Creative searching: Fong Jow Sang

By Sophie Couchman (Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria)

To get the most out of any online resource when searching for Chinese Australians you need to be smart in how you search for names. Every situation is slightly different but here is an example of how I went about searching for ‘Fong Jow Sang’ in the Victorian CEDT Index. All I was told was this was the name of my informant’s father, Fong Jow Sang, who had lived in Melbourne and travelled to China during the White Australia period.

If you search for ‘Fong Jow Sang’ in the database you get no results. A search of ‘Fong’ brings up 135 results and ‘Sang’ 61 results. However, if you scan through the 15 results for ‘Jow’ there is a ‘Tong Jow Sang’.

Entry in Victorian CEDT Index (as at 21 July 2021)
Index entry for Tong Jow Sang, 1932, Register 2, p. 151, Victorian CEDT Index, http://www.cafhov.com/vic-cedt-index-search/?type=id&search=11612 (original data taken from ‘Register of Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test, 1915-1933’, National Archives of Australia: B6003, 2).

Being familiar with errors in reading cursive script I was suspicious and checked the photograph of the original page.

[National Archives of Australia: B6003, 2]

I also checked the linked record in the National Archive of Australia’s RecordSearch. This confirmed my suspicions that this was ‘Fong’ and not ‘Tong’.

No matter how careful we might be transcribing records and checking them it is easy for errors slip in. Having found the error I reported it using the ‘Report a correction’ link at the top of the Search page on the Victorian CEDT Index website.

RecordSearch entry for Fong Jow Sang

Fortunately the record for ‘Fong Jow Sang’ has been digitised. When I examined the file there were other clues to travel undertaken by Fong Jow Sang. Although the file only contains one page it states that Fong Jow Sang also travelled to China in 1925.

[NAA: B13, 1932/12626]

A search of all the people who travelled in 1925 brings up 323 results but if we search for all those with the name ‘Jow’ or with the name ‘Sang’ who travelled in 1925 only one result comes up – ‘Jow Sang’.

Having noticed that Fong Jow Sang was a described as a ‘merchant’ I also undertook other searches using ‘merchant’ to limit results. I don’t find any other likely results.

If I was really determined I might try other misspellings or parts of the name with ‘Ah’ in front it but I would probably want to know a bit more information about Fong Jow Sang’s life to try and match with this information. I could also try using the his age to try and limit search results and match other records. The ages provided to officials are, however, often inconsistent and unreliable.

Index entry for Jow Sang, 1925, Register 2, p. 101, Victorian CEDT Index, http://www.cafhov.com/vic-cedt-index-search/?type=id&search=9587 (original data taken from ‘Register of Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test, 1915-1933’, National Archives of Australia: B6003, 2).

There is no corresponding NAA file for this record but looking at the shipping information for Fong Jow Sang in 1925 and 1932 on the page we see that he travelled out of and into Australia via Sydney rather than Melbourne. This means that as well as records created by immigration officials in Melbourne there might also be ones created in Sydney too.

A search of ‘Jow Sang’ as an exact phrase in RecordSearch brings up four records. Two of these have been digitised. The one we’ve already seen and also a second one which is a large file describing how when Fong Jow Sang left Australia he arranged for another man, Fong Shoue, to come in as a ‘replacement worker’ to take his place in his fruit business, ‘Sang Goon & Co’, while he was away.

Then if we go back and look back at the original document we found above we see a small file note on the side of the letter that mentions this and also the file number 31/1249. Note that this number matches the B13 control symbol, 1931/1249 (to learn more about C&E numbers in the Victorian CEDT Index see ‘Using Victoria, CEDT Book and C&E Numbers and Passenger lists: Mrs Lup Mun‘).

Results in RecordSearch for advanced search of ‘Jow Sang’

One last search I did in the Victorian CEDT Index was for ‘Sang Goon’, the name of Fong Jow Sang’s firm. No results came up but sometimes you can find that people travel under the name of their business rather than their actual name.

We do however have many more historical leads to follow up should we wish to. Given they both appear to share the family name ‘Fong’, Fong Shoue who came into Australia to replace Fong Jow Sang when he left was probably related to him. We could also try to confirm Fong Jow Sang’s travel into and out of Sydney in NSW Passenger Lists (for more on using Passenger Lists see ‘Linking CEDT Registers and passenger records‘). We can examine the undigitised files – one in Melbourne and one in Sydney. We could also do some more creative searching of RecordSearch for further results, including by the firm name and by Fong Shoue’s name.

Finally, it is also valuable to look very closely at the historical sources you discover. Sang Goon & Co’s letterhead in one of the files, for example, tells us that Sang Goon & Co, the company Fong Jow Sang worked for, was based at the Wholesale Fruit Markets with an office at 327 King Street, Melbourne and also had branches in Hong Kong, Manilla and Fiji.

One of the pages of the second file we found at the National Archives is a letter showing Sang Goon & Co’s letterhead showing that it was a banana and general fruit merchants and also import and exporters with branches in Melbourne, Hong Kong, Manilla and Fiji.
[NAA: B13, 1931/1249]
register page graphic

‘But where is your home?’: Mayu Kanamori reflects on working with CEDT certificates

By Mayu Kanamori (artist, born in Tokyo and based in Sydney)


If I answer that terribly limiting question, Where do you come from? I was born in Tokyo, but I live in Sydney now, another question usually follows: But where is your home? This second question assumes that there can only be one home, and that our identities are defined by affiliation to one sacred location. My home is where my loved ones are, and so my home exists in more than one place, I answer.

Before the governments’ pandemic measures closed national borders, I was fortunate to be able to travel back and forth between Japan, where my mother, sisters, and extended family live, and Sydney, where my partner and friends live. Even allowing for travel time to and from the airport, and the long check-in for international travel, I was able to travel between these two homes in less than 14 hours. Today, including quarantine periods at both ends, travel between homes could take longer than the time it took in the days of steamships, when the Immigration Restriction Act was in force, and exemptions for passage across borders, harder to come by.

Digital artwork by Mayu Kanamori, Japanese Immigration Restriction Act, 2021

As an artist working with themes related to Japanese experiences in Australia, I have often searched the National Archives for copies of the Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs) to give me some insight into the life stories of our pioneering predecessors. At times these records were all I had to find out what may have happened to these people. In the case of Japanese migrants, if they had remained in Australia until the 1940s, there are also Internee Service and Casualty Forms and dossiers created by government departments before and during the war. Unlike most other documents, however, the CEDT offers a visceral understanding of a life once lived; for instance they are the only records that include photographs. A sense of connection may be felt through their subject’s timeless gaze, looking straight at the camera, which makes me feel that they are looking straight at me. Sometimes I would print the document and place my hands on their handprints.

Digital artwork by Mayu Kanamori, My Papers, 2021

Some people have multiple CEDTs on record, their photographs showing how they matured over the passing years, and at the same time, informing me that they periodically returned to their other homes, just as I had been doing prior to the pandemic. I see their mug shots, their head and shoulders, taken as if they had committed a crime, and find them looking very like my own series of passport photos over the last forty years.

Photographs, before they became pixel images on a screen, were thought as a proof of the existence of the subject. These people lived, and were photographed, perhaps with the sense of purpose and excitement which comes from making travel preparations; perhaps with a sense of resignation, much in the same way we intuit a lack of agency when we queue at the post office to have our passport photos taken; or perhaps even a sense of pride in simultaneously belonging and not-belonging to one place.

As much as the Immigration Restriction Act is criticised today, the resulting CEDTs gave passage to those who wanted to return to loved ones, both in Australia and elsewhere. Today, for artists like myself, and more especially for descendant families, the CEDTs give us a strong emotional connection to our Elders past. I am grateful to have been able to contribute in a small way to the Victorian CEDT Index, and to bring to light the records of the eight Japanese men I found, and the lives they lived and the people they loved.

Digital artwork by Mayu Kanamori, Moon Over the Immigration Restriction Act, 2021

Mayu Kanamori

Mayu Kanamori is an artist, born in Tokyo, and based in Sydney. Her works include Through A Distant Lens, a play based on the search of lost photographs taken by a Japanese Australian photographer Yasukichi Murakami (1880-1944) and You’ve Mistaken Me For A Butterfly, a performed poetry and film about a Japanese woman involved in an assault case in Western Australia during the goldrush. Mayu is a founding member of Nikkei Australia, a group which promotes research, study, arts, cultural practices and community information exchange about the Nikkei (Japanese) diaspora in Australia. She was a contributor to Nikkei Australia’s Cowra Voices and the Cowra Japanese Cemetery Online Database. Mayu helped CAFHOV check the Japanese names in the Victorian CEDT Index.