Chinese Anzacs: Australia’s secret shame

The remarkable untold story of Australia’s 241 World War I Chinese Anzacs has finally been unearthed.

Keith Shang, 92, son of Sidney Shang, poses with son Sydney and granddaughter Emma in Maryborough. Picture: John Wilson

They were unsung heroes of the Anzac legend. And more than a century after the Great War ended, the remarkable untold story of Australia’s 241 Chinese Anzacs has finally been ­unearthed.

Will Davies, one of Australia’s leading war historians, says he was “astounded” to discover there had been Chinese Diggers in World War I — something he stumbled on last year during a visit to the Chinese Museum in Melbourne.

“I’ve been reading and studying the First World War for 25 years and I’d never heard of them,” Dr Davies said yesterday.

Most of the Chinese Anzacs were descendants of gold rush era migrants, many of them living on the fringes of society.

“Native” Australian-born Chinese, says Dr Davies, were officially banned from serving on the frontline because they were deemed too small and did not meet the army’s “substantially British origin” requirements.

Sidney Shang, second left, with Eric Ping, second right, and Ernest and Elise Deventer, a Belgian couple who billeted the Chinese Anzacs after the war. Picture: Joanna Olsen

But such was their fervour to be part of the country’s war effort many that men such as Joanna Olsen’s grandfather, Sidney Wah Shang, refused to accept it. “Sidney’s attitude would have been, ‘I have the same right to fight for king and country as anyone else’,” says Ms Olsen.

His first knock-back by the army, she says, was in part because his large extended family were well known in the then wild frontier Queensland town of Cairns for running a fan-tan gambling club and other illegal sidelines, including an opium den. He did succeed on his second attempt in early 1916, but only after he replaced his middle name, Wah, with the more imperial-sounding Waugh, a nod to his half-English mother, Mary Jane Shang.

Sidney’s older brother, Caleb, also joined the frontline in 1916 and would later return a war hero, celebrated for his bravery by WWI historian Charles Bean, who described Caleb as a “wiry half-caste”.

“In the language of the day, that was high praise,’’ Ms Olsen says.

Despite the overt racism towards Chinese-Australians at the time, Dr Davies says those attitudes did not extend to the battlefield, where Chinese Diggers were very much regarded as equals by fellow soldiers.

Caleb Shang wearing his war medals.

In all, 19 Chinese Anzacs would be awarded for bravery — including the highly decorated Billy Sing, a five-foot-two horse driver from Queensland who had an unofficial kill rate of 300.

More than one in five of Chinese Anzacs died in battle.

Ms Olsen says when Sidney and Caleb returned home, the Cairns community raised money to buy a house for their mother and a taxi for Caleb.

But Sidney would never receive any of the usual veteran entitlements, such as a pension or a soldier settlement lot, despite the fact “both of the boys came back very ill”.

“Sidney had deafness from gunfire, his teeth rotted in the army but the army wouldn’t give him dentures, he suffered pulmonary tuberculosis and he had a really bad skin rash from being gassed in the war.”

High-profile Sydney philanthropist Albert Wong says he was so moved to learn Chinese-Australians had such a direct stake in the “sacred” Anzac tradition that he commissioned Dr Davies to write a book about it.

The Forgotten, which also charts China’s effort in the Great War, will be published on November 11, Armistice Day.