In 1960, local artist Elizabeth Lund painted a quiet slice of life in Bridge Street. Despite the tired verandas and boarded-up facades, her painting shines with an intriguing glimpse of the Sun Ack Goon store, it’s windows bright with treasures.
The store was a hub of Bendigo’s Chinese community for 86 years. Golden Dragon Museum researcher Leigh McKinnon says it was an Aladin’s cave of groceries, herbal medicine, crockery, firecrackers, music and impromptu cups of tea.
Unearthing just one image from inside the store would be the holy grail for Leigh.
“To me, that’s the thing that’s missing,” he said.
This painting is part of an exhibition on the history of Bridge Street and the Chinese community’s enduring place within it.
Bridge St Chinatown: Stories of Commerce and Community is at the Golden Dragon Museum until March 2027.
It showcases the work of Leigh and museum curator Fiona Kinsey, and combines new insights from the archives with citizen records, memories, photographs and artefacts.
“A lot of forensic work in the background has allowed interesting discoveries or connections to be made that were not apparent before,” Leigh says, thanks to the recent digitisation of records such as rates and land titles.
“The information is now a lot more accessible, so it’s made it a lot easier for us than for past generations doing this sort of research.”
Leigh and Fiona will be sharing those discoveries at Bendigo Library during History Month.
The event, titled Discovering history: Place and Chinese Identity in Regional Victoria, will cover not only Bendigo’s Chinatown, but other central Victorian places that weren’t so lucky in terms of retaining a physical legacy of Chinese settlement. It will also touch on the power of citizen archives to address absences in historical records.
“We’ll also be asking people if they have further photos, knowledge, objects or memories to share,” Fiona said.
“We believe there are images out there in the community, and perhaps they are able to fill the gaps in what we hold.”
“Our research is a dialogue between community memory and documented history,” Leigh said.
Leigh’s mother’s childhood stories of walking down Bridge Street on her way to school at Camp Hill and seeing Sun Ack Goon owner Que Lan O’Hoy through the window on his abacus is a great example and offers at least a mind’s eye glimpse inside that tantalising place.
Four years after Elizabeth Lund (later Beck) painted the streetscape, the council of the time demolished this southern part of Chinatown.
“We’re quite lucky to have a photographic archive of this locality,” Fiona said. “But we would love to have more visual documentation.”
She added they were looking forward to taking the stories out of the museum and into the library this month, and potentially connecting with people who can further their findings.
“It’s always the fun part, we’re not just in the archives,” she said.
Discovering History is a regular collaborative event of Goldfields Libraries and La Trobe University Bendigo. Book now for the October 29 talk, in-person or online.
– LAUREN MITCHELL