Helen Kam Life Story
Cross cultural origins
There is a peculiar story as to how my family came to be in Australia.
My great grandparents on my father’s side came to Australia to be part of the “gold rush”, in the 1800s, but they but they never quite got to the gold. They were going to the Bendigo-Ballarat region in Victoria, but the “10-pound poll tax” got in the way of that. This was in the days when the country was not a Commonwealth yet, so each state had its own laws; Victoria imposed a tax on every Chinese arrival, which also limited the number of Chinese people on board each vessel. It was ostensibly to discourage Asians from coming to the country. The captains of the ships were responsible for paying the tax, and to avoid doing so they tricked the migrants, just dumping them off in South Australia, at a place called Robe. From there they had to walk to the Victorian goldfields.
My great grandparents settled in Warrnambool, but their son went back to China to marry. From that marriage, my father was born, in China in 1914, and named Harry Ah Cann. However, when he was less than a year old, his mother died. Harry’s grandparents in Australia got word that their daughter-in-law had died, leaving behind a son who was only a young baby. By this stage, the grandparents, who had a horse and cart and were selling vegetables for income, had come across a fellow called Mr. Peacock, who was a mayor and politician. They wanted their grandchild to come to Australia now he’d lost his mother, so the grandfather said to Mr. Peacock that his wife was pregnant (she wasn’t) and she wanted to go back to China to have the baby, but they would need right of abode for the child when she brought him back to Australia. Mr Peacock said, ‘don’t you worry about that, we will fix it’. So, the grandmother went to China, picked up the grandson, and when he was about 18 months old – so the age was a bit more ambiguous and wouldn’t be an indicator that they’d lied – the grandmother brought her grandson back to Australia, telling everyone he was her baby. True to his word, Mr. Peacock, got my father the Right to Abode, which was a piece of paper that said he could go backwards and forwards between Australia and China. So, my father’s grandmother raised him, first in Warrnambool in Victoria, then they moved to Menangle in NSW.
As my father grew up, he went backwards and forwards to China and learned a bit of Chinese. He went to Parramatta High School when he was in Australia. I remember my father saying, ‘you think you had a tough life: we didn’t have money for shoes, so I would walk to the station then catch a train to Parramatta High School, and, to save my shoe leather, I would take my shoes off and do this barefoot, putting my shoes on just before I got to school’.
He was doing very well at Parramatta High School and had gone on to start the Leaving Certificate – in those days only the extremely bright students who were destined for university did the Leaving Certificate. However, during the 1930s, my father’s grandmother, who was raising him, had a premonition she was going to die. Her duty, according to her, was to ensure her grandson got married and had a child. So, she wrote to the marriage maker in the village in China where he was born and said she was bringing back her grandson and could he please help them find him a marriage prospect. My father was about 17 or 18 years old at the time, and he was only six months away from finishing his Leaving Certificate for school. He was a very bright boy, and he was taken out of school and yanked back to China on a boat. It was always a regret of my father’s that he was not able to finish school and go to university.
Back in China, he married my mother, Yee Mai Lum (1916-2003) when he was about 19 years old. He’d never seen my mother before they married, but my mother had glimpsed him because her older sister had lifted her up to look through a window to make sure he was ok and he didn’t have two heads or was really ugly. Arranged marriages were the done thing in those days. In fact, my mother was 18 or 19 years old at the time and was considered to be an “old maid” – this was because her mother would not allow her marriage to a local person. Her mother wanted a better prospect for her daughter, and because my father came from “Gold Mountain” – as the gold fields in Australia were known, she agreed to let her daughter marry him. My sister Margaret was born in 1935, in Mui Kok, China.
My father left China when Margaret was about six months old, because his Right of Abode conditions stated he had to go back to Australia. But it was 15 years before they were reunited again. The White Australia Policy did not allow you to bring your family over until you were an Australian citizen, and that took 15 years. He was ostensibly a married bachelor for 15 years.
His grandmother died and my father’s grandfather went back to China and remarried, so my father had a step-grandmother. His grandfather also left China and went back to Australia, leaving his wife too, my father’s step-grandmother. Do I have all the generations correct here? His step-grandmother lived with my mother and baby Margaret while my father was in Australia. The women were without their husbands during the Japanese occupation. My dad’s family had some acreage in China, and they planted rice. When they harvested the rice they used to barter it for other food. They had chickens and pigs too. They were landowners so they were not poor, but they were certainly not rich. My mother’s mother and brother were killed by the communists in 1950 because they were landowners. The peasants who rented land from my step-grandmother and mother tried to protect them when the communists came, telling the communists their landlords were nice people, saying, ‘look, we are fat, we are not skinny, we are fat, we’ve been fed by our landlord, we have no patches on our clothes, we are being well cared for by the landowner’. Some landowners were very cruel, but they weren’t. But during the communist takeover from 1949 to 1952, all landowners suffered.
My mum and step-grandmother were ok because Dad sent money and they had enough to eat because of the harvested rice and food they bartered for with it, and the money coming from the land they leased to people. But during the Japanese occupation from 1939, my mother said it was horrible, because they were frightened of bombs, and they were frightened that the Japanese would rape and kill the women. Every time the planes flew overhead, my mother would run from the paddy field, race home and grab her daughter, who was only three or four years old at the time, and go and hide in the woods so she was covered by the trees and the Japanese wouldn’t be able to see them.
One time, during Japanese occupation, she took all her jewellery off, dug a hole and hid it in there, then put a stick there so she could remember where it was. The step-grandmother asked her what she’d done with her jewellery and my mother told her. So, the step-grandmother went and did the same thing, but she didn’t mark where she’d hidden it. She was a wicked, horrible woman, and when it was time to dig up the jewellery, she cursed my mother for telling her to bury the jewellery, because she couldn’t find hers – even though it was her fault for not marking where she buried it. They had to search all over this countryside to find her gold jewellery. They did find it eventually.
It was a pretty horrible time. It was a time when sugar was very prized, and the step-grandmother would go and pawn her jewellery for a sack of sugar. My mother would say to her, ‘don’t do that, once a sack of sugar is eaten, it’s gone, whereas your jewellery is your insurance’.
She would say, ‘I don’t care. I want sugar’. It was a very tense time when my mother was living with her, she was very frightened and very superstitious of the things the step-grandmother did. For example, when a person dies, in Chinese culture we put their photo up with an altar around it. My step-grandmother would do that with my mother and sister’s photos – while they were alive!
My Family Settles in Australia
My mother got out of China with Margaret just before the Communists came, in 1949.
By this time, my father was living in Manly in NSW and earning a living as a market gardener. He had a market garden where Mackellar Girls High School is now. They didn’t own the land; they rented it from the government. They were very smart market gardeners because they were the first to take celery to market. My sister remembers winding cloth around the celery to make sure it didn’t get damaged by frost. Market gardening was popular work for the Chinese because most of them came from the southern part of China, which was a very fertile, rich area, around the Pearl River Delta, so they knew farming.
At the time, the law said that if Chinese people wanted to bring their family here, they couldn’t be market gardeners; they had to do jobs from a list of specific trades, which included being a restauranteur or running a laundry. So, my father went into a restaurant business with two other partners, Mr Chiu Ahkin and Mr Pang, selling Chinese restaurant food. He lost money hand over fist, because he had no idea how to run a restaurant. I think he must have had a manager in the restaurant because he was still growing vegetables in the market garden to get some money. The restaurant was initially in The Rocks, right at the end of George Street, and then they moved to Manly, at the back of the Corso. The shop is still there, but it’s no longer a restaurant. They only had the restaurant around three or four years, long enough to meet the requirements to be able to bring my mother and Margaret here.
When they had the restaurant in George Street, they used to have health inspectors that would come. The health inspectors would always make a big show of taking their coat off and hanging it on one of the clothes pegs. They would eat a meal, which they would insist, very publicly, on paying for. It might have been 10 shillings, but they would insist on paying. Then they would pick up their coat, put it on, go to the toilet, and if there wasn’t any money in the pocket of their coats, they would go into the kitchen, and find some “grease” or some dirt or something to give them a bad health report about. If there was sufficient money, which was probably a pound, a lot in those days, they would walk straight out the door. My father always said if you think corruption started with politicians, you’re wrong, it started way down the line, with health inspectors.
Apart from working hard in the restaurant and market garden, it turned out Dad was having a good time… I didn’t realise until my older sister said to me much later, ‘do you know how you all got your names?’. I said no and she said, ‘Margaret, Helen and Lyn were all dad’s girlfriends at certain times before Mum and I came to Australia!’ That’s how my sisters and were named. To his credit, he told them he was a married man, so he was loyal in that respect.
Margaret was about 15 years old by the time they moved to Australia. I think my sister had been very spoiled in China, with her mother and the step-grandmother giving her whatever she wanted, and she got a shock shortly after she arrived because my father gave her the first belting of her life. It was because she had a tantrum over sending money to China… In those days, if a family had a girl and the family couldn’t afford to keep her alive, they sold her. The step-grandmother had bought a girl in this situation who was about the same age as Margaret, and they grew up together. She was called Moi Jay, meaning small sister. On this occasion, my father gave Margaret £10 to send back to the step-grandmother who was still in China, but Margaret wanted to send the same amount of money to Moi Jay. My father said no, so she threw a tantrum, and my father went whack! Margaret has never forgotten, she’s 90 now and she still remembers it. It was the first time anybody had ever said ‘no’ to her. She had a hard time adjusting to this authority figure who was her father, but whom she’d never seen in her life up till now. My mother was the peacemaker, saying, ‘we’re in a strange country, we can’t speak the language, we have to keep quiet.’ My sister worked in the restaurant and said she was the fastest prawn peeler of anyone working there, at age 15. They used to have prawn peeling races, in the back room of the restaurant, with all the other staff, and she was the fastest.
My mother’s duty as a married woman in Chinese culture at that time was to have sons as soon as she arrived in Australia. But unfortunately, in 1950 I arrived, then in 1951 my sister Lyn arrived. By 1951 my paternal grandfather had come back to Australia, and the oldest male in the family was always given the privilege to name the child. He wanted to name my sister Lily and my mother said no, it was too fancy a name. She wanted to call her Ly, which means barrier. My mother’s thinking was maybe if we put a barrier there, we might stop having girls and have a boy.
So, then my brother Thomas was born in 1952 and followed by another two boys, Henry and John. My mum had six children, all born in different places. Margaret was born in China. I was born in Manly Private Hospital. My sister was born in Manly Public Hospital because the private hospital had closed down. Thomas was born in Mosman Private Hospital, Henry was born in Governor Phillip Hospital in Kingswood, and John was born in Nepean Public Hospital, which still exists today.
After Thomas was born, the council took back the land my father was market gardening on, where Mackellar Girls High is now, so in 1954 the family moved to Cranbrook, near the Blue Mountains. This time they bought the land with a consortium of four. The Manly restaurant was also still running at this stage. On the land there was a big farmhouse. Not everybody had their own bedroom, the four or five of us all bumped into one room together. We had some itinerant workers who would come and work in the market garden, besides the three partners, and they lived on the farm too.
My mother looked after the ducks, chickens, and pig – I didn’t know they had a pig till later. And she had all these kids to mind, with no washing machines and so on in those days, so it was hard work.
I went to school in 1956, with not a word of English because we all spoke Chinese at home. There was no radio – or at least my Mum didn’t listen to a radio because she wouldn’t have understood what they were saying, and there was no TV in those days, so we had no exposure to English. I had to get the bus from Cranbrook to Penrith. My mum used to pack fried rice for me for lunch, and then all the Aussie kids would make fun of me and throw my lunch away. By my second or third day of school, I stopped getting my lunch out. We would have a nap after recess, and I remember I wouldn’t “wake up” – I would pretend to stay asleep and the teacher would come and poke me, saying ‘get up, get up’. I wouldn’t get up because I didn’t want to face the kids teasing me. But I was a quick learner and within a year, I was speaking quite good English.
After I knew English, there was a funny situation… My father used to go into Sydney to Haymarket with a truck to sell the vegetables, so he would do all the shopping for our family, buying all the meat in Chinatown. I remember my mother said to my father, ‘please buy some roast duck because Helen and the kids keep saying ‘shāo yā’ to each other’. Later, she said to me, ‘when you were a kid, you always wanted to have roast duck.’ I told her that it wasn’t roast duck at all, we were saying ‘shut up! Shut up, shut up!’ to each other, which means to keep quiet, but rudely!
My parents never learned English. My mother always thought she would take the family back to China. I took both my parents back to their village in China in the mid-1970s, as soon as it was opened back up, and my mum said, ‘I’m so happy I’m in Australia’. My youngest brother, Johnny, had a hole in the heart, and he would not have survived in China. He had an operation when he was seven years old, after waiting to see if the hole would grow over which it didn’t, and they cut him right open down his chest to repair his heart. He was in Princess Alexandria Children’s Hospital for about a month, and it didn’t cost anything, and my mum used to say, ‘this would not have happened in China’. Johnny’s grandson, born recently, has the same thing and they just went in with keyhole surgery to fix it when he was less than a year old.
After a while, there was a dispute between the four partners in the Cranbrook market garden, so my father and Mr. Chiu Gar Wong left and started another market garden, in Rooty Hill in 1957. With the property there was a small roadside stall, selling the fresh vegetables from the garden. Eventually, the stall grew a bit bigger, and bigger, to the point where my father had to actually go to the Haymarket markets and buy produce to come back to sell it on the roadside stall – things we couldn’t grow, like apples and oranges. After a while, there were four partners involved in the market garden and roadside stall – my father and Mr Wong, my uncle Jim who was from our village in China, and Mr Wong’s grandson, George, who was trained as a mechanic but then he gravitated towards the retail business.
We had Mum, Dad, and us kids living in the main house, and then Dad built a long dormitory-style building, where Mr Wong had his room, and across the corridor was the room his grandsons, Dennis and Patrick, shared. Up from Mr Wong’s room, there was Uncle Jim’s room, and across from them were a couple of illegal immigrant workers – although, at the time we didn’t know they were illegal… until we got raided. I remember there was this shouting and carrying on, and all these uniformed men looking for two men who worked on our farm, who were running away.
My father’s business partner, Mr. Wong, has a very interesting family. During the Japanese occupation, his son died, perhaps of cancer but they didn’t know in those days. This left his daughter-in-law with four sons, George, Stanley, William and Norman Chiew, who Mrs. Wong and the bereaved daughter-in-law were raising. During the Japanese occupation, both women were petrified because of all the stories they’d heard about what the Japanese were doing to the women – so much so, that both women took themselves off to try and hang themselves on a tree. A man came along and cut them down, and he said, ‘don’t be silly, you’ve got four children, what are they going to do if you both suicide?’ So, the women went back home to the village. The daughter-in-law went out again that night to hang herself and she was successful. So the grandmother was left with these four boys. Mr. Wong was in Australia when he found this out, and he said to send the two oldest boys to him – he couldn’t manage four, but he could help with the two oldest sons. So those two boys came to Australia. One of the boys, George, married my sister, Margaret.
Mr and Mr Wong had two daughters as well as the son who died. Before the Japanese occupation, the two daughters somehow managed to get to Hong Kong, where they stayed. One of the daughters married a person called Mr. Kam in Hong Kong, and they had six children. The second of those children was called Dennis. In 1962, Dennis came and lived with his grandfather, Mr Wong, who lived with my father on the Rooty Hill farm. And that was how I met my husband – Dennis Kam. So, totally unplanned, myself and my sister, married first cousins from the Wong family.
School Days
After we moved to Rooty Hill, I went to Colyton Primary School. I had learnt English by this stage and loved school. In those days at Colyton, there were a lot of Polish and Italians who were eating their slimy sausages and their spaghetti, like I had to eat my fried rice. But by that time, I had begged my mum to make Devon and tomato sandwiches because I wanted to be like everybody else.
I had some lovely friends at Colyton Primary School, including one friend, whose names was Neda Bonora. We were friends all the way though, first class, second class, third class, fourth class, fifth class, and then the middle of sixth class, she just never turned up. To this day, I never knew what happened, she just disappeared. I think she was hijacked back to Italy to get married, at age 13. I remember the teacher asking, ‘is Neda absent again today?’ And then he just stopped asking.
When I was about seven years old, my Uncle Jim suggested I go up to the roadside stall and learn some arithmetic and, with my English, help serve customers. I credit that with my ability to be able to relate and socialise with people, and with being able to do mental arithmetic. People would order a pound of onions and so on, and I would all add it up in my head, and tell them, ‘that will be $14.10, thank you’. They would always say things like, you need to write that down, or I can write it down for you, but I would tell them ‘no, I can add up very quickly in my head’.
We were the only Chinese family in the whole school, and my father would donate boxes of fruit to the school fete, so we were a well-known family, and a well-regarded family. I had a wonderful time in primary school because I was a very good sportsperson, and I was quite a good scholar. I was very good at softball, netball and basketball. They were the only sports on offer. You could play Vigaro, which was played with a paddle and is a bit like cricket, but you only played that if you weren’t really good at sport. We didn’t do music. My father, to his credit, said that his children would all go to university, because he missed the opportunity to do that. Five of us went to university, except for my brother Thomas who only went for a year and a half and gave it up – not that he didn’t pass, it just wasn’t for him. Four out of my father’s six children hold Master’s degrees, one with a PhD. Dad was absolutely stoked.
It was too late for Margaret to make it to uni by the time she arrived at 15 years old and not speaking English. She only went to school for a year and a half, then she left. She went to work in Randwick and was billeted with a family in Sydney. She was very popular, very attractive. She worked in a grocery store, serving behind the counter, selling a pound of sugar, half a dozen eggs, and so on. She used to come home on the weekends. She was sought by a lot of young men, but she’d fallen in love with George. She wanted a particular diamond ring which George couldn’t afford, so she said she was prepared to wait – and she did, and he saved up enough money to buy her whatever she wanted. I was the flower girl when they married at St Andrews Cathedral, in 1958. She made all the wedding dresses plus wedding cake. George is a gorgeous man. We just celebrated his 90th birthday along with my sister.
I went to Rooty Hill High School from 1963 to 1968. High school was wonderful, the best years of my life. My father encouraged us at school, but we always had to come home every afternoon and work in the garden. We would get home from school and Mum would always have something hot for us to eat, and then we’d go out to the garden, picking out weeds or planting or transplanting, every day of the week. Homework happened after dark.
In year 11, I was finding it tough, because after the end of year 10 everyone left – they went to secretarial school, to apprenticeships, and so on. It was unusual to go on after year 10, and it was only the people who wanted to go to university who stayed. All my friends left school and went off to Miss Hayles Secretarial College to learn typing and shorthand. They were so glamorous, all dressed up, and going to their secretarial work, and here I was, still stuck in a school uniform. So, I decided I’d leave. My father said, ‘well, if you’re leaving school, you owe me two working years in the garden. I wanted you to go to university, but you have to finish high school before you go to university, so you’ve got to do two years in the garden before you can go’. I said ok. So, my father signed the papers for me to leave school, and I went to the headmaster with my exit forms. Little did I know my father and the headmaster had already been talking… The next morning my father woke me up at some ghastly hour, saying, come on, these are your chores, go and hoe that and pick this. After two days I wanted to go back to school. When I went back to the school office and asked them for the re-enrolment papers, they said, ‘re-enrol for what? You never left’. It was all a trap, my exit forms were never processed by the headmaster!
I went through a year 11 and year 12 and did quite well in the end. My father’s theory was that if I went through to the end of school, all my brothers and sisters would too; if I left, they would too. He always used to say it was a regret in his life that he wasn’t able to go on to
university.
I loved school. I was good at it. I came in the top 10 in the State in economics. I did English, math, science, economics, and geography for the HSC and PE was my favourite subject, but they didn’t have it at HSC level in those days.
I represented the State twice in softball. In 1966, when I was 16 years old, I went up to Brisbane with the team for it – it was the first time I’d ever gotten a plane. We were up there for two weeks. Even then discrimination happened. In those times, students who travelled for sport like us, were billeted out, nobody stayed in hotels, and I was always left till last to be chosen for billeting because usually nobody wanted to take a Chinese girl. One time I was in Thirroul for sport, and the teacher told me I was going home with her, and then another time was in Newcastle, and I went home with a coach. It never occurred to me that I hadn’t been chosen for billeting, I thought I must be very special to be staying with teachers and coaches. It wasn’t until a long time afterwards, that I realised none of the other families wanted to billet me. I tried to be positive and think that it was maybe because they didn’t know about what a Chinese girl would eat.
Despite this, I had some funny experiences. When I was in Newcastle, and was billeted with the coach’s mum, she said one day that we were going to go and see her husband. So, on the Sunday, off we go in the car, and after a while we pulled up at a cemetery! Her husband was buried in the cemetery. Another time, I was staying with a woman in the country, and she asked me if I liked brains. My mum always told me to eat everything that was put in front of me, whatever it was. Of course I wasn’t rude, did as my mum told me, and I got these brains in breadcrumbs on the plate, with bacon – for breakfast. I took one bite and was gagging and she said, ‘you’ve never had brains before, have you? Toilet – that way!’ I always remember that. I’ll always remember those brains. Another time, the house I stayed in had a chenille bedspread, then a blanket, then a top sheet, then the bottom sheet – all neatly tucked in. But in our house, we only had doonahs and that was it. I remember looking at this bed, thinking, where do I sleep? In between the sheets, on top of the second sheet… There were so many layers, all tucked in neatly in a certain order. Instead of sleeping between the sheets, I slept with my jumper on, on top of the chenille bedspread so I didn’t have to put it all back together again. I was about 13 or 14 years old, and we’d never left home, never been to a motel to sleep – we just lived on the farm.
We weren’t what you’d called religious. My father professed to be Church of England, and my mother, being from China, was a Buddhist. I think the Church of England came from my father’s schooling, because he’d been here since he was 18 months old he would have learnt about it in a scripture class. But it wasn’t a big thing, he never went to church. And the Buddhism wasn’t a big thing for my mother either. Having said that, every 15th of the month, which is full moon time, the first of the month and at the end of the month, she would always be praying – keep my children safe, make sure Dad doesn’t have an accident, that kind of thing.
But Mum always taught us respect, and told us, ‘do not damage or disrupt anything’. She was always against us playing sport, she thought there was no benefit in playing sport, that all that happened was we’d come home with bruises that she had to fix. Whereas Dad was quite keen for us to get out and try different things. I was quite well coordinated though so I was naturally drawn to sport.
University Life
I’d always wanted to be a teacher. In the pre-Whitlam days, you had to either get a scholarship or you had to pay to go to university. I knew my parents’ financial situation wasn’t great. In fact, I used to hear my mum my mum and dad arguing about it because the walls were quite thin. My mum would say to my dad that we needed to save the money for the boys to go to uni, because they were going to have to have to work for the rest of their lives, whereas us girls, if we married, wouldn’t have to work. It was old-fashioned thinking. My father kept saying that if I was capable I would go to university, I would go, and the rest would follow. He told her, ‘we will find the money’. My mother used to cry and carry on about the cost and how they didn’t have a lot of money and he said, ‘I will pawn my last pair of pants so she can go to university’. Who would want his last pair of pants?! It was my father’s absolutely insistence that I go.
It happened that just before I got my HSC results, I was offered a cadetship at Parramatta hospital to do radiography. It was internal training, not university, but I thought it was very glamorous, with the white uniform, being in charge of patients, telling them to breathe in, breathe out for the Xray – because it was during the days Tuberculosis was everywhere. I accepted that offer. Then my mum told me it wasn’t just about breathe in, breathe out, that I might get patients coming in who’d been in an accident and were all bloodied and very injured. I thought, I can’t stand the sight of blood, it makes me weak, I’m not doing that! So, I had to ring them up and say I wasn’t coming, even though I’d had my interview and been measured up for a uniform.
Fortunately, that same day the results came out and I got a teacher’s college scholarship, which I took. My father was thrilled to bits. In those days, and they still are, the honours for each subject were published in the paper. At our home we had an outhouse and I remember him running out of the outhouse pulling up his pants shrieking ‘HELEN! HELEN!’, and I was thinking, oh no, what have I done, what have I done… He said, ‘your name is in here!’
I said, ‘I didn’t do it!’
Then he said, ‘I’m very proud of you, you came ninth in the State for economics.’
I said, ‘Oh, I did do it!’
I followed that path and got a degree in teaching from Macquarie University.
Part way through my teaching degree, I had a bit of a setback. When we were living at Rooty Hill, there was a man from my father’s village, who was in Australia by himself, with a family back in China. He took up opium. His wife wrote to my father, asking him to find her husband as he had stopped sending money to her for the past six months. My father then went into Chinatown, made inquiries, found him and discovered the man couldn’t work. My father threatened him, telling him he needed to sort himself out. This man came and lived on our farm, and I think he did rehab. But the next thing we know, I found him hanging from the garage. I remember my father cutting him down, but he was dead, he was blue. It freaked me out, I had a turn, and I stopped going to uni. I went into a shell. I was 17 years old. For the rest of that year, I worked an admin role in a company. I had delayed my scholarship, but because they’d already paid me for half a year at Macquarie, I had to find enough money to be able to sustain myself for the first six months when I returned, so working helped with that.
The next year I enrolled in Newcastle uni, to continue teaching. I loved it, absolutely thrived there. I was able to play all my sports, and I was voted the in as the first female president of the sports union for all of Newcastle Uni in 1972. They also gave me the award for sportsperson of the year. I was in everything – I was in the softball team, the basketball team, the netball team and the squash team, playing in varsity games, representing the uni playing against New England uni, against Sydney uni, and so on.
I was away from home, away from Mum and Dad, and I just really enjoyed myself. Some of us had a car and we would drive up to the wineries, and seven or eight of us would pile out – you couldn’t buy grog on Sunday, but you could taste, and as soon as the staff saw us pull out, all the peanuts would go away! I had a wonderful time, absolutely wonderful.
The first year, my mother made me board with a friend of a friend up there. Luckily, that friend had her mother coming from Hong Kong to live with her and she said to me, halfway through, I’m sorry, we need the room. I thought, you beauty, I’m leaving! There were a couple of girls I knew who were living with a widow, called Mrs Greenwood, who had a spare room, and they asked me to move in with them.
Mrs. Greenwood was from a family that ran several high-end shoe shops in Newcastle. She was a very refined lady. You could tell what day the week it was, because from Monday to Friday there was a specifically set meal for each particular day of the week. I learned a lot of etiquette from her. There was always beautiful cut glass and beautiful settings on the table, at every meal. When her husband died, it was discovered he’d always had this mistress, which in those days was absolutely shameful. Us three girls lived with her for up to a year, then we told Mrs Greenwood we were leaving, we were going to flat out for our second year. She was fine with that, told us we’d been lovely girls and wished us well.
We rented a beautiful house in New Lambton Heights through one of the girls’ uncles who was traveling for a year. After the holidays we went to see Mrs. Greenwood to say hello, but the house was all locked up, it was very strange. We tried and tried to find out what happened to her, and eventually someone told us that she decided she wouldn’t live any longer, so she packed up all her stuff in several suitcases beside her, took a sleeping tablet and went to sleep, permanently. We knew her son had insisted she take in boarders, so we think he must have known she was depressed after news of the mistress. We thought it must have been us who had kept her going when we lived there. We felt guilty, but she was very happy for us that we were going out to be independent young women.
Dennis
In 1962, when I was 12 years old, Dennis came out to Australia with his brother Patrick, to live with Mr Wong, who was their grandfather. They came on a study visa.
My father and Mr Wong went to collect Dennis from the ship in the Bedford truck. Dennis was bringing with him a big order of non-perishables, such as a cask of soya sauce and other groceries which my mother had ordered for the farm. I was standing in the grocery shop, ready to serve customers, when my father, Mr Wong and Dennis walked in and Mrs Ross, who worked in the shop, said, ‘here comes your future husband’. I took one look at him and thought, no! He’d been 14 days on a boat, he was skinny, with a crew cut in the days when everyone had long hair, he was wearing a tie, and I was only 12! Later, when I got married at 21, I invited Mrs Ross and Mr Ross to my wedding, and I told her she was right.
Growing up, Dennis was just like anyone else in the house, and the rest of the workers didn’t take much notice of him, but he was always very kind to me. He used to ride his bike to the station, to get the train to the city for college, when he was studying for his accounting degree. One time, a dog bit him – he lost the pedal on his bike, his trousers were all torn, and he came back quite upset. After that, his father bought him a Ford Cortina. When I was going to high school, we lived about three miles – five kilometres – from the station, which I used to walk. After he got the Cortina, he would come and get me at seven o’clock in the morning to drive me to the station with him. I shared a room with my sister, and he would knock on my window to make sure I was up because it was so early when we had to leave. We would hear knock, knock, knock, and my sister would say, ‘get up, get up!’, and I would quickly get into my uniform. I’d rather get to school at 7:30 in the morning, than walk the five kilometres to the station. He gave me the keys to his car so, at the end of the school day at 3.30pm, I could sit in the car and wait for him to come back and take me home at 4:30pm. I guess our relationship sort of started like this and maybe started to get to get a bit more serious over this time. Dennis taught me to drive when I was 17 years old, and I got my driver’s licence on the first attempt.
He asked my mother if he could take me to a Dragon Ball in the Trocadero. They had Dragon Balls every year, which were very fancy, everybody dressed up in a dinner suit and formal gown. I had to make a long dress for it, and he bought me a corsage. The Dragon Ball was wonderful. We used to go every year after that. It was good fun because it was mostly Asians. That’s where I learned to dance. I had corsages, he bought me a rabbit fur, and I thought, ooh, this is all very spiffy!
For my 18th birthday, Dennis took me to the Summit restaurant. It was a very fancy restaurant at the top of the Centrepoint Tower building, and it revolved around. This was during the Beatles’ time, but I didn’t know anything about the Beatles and what they wore… The Summit wait staff were standing at each table, wearing the Beatles fashion, with the white stand collar, and I thought, oh, how posh, we’re being served by priests, maybe we’re going to say Grace! (I knew about Grace because I’d been to scripture at school). Then Dennis said, ‘they’re the waiters!’ I was so naive, when I think about it.
When I was 18 years old, my sister Lyn and I went on a holiday with Dennis and his brother Patrick, who Lyn was dating. My mother wasn’t very happy about us going and told us to make sure we stayed together. We flew up to the Gold Coast. When we got there, we discovered we only had one room, with a double bed. We thought, oh no, what are we going to do? So, my sister and I shared the double bed, Dennis slept on the couch and Patrick slept in the bathtub! Mum was very strict about this kind of thing, and we couldn’t go against what she’d told us.
I met Dennis’ parents for the first time near our engagement. They were in Australia for a business conference. Dennis’s father was the biggest importer of Australian apples and pears into Hong Kong, and he was also the sole agent for Sunkist Oranges from California and South Africa. He was a very well-established businessman. The Australian apple and pear board would invite him every year to come out to Australia to have a look at the orchards. And he would never come, but the of our engagement, they both came, probably to meet me because their son’s marriage was on the cards. His parents were nice.
First of all, Dennis asked my parents if he could marry me. I remember him disappearing off into a section of the farmhouse, and I thought, I wonder what’s going on there? Then he came out, and my mother said, ‘come here – your father’s just given permission to him for you to get engaged’. I think Dennis and I had talked about it, so it wasn’t a shock. Dennis had asked his mother to buy a diamond ring in Hong Kong and bring it out, which she did, and he gave me that for the engagement. We just sort of meandered into the engagement really – just, sort of, ‘let’s get married’. This was on the 18th of October 1969.
Our wedding was at Andrews cathedral, on the 27th of November 1970. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Our reception for 200 guests was in an upstairs restaurant called the Mandarin Restaurant on George Street, in Sydney. The building is still there, but it’s no longer a restaurant. It was a very hot day, and my grandfather collapsed because of the heat, the poor thing. George, my wonderful, beautiful, lovely brother-in-law, escorted him to hospital. He was ok, but he missed out on the celebrations. It was a Chinese wedding reception, with a lot of relatives, and a lot of friends of Dad and Mum’s. Dennis’s parents came out from Hong Kong for the wedding.
We went on our driving honeymoon from Sydney across to Adelaide. Meanwhile, Dennis’s parents flew to New Zealand for a bit of a holiday on their own. We then met up with them in Melbourne, and we all drove from Melbourne back to Sydney. Then they went back to Hong Kong.
About two or three weeks later, we went to Hong Kong to have a wedding reception for 600 people – of which I knew six! I didn’t enjoy it. I had to wear every piece of jewellery that I was given, and I had no idea who anyone was – there was this auntie, and this third cousin, and this businessman, and his whole family. Dennis didn’t remember any of those people because he left when he was about 18 years old. He recognised some of their names, but they’d changed in appearance as it had been such a long time since he’d seen them.
We were in Hong Kong for about two weeks, and then we had a second honeymoon. We flew to Japan and Taiwan, then came back to Hong Kong and flew back home. It was quite a long celebration for getting married.
I still had one year left of uni when we married, because I had that year off earlier, but Dennis couldn’t wait until I was finished to get married. So, I still went up to Newcastle to uni after we were married, and I came home every weekend.
Denlen Sandwich Shop
I finished teaching at uni in 1972 and in 1973 I was appointed to Pennant Hills High School??. I was working in West Pennant Hills?? and it was wonderful. I loved that year. I taught economics and business studies, and Asian Studies. The head teacher was a man called Gordon Stewart – who would come back into my life in later years.
We had bought a poultry farm in West Pennant Hills by that time. We bought the property because Dennis thought it was a good investment. His father sent money out and we paid for the poultry farm, and, oh my gosh, we had all these chooks running around – we had no idea, no idea! One day we went to see my mum, living at Rooty Hill, on a stinking hot day in January. When we come back, about a third of the chickens were dead, from the heat! We rang the guy who sold them to us, and he told us to use the sprinkler system to spray mist over the chickens, because they’re very heat sensitive. I took one look at all the dead chickens and said to ‘Dennis, there is no way I’m going to do anything with them!’ I rang my mum and said, ‘we’ve got all these dead chickens, can we eat them?’ She said no, because they’d died naturally, we couldn’t eat them. Dennis called a mate over to help. We ended up throwing them in a great big pile, putting kerosene on the pile and we had a bonfire of chickens! I still remember the smell of burning feathers. We soon learned what to do with chickens – that we had to inject them for flu, and so on. The chickens lasted for about two years.
I was only 22 years old, but Dennis was now 30 years old, which was considered quite old to start a family at that time. We thought it would take longer, but I became pregnant quite quickly after starting the position at Pennant Hills High, in the March, so I only completed one year of teaching there. I remember that first week of December at the end of my pregnancy was so hot, and I had to climb all these stairs to get the classroom. The kids would say to me, ‘Mrs. Kam, are you okay?’ My belly was getting bigger and bigger, but I finished the whole year. I had Andrew on the 21st of January 1974.
At the time, Dennis was doing what they call a PY, a professional year – he was an accountant, but not yet a chartered accountant, and in order to get the chartered accreditation, he had to do the extra PY study. I remember, in 1974 when Andrew was born, I was still typing up his last assessments, correcting the English, and so on, after I’d had Andrew.
We had the children in quick succession. After Andrew, Russell was born on the 14th of August 1975, then Belinda on the 6th of November 1978 and Michelle was born on the 30th of January 1981.
I didn’t go back to work as a teacher after Andrew was born, but I did work…
My husband came home one day in 1975 when I was pregnant with Russell, and he said, ‘I’ve quit’.
I said, ‘what? You quit? But I can’t go to work!’
He said, ‘it’s alright, I’m going to buy a business.’
I said, ‘what sort of business?’
He said, ‘I don’t know yet’!
Dennis was working for a company called Peat Marwick Mitchell, which later merged with Coopers & Lybrand. He was an auditor and every time it came up, he was getting passed over for promotion. I think it was because he didn’t go to the pub on Fridays and drink up with the boys, and all that kind of carry on. He eventually got a promotion as a manager, which meant more work, with a badge on the door, but no extra money. So, he said, bugger that, and he quit.
He looked around the businesses for sale, and he found a sandwich shop he was interested in. He said, ‘I think this is a good buy’. But it was a lot of money, a whole heap of money. But we knew that owning a small business you could make more money than working for someone else. Dennis would stand outside this sandwich shop and count the people that would go in and out, and average out how much they would spend – just as you’d imagine an accountant would do. He worked it all out – how many people were working there and how much their wages would be, and so on. We ended up buying the sandwich shop.
The shop was called Reed’s Gourmet Foods, owned by Mr. And Mrs. Reed, who were Hungarian Jews, very strict with their staff and very efficient. They stayed on for a month to hand over to us, while we learned the business. They had a long servery, with a sandwich bar, then along from the sandwich bar there was a hot food bar, and then along from that there was a delicatessen section with salamis and all kinds of cheeses. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Reed didn’t think we’d make it, because we didn’t know anything about cheese! Dennis and I went to David Jones and bought up all the books about cheeses – edam, gouda, soft cheeses, and we studied them every night. There is no cheese in Chinese food, we don’t eat much dairy at all.
I remember going for about a month or two months to learn the business, then I had Russell, so I couldn’t go out to work because I was breastfeeding him. Dennis went to work every day and learned the business. We inherited staff from the Reeds, and they were all lovely, old ladies with names like Ivy, Faye and Ethel. They were very nice ladies. We grew the business, adding chicken and corn soup, Chinese fortune cookies and so on.
I remember Mr. Reed asked me about my background. I told him we had a roadside store that turned into a fruit shop, then two fruit shops. And he said, ‘see this pineapple? How much did you sell it for in the shop?’
I said, ‘oh, maybe $1.50’.
He said, ‘we get $1.50 per slice, and we get about eight slices out of a pineapple’. They cut the whole pineapple into slices and sold them individually. He was quite modern in his thinking. I thought, now that’s the way to make money. I had always been involved in retail and dealing with customers, and I was quite excited by this.
We changed the name of the shop to Denlen – Dennis and Helen.
We decided that we’d be 50 cents more per sandwich than other shops in the centre and all around us, but we would add lots of value. For example, we were the first to start using shredded carrots and alfalfa sprouts in sandwiches. Our sandwiches were a lot bigger than those around us who only added lettuce – they were so high people couldn’t wrap their mouths around them – and although ours were 50 cents more it looked like they were getting so much more for their money. We had queues out the door! We had 12 women serving sandwiches and hot food. Instead of selling great big pies that needed to be heated in the oven, we had little sausage rolls and party pies and we quickly dipped them in hot oil to make them really crunchy and hot. People loved them! We would just have an idea, think to ourselves, people would probably like this, and we’d try it. I made spring rolls and samosas every night at home.
I worked only Mondays and Fridays, and on Sunday we would go to the shop and do all the prep for the salads, clean out the fridges and so on. Customers could have eggs in a number of ways, which was also innovative for the time – they could have curried egg or sliced eggs, and we would slice it in front of them and put it on the bread. We had whole eggs you could buy – every day we had to prepare 15 dozen eggs. Michelle, who was only about four or five years old at the time, says she remembers peeling 15 dozen eggs for egg sandwiches on Sundays, and the kids would smash them all up for the curried egg mix. They had fun. After, we would have lunch somewhere in Chinatown, and we would take the four kids to Mums, where they’d stay overnight; because the next morning, at five o’clock, we would race to the city, Dennis would drop me off to open the shop, and then he’d race to Flemington markets to buy tomatoes and other groceries we needed in the shop.
In those days, we had to open at 5am, 5.30am at the latest, because in we had a proper, imported coffee machine, and it needed steam pumped up for it to work, which took an hour and a half to get going. It wasn’t like the machines you get nowadays that are automatic. Good coffee was around then, but we weren’t real coffee culture yet, and it was mostly sold by the Italians. Our coffee was special though and again we sold it for 50 cents more than others. We were the only sandwich shop that had a butter machine – we would put a whole slab of butter into the machine, and then somebody would stand there feeding slices of bread into it, and it would come out with butter on one side. I remember Mari?? standing on a box doing it, and she would catch the bread and put it back in the plastic bag ready to make a sandwich later on. Mr. Reed had imported the machine from England.
We had the shop during the period of bread strikes – for some reason the New South Wales bakers kept going on strike. Dennis said to me, ‘you fly up to Brisbane, and try and find a baker who will send us bread, because without bread, we can’t make any money because we can’t make sandwiches.’ So, I went up to Queensland, found a baker who would send us bread, and we were the only sandwich open during that period. The strikes went on for months. They’d strike one day, then they wouldn’t strike the next day – you can’t run a business like that. We were the only ones that had bread, so it was good.
The sandwich shop was hard, hard work. Dennis was there early, at five o’clock, and I was there by 5.30am Mondays and Fridays. My parents would come Thursday night and look after the kids at our house so I could go to work with Dennis on Friday morning. I would do all the staff pays on Fridays. I was also in charge of sacking people. Dennis hired them in the beginning, but it got a bit tricky… Under us, the first part of the long, very narrow shop was the cold bar, run by Australian ladies; the second part was the hot bar run by Italian and Yugoslavs, who were lovely and very hardworking, but volatile; and then the end bit was run by us. Because the shop was narrow, if someone working there was more than a size 16, we couldn’t fit two people squeezing past each other to get to the produce to make the food. When Dennis was hiring, he would say, ‘how much do you weigh?’ Of course, they wouldn’t like that! So, I took over and I would say, ‘we supply uniforms – what size would you wear?’ And if they said they were a size 18, I would say, ‘I’m sorry, the position has been filled’.
We supplied uniforms which had no pockets; the staff had a locker downstairs in the basement of the building, and they were told they were never to bring any cash up. My father used to come in sometimes on a Friday and he would sit in the back room; he loved our roast chicken. One day, he said to me, ‘you need to watch that lady, she’s been thieving money’, and at that time, we were always short in our cash register. He said he’d seen this lady take a $20 note from the customer and drop it on the floor, then slip it her shoe. She was very clever – she would then make up a bit of that $20 by not ringing up as much, so it was not really obvious. In the 1970s $20 was a lot – people were only earning $40 or $50 a week. I had the job of checking it out: I said, ‘Ivy, there seems to be something in your shoe…’ No, she says. I asked her to show me, and sure enough, there was $20. I said, ‘you knew the rules when we hired you – you keep all your belongings, including cash, in your own locker and you have the key.’ She said she didn’t know how it got there, but I said, ‘I know how it got there. Ivy, you need to leave and do it quietly otherwise I have to call the police.’ She left quietly. She’d been working for Mr Reed for years, so who knows how much she took – or didn’t take, who knows. That was my father’s contribution to our business.
Raising a family
It was hard work, really hard work, raising the children during this time. Andrew didn’t sleep during the night. He was up all night, and he slept during the day. It was horrible!
But then Russell arrived, and he slept beautifully! He knew when night and day was, when to wake up to have the breast, he was much easier than the first baby. Then we had a three-year gap after the boys, because they came within 17 months of each other, very close together, plus we had the business as well. I always wanted a girl, and then we were lucky and I had my daughter, Belinda. Dennis said, ‘that’s enough, you got your daughter.’ But my sister, Margaret, had two girls and a boy, and I always felt the boy was left out – I always remember him banging on the door, saying, let me in, let me in, I want to play, and them saying, no, go away, go away. I said to Dennis, ‘we either have two children’ – and we’d already had the third – ‘or four’, so I convinced him to have one more and we had Michelle. And she just grew up; I turned around one day and thought, where did you come from? She just grew up, raised herself!
It was hard because I was trying to support my husband, trying to run a business, I had all these kids, and they all went to private schools, so we had big bills to pay. They went to private schools from year five, because I thought year seven was a tremendous, tumultuous year, with new teachers, a completely different system and new kids coming in, so I decided to send them to the private schools for two years of primary school so they had a cohort of people they knew before all the change and transition to high school. The girls went to Abbotsleigh and the boys went to Knox Grammar School.
Motherhood kind of passed by in a bit of a blur with work and the business but I still managed to play my sport. I converted to competition squash because I could play that at night, which suited me well because I didn’t have any time during the day.
We owned the sandwich shop for about 10 years and did very well financially during this time. Then Dennis decided he had to go back to accounting otherwise he’d lose his accreditation. So, he and another fellow, called John Lee, who he met when he was working as an accountant, decided to go out on their own. We still had the shop, which we put it under one of the head girls we had working there and she ran it, and I would still go in on Mondays and Fridays.
The Department of Education kept sending me letters saying I had to go back to work because I’d had 10 years of maternity leave and I couldn’t possibly be having any more babies! I resigned from education because we had the shop, but after a while, after Dennis went back to accounting, the shop started becoming a bit of a problem. There were staff problems and rent went up, and we had both decided that at some point we wanted to go back to our professions. Dennis had been two or three years in his accountancy practice by then and was getting clients and well established. It was a good time to sell, in 1987.
We sold the shop and I decided I would go out on my own. There used to be a building called the MAN Tower, in North Sydney and I bought a sandwich shop in there for cash, we wanted to buy a cash business. I did that for about 18 months, then I had to give it away, it was just too much. Michelle was only in preschool at this stage; the others were at school.
In 1985, Michelle went to school and we sold that shop. I decided that I wanted a break and I was going to have a year off before I returned to teaching. It didn’t happen.
I put my name down to go back into teaching after selling the shop because I heard that there was a long waitlist, that there were so many teachers that I wouldn’t get a job for two or three years. Straight away they sent me a letter saying I’d been appointed to Concord High School – the following year! Oh no, I thought, I want a rest! Dennis said I should probably take it, because otherwise they might send me out to whoop whoop. So, I decided I would and in 1986 I started work again as a teacher.
Back to Teaching
Teaching was a bit of a shock. It was excellent, but a bit of a shock going back after so many years, because the kids had changed. They were much more challenging and much more verbal. Before I went to Concord, I did a substitute term at Glebe High School, and I said to Phil O’Brien, who was my head teacher, ‘I’m not going back to this profession. I can’t cope. All these kids are “F” this and “C” that’. He told me to think about it from their point of view; that’s how their parents talk to them, and they don’t know if it’s right or wrong, they just hear their parents saying that. He told me to make my own rules in the classroom.
I taught year 11 economics, the older kids, not year sevens, so I asked them, ‘hands up – who wants to leave school and get a good job?’ Everybody put up their hand. I said, ‘part of that is presentation and first appearances. Part of that is language. So, let’s agree that in these four walls, when I have the class, we don’t use these words, right? We present ourselves well, we say our P’s and Q’s, and we behave nicely. If you want a good job, this is the way to go’. I was driving a little sports car in those days, so I think they may have thought, she’s pretty cool, let’s be like Mrs. Kam. Whatever the reason, it worked. To start with they would say ‘sshhhh- shivers’, then it just became habit and after a term there was none of that language. My principal asked me how I stopped them speaking the way they were, and I told him what I did. We tried to introduce that as a policy through the school – that language was important, presentation was important, hitching up your skirt so we can see your underpants is not acceptable, because this is the way it would be in the workplace. It started to permeate through the school, which was good. I left after a term, because the person I filled in for came back from long service.
Then I went to Concord High. I stayed there for six years, I saw a group from year seven through to year 12. In my staff room there were eight males, all very ocker males – they would make a ball out of elastic bands and play cricket in the staff room, or down the corridor. My mum always told me, keep your head down below the pulpit. Do not put your hand up to volunteer, don’t ask for extra work, don’t rock the boat, just do your job well. But I started seeing all my colleagues who I knew couldn’t do the job, put their hands up for promotions and get promoted. I decided I didn’t want to work there any more. I decided to go back and do my Masters in teaching at Sydney Uni, in 1991. During that time, I was on half pay, because they were encouraging people to get more qualifications in those days.
A couple of years in, just before Christmas time when we were going to visit the in-laws in Hong Kong, I saw an ad in the paper for a new school starting up, called Bradfield College, which was going to be part school and part TAFE. I thought, I think I will have a go at this. I wrote out an application longhand, because there were no computers, and asked the school secretary, Debbie, to type it up for me for $20, and to keep a copy for me as I was leaving – this was a when we had carbon paper copies.
The day I got back, in mid-January 1993, I got a phone call from Bradfield saying they’d been trying to trace me. They said, ‘we want to interview for the position you applied for. Can you come tomorrow?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t come tomorrow, I’ve just landed in the country,
I’ll come the next day’. In actual fact, I needed time to get to Debbie’s place in Castle Hill, to get the copy of my application because I couldn’t remember what I’d said in it! Thank goodness for carbon paper copies.
I went in and they asked me all these questions about how I would deal with an unruly child, how would I engage them, and so on. I told them I’d never had an unruly child, which they couldn’t believe. I waited a week, and they rang me to say I got the job.
It was nirvana. It was just the most beautiful job. They education department and TAFE were throwing money at this school because there were so many kids after year 10 who were leaving, disengaged and didn’t want to learn anymore. There were 17 of us that started the school. They just threw money at us – most schools were saying they didn’t have enough money for toilet paper, and we could order whatever we wanted. We each had a telephone on our desks, whereas most schools only had two telephone lines, one for the principal and one for the office, for which the rest of the school had to line up if they wanted to make call, and that was it. In those days of no mobile phones, it was wonderful to have a phone each.
When we started, we just accepted anybody – if you were breathing, you could come. We had to recruit students, and it was only year 11 and 12, so the child had to be 16 years old before they could come to us. We used to say, ‘it’s really tough. You’ve got to really want to come to the school. You’ve got to come to the interview, we don’t want your parents at the interview, we just want you’. These kids would rock up and they’d be tough, they’d left school or were thrown out of school. We would ask them why they wanted to come, and they really had to think about it. We asked them what they wanted to do, and they really had to think about it. We treated them as if they were at TAFE. We called them by their first names, and they called us by our first names. They only came by session – so if they had English on in the morning and then they didn’t have anything on in the afternoon, they could leave. They were treated like adults. If they didn’t turn up for a few lessons, we’d ring and ask, is there a problem with you getting to college? If there is, we can help you out on that. It wasn’t a punitive thing, it really was, can we help you – we’d send a taxi if they needed it. But, we’d only do things like that once or twice. We had plenty of money, so much money. The kids would say, you really want us to come, don’t you?
We had wonderful success with the children. There are kids out there that are doing so well: the guy who owns Boost was one of us, Rose Byrne, the actress, was one of us, Nadia Townsend, Simon Townsend’s daughter, was one of us.
I stayed there for a while and in 1994 I became the head teacher in of the Social Sciences department, or they used to call it the Business Services department because it included the TAFE subjects so was slightly different to school departments. When we started, it was just one department and we taught everything. Then they had enough students and enough staff to have different departments and head teachers of each of those departments.
Bradfield College is still there today, within the grounds of North Sydney TAFE. It’s morphed into being known as a performing arts school, but in fact it’s a whole lot of things, it’s also known for it’s IT education. 60 percent of our kids came from private schools; the parents would ask how much it was and when we’d say $375, they would ask what the rest of the year’s costs were. We’d say, no, that’s for the whole year. It’s good that it’s still going.
In the end, I left because of a disappointment. I was a head teacher, and then the assistant director of the school left, and I was asked to become an acting assistant director. I did that for 12 months. Then we got a new director who was tasked to appoint the new assistant directors. When she came in, she gave me this glowing report and a beautiful silk scarf to say thank you for doing the assistant director’s job, told me I was so wonderful and that the college had been managed very nicely. I applied for the permanent position of assistant director and didn’t even get an interview. So I threw a tantrum and said I was leaving. I was very angry and very upset and very distressed that this woman had used me. It was then I found out that she wanted to bring a man on board because she worked much better with male colleagues, as she felt under threat by females.
My boss at TAFE found out and said, come and work for me. So, in 1996, I went to work for TAFE and managed their HSC throughout the state. In the end, I got a position that was higher than hers anyway, although she didn’t work for me. The HSC TAFE program was for adults or those who’d left school early and wanted to come back and do the HSC. Then there was another course called TPC, Tertiary Preparation Certificate, with which you couldn’t get into the high demand courses such as dentistry, medicine or law, but it was very good for other all students who wanted to go to uni, and who for some reason hadn’t been able to do the HSC, for example, if they were mature age and didn’t want to be sitting next to a high school student doing the HSC.
Starting a School in Vietnam
In 1998, we started a school in Vietnam. Dennis had a client who was the principal of a private training college here in Sydney and was looking for overseas opportunities. At the time, we also had a client who was Vietnamese. The three of us got together – us, the principal and the Vietnamese man, and we invested in a school in Vietnam.
It was a greenfield project, in Ho Chi, Minh City. We decided to try a school for learning English, but after about two years it hadn’t kicked off, because they were adults in our school and it was too late for them to start learning English, they couldn’t get their tongues around it.
So, we changed it to a business and IT school. The investor who was the principal of the training college, was an ex-TAFE person I knew, and so together, we presented TAFE in Australia with an idea that said: we will teach your curriculum in IT and business at our school in Vietnam, but you need to give us accreditation so that out the students who graduate with us can come to Sydney to study or work. This was very new, to have an offsite campus teaching an Australian TAFE’s curriculum. There was a memorandum of understanding, a contract, and a lot of legal work which took a long time to organise. The Ministry of Education in Vietnam had to approve it because we were giving an overseas qualification to a Vietnamese student. We decided we’d give them a Vietnamese qualification as well as an AQTF, Australian Quality Training Framework qualification, which meant that they could take their certification and go anywhere in Australia and have that recognised.
It took a number of years, and eventually we got it started. We started with about 100 students and now there are about 1000 students, 28 years later. It’s known as Kent International College, because there’s a Kent college here who we were aligned with, but which is no longer partnership because different people have taken over.
It was a business opportunity and, being a teacher, I tried to keep at arm’s length from it all, but the partner who was principal from the school here would keep asking me to run the Vietnamese college. As I was still working for TAFE NSW at the time, it was a conflict of interest. As soon as I retired, in 2014, I was able to go over there to consult and do some auditing, but before that I didn’t have anything to do with it for a long time.
It was an interesting business opportunity.
Other Business Opportunities
In 1988 we bought a landscaping business, called Baulkham Hills Landscape Supplies, with my brother, Thomas. An investment opportunity came up, Thomas approached us with it and we funded it. I went there and worked every Sunday and learned the trade, while I was still teaching. I would give him a week of my school holidays, and I’d go and work there so he could take a break, because it was a seven day a week business. I learned to drive a loader, which was fun – a bit scary, but fun. I learned to drive a truck as well. Dennis would look after the children on the weekend, while I worked Sundays. I did that for a number of years.
Then one day, Michelle, who was still relatively young, said, ‘Mum, can I have a photo of you?’
I said, ‘why?’
She said, ‘I can’t remember what you look like because you work all the time’. I thought, OK, that’s it, I’m not going to work anymore.
Gradually, I went from working every Sunday, to every second Sunday, then once a month, and then only school holidays. In 2016, North West Rail were going to construct right in the middle of our business land. This was good: my other brother was an engineer, and he made sure that our property had to be resumed as part of that railway construction and we got a decent amount of money. We then used that money to buy another property in Kellyville, which now has an Amber Tiles franchise on it, which is the busiest Amber franchise in New South Wales. That was a good money spinner for a few years as well. We still have that business.
Back to Bradfield
After I was the HSC manager for TAFE, I went to Brookvale TAFE, but I only lasted about 18 months to two years there, because then the job as college director at Bradfield came up. I had no intentions of going back, but the staff at Bradfield told me the position was vacant and that they wanted me to come back. Initially I said no, I’m not going back to a place that I left under those circumstances. They kept asking, and saying please come back, please at least think about it. I thought about it and I thought about it. I thought, I could lead that college easily.
So, in 2004 I won the job as a college director. I stayed there until 2014, and I loved it, I absolutely loved it. I was very hands on, so I would go and talk to the students. I’d say to them, ‘you’ve left your lunch stuff all over the place. Can you put that in the bin?’ They’d come back with, what’s the cleaner for? And I’d say, ‘they’ve got other jobs to do. Do you do this at home? Do you expect Mum to pick it up for you? Well, guess what, Mum’s not here – pick it up.’ I got on very well with the students and the staff, because I just walked the talk.
I didn’t expel anybody, I would offer to declare their place vacant, and I would say to them, ‘if you leave of your own accord, this means there will be no record of you ever having been expelled. Because in a year or two’s time, once you’ve sorted yourself out, if you want to go back to TAFE, there won’t be that record against your name that you were expelled’. They would always leave of their own accord, because that’s an easy way out for them, they were able to keep face.
I would always talk to them, always meet with the parents. I would often say to the students, ‘how often do you eat with your family, sit down for dinner or lunch together?’ Sometimes it was never – the parents would just give them money to get food for themselves. Then I would say to the parents, ‘I think you should sit down and eat dinner with your children because it’s really important to have that communication with them, ask them what they did that day, ask them what they learned, or say tell me what was really horrible for you today’. I believe you start the conversation and building the relationship will follow.
Some of them I couldn’t get through to. We buried three of them due to drugs. It was a horrible thing to have to go and attend their funerals. You can’t save everybody. I remember at an Open Day, the parents would ask me if there were any drugs at the school? I would say, ‘yes, there is. I’m just being honest with you. There is no school on the north shore that doesn’t have drugs – they may tell you they don’t have drugs, but honestly, there are drugs. However, as soon as I find out there are drugs here, that person goes and I call the police, we are proactive about all substance abuse.’ I remember one time, the kids were smoking bongs, and the security officer came running in to tell me and said they buried them in the garden. I asked him where and he told me. ‘Fine, I said. ‘Go out there and water the garden in that spot’. The kids came running out yelling what are you doing? What are you doing? I shrugged and said, ‘dry patch’.
I loved it, I absolutely loved that job. Kerry Packer said, ‘I only get one Bond in my life’, and for me, I only get one Bradfield. It was great. It was fabulous.
In the 10 years that I was there, I was seconded off and became college director at Ryde, and I did a stint at North Sydney, as college director. I really, really enjoyed those stints as well, because they were different, the students were really adults, not year 11 and 12, so it was a different relationship with the students, and the school had a different feel about it.
Travels
In 1980, while we still had the sandwich shop, Dennis said, ‘let’s go to the Gold Coast on a holiday’. We had some money at that stage and Michelle wasn’t yet born. Then Dennis saw an ad for Disneyland which didn’t cost much more than going to the Gold Coast, so off we went. We flew to Hawaii first and then we went to Disneyland, with the boys who were about six and seven years old at the time. We had a nice time. That was our first big overseas holiday with the kids. It was only in our later years that we decided to travel and explore – this trip was just because it was a good deal Dennis had found. The kids were absolutely thrilled. We left Belinda with Mum and Dad.
Since then, we’ve taken the kids everywhere. They’ve been to Europe, we’ve taken them to Canada, we’ve taken them to the Caribbean, on cruises, everywhere. Nowadays, Dennis is an advocate for cruising, and we’ve gone on one or two cruises every year. I’m not as much of an advocate because I tend to eat too much! You’re sitting down to breakfast and then morning tea and then lunch and then afternoon tea and then supper. It’s too much! When we had a 23-day Mississippi cruise from New Orleans to Chicago in 2025, and we got off every day and walked 20,000-steps, so I didn’t put any weight on during that trip.
There’s not a continent we have not been to. In 2024 we did a trip to “the five ‘stans” – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. I loved that, but it’s got to be done when you’re young because there’s a lot of walking and it’s a bit primitive in terms of the accommodation and so on. We’ve been to Antarctica.
In 2023 we had a trip to Romania, and Bulgaria for a month, which I loved. We were in Bulgaria at the time of the roses blooming – Bulgaria provides a large percentage of the rose oil for perfume. It was just beautiful. Then we went to a house I hired in London for six months. It’s so far to travel from here, that we made that our base and did lots of little trips while we were close to everything. All our siblings came at one time or another. We all used to dump the luggage in London and go off to the continent, or off to Edinburgh or to Wales, and so on. It was fabulous. When you compared it, it wasn’t that much more expensive than staying in a hotel because we were able to do our laundry, we cooked, yeah, we hired a car then a friend of a friend gave us his car and we paid him back. It was great.
Dennis came for Romania and Bulgaria and onto London, but he only stayed for about four weeks then came back because he still was still working. He was going to fly back but one of our nieces decided she’d get married earlier than anticipated, so we didn’t quite last the whole six months, because we came home for the wedding.
The thing I love most about travelling is the learning. I had no idea about Central Asian history, for example, and I knew there was a civil war in America but I had no idea about the slavery. I love learning about what’s happened in the country, and seeing the beautiful mansions in southern Louisiana, visiting Elvis’ house and all those activities. I like the history. I try and read before I go, and then when I come back, I’m very avid about reading about the places we’ve been to again, because I find more information about the places I’ve been to. Recently we watched a movie and recognised a castle in Romania we’d been to – Dennis went back through our photos and was all excited that we’d been there. Learning about the history of the country and eating the food and the culture people, is what I love about travel.
Coming up, we’ve booked for a cruise from Singapore to Sydney; we are hoping to play golf in Vietnam and Malaysia.
Family Nowadays
My father died on the 7th November 1999 and my mother died on the 23rd May 2003. They’d moved to St Mary’s from Rooty Hill at that stage. They were in their 80s, so it was just old age.
My second son, Russell, got married first in 2004, to Linda. Our first son, Andrew, got married second, to Caroline in 2006, then my daughter, Belinda, got married to a Canadian Chinese man called, Vince, and she had a Chinese wedding gown then a second gown she got changed into for her wedding. My daughter, Belinda or Michelle??? has a doctorate in in organisational psych, so my dad would have been extremely proud to have two doctors in the family. My other my daughter, Michelle, never married.
Andrew is a director at Goldman Sachs. He’s now in his 50’s and has worked for them for about 20 years. He’s quite successful, he’s earning quite well.
Russell was a solicitor for about 12 years then he decided he didn’t like law anymore, got sick of billing every 10 minutes and other things. He rang us when we were on a boat on the Nile, and said, ‘Mum and Dad, I got some news for you. It’s good and bad. Do you want the good news or the bad news – it’s the same news’! He told us he’d quit his job and was going to become a teacher. I said that was wonderful, so he said, ‘can you tell Dad if you think it’s so wonderful?!’ Dennis couldn’t understand why he would give up a lucrative career in Phillips and Fox and become a teacher, but that is what he wanted to do. By this time, he was married and they were expecting a child, but his wife, Linda, was a director at Qantas, so they were going to be fine financially. I said to Dennis, ‘they’ll be alright. They will spend as much as they earn’, we’ve always taught our kids that. He went back to uni and got his fourth or fifth degree and now he’s a dean at Riverview, St Ignatius, and he loves it. I find mature age students are wonderful as teachers.
Belinda is an immigration lawyer and a director at Deloitte. And Michelle is a vice president at BHP.
My dad would be so pleased with all of us – my two brothers were gold medal winners at UNSW, in civil engineering. He would be so pleased with our kids and their achievements. They’re decent human beings. They don’t skite about their jobs or their professions, and they all own their own homes.
We have seven grandkids. From Russell’s family there is Jade, born in 2007, who is studying business at UTS, but I think she enjoys making money more – she’s recently had four weeks in Europe and had to pay for that herself. She came back much slimmer and I asked her what happened – she said, ‘we didn’t buy any food. We wanted to save our money for cocktails, so we had a big breakfast which was included, then we’d skip lunch and, in the evening, have cocktails and stay out late at night!’
Jade’s brother is Owen, born in 2009, who has just started driving and is at Riverview school. His younger brother is Hudson, born in 2012, who has just started high school, also at Riverview.
My oldest son, Andrew, has two boys: Harvey, born in 2009, is in high school at Shore and his younger brother, Zach, born in 2010, is the year below him, also at Shore.
From Belinda’s family we have Jody, born in 2011, who is at Wenona school, and Mitchell, born in 2013, who is at Redlands. Three of our children live in Willoughby, on the three corners of Willoughby Park. Michelle lives in Melbourne because of her job.
We have a big family Christmas here, with about 50 people. And every Sunday, there’s 13 to 15 here to sit down for dinner – our four kids plus their partners, and the seven grandchildren all come here for dinner, every Sunday. Even when Dennis and I are travelling, they still come here! My oldest granddaughter asks, ‘can I bring my friends to your resort?’ They come and play tennis and they dip in the pool.
It’s wonderful being a grandparent, wonderful, I absolutely love it, I can spoil them and give them back! And they’re good kids. They all want to come to Grandma’s to have dinner every Sunday, and they all get on very well together.
Mitchell, the youngest one, was being bullied at school and he wouldn’t tell anybody. He was becoming disenfranchised from school, and wetting his bed and then finally, his father, Vince, got it out of him that there was this a boy badgering him. The other cousins, Harvey, Zach and Owen, were told by Russell that Mitchell was being bullied, but, he told them he didn’t want any violence. At school, the cousins all surrounded this boy and Harvey said to him, if you touch or say anything to my cousin, you need to watch out for all of us too. And that was it, he’s never been bullied since. They stick together; they really do. They play on the court here, they play tag, they do all sorts of things together. I’m very proud of them.
Retirement
Bradfield College moved from where they were on the North Sydney Girls site, back to TAFE. It would have involved at least four or five years adjustment and I thought, no, I’ve had enough, I don’t want to have to start all over again. I was 60-odd years old. It wasn’t a health reason or anything, I just thought, I don’t want to do this anymore. So, in 2014, I retired.
It was horrible, absolutely horrible to leave.
The first three months I enjoyed my retirement. I did all the things, like clean up cupboards and go have lunch with the girls who were also retired. And then I went into this deep depression. Dennis would go to work, and I would think, well, I’ve read the paper, I’ve planned tonight’s dinner, and it’s still only 10 o’clock – what am I going to do with myself? Then one of my work colleague girlfriends, asked me why I was still lurking on the TAFE internet. Every morning I would be on there, looking around, saying to myself, I wouldn’t have made that decision, that’s a stupid decision, why would you do that? She said, I’ll fix that, and she got the IT people to take my access away so I couldn’t work anymore.
Around this time, my sister Lyn, gave me a fishing rod. They had a boat. So, I took myself off down to Tunks Creek??, fished for a while, in solitude, feeling sorry for myself, thinking, why did I give up work, I was making 10 decisions every day and now all I have to do is decide what to make for dinner.
Then I caught my first fish. And that was it, I was hooked.
I saw people coming back with all these fish on boats. I said to my husband, I’d like to buy a boat. My sister-in-law, her husband and her son, who live in Melbourne, love to fish. She said to me, ‘whatever you do, buy one with a toilet, it’s very undignified sitting on a metal bucket when you have to go on a boat! It’s got to have a toilet’.
In 2016, Dennis bought a boat. He bought a big boat with three bedrooms, two toilets and all the bells and whistles – but we had no idea to run it! We had to go and do boating lessons and get our boating licence. Now, every weekend we go on our boat, fishing. I catch and cook, and Dennis cuts and cleans. We invite other people out with us, we know another couple who love to fish too so they very often come with us. Even if the weather is really bad we go and sleep on our boat, it’s like a holiday. Out of the 52 weekends per year, we probably spend about 40 weekends on the boat. Dennis doesn’t work Fridays now, so often we go out on Thursday night and don’t come back until Sunday. The kids and family all come on the boat, mostly in the school holidays. They have Saturday sport with school and then Sunday we’re back here having dinner together anyway, so during the school term they don’t come, just in the holidays.
Also in 2016, I had a left knee replacement, so there was no more squash for me. I took up a golf because, as my son told me, I became a grumpy old woman without sport. I told him I couldn’t play golf, I’m not old enough! He said, ‘you are now!’ So, I took it up and I love it. Then the other knee was replaced in 2023, and I can walk five to seven kilometres now, depending on how straight I hit the ball.
In 2019, we went to Hong Kong to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 100th birthday. Everybody – that was about 50 of us – all went on a cruise from Singapore. She’s got children in England, children in Canada, children in The States, us here in Australia, we all went, plus all the grandchildren. At 106 years old and she flies here to Australia. Two years ago she came here and I looked after her for about three months. When she returned on Qantas, they made a big deal about her, with the captain announcing, ‘we have a very special VIP on board. She was born in January 1920, and Qantas didn’t become an airline until November 1920 – she’s older than Qantas.’ Everybody clapped and carried on, and they all took photos with her.
The Australian Consulate General in Hong Kong read about that trip in the newspaper and highlighted it to his PA, called Madeleine. Madeleine happens to be best friends with Linda, my daughter-in-law who is very senior in Qantas, so she asked the Consulate General if he’d like to meet her and they made it happen. A black car with flags arrived to pick my mother-in-law up, she was escorted into the car, met the Consulate General at his house. They had asked me what she liked to eat, and I told them no sweet things, she likes savouries like garlic bread, crunchy, nuts and so on, so they cooked all that up for her. I told them she likes to play Mahjong, so he got his staff playing Mahjong with her. She’s been twice now. She said, ‘you know that person? He’s very important’…! She’s very cute. She told me they let her win Mahjong, but I said, I don’t think so, I don’t think they let you when you win five rounds!
I learnt to play Mahjong. I started very late in life, because we were always working so there wasn’t time. My siblings gave me an automatic Mahjong table for our 50th wedding anniversary, in 2021. There is a simple way of learning, and then you can add complexities. I taught my grandchildren to play, from eight years old onwards. They all play on Sundays when they come for dinner, especially in winter, when they can’t go outside. It’s very good for your brain.
Lessons in Life
My advice to my grandkids would be to be kind to everyone, regardless of race or creed or colour. I want them to always have self-respect, because before you can respect other people, you have to love and respect yourself. I want them to be decent human beings – and they are decent human beings. They treat everybody well. There is no discrimination. This reminds me of a funny story; a long time ago, our little grandchild went up a friend who is African American and started rubbing his skin. I asked him what he was doing. He was rubbing away and said, ‘he doesn’t change colour!’ He touched his face, touched his arms. We laughed, wonderful. Kids – they have no filter.
All these lessons I want my grandchildren and children to know, I got from my family. I want them to look after each other, and to always remember your family – because that’s what I was taught by Mum. She used to say, ‘if your siblings ever come for dinner or come to your house, make sure you make them a meal – get a couple of dozen eggs and get the Chinese sausage out, which is always in the fridge, and make them an omelette. Around a table, things happen, stories come out, whether they’re good or bad, they come out around meals.’ So, we always catch up around dinner, around lunch, around cake. It’s really important. I want them to always remember that they’re part of a family, and that family will help them.
My kids are quite successful, both in their professional life, as well as in their personal life. My older son got divorced, and he’s never wanted to re-partner, saying he’s not ready, so my wish for him is to find somebody, a companion. My youngest daughter is career-minded and travels the world and she has had a number of long-term relationships that haven’t worked out, but now has found a partner.
I think the biggest challenge in life has been because I’m Chinese but I’m also Australian; it’s trying to be a Chinese woman for my in-laws and for my parents, but also to live in Australian society. It’s a challenge because I’ve got to switch hats all the time. With my husband’s Chinese friends, I have to be one sort of person, and with my Aussie friends, I have to be a different sort of person, so I’m always trying to juggle. But, I think it’s an advantage too, because I can be both. For example, I’ll say, ‘I don’t do that because I’m Chinese’, or ‘I don’t do that because I’m Aussie!’ It’s similar to when I was college director at Bradfield school – the Department of Education would tell me to do something and I would say, ‘no, we don’t do that because we’re TAFE’. And then TAFE would tell me to do something and I would say, ‘no, I don’t have to do that, I’m a school’. I don’t think it’s as much of a challenge for my children because they’ve grown up in Australia. It’s a different time, and they don’t have parents-in-law that are very Chinese, because they’ve all grown up here.
The best thing about life is that I married a very good man. He’s been very supportive of me. I’ve yelled and screamed and carried on and I don’t think he’s ever said a harsh word to me. He’s been an absolute treasure. I was very lucky to meet him at 12 years old, and for us to have grown up together, and known each other for 60-odd years. He comes from a decent family – his mother is a very good lady. I say to him that in my next life I want her as my mother-in-law again. He tells me they come as a duet and I have to have him again too!
I’m also very proud of my mum. She didn’t have much, but she taught us very good values. Not so much my father, but certainly my mother taught us family values, to help each other, to not hold too much of a grudge, and to always to be happy. The only thing she didn’t teach us was to be ambitious; she preferred us to keep our heads down because we’re Chinese in Australia and we stand out. But my dad had that part, telling us to do whatever we wanted to do. They were a good partnership, having not ever met each other before marriage and then being married for over 60 years.
Family is very important.
