Shirley Williams is just two generations removed from a Ballarat very different to the one we know today. Approaching 92, Shirley's grandfather was Chin Ah Foo, who migrated to Australia in 1865, joining the region's substantial and prosperous Chinese community.
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Shirley's memories encompass a childhood living on Main Road in Ballarat, the extensive Chinese descent community, floods from the Yarrowee, and playing around the long-demolished 'Joss House' and Kuomintang Hall near her home.
A storekeeper in Creswick, Chin Ah Foo was a respected and upright citizen. The Lindsay children would loiter in his shop, much to the chagrin of their mother, who thought it indecent. She was disabused of this fear by Dr Robert Lindsay, who said the ten children were cared for and sent home by Chin Ah Foo if they misbehaved or outstayed their welcome.
Chin Ah Foo married Elizabeth Tongue in 1884, Australian-born but of Irish descent. Many marriages between Chinese and European took place, despite attempts by the media to stir accusations of 'Oriental immorality and vice'.
While some Chinese people certainly loved gambling - Shirley's uncles ran a billiard saloon in Grenville Street that doubled as an SP bookies' haunt - the fact was betting was loved by many on the goldfields and overall the Chinese community was regarded as generally sober, hardworking and good with money.
Life on Main Road in the 1930s and 1940s was to be surrounded by the ongoing evidence of Chinese influence: Hon's woodyard, Roy King's scrapyard (it's said Roy King was originally Roy Sing, but like many sought an Anglicised surname), Chinese stores and herbalists, and the 'Joss Hoss'.
Demolished 100 years after its construction, the joss house was a Shen temple for the worship of deities and communication with ancestors built in 1859.
Rubbings from the temple door carvings, held by Federation University, allude to the families who built the place of worship and its purpose, although the translations are perhaps bowdlerised.
"Erected on an auspicious day in winter 1859. Think of his loyalty (Quan Yu, now canonised as the god of war to whom this temple is dedicated) during those days of the warring kingdoms (AD184) to his sworn brother, their sworn brotherhood pledged in the peach garden as has been praised for thousands of years.
"His great graciousness spreads to other (us here in foreign lands) kingdoms, and his virtue guards our gold miners everywhere. Dedicated by my disciples the Chu Pei-Huo family."
Shirley's memory of the temple is not so much as a place of worship as one of mystery, where local children overcame their fear of its dark interior and played.
"As I keep saying: the Joss House that is at Sovereign Hill is nothing like the Joss House that was on Main Road. It is nothing like it, nowhere as big. And there were two buildings...we used to go and play in the Joss House.
"It wasn't ever used a great deal, you never saw crowds of people there. The Doon family had a lot of information about it... Harry Doon started a little cafe in the block above the hospital on Sturt Street, he's long dead now but that's still there.
"Main Road used to flood quite a bit for some reason; it used to be three feet deep. All the firewood floated out of Hon's woodyard and we'd bring it in for home. My father worked on the railways, and so did my brother Harold."
Shirley's brother Harold Foo was president of the Ballarat Trades Hall and Labour Council in the 1970s, a member of the Communist Party of Australia and staunch unionist.
"Harold did a lot of good for a lot of people in Ballarat; there's still a picture of him up in the railway workshops I'm told," Shirley says.
"He was a very quiet person, like my father, but if you had any issues with work or the like, he made sure you were treated correctly."
