Family fortunes
Original Purple Wiggle Jeff Fatt finds a sense of belonging thanks to Who Do You Think You Are?
Jeff Fatt:
The racism that my ancestors would have encountered, it’s quite amazing what they would have had to endure.
Jeff Fatt’s ancestors survived cyclones, dealt with discrimination and also thrived over generations in Australia.
The original Purple Wiggle discovered just how resilient they were as he delved into his past for the latest series of Who Do You Think You Are?
“It’s very enriching to know the details of certain events that occurred in my ancestors’ lives. In hindsight it gives you a bit of regret in not asking my parents more about their lives, it just seems to make it even more interesting,” Fatt said.
Fatt’s mum lived in Hong Kong at a time of great progress and he took great delight in discovering more about how glittering her life would have been, while taking part in the genealogy series.
“It seems that she’d led quite a colourful life, particularly her lifestyle back in Hong Kong I would imagine it was quite glamorous,” he said.
“She did allude to little snippets of things like that. The classic early days in Hong Kong would have been sensational. Hong Kong back in the ’30s was a growing vibrant colony and particularly with the British there. It would have been such a diverse society and with her family being relatively well off, I would imagine that enabled her to have that societal lifestyle as a teenager.”
But, the glamour made way for tougher times as his mum and her family fled Hong Kong with the rise of communism in China and the Japanese invasion, for the safety of Australia, only to be blocked from disembarking the ship because of the White Australia policy.
That wasn’t the only moment of hardship Fatt discovered in his ancestors’ backgrounds. With his Chinese heritage, going back four generations, Fatt found links to Australia’s goldfields and even a mixed-race marriage.
“I’d always known about that but I didn’t know the circumstances as to why mixed-race relationships, between Chinese [men] and European women, was quite a common caste because it was very rare for Chinese women to come out to Australia in those times,” he said. “It was the time of the Gold Rush and it’s a very unknown period.
Also Chinese women were very family-oriented and they would have been away from the families so there were quite a range of reasons why that didn’t happen and why Chinese men ended up with European women, because there were no Chinese women around.”
What Fatt knows now is that this mixed-race relationship would have faced intense racism at the time.
“White society would have frowned upon it,” he said.
But, on the flip side, his ancestors worked hard and were extremely successful, and Fatt was shown through this research just how resilient they must have been.
“Offsetting that is the success of their business and their dealings with the European community which is what was revealed amongst my ancestors – they were very active with the European community and that helped to create a bridge between the two societies and I was quite proud of the fact that that was going on,” he said.
For the musician, the whole experience has opened him up to his Chinese heritage – a side of his background that he’d never really explored before.
“I’d never really been interested in the way that the Chinese were treated back then because, growing up with a classic European upbringing, I’d never seen myself as being very Chinese. My mother taught me a little bit of Cantonese but I’d never really felt Chinese.
But with all this research
I do feel much more Chinese and very proud of it,” he said.
“And particularly the racism that my ancestors would have encountered, it’s quite amazing what they would have had to endure.”
He also discovered some potentially interesting health implications through his greatgrandfather Joseph, who died because of heart problems.
“He had a relatively early demise. He lived through a cyclone in Darwin which would have been quite harrowing.
“I’d love to have known whether my grandmother, who lived through that cyclone as a six-year-old, whether she suffered any traumatic effects from that.”
Taking part in the show has brought out a new passion in Fatt for his family history, and for sharing it.
“I have four other siblings and my remaining aunty on my father’s side and there’s quite a few other relatives on my mother’s side. There’s one who I’m trying to follow up at the moment because she was a cousin of my mother,” he said.
“I have done a family tree and I’ve got 900 people in it at the moment. This experience actually opened up to me the colourful nature of what they were doing and it wasn’t as one-dimensional as just finding out where my greatgrandparents came from, but really provided a lot of colourful detail about their lives.”
As often happens when people participate in this TV series, Fatt wants to keep digging into his past.
“Around my ancestors, there was a huge community and I have been looking at various Facebook groups of Chinese in NSW and in Australia to see how there’s some very similar stories going on,” he said. “It made me more in tune with my family and wanting to find out even more.”
When borders start to open up, Fatt would like to travel to China to see for himself where his family lived. The journey has just begun for him.
“There’s villages where my ancestors would have come from so I’d love to just find out where that actually is to experience that sort of thing,” he said.
“Some of my other relatives have gone back to them and a lot of these places haven’t been bulldozed over yet, so that would be interesting to see.”
■ Who Do You Think You Are? Tuesday, 7.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand.
Jeff Fatt appears on June 29
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