Pig Oven, Stuart Town

A pig oven in Stuart Town was identified by Hoy Lee (1911-2006) in an interview with historian Janis Wilton in 1999. Lee was the son of Wong War Lai (Tommy Lee), who came to New South Wales from Baak Shek village in Jang Sheng County in 1888 to work in the Fong Lee store in Wellington, later opening his Yee Lee store at Stuart Town. Hoy Lee recalled his father’s pig oven in the backyard of the Yee Lee store:

He built a brick oven out in the backyard ... It was built of bricks and mud ... Down the bottom he has a little hole where he put a brick in so you could scrape the ashes out ... he used to light a fire in it ... and the heat would be in the oven itself ... you hung the piece of pork off a bar of iron across the top and to keep the heat in the thing you had a dish over the top with a wet bag over the top ...

The Yee Lee store closed around 1945 and the family sold up. Though the store still stands in Stuart town as a private residence, there is today no sign of the pig oven in the backyard.

Janis Wilton, ‘Thomas Hoy Lee: Remembering Stuart Town’ (transcript of Wilton's 1999 interview of Thomas Hoy Lee), in Lost Story: Old Stories, History and Tales, Accessed 14 August 2023, In Juanita Kwok, A reassessment of Chinese pig ovens in Australia, Journal of Australasian Mining History, Vol. 21, October 2023, p.130.