At just 20, Morrison signed on for a South Seas cruise with a Queensland slaver and wrote an exposé of the iniquitous kanaka slave trade. His reports in the Melbourne Age led to a British Colonial Office inquiry. Then between Christmas 1882 and April 1883 he walked 3300 kilometres in 123 days from Normanton in North Queensland to Melbourne, tracing the route of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition of 1860 but in the opposite direction.7 Later that year, he almost lost his life when he was speared in New Guinea while attempting to cross the island from south to north.
As the Donald brood grew to five sons and three daughters, George Donald entered politics as a leading figure in the campaign to have Lithgow declared a municipality. He was elected the town’s first mayor in 1889, and from 1891 to 1894 served as one of two members representing the electorate of Hartley in the Legislative Assembly. Hartley’s second MLA was the ex-miner and unionist Joseph Cook, a future prime minister of Australia, but whereas Cook was then a member of the Labor Party, George Donald was an independent freetrader who opposed government tariff policies which were preventing Lithgow’s embryonic iron industry from creating another industrial crucible like Birmingham west of the Blue Mountains.8
William was known as Will to his siblings, Don to his friends and Bill to acquaintances. He was educated at Lithgow Public School and the all-male Cooerwull Academy, a Presbyterian training college built by Donald & Crowe at Bowenfels on the western outskirts of town. In fact, George Donald’s company was largely instrumental in transforming Lithgow from an outback settlement into a bustling community with modern amenities.
One of his proudest achievements was St Mary’s Presbyterian Church where Bill, always a boisterous boy, joined other young parishioners in jumping from a platform in the bell tower and swinging on the bell rope. One day he missed the rope and fell heavily, breaking his collarbone. Bill was due to follow the family tradition and join his father’s firm as a builder but the fracture left him with a permanent weakness in his left arm.9
While accepting that the injury would prevent his son from an active life in the construction industry, George Donald insisted that he learn a trade. He arranged for him to be apprenticed as a printer at the Lithgow Mercury in which he was a shareholder. Once he had mastered typesetting and compositing skills, the paper’s veteran editor James Ryan took him in hand and taught him the skills of journalism.
Ryan was a fine mentor. He had given the Mercury a sharp editorial edge, with campaigns demanding good housing and public amenities, education for all ages and government investment in local industries. He instilled a social conscience in his young charge. Given the influences at home and at work, it was inevitable that Bill Donald would take a great interest in the raw political movements that were leading the Australian colonies towards nationhood. In Donald’s mind, politics came to mean republicanism, a united Australia freed from the bondage of empire.
At 23, Bill Donald moved further west to Bathurst, where the legendary Loong Hong Pung had preached revolution in his store on Howick Street. Donald became editor of the National Advocate, co-founded in 1889 by James Rutherford, the American owner of the great Cobb & Co coach service. Rutherford was a hard taskmaster: the previous editor, a young Englishman, complained he had to make do with just three and a half hours’ sleep a night and had fled after a year in the job.10 Donald stayed for two years and then headed for the big time of metropolitan journalism as a high-speed shorthand reporter on the Daily Telegraph, starting off on police rounds.
Sydney had become the hub of royalist Chinese support for the Emperor Kuang-hsu, who was still languishing in his island prison. At the urging of Kang Youwei and Liang Chi-chao, a group of merchants among Sydney’s Chinese community had formed a branch of the Chinese Empire Reform Association in January 1900.11 ‘The object of this body is to get a satisfactory and modern form of government established in China,’ one of the founders, Thomas Yee Hing of the firm of On Chong & Company, told the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘We desire to abolish the old dynasty and dethrone the Empress Dowager and then adopt a kind of limited monarchy.’
Yee Hing said the reform association strongly objected to China being split up or divided among the powers. Its members believed that if the present government were replaced by the young emperor, with the aid of proper advisers ‘things could gradually right themselves’.12
The association invited Liang Chi-chao to visit Australia for a lecture and fund-raising tour. Described in the Australian press as ‘a distinguished Chinese nobleman’ and ‘ambassador of the Reform Party’, Liang arrived in Fremantle in late October 1900. Addressing mass rallies in Perth, Geraldton, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat, Bendigo and the New England district of New South Wales, he impressed everyone with his vision for China of an equal society in which it was the duty of every citizen to be critical of its failings.
Liang’s lectures were greeted with great enthusiasm by Chinese businessmen, British and Chinese clergymen and the lieutenant governor of Victoria. During his six-month visit, new branches of the Chinese Empire Reform Association were established in half a dozen cities and large sums contributed to a fighting fund. At a farewell function at the association’s headquarters in George Street, Sydney, Liang was presented with a gold medal studded with diamonds and rubies. He sailed for Yokohama to continue the liberation battle with other Chinese radicals living in exile in Japan.13
In 1902 fate intervened in the life of Bill Donald in the shape of William Petrie Watson, a young Scots journalist who had spent three years in Japan working for Alfred Curtis on the Kobe Herald.14 He had gathered material for a book entitled Japan: Aspects And Destinies on Japan’s sudden emergence on the world stage following the Boxer Protocol under which she gained the same rights as Western nations to station troops permanently in Peking and Shanghai to protect her diplomats and nationals.
On his way back to London via Australia and South Africa, Petrie Watson passed through Hong Kong where he learned from his fellow Aberdonian Thomas Reid that the China Mail’s proprietor was anxious to recruit a strictly teetotal shorthand writer with some knowledge of the printing trade.
Petrie Watson reached Sydney on Christmas Day, so the story goes, and called at the Daily Telegraph office looking for a loan to tide him over until the banks opened after the holiday period. He was referred to Donald, who had just been promoted to the sub-editors’ desk. Donald took the stranger out for a meal. Both men ordered tea, Donald letting slip that he was a teetotaller who had never tasted alcohol in his life. He pumped the visitor for information about Japan. Petrie Watson, as he later wrote in the preface of his book, had been ‘in close, daily, arduous association with its people, with its problems, with its politics’. He was happy to share his experiences.15
Donald was fascinated. As Petrie Watson spoke, he scribbled notes in shorthand. Back in the office, he asked the Scot to write down his thoughts in an article for the Daily Telegraph which Donald headlined ‘The Hegemony of the Pacific’. As the cashier had gone off-duty for the night, he gave Petrie Watson all the money he had in his pocket – 17 shillings – and thought no more about it. Petrie Watson, though, made a mental note to mention Donald to his Aberdonian friend Thomas Reid in Hong Kong.16
During this time Tse Tsan Tai, the Australian revolutionary, had remained quietly in Hong Kong. He was now a married man and with his wife had joined the Hong Kong branch of the Natural Foot Society, an organisation founded by Mrs Alicia Little, a crusading Englishwoman, to outlaw the medieval practice of foot-binding that virtually crippled millions of Chinese women.
Tse was a gifted illustrator and he found an outlet for his artistic talent – and political beliefs – in a cartoon strip thought to be the first drawn by a Chinese national. ‘The Situation in the Far East’ portrayed the conquest of China since 1842. It mocked the disgraceful behaviour of Ching collaborators and the general complacency of the Chinese people. Tse intended the cartoon to �
��arouse the Chinese nation, and to warn the people of the impending danger of the partitioning of the Empire by the Foreign Powers’.17 Predictably, ‘The Situation in the Far East’ was banned in China but a gleeful Japanese firm published it in 1899. When copies found their way into Hong Kong, its creator received a further reprimand from the colonial secretary for his ‘extremist political views’.
In 1900, Tse’s friend Yang Chu-yun, co-conspirator in the failed coup at Canton, returned to Hong Kong and, having lost his job in shipping, became an English teacher. On 17 June, the two men met Sun Yat-sen in a bobbing sampan tethered to Sun’s ship, the SS Indus, in Hong Kong harbour. Sun was a marked man: there was a price on his head and he was banned from landing in Hong Kong for five years. The purpose of the meeting was to plan a joint enterprise between the Hsing-chung hui and the reformer Kang Youwei, who had gone into exile on the Malayan island of Penang.
The outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion a few days later disrupted the plan for concerted action and the two groups acted separately. Kang’s insurrection centred on Hankow in the Middle Yangtze, but it ended farcically on 21 August when 30 rebels were arrested by Ching authorities without firing a shot. They were summarily executed.
Sun’s uprising two months later was only marginally more successful, although the rebels at least had the satisfaction of putting their firearms to good use. For two weeks a Triad force financed by the Hsing-chung hui fought a series of battles against imperial forces at Huizhou in the Pearl River Delta, with casualties on both sides. When additional funds promised by Sun failed to arrive from Japan, the survivors ran out of food and ammunition and had to flee for their lives.18
Hearing that Yang Chu-yun had returned to Hong Kong, the Ching authorities took revenge. On 10 January 1901 a hired gunman tracked him down to his home and shot him in front of his students. He died in hospital the next day.19 The assassination of his political soulmate was a grievous blow to Tse Tsan Tai. He cut all ties with the Hsing-chung hui and planned a new uprising completely independent of Sun Yat-sen whose schemes always ended in disaster.
While George Morrison’s exploits in China have been well documented, his relationship with the Chinese revolutionaries, particularly his fellow Australian Tse Tsan Tai, is virtually unknown. He first met Tse at the Hong Kong Hotel on 22 Nov- ember 1901. Tse describes him in his diary as ‘tall and close-shaven, with a bold, broad and commanding brow, large eyes with a piercing look, straight eyebrows, long nose and firm mouth with thin lips. His hair is light and he is a fine looking type of Australian manhood.’
According to Tse’s diary, ‘We discussed the movement of Freedom and Independence and he assured me of his friendly sympathy and support.’ He quotes Morrison as saying, ‘I am quite willing to help you and shall do my best to further and support the movement. My support means the support of The Times and the support of The Times means the support of the British people.’20
Tse informed Morrison that he was planning another insurrection. As in 1895, the target would be Canton and the date – the Chinese New Year of 1903 – would coincide with a festival, which would give the fighters a legitimate reason for being in the city. Tse’s idea was to throw out the monarchy and set up ‘a commonwealth government under a protector’ – similar to Cromwell’s England – rather than a republic, which Tse considered too advanced for China.21
On his return to Peking, Morrison kept in touch with Tse by mail. In a letter dated 25 June 1902 he expressed the opinion that the Chinese Government ‘is the rottenest in existence with the possible exceptions of Persia and Turkey’. On 9 October, Tse replied, warning Morrison to be in readiness ‘for the coming revolution’.
In the months leading up to the coup Tse wrote anti-Manchu articles for the English-language press in Hong Kong. He still had the support of Thomas Reid at the China Mail but Alfred Cunningham, editor of the Hong Kong Daily Press, was the more active participant in the new scheme. The 32-year-old Londoner even printed the revolutionaries’ Proclamation of Independence on Christmas Eve 1902.22
One of the main conspirators was the bearded Taiping prince Hung Chun-fui, now a senior member of the Hung Men brotherhood. During his many years of exile, Hung had spent some time in Australia, where he had been in touch with Australian branches of that powerful secret society. On his return, he met up with Tse Yet Chong, the former Grafton grocer, who introduced him to his son Tse Tsan Tai.23
It was decided that Tse would raise awareness of the coup’s aims among the foreign community, Li Jitang, a wealthy Hong Kong resident, would be responsible for finance, and Hung, who had led Taiping troops in battle, would take care of military matters. As his deputy, Tse chose his younger brother Tse Tsi Shau – Grafton-born and baptised Thomas See – who was recalled from his base in Singapore for the mission.24
On Christmas Day, while Bill Donald was meeting William Petrie Watson in Sydney, Tse Tsan Tai showed his brother the Proclamation of Independence and informed him that the coup would begin with an assault on the Temple of Longevity in Canton. When all of the leading Ching officials had gathered inside for the Chinese New Year festivities, the temple would be blown up. At the same time, one band of militia would destroy the provincial arsenal in Canton, while two other contingents attacked the provincial army and navy respectively. The three rebel groups would then converge on Canton and seize the city.25
On Boxing Day Morrison arrived in Hong Kong in the SS Hoihao and met Tse at the Hong Kong Hotel to discuss the coup. Two days later, Tse handed him a copy of the proclamation.26 Morrison then sailed for Australia in the SS Chingtu on 29 December after extracting a promise from Tse that he would cable him with news of the uprising. ‘Before parting,’ Tse wrote, ‘he assures me of his staunch support and promises to return to China immediately on receipt of my telegram.’
On 20 January 1903 Tse Tsan Tai, his father and brother completed their preparations at a meeting in Hong Kong. It must have been a tense moment: two brothers committing themselves to the cause that had been the subject of their father’s obsession for the whole of their lives.
Two days later George Morrison stepped ashore at Sydney’s Circular Quay. He checked into the Metropole Hotel where ‘from an early hour he was besieged with friends anxious to welcome him back to Australia and have a few minutes’ conversation with him’.27
He then retired to his bedroom to entertain a married German actress of his acquaintance, noting their couplings in his diary:
22 January X X X
9.30 am
11.30 am
6 pm
23 January X X
11.30 am
3 pm
Shortly after 3 pm on the 23rd, Morrison packed his bags and took the overnight express to Melbourne. He went on to Geelong where he was reunited with his family and driven to the town hall for a civic reception. Back in Hong Kong, Hung and Tse Tsi Shau left for Canton via Macau to direct operations for the capture of the city. They were still in Macau when a squad of Hong Kong police, acting on a tip-off, raided Hung’s headquarters at 20 d’Aguilar Street and made a number of arrests. Hearing of the raid, Tse Tsan Tai sent an urgent message to a German missionary at Fong Chuen begging him to warn the revolutionary groups in Canton and Fong Chuen of the danger. Another messenger was sent to Macao to warn Hung and Tse Tsi Shau that they had been betrayed.
Tse Tsi Shau returned to Hong Kong but uniforms and equipment had been seized and more than 20 fighters rounded up and executed. Hung shaved off his beard and escaped into exile abroad. Tse Yet Chong, the young men’s father, blamed the police raid on Hung for ignoring his advice and ‘lacking in discretion’. He fell ill through anxiety and died on 11 March 1903 at the age of 72.28
Five days later Morrison reached Hong Kong on his way back to Peking from Australia. He met Tse Tsan Tai at their favourite location, the Hong Kong Hotel, and commiserated with him about the death of his father and the failu
re of the uprising. He assured the younger man of his unswerving support.
The Cantonese authorities investigating the uprising reported that a number of Chinese residents in Hong Kong, including Tse Tsan Tai, Tse Tsi Shau and Li Jitang, were involved in the plot. The list of suspects was sent to the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Blake, a great friend of George Morrison’s. The 63-year-old Irishman had been appointed governor of Queensland in 1888 but had resigned before setting foot in the colony when the Queensland Premier, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, objected to his appointment on the grounds that ‘his past career does not fit him for such an important position’.29
Queensland’s loss was Hong Kong’s gain: Blake was a gifted diplomat and able administrator. As he scanned the list of revolutionaries, he recognised Tse Tsan Tai’s name. Tse and his wife were friendly with Blake’s wife and daughter through their membership of the anti-foot-binding society. Furious over the breach of British sovereignty involved in Yang’s assassination, the governor announced that he couldn’t believe that any of the suspects could possibly be guilty and refused to take any action.
Back in Australia, Bill Donald quit the Daily Telegraph and accepted a job as political writer on The Argus in Melbourne, the political capital of Australia.30 According to a reporter who ‘pounded a typewriter on the same table in the old Argus building in Collins Street’, Donald was ‘bright as a new shilling. Small and wiry with the light of keen intelligence in sharp eyes that missed nothing.’ He had been in his new post for only a matter of weeks when he was handed a letter by a copy boy.
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