, 1892), 337, accessed online at the Ancestry.com.au database, August 7, 2021; John Sands and Dugald McDougall, eds., Melbourne Directory 1893 (Melbourne: Sands and McDougall, 1893), 88, accessed online at the Ancestry.com.au database, August 7, 2021.
[19] Frederick Bernard Harrop, “Harrop Family History: Introduction” (unpublished manuscript, 1971), typewritten on paper, 1. As noted by John Charles Harrop’s son, he was well-placed to write Job Harrop’s personal recollections, “having been told firsthand to him by his father in the many father to son stories over the years.” This was likely also necessary given Job’s lack of a formal education.
[20] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 11–14, 21–22.
[21] J. A. Patterson, The Gold Fields of Victoria in 1862 (Melbourne: Wilson & Mackinnon, 1862), 134, http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30122169.
[22] Pauline Rule, “The Chinese camps in colonial Victoria: Their role as contact zones,” in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940, eds. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor (Kingsbury, Vic.: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004), 119. Rule draws on the work of literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, who defines a contact zone as, the “space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6, quoted in Pauline Rule, “The Chinese camps in colonial Victoria,” 119.
[23] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[24] J. A. Patterson, The Gold Fields of Victoria in 1862, 134–35.
[25] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[26] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[27] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[28] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[29] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[30] Job Harrop and John Charles Harrop, “Little Job The Digger,” 20.
[31] For the very few other primary accounts relating to Victoria’s gold rush towns that demonstrate a similar cultural openness and challenge prevailing racial prejudices against the Chinese, see J. A. Patterson, The Gold Fields of Victoria in 1862, 130–46; Betty Osborn, Against the Odds: Maryborough, 1905–1961 (Maryborough: Central Goldfields Shire Council, 1995), 7–9.
[32] See the following primary sources that address the “Chinese question” for an indicative sample of the racial prejudice directed at Chinese people in colonial Victoria: Francis H. Nixon, The China Puzzle Adjusted: A Letter on the Subject of Chinese Legislation in Victoria (Beechworth: James Ingram, Camp-Street, 1857), 4–5, http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/246416.; Humanity [pseud.], Sketches of Chinese character, illustrative of their moral and physical effect on the rising generation of Victoria (Castlemaine: F. Y. Benham, 1878), http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-406293758. For a robust and comprehensive response by prominent Chinese community members to formal and informal racial prejudice in colonial Victoria, see Lowe Kong Meng, Cheok Hong Cheong, and Louis Ah Mouy, eds., The Chinese Question in Australia, 1878-79 (Melbourne: F. F. Bailliere, 1879), http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/246270.
[33] Obituary, Dunolly and Betbetshire Express, September 7, 1917. The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Dunolly was built and opened in 1863. See Chris McConville and Associates, Shire of Bet Bet Conservation Study: Volume One (Williamstown: Chris McConville & Associates, 1987), 15, https://www.vgls.vic.gov.au/client/en_AU/search/asset/1287949/0.
[34] John Charles Harrop, “Harrop Family History,” 5.
[35] “Mr J. Harrop,” Prahran Chronicle, September 22, 1917, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article88463656.
[36] Walter Phillips, “Seeking Souls in the Diggings: Christian Missions to the Chinese on the Victorian Goldfields,” Victorian Historical Journal 72, no. 1–2 (September 2001): 90–91, http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1fe7t3h/SLV_ROSETTAIE7832434.
[37] Ian H. Welch, “The Methodist Chinese Mission,” Department of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, published 2010, http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/missionary-history-welch-methodist-chinese-mission-2010.pdf. Dunolly’s first Chinese catechist, David Chin Ghin was appointed in 1882.
[38] Ian H. Welch, “‘Our Neighbors but Not Our Countrymen’: Christianity and the Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Victoria (Australia) and California,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations 13 (2004): 183, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23613281.
[39] Report, The Spectator and Methodist Chronicle, August 22, 1884, cited in Ian H. Welch, “Alien Son: The Life and Times of Cheok Hong Cheong, (Zhang Zhuoxiong) 1851-1928” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2003), 548, http://hdl.handle.net/1885/49261.
[40] Australian Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society Report 1887, 1887, xv, cited in Ian H. Welch, “Alien Son: The Life and Times of Cheok Hong Cheong, (Zhang Zhuoxiong) 1851-1928” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2003), 556, http://hdl.handle.net/1885/49261.; Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Church, Victorian and Tasmanian Conference, Minutes of Annual Conference, Statistical Reports, 1891, quoted in Walter Phillips, “Seeking Souls in the Diggings: Christian Missions to the Chinese on the Victorian Goldfields,” Victorian Historical Journal 72, no. 1-2 (September 2001): 101, http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1fe7t3h/SLV_ROSETTAIE7832434.; “News and Notes,” Ballarat Star, August 13, 1884, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article201117167.
[41] The Spectator and Methodist Chronicle, 28 March, 1884, cited in Ian H. Welch, “The Methodist Chinese Mission,” Department of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, published 2010, 17, http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/missionary-history-welch-methodist-chinese-mission-2010.pdf.
[42] “Stations for the Year,” Argus, January 28, 1887, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11587973.
[43] Ian H. Welch, “The Methodist Chinese Mission,” Department of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, published 2010: 15, http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/missionary-history-welch-methodist-chinese-mission-2010.pdf.