Perth Voice Interactive

NEWSPAPERS of the day were mixed in their depiction of Hop Chong and other Chinese market gardeners, with some sympathetic while others were deeply xenophobic, referring to them as “vegetable Johns who coax callots and cabbagee from the fecund sand in the vicinity of Perth”. 

The New Call’s December 31, 1931 edition was one of the less discriminatory depictions of “Hop Chong, a bland-faced, bald-headed, small-sized market gardener” who, they said, “suffered these injuries in the fair, and now unfortunately rare, cause of chivalry. He was punched while acting as protector to a lady friend.”

While The New Call court reporter described his missing tooth and opined that “there was no doubt that he had been assaulted”, a different article in the same edition struck a wildly different tone.

Calling Hop Chong a “heathen Chinee”, this unusual report says a court attendant “Sam Pimblett, who looks after the requirements of complainants, defendants, accused, prosecutors, magistrates, etc, in the policy court, bustled up with a box of matches, ready to strike a light so that Hop Chong could blow out the light. 

“This habit is symbolical of the fact that whenever a Chinaman gets up in the witness box to tell a story, he leaves everyone in the dark. But Hop Chong didn’t want any matches. He wasn’t one of those blow-hards.”

The 1931 assault wasn’t the only time Hop Chong was a victim of crime. 

In one of the few details of Hop Chong’s life, we’d previously read that he enjoyed an occasional bottle of stout. 

So did a thief who stole six bottles of stout from Hop Chong’s Beechboro Road property and robbed several other nearby “Chinese huts,” according to an article from 1927 the Voice came across this week. 

The unusual court report from the August 26, 1927 edition of The West Australian states that a woman named Jane Heenan stole six bottles of stout from Hop Chong, six bottles of stout (and two of whiskey) from Sue Long, and six bottles of stout, two jars of Chinese medicine, a bottle of peppermint, pills, and coffee essence belonging to Ah Feng.

Ms Heenan was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment. It was not her first offence: “She started her ‘BAD CAREER’ in October 1912, and the cause of her downfall was drink,” according to the sensationalist newspaper The Truth. 

Heenan, who had a troubled life judging from three decades of court reports, had a long association with Chinese market gardeners in the area, and had robbed many.

On March 2, 1918, the highly controversial The Truth newspaper reported: “Her name is Jane Heenan, and she is in the habit of knocking about Chinese camps.

“She is always willing – nay, eager – to accept a position as housekeeper to any Pong who yearns to hear the rustle of a woman’s petticoat across his threshold.

“But Jane is light-fingered, as well as light-o’-love, and her peculative propensities soon cools the ardor of any concupiscent Chow who takes her on as a temporary bride.

“Jane has been weighed in the balance and found wanting by almost all the vegetable Johns who coax callots and cabbagee from the fecund sand in the vicinity of Perth.”