Nexus系列 2：Chung Wa 中华

pinxinge

ADAM LOWE: My name is Adam Lowe. I'm the president of the Chung Wah Society and I have been for the last seven years. The Chung Wah Society is basically a community organisation that was set up in 1949, officially. And what it does today is to provide facilities and services to its members. The temple, here, we maintain as a place of worship. We do follow the Chinese culture and the biggest event is the Chinese New Year. Every year, we have a street dance of our lions - there's seven or eight lions which we visit all the business premises or anybody who wants to be visited by lions for the New Year, as is the tradition. And the temple that we're in now is the third incarnation of the temple that has been here since the 1880s. It caters for three basic religions - that's Taoist, Buddhism and Confucianism. It was severely damaged in the 1930s, when a cyclone came through. And then we had another damage during the war, of course, and it was written off and rebuilt. And then, in 1975, we had... '74, sorry, we had Cyclone Tracy, which completely demolished it. And the one we're sitting in now is the rebuilt version of the temple.
JAMES: I'm James. I look after this temple. I'm the caretaker. And I open the doors, or the gates, for the temple, and then see that, you know, the things here are clean. And then, sometimes, I have to entertain the visitors. And there are a lot of tourists from everywhere.
ADAM LOWE: The Chinese in the Northern Territory, and particularly in Darwin, go back a long way. The first official recorded history of the Chinese started in 1874, when the first boat load of indentured labour were recruited from Singapore. Well, the Chinese have been involved in most things since they were here. First of all, they came over as basically servants and labourers. And then, as years went by, they became more affluent to the stage where, just before the 1920s, 1930s, I guess, they actually controlled the financial wealth of the Territory, through their own investments, business dealings and so forth. And I know there's quite a number of stories that if it wasn't for the Chinese money, Darwin wouldn't have existed, because they had control of the funds and the wherewithal to allow business to proceed. Like they owned market gardens, fresh fruit and vegetables which, before they arrived, were nonexistent, because the Europeans had no idea how to grow vegetables in the tropics. So it was quite a surprise that they could grow so much... ..a wide range of vegetables in Darwin. But they did. Each family has their own way of surviving and, you know, based out of different industries. A lot of them became shopkeepers, they owned laundries, they even ran basic transport - delivery of goods from, you know, one town to another. So they covered the whole gamut of life as it was in those days. And they did the hard yakka, from dawn to dark.
This is part of the Northern Territory Chinese Museum. It's a section on dealing with the family trees. These family trees are of the early arrivals of the Chinese in the Territory. Well, this is my grandfather, Low Dep Chitt. And all the descendants are listed on here. And there's 13 children. But currently, that's 700 descendants that we can count and that we know of.
Darwin used to have a Chinatown up to about the Second World War. There was quite a viable Chinatown. But it evolved from the early 1900s and hit its peak around about the 1930s. It was the centre of Darwin. All the property, as far as we can know, were owned by Chinese. And from there, all the business was done. Now, during the war, Chinatown was severely damaged by the bombing. When the town was evacuated, the Australian Government of the day decided that they would demolish Chinatown. The philosophy was that, "We won't let the Chinese "rebuild another Chinatown in Darwin." And that's why, in Darwin, now, there's no such place as Chinatown. All the Chinese are scattered amongst the suburbans, where everybody else lives, which is a good thing in one way but sad in another.

原始来源：http://australianetwork.com/nexus/default.htm


[ 本帖最后由 pinxinge 于 21-8-2010 01:17 编辑 ]

pinxinge

***Vocabulary***
business premises: 经营场所
incarnation： a period of life in a particular form
Taoist, Buddhism and Confucianism道教，佛教，儒家
cyclone 飓风
written off：报废
caretaker：a person whose job is to take care of a building
Indentured labor 契约劳工
affluent：Having a great deal of money; wealthy
wherewithal：The money or other means needed for a particular purpose
tropics 热带
gamut：The complete range or scope of something
Hard yakka艰苦的工作一般指体力劳动