Original subtitles

- All my performances begin with photographs.

First I take the slides, which I push around my light box,

then the words come.

I'd already done two shows about my Chinese heritage.

In my third show, I wanted to examine two themes.

The first centered around a journey I made

to far north, Queensland, to look into my family history.

The second involved my work

as a social photographer in Sydney.

When I reread my diaries from the early 90's,

I saw that I'd been to more wakes than parties.

I felt compelled to tell these stories of my friends,

to unburden myself of the things that I have seen.

(somber orchestral music)

(clicking)

I hadn't seen Allan for about three years.

I heard that he was back in Sydney.

I heard that he was sick and I was in ward 17

of St. Vincent's Hospital, that's the AIDS ward,

visiting another when I looked through one of the doors

and I saw Allan and I recognized him immediately,

but he had changed.

He seemed like an old man.

His best friend, Jeffrey was there to help him.

Allan had VMO Cistus at the time

and we thought he might die,

but he pulled through.

He began to improve.

He got his appetite back.

He began to put on weight.

He came to visit me and after lunch,

I took him upstairs to my studio,

put him under the lights and took this photo of him

and that was the best he ever looked during this period.

But the hospital was never far away.

He kept a diary and in it,

he wrote in all his hopes and dreams

as well as his deepest fears.

He wrote, I think more people die of self-pity

than die of AIDS.

I remember another entry.

I made my will today.

It wasn't as scary as I thought.

But there came a time when the quality of life

just wasn't good enough.

Allan knew that all the medicinal drugs he was taking

were keeping him alive, never-the-less,

he made the momentous decision to go off medication

and he'd been off medication about 10 days

when Jeffrey called me and told me

that Allan had taken a turn for the worse

and he warned me not to expect him to be

like the last time I saw him.

It seemed like his whole face had caved in.

He went into a coma.

I saw the nurse give him a glass of water,

but the water just ran out of his mouth.

I half expected him to be cold,

but he was burning with fever.

Later this night, Jeffrey called me up

and told me he had died.

I remembered Allan as a young man of 20

when I first met him.

We were boyfriends for over a year.

He was so full of life and enthusiasm and hope.

(soft somber music)

(cars honking)

In 1990, I began my research

into the Chinese in Australia.

I set off from Sydney in Cheryl,

my Toyota Crown with the Holden engine, traveling north.

(cheerful jazzy music)

I arrived at the house of my mother in Graceful, Brisbane.

My parents moved here from the north in 1969.

At the time, my brother and I were also living in Brisbane.

My father wanted us to move back home

and live under the same roof, Chinese style.

I thought the idea was a complete joke.

It was the last thing I wanted to do.

I was on my way out of Brisbane,

off to the brighter lights of Sydney.

This is the last photograph taken of us as a family.

My father died in 1975.

That's my brother Allen and my sister Francis,

the eldest child.

Francis married a Japanese American

and she's lived in California for over 25 years.

My mother hasn't taught me much about the family,

but there's one story she's told me

that I've never forgotten.

My mother's eldest sister, Bessie,

had an arranged marriage to William Feng Nguyen,

a rich land owner.

Feng Nguyen was 40 and Bessie was 16

and the Chinese thought that that was a very good match,

but in the 1920's, at a place called Merillian,

Feng Nguyen was murdered.

My mother regretted telling me that detail

because I'm the sort of person who talks about

that sort of thing, in public too.

We were brought up in the Western way.

My mother wanted us to assimilate.

She only wanted to do what was best by us

and she thought that by

putting us in the mainstream culture,

she was giving us the most opportunity.

She saw being Chinese as a liability, a useless thing.

I've grown up with the Chinese side lost and denied.

For most of my adult life,

I felt very uncomfortable about being Chinese,

but now I'm traveling north into my family's past,

into the territory of my uncle's murder.

(cheerful jazzy music)

Cheryl and I limped into Innisfail.

The north was hot, hotter than I'd ever remembered.

Cheryl had blown a thermostat as we arrived

at the house of my relative, Christine.

That's Christine.

She married the Italian, Vinny Perintosi,

who is a mechanic.

She's the oldest daughter of my late cousin, Dora Menon.

Christine and her brothers and sisters

all live in Innisfail.

They're a tight-knit group.

They all married Australians.

(clicking) Very good.

So here they are, my first cousins, twice removed

or you could call them my grand nieces and nephews.

Each of these kids is a quarter Chinese

and on their Chinese side,

they're all fifth generation Australians.

It takes 100 years to get a blend like that.

Okay, just look at me.

(people talking)

Okay, that's good.

Nicholaas rang me.

He had a proposal.

At the time, he was employed by ACON.

That's the AIDS counsel of New South Wales.

We'd worked together on a few posters

where I was the photographer.

He was wonderful to work with because he was very organized.

Nicolaas' proposal was this,

he wanted to commission me to take a portrait of him.

He explained that he didn't have enough money

to pay me for the session,

but he'd buy some prints.

He was turning 40 the next month

and I think he figured he was still looking good

and he'd get himself recorded.

As we went through the process of taking the photos

and doing the prints, we came to an agreement

that he would let me take his photo during his illness.

(somber piano music)

I went to see Herbert See Poy,

a distant relative by marriage.

The sign he's holding refers to the See Poy shop,

which later became the big department store in Innisfail

for nearly 100 years.

The See Poys were the premier

Chinese family of the district, no doubt about that.

Herbert knew William Feng Nguyen

and he told me that Feng Nguyen was murdered

by a white Russian, Peter Danalshenko

at a place called Cowley's Creek near Merrilian in 1922.

Danalshenko was a manager

on one of Feng Nguyen's cane farms.

Feng Nguyen employed him.

Herbert said, Feng Nguyen was a very rich man,

but he was also very arrogant.

On this particular day, he was paying Danalshenko

some money, probably for a salary,

when they had an argument.

- Show me some respect--

- [Narrator] Feng Nguyen dismissively threw the money

on the floor then turned his back on Danalshenko.

- Don't you turn your back on me.

- This so outraged the Russian that he shot him.

(firing shot)

Herbert stood up and gave a demonstration

of how it happened and it all seemed very convincing.

These are two very good friends of mine.

Peter Kingston the artist is also known as Kingo.

Scotty used to work with Kingo and lived with him.

Kingo was mad about Scotty and from Scotty's point of view,

they were close, but they had separate rooms.

Scotty was HIV positive,

but he hardly said anything about it.

When things got really bad,

Scotty had one great fear,

he hated hospitals and he feared that one day

he'd be taken in and there he'd get so sick

he'd never get out.

Scotty had another smaller fear,

he and Kingo used to live next door to an Indian restaurant.

Scotty thought it would be terrible if he died at home

and his body had to be taken past the restaurant,

especially if people were eating.

Never-the-less, one night, he sat in that chair,

he put on his favorite video,

and he took pills.

He died that night.

(cheerful piano music)

About a year later, I was reading Kingo's notice board

as you do, and I saw a photo.

Kingo, that must be Scotty's quilt.

As you probably know, when someone dies of AIDS,

the friends usually make a quilt for them.

They're quite big things, six feet by three feet.

I looked more closely.

Kingo, is that stitched?

Yes.

Did you do it all yourself?

Most of it.

Others helped, but some of the work wasn't good enough.

In the end, I had to unpick it and do it again

and I thought of Kingo, all those weeks,

all those months, sewing Scotty's quilt

and I was stunned by the labor of love

and the depth of the sadness.

(somber orchestral music)

(cheerful jazzy music)

Christine took me to visit my Auntie Kath,

half Chinese, half Irish.

Auntie Kath had married my late uncle, Charlie Wing.

She had a sharp tongue and a fiery temper.

My mother was appalled I was going to see her.

She said, don't believe a word she says.

Certainly my mother had not told me about

Auntie Kath's defacto, Bobby Lee Long,

who went into the kitchen and made these savories.

In Chinese circles, tinned crab meat on Sayos

is considered a delicacy.

I knew I was being treated like a V.I.P..

I asked Auntie Kath about Feng Nguyen's murder

and she said,

at the time, there were Kanakas in the district.

Kanakas were South Pacific Islanders who'd been brought in

to work on the cane fields as slave labor.

One of these Kanakas had left a spear in the room

where Feng Nguyen and Danalshenko had an argument

about a gambling debt.

Danalshenko grabbed the spear and

speared Feng Nguyen in the back.

And when he wasn't dead, he shot him in the head,

then kicked him under the bed.

It all seemed a bit farfetched and I was forced to consider

that perhaps my mother was right about Auntie Kath.

(cheerful jazzy music)

Christine said to me, why don't you visit our friend,

John Strano, he's got a farm on Cowley's Creek

where your uncle was killed.

John Strano said, yeah, there was a Chinaman

that owned this place before the people we bought it off.

In the kitchen, his mother said,

yes, that was Feng Nguyen.

He was shot in a shed in another paddock not far from here.

We'll take you there.

The shed had been blown away in a cyclone 10 years ago,

but they still had a photo of it.

Mrs. Strano said, but you should see Jennie Jury,

she's Dr. McKutchin's daughter and they

owned the farm before us.

Jennie said, oh yes, it was a big thing in the district.

Everybody talked about it and most people agreed,

Danalshenko was a bad egg.

Feng Nguyen and Danalshenko were playing at cards

when they had an argument and Danalshenko shot him.

(firing shot)

There was a trial and Danalshenko was acquitted.

Did you know that?

He got off.

And there was that thing about the diamond ring.

I said, the diamond ring?

Jenny said, yes, didn't you know?

Feng Nguyen had a thing about diamond rings.

There was one big diamond ring

that he always wore on his left hand.

Now, on the day of the murder,

on the day that he died,

that diamond ring disappeared.

A few years later, after he had been acquitted,

Danalshenko began to openly wear Feng Nguyen's diamond ring.

I saw it on his hand with my own two eyes.

So I stood in the place where my uncle had been shot.

I tried to put all the bits of the story together.

There was only one detail that everyone agreed on

and it was this, the Chinese felt very bitter

about the outcome of that trial.

It was a great miscarriage of justice.

(suspenseful orchestral music)

(people talking cheerfully)

When I first came down from Brisbane,

I met Peter Tally and David McDiarmid.

They'd come to Sydney from Melbourne.

They were artists and we all became great friends.

They were strong influences in my work.

Peter, because his work was zany and colorful and humorous,

David because his was overtly sexual and political.

Peter rang me from St. Vincent's Hospital.

I've just been diagnosed.

I've got full blown AIDS, he said.

I was stunned.

I didn't even know you were HIV positive.

Neither did I.

They messed up my last tests.

He said that he was responding to treatment.

He had pneumocystosis and he expected to recover from that.

Then he was going down to Victoria

to tell his parents the news.

Over the next three years,

Peter had a pretty good run.

He was hardly ever sick.

He had a lot of creative energy

and he had a retrospective exhibition

at the Australia National Gallery.

It was the first time they had given a retrospective

to a living artist.

That same year, Peter organized a bus trip.

The theme was tragic tourist.

He took us to tragic tourist destinations around Sydney.

The Toilets at Central Station.

Harry's Cafe de Wheels.

The sewage plant at Malabar.

He dressed up as Auntie Ruby

who first lost her teeth and then her colostomy bag.

As part of his immaculate makeup,

he painted age spots on his hands,

but everyone thought he had Pal posy Sarcomas.

The whole event was too close to the bone to be comfortable.

The response was wild hysterical laughter.

It was right on the cutting edge of life

where he always wanted to be.

(energetic party music)

He died in Paris.

He'd gone over to be in an exhibition.

He got sick and went to hospital.

We all expected him to get better and

come back to Sydney because we knew that was

what he wanted to do,

but he got worse.

An old friend from Melbourne, Murray,

went over to be with him.

David was supposed to go to,

but he got sick at the last moment and canceled.

Peter Talioni told his parents he had AIDS

three weeks before he died.

There was a lot of denial going on there.

He denied he was dying.

I took this photo of Peter and David in 1974.

They were best friends for over 20 years.

That's David's obituary for Peter in the Star Observer.

It was typical of David, acerbic,

full of bravado, and angry.

(cheerful jazzy music)

My northbound journey of 2000 kilometers

brings me to the house of Feng Nguyen's eldest son,

David in Cannes.

David said, my father was killed by a bullet,

fired into a room from outside.

The bullet hit the window mallian and ricocheted inside.

(shot firing)

It was an unlucky deflection.

It was fate that he died.

I remember that day.

I was eight years old.

I'd just come home from school and they

took me aside and said,

your father's dead.

He's been shot.

We went out to the farm,

there on the trolley was the body of my father,

wrapped in a blanket, sodden with blood.

I went to see the youngest son, Frank Feng Nguyen.

I asked him about his father

and he replied with an air of bravado.

My father was murdered by the Chinese mafia,

the Black Hand Gang.

(shot firing)

But Frankie was just a baby in arms at the time

and he would have heard that information second hand

many years later.

Nicholaas had severe sweats and night fevers

which they could not treat.

He had been very sick.

He'd been at hospital, but they let him come home.

The Carposi Sarcomas, the cancerous growths,

were just starting to come out on his hand,

but he remained in good cheer.

He had a very good attitude towards his illness.

He accepted it.

You could always talk to him about it.

I think he was able to be like this

because he believe in the afterlife.

He didn't think death was the end.

It didn't frighten him.

He showed me this Santeria or Grass Plant in his backyard.

He'd lived on a farm.

A bulldozer had knocked it out.

He brought it home to Red Fern and planted it.

It stayed in the ground for nine months before it grew.

He said, that's the only thing in this world

I'm attached to, the only thing I'll miss when I'm gone.

Dimbulah began as a railway junction between

mining towns and later it became a

tobacco growing district.

We were all born in Dimbulah.

None of us learned to speak Chinese

partly because my father, a hat-ga,

spoke a form of Mandarin, whereas my mother,

a si-yau, spoke Cantonese,

so English was their common language.

My mother could have taught us Cantonese,

but frankly, she couldn't see the point.

One day, when I was six years old,

one of the kids at school called me ching chong Chinaman,

born in a jar, christened in a teapot, ha, ha, ha.

I had no idea what he was talking about

although I knew from his expression,

he was being horrible to me

so I went home to my mother and I said to her,

mom, I'm not Chinese, am I?

And my mother looked at me very sternly and she said,

yes, you are.

Her tone was hard and it shocked me

and I knew in that instant that being Chinese

was like some terrible curse

and I could not rely on my mother for help

or my brother, who was four years older,

very much more experienced in the world,

he chimed in, and you'd better get used to it.

So for most of my life, I've had negative feelings

about being Chinese, which is rather ironic

since now I seem to have made a career of it.

(cheerful jazzy music)

When I was coming back from my first trip north,

I stopped at the Innisfail Courthouse

and I asked the girl behind the counter

if she had anything on the trial of Peter Danalshenko.

The girl went into an adjoining room

and she came back with a dusty cardboard carton

marked 1920 to 1930.

Yes, there's something here,

but it's not the transcript of the trial that you wanted.

It's the depositions or sworn statements of the witnesses.

The testimonies of the simple Chinese laborers

were vastly different from the testimonies

of the policemen, one of whom gave a statement

that was so biased, it's almost absurd.

- [Male Voiceover] Charges me too much for my goods.

He charges everybody too much for their--

- I think I can say that they were out to get Feng Nguyen

or rather, they were trying to save the white man.

In those days, killing a Chinaman was not considered

a serious crime.

This is the place where the murder was committed.

It wasn't the shed that the Stranos showed me,

but a much earlier, more primitive building.

No one got it right about the motive for the crime.

It wasn't about a card game or a gambling debt,

although it was about money indirectly.

What they argued about was the weight of cane

that'd been in the railway trucks to the mill.

I guess Feng knew and accused Danalshenko

of cooking the books.

- You are stealing from me.

- They had an argument and Danalshenko shot him.

(firing shot)

He was holding these papers when he died.

My mother gave evidence at this hearing.

She was asked about the diamond ring

and she said that she'd never seen him take it off.

So the diamond ring was a real object.

It really shocked me to see

my mother's signature on that page

because she'd never told me about it.

I think this event was a very traumatic experience for her.

She was only 16 at the time.

It was proof that being Chinese in this country

was not only undesirable, it was also dangerous.

You could be murdered and your killer go free

just because you are Chinese.

The legacy of this murder came down to me

in the way that my Chineseness was denied.

Perhaps it was my mother's way of protecting us

from Feng Nguyen's fate.

(upbeat dance music)

I photographed the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

for the last 20 years.

For a community overwhelmed by debt,

the Mardi Gras was a chance to celebrate life.

In 1981, Peter Tally wore this costume.

The next year, he became the artistic convener

of the Mardi Gras for several years

and his input into the event was tremendous.

That year, Scotty came dressed as a sailor.

In real life, he was a sailor from Longsester

who joined the Navy and come to Sydney.

In 1982, Allan wore accessories by Peter Tally

and he carried a satin pink triangle flag.

At the party, Peter wore his Judy Free outfit.

Judy usually carried a sign.

She became famous for that sign.

Like Peter, David was also an artistic convener

of the Mardi Gras.

In 1990, Scotty came dressed as an AIDS apparition.

The volcanic eruptions on his head

symbolize the headaches he was getting from Meningitis.

Scotty loved the Mardi Gras.

He saved himself for just one more

because three weeks after this photo was taken,

he took those pills.

David rang me.

Could I take a photo of him in front of his big queue

at the Art Gallery of New South Wales?

His physical deterioration was happening quickly.

He felt it would be the last time

he would like having his photo taken.

David's creative spirit was bright and vibrant

but his body failed him.

It was heartbreaking.

I've two weeks left to live, he said.

The news has just come through.

Two weeks, that was all the time that was left.

There was so much he wanted to do.

But David, I said, we always want more time

and usually there is something left undone.

It was no consolation.

He wanted more.

He left some of his work for others to complete

like these totems made of Peter's collection

of anodized kitchen utensils.

They were some of the few things

that David ended up with after Peter's death.

To me, they symbolized David and Peter's friendship in art.

I was leaving on a tour the next day.

I didn't have a plan for my behavior.

I thought I'd take my cues from him.

We said goodbye at the door as if

we'd see each other again the next week,

although we both knew this would be the last time.

This is all very strange, was his only comment.

I felt it too.

In the 50's my parents built their dream home,

but when I saw it on my trip north,

it was in a very bad state of repair and it was empty.

By some stroke of fate,

my sister came out for a visit from America in 1992

and we all went up to North Queensland for a holiday,

my brother, my sister, my mother, and I.

My mother had a wonderful time seeing old friends.

The trip went well,

but 10 days after this photo was taken,

after she had returned back home to Brisbane,

my mother died suddenly.

My mother had a stroke on the Friday

and she was taken to hospital in a paralyzed condition.

As she lay there, I think she had a choice,

either she could cling to life

or she could let go.

I think that the trip to North Queensland

gave my mother a bit of space.

She had a chance to see all the places of the past,

to see old friends and relatives, to say goodbye.

Her family was around her.

She was happy.

I think this allowed my mother

to slip gently into the next world.

(somber orchestral music)

When my mother died,

my brother rang me from Brisbane to tell me.

He burst out crying on the telephone.

I hadn't heard my brother cry

since we were children together.

I said, when do you want me to come up?

He said, get the next plane.

Always he'd been my older brother,

very independent, never needing me.

This was the first time he'd ever asked anything of me.

The hardest thing was walking into that room, home,

and she wasn't there.

My mother wrote to me on Friday,

the day before she died.

Dear William, it took me two days to fully recover

from our whirlwind trip.

I have enjoyed every minute of it.

My watch has stopped.

Either I'll get another battery

or perhaps I need a new one.

The flowers you sent me for Mother's Day are still fresh.

I have some roses in bloom,

love mother.

Nicholaas was admitted to Prince Henry Hospital

at La Peruse.

They suspected he might have Tuberculosis,

but while he was there, he had a heart attack.

His mother and his brother came out from South Africa

to be with him.

In typical Nicholaas organized fashion,

he told them he had given me permission to take his photo

and they weren't to stop me.

I was only with him a short time this day.

He was very weak and very tired,

but on the Sunday, he called me up.

He said, I'm feeling much better today,

why don't you come over.

Oh Nicholass, I said,

I've got someone helping me in the darkroom.

I can't come.

So I went to see him on the Wednesday,

but in the meantime, his liver had completely collapsed.

He was bright yellow.

He was in a semi-coma and it was obvious he was dying.

When he heard that I was there,

he seemed to come out of his semi-coma

because there was something he wanted to tell me.

His motor functions had gone.

He could hardly speak and the words that came out

were in Africans.

It was terrible and frustrating

because we couldn't work out what he wanted to say.

Finally he said the word photograph

and I knew what he wanted.

He hadn't told me which photo he wanted

printed on the card to be distributed after his death.

And when I realized this, I said,

Nicholaas, don't worry, I already know.

Rita's told me on the phone.

It's all under control,

but I felt terrible that I'd put him through all this

when I could have seen him on the Sunday.

Always we think there is more time.

The next day, he died and I was confronted by that

indescribable abyss that exists between

those two opposites, the living and the dead.

(soft somber music)

- [Man] We remember Ron Oshey, Peter Tulley,

Luke Besier--

- [Woman] We remember Dr. Ralph Dietrich.

- [Man] We remember Michael Richardson,

Rowan Mustgrave, Michael o'Sullivan.

- [Narrator] I have told you some of the stories

of my friends, but you have to multiply these stories

many times to get a picture of the community.

- Glenn James, Joe Mally, David McDiarmid,

and my friend, Paul Phillips.

- [Narrator] I spoke at Allan's funeral

and I read the eulogy at my mother's.

The two strands of my story, the gay and the Chinese side,

had come together over the common experience of grief.

- [Man] For all those who have been in our care--

- [Woman] We remember.

- [Man] Eric James--

- [Woman] Remember their names--

- [Man] Wayne Adams and my friend, Stephen Cummings.

- I wrote to a friend, I have been very sad at times,

and I have cried, but I'm feeling better now.

People have been caring and supportive

and there is kindness everywhere.

I am grateful to experience a better side of human nature.

The Chinese believe that the true self,

the real I, is a spirit which never dies,

which is eternal.

At death, the spirit sheds off the physical body

like a garment and begins a journey in the next world.

I would like to wish all those spirits,

already departed, well.

We should not try to pull them back

to this physical world with our sadness.

Let them go.

They have a new journey to travel.

The sage, Laozi, said, there's no difference

between the living and the dead.

They are the same channel of vitality.

Loved ones are never lost.

They are always here in the heart.

(somber orchestral music)

(soft somber music)