9 - Patriotic Chinese Women: Followers of Sun Yat-sen in Darwin, Australia

Summary

This chapter examines the lives of the young men and women who organized the Darwin Branch of the Kuomintang (KMT) during the 1920s and 1930s, in particular looking at the role of Chinese women in politics. The influence of Sun Yat-sen in the Nanyang was most obvious during the period when the children of the 1911 Revolution were of an age to take up his aim of making a modern Chinese community. In 1925, when Sun Yat-sen died, the executive members of the Darwin KMT were aged between twenty and thirty. They were well-known figures in this small northern Australian port-town that boasted a Chinese population of some 400 people. If we were to judge by the surviving photographs there was a certain glamour about the members of the KMT. They dressed in the fashionable western clothes of the time. The men were physically fit, being keen promoters of sports. They were well-educated, in both English and Chinese, and were eloquent public speakers on matters of local, national and international significance. They were, one might argue, the embodiment of Sun Yat-sen's modern young Chinese.

In this 1930 wedding photograph (see Figure 9.1), we can see Chin Mon Di, the president of the Darwin KMT wearing the twelve-pointed white sun on his lapel. To the right of the bridegroom is Gee Ming Ket, secretary of KMT until 1930. To the left of the bride is Selina Hassan (nee Lee), secretary of KMT after 1930.