Book Launch: The Old Reliable Firm by Dr Sophie Couchman

Join Dr Sophie Couchman and the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia as Dr Mei-fen Kuo launches The Old Reliable Firm, Good Workmanship Guaranteed: A Chinese Australian Story of Family, Migration and Entrepreneurship.

Historian Dr Sophie Couchman met the Leong and Lim families in 2012 when they took a guided tour of the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne. Gary Leong had been researching his maternal grandfather, Lim Kee Tey, and his involvement in Melbourne’s cabinetmaking industry, and he was keen to share this history with the rest of the family. In 2021, Sophie was commissioned to write a history of the two families. What started as a simple family story evolved into a more significant history. The journeys of two young men from different parts of the Pearl River Delta to Australia in the late nineteen century – and then, with their Australian families, back to Hongkong in the early twentieth century – are a part of a much bigger history that explores the importance of the overseas Chinese diaspora in the economic development of Australia, the growth of villages and towns in Kwangtung province, and the cosmopolitan character of colonial Hong Kong.