‘I am nearly heartbroken about him’: stories of Australian mothers' separation from their ‘Chinese’ children

In 1911, Frances Storey of Paddington wrote to the Prime Minister to plead for his assistance in bringing her son Charles back to Australia. Charles had been living in China for the previous two years with relatives of his father, and now her letters to him were being returned unopened. In 1913, Beatrice Denham of Carlton met with the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs to see whether he could provide help in securing the return of her two children, Alice and Eric. They were living with her late husband's first wife in a village inland from Hong Kong, but she wanted them to come back ‘home’ to Melbourne. Both Beatrice and Frances, suffering the pain of separation from their children, turned to government authorities for help. Using records from the National Archives of Australia, this paper will follow their attempts to be reunited with their children, as they struggled with the difficulties of their cross-cultural lives. Their stories, and others like them, demonstrate that Chinese-Australian intermarriage demanded a complex negotiation between two very different ideas of family.