A Certificate in Accordance with the Act

Abstract

The twenty-eighth of February 2012 was the 150th anniversary of the cut-off date for nearly 13,000 residents of New South Wales to register under the Chinese Immigrants Regulation and Restriction Act of 1861. The author's great-great grandfather “Apow” (Gwok Ah Poo, also known as George Harper) received a parchment certificate, numbered 1311, on the Tambaroora goldfield. While the National Museum of Australia may have one of these certificates, and the National Archives of Australia holds another two, the vast majority of these durable documents appear to have disappeared. A public request for information on other examples in private hands (published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, 18 February 2012) confirmed the existence of only one more of these potentially informative documents. Show more