LM: You’re listening to Untold Stories of Perth, a special edition produced by the Centre for Stories. 

DK: I didn’t know that I had Chinese blood until I was 45 years old… but I remember vividly the conversation that I had with my Mum. I said, “Mum, have we got Chinese in us?” She looked a bit ashamed and she was very stern. She said, “Your grandfather was a French polisher with Washing Brothers. He worked with his brothers in the Newcastle Street premises. That’s all I’m going to tell you, if you bring this subject up again, you will only upset me.” 

LM: In this episode of Untold Stories, we talk to David Kennedy, the author of Charles Washing and Racist Furniture, a book that traces the little-known history of his grand-uncle, a half-Chinese, half-Englishman who came to make his fortunes in furniture-building in Perth at the turn of the 20th century. 

DK: Eddie Marcus wrote a paper for Curtin University and in it he said, “Charles Washing was a very prominent man who needs to be remembered and someone should write his autobiography.” I thought I’m going to do this. I’m going to have a crack at this. 

LM: Our story begins with Charles Washing’s Chinese father, Wah Shing, and his English mother, Louisa Meyers, emigrating to Australia in the late 1800s. On the surface, it would seem his parent’s worlds could not have been further apart. But in reality, Wah Shing was fleeing civil war and poverty from his native Canton, while Louisa, his future wife, sought to escape the grim and gruelling working-class conditions of Victorian-era England. They both came to Australia looking for a better life – but soon found a nation rife with discrimination and contempt against anyone who wasn’t white or European. 

DK: You know, if you’re Indigenous, you’re different. If you’re Chinese, you dress differently. All those things that are totally different to European living, I think create apprehension and fear a bit. Also, the success of the Chinese; they’re very good shopkeepers, and they’d work long hours, they’d work a lot longer hours than a paddy or a pom. And that would also create contempt amongst the people, and hatred towards them. I think it was just commonplace for people to be racist, there was a great acceptance of it. 

LM: Charles Washing and his 9 other siblings, unable to hide their Chinese ancestry, grew up in this harsh environment. Charles was just an ordinary, “knockabout” kid, as David described him, seeking a normal life. But when the family moved to Creswick, Victoria, where Charles’ father Wah Shing began making and selling cabinets, it became clear that no one would buy from a company called ‘Wah Shing’. In an attempt to assimilate into European society, Charles’ family changed their surname from ‘Wah Shing’ to the far more English-sounding, ‘Washing’. But it was the downturn in Victoria’s market economy that finally pushed the Washings to look elsewhere for better opportunities. Their eyes roamed to the West – to Perth. 

DK: I think they decided that they’d send a forward scout and that would be Charles. He was only a kid – 18, 19 years old. He came over to Perth to suss out the scene and see what it was like. Perth of course, compared to Melbourne, was very small, but it had a brilliant future because of the agriculture and wheat and sheep situation, and you also had gold mining in Kalgoorlie. So, there was a great future for Perth, and they could see the growth; and with that growth came buildings, with those buildings came furniture. So, I guess they did a lot of that thinking. 

LM: Charles was a determined, innovative businessman and he soon gained employment in Perth with a European furniture company. 

DK: He worked for a company called Bickford and Lucas, they were a European firm. They didn’t have Chinese [staff], but he got in the door. Though as soon as he did, some of the cabinet makers and union representatives noticed that he was a little different and they didn’t have to do much delving to find out that his name was Wah Shing. This guy said, “You’ve got to get out of here, son, you should resign. You’re going to get beaten.”  

LM: Despite a traumatic first experience out West, Charles was undeterred. His passion for the family business meant the world to him and nothing was going to stop his dreams for success. 

DK: His first love was furniture and everyone else came second; even his brothers, everybody, came second.  So, he came over, he brought a couple of the people that he had employed with him, so they had to expand; and that’s when it started to flourish. In the early 1900s, the growth was huge. I think innovation-wise, they didn’t just build furniture, they restored furniture, they did the trays on the backs of trucks, they did carriages, horse driven carriages. They also did the gramophones; Richard Renny in his book, ‘Encyclopedia of Western Australian Wirelesses and Gramophones’, makes mention of Washing Brothers as being the finest gramophone makers in Western Australia, which I thought was rather nice. The Oxford Theatre down in Leederville was totally decked out by Washing brothers. They made all the chairs. The other thing that was really interesting which gave him a bit of an edge was he was pretty canny with the way he did things. Wood cost money, so he negotiated with a car dealer down the road and the car dealer used to get their cars in from France, they [the cars] were in wooden crates. So, he bought the crates for just about nothing, to get them off the premises. He’d stockpile that wood and then he’d make furniture from the wood. I guess that set them apart and it also kept them alive because they were deemed to be a Chinese company, and they were really looking to get rid of these people. 

LM: Australian unions and European businessmen looked at people like Charles and other Asian workers with jealous concern – they wanted to ensure they kept their stronghold on business profits to themselves. Putting increasing pressure on the Australian Government to end what they saw as foreigners stealing their money and good, white men’s jobs, the Factories Act was implemented in 1904.  It was a desperate attempt to eradicate Asian businesses entirely. 

KP: At the time of the Immigration Restriction Act, or the White Australia policy, the census showed there were 1600 Chinese out of a population of almost 200,000. So, it was 0.01 of a percent. But if you were to read the newspapers of the day, you would’ve thought the state was being flooded by Chinese. 

LM: That’s Kaylene Poon, honorary historical advisor for Perth’s Chung Wah Association. Kaylene assisted David while writing his book on the history of the Factories Act and other important stories of the Chinese community in the 20th century. 

KP: So, there were these immigration restriction acts at that time, which initially started off with one Chinese per 50 ton of ships weight. And that also included a 10-pound poll tax that captain had to pay per Chinese [person]. After a few years they increased it to one Chinese [person] per 500 tonnes, so that’s how paranoid they were about the numbers of Chinese coming into WA.  

I think the Factories Act was another form of trying to limit the impact that the Chinese in particular were having, especially on furniture making. They obviously felt they needed to define what a factory was, and how it was run. For Chinese [people] to be in a factory, basically you had to employ just one Chinese [person] to be classified as a factory. So, it was just staggering. For anyone that had a Chinese [person] in their business, they had to register annually and pay a five-pound fee to be a factory. It didn’t say anything if you were a Caucasian business. The Chinese [people] were also only allowed to work the same hours as women and children, which were daylight hours. And my father pointed out that if a Chinese [person] had a laundry or a bakery, particularly in summer, you would want to work before sunrise and after sunset. But no, you weren’t allowed to, you had to work within those hours. Chinese [people] that were selling, or even reselling furniture had to stamp all their products. The trade unions were mainly behind this because they were trying to get their consumers to buy products that weren’t made by Asians. I’ve seen an ad in one of the Eastern state’s magazines [saying], “is your furniture made by white or yellow labour”? 

DK: By bringing in that Act, they really did get what they wanted. There was a lot of Chinese factories that just went down under. Some went back to China if they could afford it. Some just were left destitute, some went to the country and had their little market gardens and things, you know, it was a really tough time… 

LM: The Factories Act was just one part of the ongoing difficulties that Charles and his family had to face in order to see their business succeed. 

DK: At the first premises they were in, you talk about hardship – there was a mysterious fire that broke out in the, of all places, the inflammables rooms. There were two of them at the front. It just smells of arson. There were several Chinese people that actually slept on the premises. And you read the article from the paper, the journalist says that “two Chinese escaped with their pigtails singed”, and you go – really? But yeah, it reeked of arson – and why? It was perfect timing. Their factory was full of completed furniture. They were ready to transfer it, so this was a major disruption. 

LM: The family was not going to just roll over and let the unionists defeat them. One of Charles’ brothers, Albert Washing, wrote a fiery letter to the paper of the day expressing his anger at being treated so unjustly as a result of his appearance. Here, David reads aloud the letter that Albert wrote all those years ago. 

DK: It goes, and I quote: “I observed that it was decided all furniture made on the premises of a Chinese employer should be stamped. I feel a most unjust stigma and approach has been put upon us. Why, a half-caste Chinese is assumed to be more degraded than a half-caste Englishman, which I am, I fail to understand. I also fail to understand why, because a half-caste follows the trade of a furniture maker, he should be singled out for special and degrading legislation. Why, again, I ask, is this stigma put on us half-castes? I mean, our being treated as if we were aliens and foreigners.” 

KP: It took the likes of the Washings and Louis Wah, who was a very successful merchant in Melbourne, to band together and say, we need to have a voice for the community because there was all this kind of discrimination from the top level, right down. They felt that if they wanted to stay here and be part of the community, they needed to have a voice. That’s how the Chung Wah [Association] was founded. 

LM: Despite repeated attempts from the European unions to shut down the Washing’s business premises, Charles managed to evade them and find clever, sometimes even law-bending ways of keeping the factory afloat. They did what they had to do in order to survive and the business continued on for many decades, only closing down as recently as 1968. 

DK: Reluctantly the union, and the government, had to accept that they were in fact European, they were born in Australia. So, they actually started stamping their furniture, ‘European labour only’. Never, ever were they beaten. The government and the unions were the ones that were beaten, which is good to know. 

LM: To this day, you can find a small street in the bustling suburb of Northbridge called Washing Lane, named so after the hardworking Washing family and all that they achieved. The lane sits between many other flourishing Asian businesses, as well as a thriving Chinatown – constant reminders of a multicultural community and identity here in Perth that, against all odds and discrimination, have managed to live on.   

In writing his book, which was based on years of research done by his brother Michael, David has been on a journey and a half in getting to know more about his family, himself and a different side to our collective story of what it means to be Australian. And Kaylene hopes that Charles Washing’s story will remind us of the ongoing need for compassion towards other immigrants and marginalised communities living in WA.  

KP: I think, we should be looking at people for who they are, not what they look like, what their contributions are. That goes for the current refugees, we have look at them and say, these are people, what can they contribute?  

DK: Australians are made up of many, many different races these days. The only “pure blood” Australians are our First Nations people. Everyone else has come in from somewhere else. Am I proud that I’ve got Chinese blood? Yes. Yes I am. 

LM: This podcast was commissioned by the City of Perth and produced by Luisa Mitchell from the Centre for Stories. Editing and soundtrack also by Mason Vellios. Research and scripting support from Kaylene Poon and Claudia Mancini, and special thanks to David Kennedy and Kaylene Poon.