Chinese Australians fought and died alongside their white countrymen then faced discrimination and marginalisation when they returned home.
The Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial lists the names of the more than 102,000 Australian men and women who have died as a result of their service in uniform. Among those names is that of Private Arthur William Moy, who served with the 39th Battalion in. He was born near Stawell in western Victoria, the son of Ah Moy, a Chinese man, and his English wife, Mary. Two of Arthur’s brothers, Charlie and John, also enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force.
. The Chinese press encouraged the enlistment of Chinese-Australians and took out advertisements encouraging the Chinese community to contribute to war loans. They also contributed to battalion comfort funds and raised money for the Red Cross and for welfare benefits for those returning wounded. A typical recruit from the early days was George Griffiths, a Chinese-Australian from Victoria, who enlisted on August 18, 1914, just two weeks after the declaration of war. He was a miner aged 30, single, 5′7″ tall, from Talbot, north of Ballarat. His battalion, the 8th, was formed in rural Victoria within a fortnight of the declaration of war. With his low serial number, Griffiths would have been an early recruit..
Billy soon went to work. He took up a sniping position at Chatham’s Post; he moved around the frontline, often with his observer, Ion Idriess, later a noted author. His experience in the Queensland bush as a hunter and crack shot quickly brought him to the attention of his officers, first to General Birdwood, the Australian Commander, then to General Ian Hamilton, the Commander of the British forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, and finally to Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War.
Thanks to the work of Dr Edmond Chiu, Dr Sophie Couchman and the diligent researchers at the Chinese Museum, there have been identified 34 Chinese Anzacs who fought at Gallipoli. Four were killed in action, a further eight were wounded and two suffered from “enteric” fever. This was, in fact, typhoid fever, a debilitating disease caused by poor sanitation, unclean food or infected water. But inoculations kept the mortality rate low. The fever lasted from one to eight weeks.
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