Moo Tai Mue Temple, Darwin

Moo Tai Mue Chinese Temple. Otherwise known as the Fisherman's Joss House. There is a prayer furnace at the side. The Joss House was on Fisherman’s Beach at Palmerston, below some cliffs.

Moo Tai Mue Temple, Darwin

Image Courtesy of: Peter Spillett Collection

"There are some people that are beginning to like John Chinaman – they get fish, prawns and fine vegetables, &c, which they could not procure awhile ago at any price."

The Northern Territory Times, 1 June 1878, p.1.

"...in strolling along the beach, ... he may suddenly come upon a small joss-house guarded by chipped stone dragons, with its gaudy gilt fretwork, waxen images, and pewter bowls, glimmering through the incense-thickened air...

Elsie Masson, An Untamed Territory, 1915, quoted in Sophie Couchman, In and Out of Focus:
Chinese and Photography in Australia, 1870s-1940s, Phd, 2009, p.279.

"... the new Northern Territory administration [the Commonweath in 1911] quickly got down to the more serious business of making the Commonwealth safe for its white destiny. In this case by, within a matter of weeks, the ‘closing of the avenues of employment’ of non-white peoples or ‘Asiatics’ as the term was, in ‘mining, fishing, coolie labor on the wharf and in gardens’. What the specific intention of those responsible for this was is unclear, but one result was an organised protest by 40 to 50 now unemployed ‘Chinese and Malays’ demanding either ‘employment or rations’. A well-argued petition declared ‘it means great hardship and in many cases starvation’.

Michael Williams, Australia’s Dictation Test: The Test it was a Crime to Fail, Brill, 2021, p.170.