Stanley Hunt

Stanley Hunt

Image Courtesy of: Stanley Hunt

Stanley Hunt tells his story in From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography (wild peony, 2010). Born in a south China village to a family with strong links to Australia and schooled in the county capital of Shekki, Stanley came to Australia at a young age and established his life here while maintaining ties with his home village. The most remarkable aspect of this typical Australian story — as typical as one originating in a British or Italian village — is that it is not generally recognised as typical.

Stanley Hunt can be seen as a bridge between the sojourner and the permanent resident, a dynamic that has been a defining feature of Chinese Australian history. For generations, fathers and grandfathers worked in Australia while maintaining families in China. Stanley embodied this Chinese-Australian heritage. Arriving at a young age, he largely grew up in Australia and worked in the vegetable trade for most of his life, a stereotypically “Chinese” occupation. However, as a store owner and employer of often non-Chinese staff, he did not fit neatly into many of the stereotypes of Chinese Australians that still persist. Later in life, Stanley was also prominent in Chinese Australian organisations and in donating educational resources to his family village in southern China.

Stanley Hunt’s From Shekki to Sydney is one of only a small number of near-contemporary sources whose narrative stretches from the mid-twentieth-century wartime period through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This remains a significantly under-researched period of Chinese Australian history.

From Shekki to Sydney

Image Courtesy of: Stanley Hunt