Chinese gardener’s timber yoke:

Formerly used by Chinese market gardeners to carry baskets of produce around Pambula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Chinese immigration to Australia grew significantly with the Victorian and New South Wales gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s, many lured from the impoverished areas of southern China by the potential wealth of the Australian goldfields.

Once the 1860s Snowy Mountains rush at Kiandra waned, many luckless Chinese miners returned to the coast, taking up residence in local towns including Pambula, as well as Merimbula, Wolumla and Bega. Described as industrious and hard-working, they soon turned their attention towards establishing market gardens. 

Those who are known to have lived in Pambula at various times included Willy, Wey Lee, Ah Kee, Ching Pong, Ah Tin Gut, Joe Ah Yup and Lamby. In 1906, Pambula had four resident Chinese males, but no written or other accounts indicate that there were females amongst their number.

Their gardens at Pambula were initially located on the corner of the Princes Highway and Sandy Lane on the Flats. However, although that ground was rich and fertile, it was also in the midst of a flood plain, and not surprisingly their crops and huts were often affected by the almost annual inundations. When waters rose to serious levels, the men were forced to seek refuge at the local courthouse, and during the particularly severe 1919 floods, Joe Ah Yup’s garden was completely destroyed.

Eventually the group relocated to the site where the Colonial Motor Inn now stands. There they grew an assortment of fruits and vegetables that they peddled from house to house using small handcarts or baskets suspended from wooden yokes such as the one pictured here. A small timber house and a number of sheds stood within the gardens, and it was there that most of the local Chinamen lived.

In 1927 when Joe Ah Yup decided to return to China, the Pambula Voice reported that "After over 30 years a citizen of Pambula, Joe Ah Yup leaves for China on Saturday. During his residence here, he has proved himself to be most law abiding, honest and straightforward. His purse was always open to every charitable and sports object and he never had to be asked for his annual subscription to the hospital. Joe will be greatly missed by the children when he fails to do his rounds on Saturday afternoons with his fruit baskets. A collection was initiated prior to his departure, when he was presented with a set of pipes by the townspeople as a small token of esteem and appreciation of his past citizenship."

It was after Joe's departure that Lamby moved from Bega to Pambula, taking up residence in a cottage at the rear of Baddeley’s tannery and opposite the Chinese market gardens. According to former local resident Terry Dowling, he had a large egg shaped growth on his neck and was an old man by the time he arrived in the town.

He also had a taste for echidnas, which he and his fellow gardeners reportedly ate. Terry recalled "One and six they'd give you for them. Puddin' Burgess and Jackie Newlyn and I walked those bushes and bagged every poor old echidna up...Wouldn't matter if you took them fifty, they had the money to buy them. They must have loved them...We took them live, they didn't want them any way else, any other way bar alive, not damaged or anything..."

Lamby was apparently the last of Pambula’s Chinamen. In 1934, he was sent to the Lidcombe State Hospital and Home for Men in Sydney where he is likely to have died.

Little remains today as evidence of Pambula’s Chinese except this wooden yoke, a few stray plants growing wild on what was once their garden plot and a dwindling number of residents with memories of their presence.

This yoke is in private ownership.

© Angela George. All rights reserved.