Cochran Town, 2015

Single thread hand-sewn embroidery

41 x 42 cm

Boroondara City Council Collection

The embroideries in Cochran Town are replicas of pages within the diary of Jong Ah Siug, a Chinese migrant to Australia in the mid-1800s. The author kept the diary whilst he was incarcerated for the majority of his life in the Yarra Bend and Sunbury lunatic asylums in Victoria from 1866.

The palm-sized diary was written in pidgin English by Jong and contains detailed descriptions and accurate maps of the towns and cities he lived in and travelled through. The only remaining legacy of Siug, the diary was a proclamation of his sanity, however difficult it was via his expression of limited English. It is thought that he intended to present it to the Duke of Edinburgh, who came to Australia for a royal tour in 1867, to regain his freedom.

The diary, however, never made its way to the relevant authorities, and instead ended up in the State Library of Victoria as a ‘literary curiosity’ in 1880, twenty years before the author’s death while still incarcerated in 1900. The diary now stands as a testament to the ramifications of cultural misunderstanding and mistranslation of the Chinese community at that time.