History's orphans
With my mother's 80th birthday approaching, I have in the past year developed a keen interest in history. Dozens of nights of searching internet databases to help build a family tree have turned up all manner of facts I hadn't known or realised about my forebears. They are probably of little interest to anyone other than me and my relatives, but they have made me more aware of who I am, where I came from and how I got here. The sense of pride and understanding this has brought makes me realise Hong Kong has much to gain from paying better attention to its past.
No one famous has been turned up by my research. The people from humble backgrounds have nonetheless been present at some of the most important events that shaped modern Australia. My ancestors were on the First Fleet convict ships that sailed from England in 1787 to found a new British colony, among the migrants who fled the Highland clearances of Scotland in the 1830s, working the goldfields in the latter half of the 19th century and on the battlegrounds at Gallipoli in 1915. Family lore says my great-great-grandmother rode the horse of bushranger Ned Kelly and my father left the misery of post-war Germany to build the suburbs that turned the capital, Canberra, from a village to a city. It's a heritage that would make any Australian proud.
A year ago I had barely an inkling of these events. I believed that where my family had come from was of minor significance to where my life was going. Thinking that the past has little bearing on the present and future is a common error made by societies. Hong Kong has been especially prone to the problem since its British colonial days began in 1842. Progress has been perceived as tearing down the past, which is why so few buildings of even half a century ago remain. But history matters. 'He who controls the past controls the future' - the totalitarian party slogan from English writer George Orwell's landmark book 1984 - is as apt a way of expressing its importance as there could be. Answers for the future lie in what happened in the past. We need to do our best to preserve it physically and, if that is not possible, its memory.
That's why an idea floated in this newspaper last week by local historians Dan Waters and Tony Banham has me so interested. They believe that forgotten people, places and events should be remembered with plaques, much as happens in cities elsewhere. There are a sprinkling of these already, but some, like that on the boulder in Chater Garden that tells of the 1890 to 1904 reclamation, have become almost illegible or obscured. A few, like the one that once marked 8 Gough Street, where revolutionary Sun Yat-sen held meetings, disappeared when the building was demolished.
Waters sent me an extensive and compelling partial wish-list. Among plaques he would like to see are ones in front of the Hung Shing Temple in Queen's Road East showing the water line when British rule began; marking Victoria Barracks in Hong Kong Park, the British command headquarters when the Japanese attacked in 1941; showing Queen's Pier, where dignitaries arrived and departed; indicating that 41 Conduit Road, where the Foreign Correspondents' Club once stood, was where most of the 1955 Hollywood movie Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, was filmed; and kung fu star Bruce Lee's home in Kowloon Tong.
Politics shouldn't be allowed to get in the way. Debate raging in the Letters to the Editor column on which flag should fly at the Cenotaph in Central are telling. The People's Republic of China did not exist at the time of the two wars that are remembered and Chinese were not the only participants - yet no other flag is represented. Banham's suggestion to me that a plaque-laying project should be tourism-led, and directed by a committee that includes historians and academics at its core, is crucial.