- Quong Tart came to Australia in 1859 as an enterprising nine-year-old, where he later established a tea export business and set up elegant tea rooms
- At a time when there were few places women could mingle with ease, the tea rooms formed important venues for women’s early discussions on getting the vote
A lovely story about a Chinese-Australian that I’d never heard of (why not?), but ought be more widely known: Quong Tart, aka Quong. He was an entrepreneur and philanthropist in late 19th and early 20th century Sydney. About the same time our grandfather arrived from Ballymena in Northern Ireland and set up his own shop, Forsythe’s, on the corner of Pitt and Goulburn, just a few blocks south of Quong’s King St Tea House, above. Quong’s Tea shops flourished and survived while Forsythe’s was wiped out in the depression.
Quong gets his name from the transliteration of his name in Cantonese (he was from Taishan, Guangdong): Mei Kwong Tat, but which someone — perhaps an immigration officer — chose to render as Quong Tart. It was common practice in those days for the names of new arrivals with “funny names” to be given one by the first officer they met. In Mandarin it’s Mei Guangda (梅光达). More at Wikipedia
/Snip, from the article…
A group of wealthy and respectable middle-class Sydney women gathered in a tea room in the 1890s, where they “sat by favour of that Chinese gentleman” Quong Tart while considering how best to fight for the right to vote, a movement that was gaining ground in England.
Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald decades later, Maybanke Anderson, one of the city’s prominent women’s activists, remembered the moment in 1891 when she and a comrade, Rose Scott, “first spoke a few words on the subject of women’s suffrage” in one of Quong Tart’s tea rooms.
By the 1890s, women around the world had been fighting for the vote for years, and they would keep up the struggle for many more, despite being beaten, arrested, sent to prison and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.
Australia, after New Zealand, was one of the first nations to allow women to go to the ballot box, first in individual states and federally in 1902.
Quong Tart’s elegantly appointed tea rooms on Sydney’s King Street, and later in the still-standing Queen Victoria Building and elsewhere in the city, were important venues for Australian women’s early discussions on the battle for universal suffrage. Click here to read more…
