An Ordinary Australian Family

Lee Sam, dead on Friday, was buried on a fine Monday in August just days before the Great War began. I notice the event wandering through the pages of the Melbourne Argus looking for shadows of my family story, in a handful of days that marked our history. The eighty-eight-year-old Grand Master of Gee Hing, a Chinese Masonic Society, had lived over fifty years in Australia. More than a thousand people gathered outside the Lonsdale Street headquarters of the society, which was also his home, on the day of his funeral, and groups gathered along the way to watch as the funeral procession made its way to Kew Cemetery. At the head of the cortege a band playing the “Dead March” was followed by 150 of the society’s country members marching ahead of a long procession of a hundred cabs carrying more society members. At the graveside, with five or six hundred mourners gathered about, the religious ceremony was performed by two Methodist ministers. Selina, my grandmother, brought the…