William Tangee

William Tangee didn’t come to Australia to seek his fortunes on the gold fields, nor did he come to Australia to start a new life as a market gardener in a town which was formed on the back of the gold rush in Omeo in 1850.

At around 18 years of age, the teenager was kidnapped on the streets of Amoy in China and loaded aboard a ship destined for Australia, to work as an indentured servant in a land that was only just starting to be settled by white man.

At this time, William was known as Tong Jee and appears to have arrived in Geelong in 1848 on the Phillip Laing.  One of 125 Chinese men onboard, Tong was brought to Gippsland to work for local landowners, and is believed to have ended up at Snake Ridge working for John King.  The Snake Ridge Homestead was located across the river from where the township of Rosedale would be established.  

The young Chinese man would befriend another young man also sent to the region, Poa Nine.  Poa would be based at the Holey Plains Homestead before establishing a bakery in Rosedale. 

We don’t know for how long Tong was a servant at the King homestead but in 1859, he became a naturalized British subject, beginning the process of anglicizing his name to Tangee and then adopting the name William.

By 1863, William married 19 year old Catherine Loughlin.  This marriage may have been arranged with Catherine’s mother appearing to be focused on getting her daughters married or working.

Now living in the Desailly Flats on the outskirts of Sale, William and Catherine had eight children between 1864 and 1877.  Life in the flats wasn’t easy.  Set on the flood plains, the land may have been great for growing vegetables but when the Spring rains would follow the Winter snow melt, the gardeners would have mere hours to move their tools, animals and anything of value before the rising Latrobe and Thomson Rivers would meet and flood the land surrounding them.

William had built a reputation for the quality of his vegetables in the region and regularly entered the competitions at the local Agricultural Shows.

 In April 1877, the local newspaper reported from the North Gippsland Agricultural Show.  “The show of vegetables and fruit was first class for this period of the year, and Tangee, an irritable little Chinaman, who was at constant war with that social problem – the boys – achieved quite a proud position as prize taker.”

William would follow up his April success at the Spring Agricultural Show in November of the same year.  “Our familiar Asiatic costermonger, Tangee, shone in esculents”.

In the same year, William and Catherine would welcome and say goodbye to a daughter, Jane and welcomed another daughter, Alice in 1881.  But with the joy of the birth of his daughter, William also experienced tragedy with the death of his six year old son John, who succumbed to scarlet fever.

This may have been the turning point for William, or maybe Australia wasn’t the promised land that he had hoped for but, the next year, after 30 years in a foreign land, William would take his 6 year old son James and return to China, with neither of them to return.

William Tangee (Tong Jee)

Born: 1830 in Amoy, China

Died:  Unknown, China

Great Grandfather of Edward William Heard