Tommy Lee
When I was studying to be a minister of the Gospel, my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
One of the identities in the streets of Newmarket in those days was a Chinese market gardener by the name of Tomire. He was a third generation Australian born Chinese but he lived on his own, had no family known to us, and was still unable to speak very much English. But what he could do he did magnificently – he grew the best vegetables in our area.
“Tomire”, as he was known by everyone, had been born in this area down on the banks of the Maribyrnong River behind the Flemington Racecourse where, on a bend of the river, was a large fertile, flat flood plain where he and his father, and possibly his grandfather before him, had grown vegetables. Tomire took these vegetables into the Victoria Market on a Saturday morning and sold them from the back of his cart. During the week he would go round the streets where regular customers would buy their vegetables fresh from his cart. Tomire was a well known character and the source of much amusement. His hand painted signs on the sides of the cart described his very best fresh vegetables. His horse, which pulled his vegetable cart, wore a straw hat with two holes in the sides through which his ears poked. The children loved to pat the horse’s nose and with his straw hat he was quite a character in the area.
Tomire always wore baggy black trousers, a shirt without a collar, and a black waistcoat. When he was working down in his market garden he also wore a very traditional Chinese bamboo hat, and whether it was sunshine or rain he was always working. He was probably the hardest working person in the area and his whole life was devoted to producing fresh vegetables.
His house was built on stilts about four feet above the ground and in the front were beautifully heaped up rose beds with scores of rose bushes. His old horse provided the roses with adequate manure. Every morning when Tomire would load up his cart with vegetables for his rounds in the streets he would pick roses to give one to each lady customer. Each flower, as he would say proudly, was “For Missee”. He called all ladies Missee and everyone loved getting their fresh rose.
The vegetables in the back of his cart were guaranteed fresh, picked that morning from the rich soil of the Maribyrnong River. He grew everything and would call out what goods he had on board that day as he slowly went down the street. He had an unusual way of pronouncing many of his words but the pattern of his call became familiar to all of us.
“Fresh vegies, fresh vegies, rettee, tomatee, carrot, parsnip, turnip, caurifrower, cabbage, Chinee rettee”, and his special fruit which we all loved called “Chinee gooseberry” which we always thought was solely a Chinese product until some very clever New Zealanders started growing it and exporting it to Australia under the name of “Kiwi Fruit”.
The ladies in the streets of Newmarket would come out of their narrow weatherboard houses when his horse and cart would stop and walk up to the back where he would display his goods. Each lady would receive a rose when she gave her order. His method of parcelling up the vegetables was always the same. Three parsnips wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, then three carrots wrapped in a sheet of newspaper or two handfuls of what he called “brussa sputs”. If you bought beans you received two handfuls regardless of how many you ordered – one pound, two pound, three pound – it was all the same. He would put two handfuls in a sheet of newspaper and wrap them. If you wanted more you got another two handfuls.
He never cut his vegetables in half so if you wanted half a lettuce you always got “whole lettee you no pay for the other half” and it was the same with the cabbage and his caurifrower. He was a most generous man.
Tomire, or as I discovered much later his name was Tommy Lee, completely disregarded the introduction of the metric system of Australian money and he always disregarded price rises. Everything was “one bob” and when he had finished packing up your vegetable he simply counted the packages, “One bob, two bob, three bob, four bob, five bob, and so on” and in the end would say “Ten bob, Missee”.
The ladies always got a bargain and always received the red rose.
When I was visiting the people who lived down around the river in a series of very squalid and dilapidated old wooden buildings, I often used to see Tomire working in his market garden. He had long rows of vegetables, all perfectly straight and every row and plant was placed by hand. I always imagined his old horse doubled as a plough horse, until I saw Tomire plowing by hand, pushing a single furrow plough with a wheel in front through the loose, rich loam.
One morning when I was in the area for a now forgotten reason, I stopped and talked to him as he was hand watering from two watering cans with rose end spouts on the end of a yoke that he carried upon his shoulders. There was just enough room for him to walk between rows and the two watering cans would water two rows as he walked between them. I noticed that morning an old market gardeners’ trick that Tomire had learnt. In the cold morning air with the chill frosts of a Melbourne winter around, Tomire had his legs wrapped up in old newspapers, tied with pieces of baling twine which he saved from the bales of hay he would buy for his old horse. The cold winter air would never get through the wrapped newspapers around his legs.
Tomire had no wife, spent his long hours producing magnificent roses and vegetables, and seemed to have no needs in his life.
One year the Maribyrnong flooded badly. All the people down at the flood level had to be evacuated. We opened up the church hall at Ascot Vale and provided mattresses on the floor for people, with hot food on the boil from the church kitchens. I drove my BSA 500 motor bike down around the houses calling in on people and inviting them to come up to the church to stay the night while the floods rose. The real danger would come in the very early hours of the next morning when the tide from Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay would rise and the water of the river would back up and flood the surrounding houses. Some people already had sand bags and dirt dykes around their houses.
I then suddenly remembered Tomire, and walked through the sloshing mud to climb the ten stairs or so up to the front door of his unpainted wood and roofing iron house. It was the first time I had ever been in Tomire’s house. He was sitting in front of his fire smoking a small pipe. I had heard suggestions at various times that he would smoke opium but certainly he was smoking nothing else but a little bit of Capstan ready rubbed tobacco, but smoking it very sparingly in the small bowl of a long stemmed pipe.
He invited me to come in while I explained to him that the tide was coming in, in the morning, and the area would flood but he could sleep the night up on our church hall and we had plenty of warm soup and good food for him. He pointed to his own soup pot that was on a wood fired stove, “I got prenty hot soupee” and I am quite sure he had. Tomire was not worried about the floods. He went on to explain to me that his father, possibly his grandfather I was not quite sure, had built this house and he had built it up on the piles, higher than any flood waters would ever come. He was quite safe there and he would stay the night. No one had ever left because of the floods.
Along one wall he had many large bottles which I gather were bottles of herbal medicine which he made himself. I spoke to him about them and he told me of the ingredients from the garden which went into his large bottles. That medicine could fix any sickness anyone ever had. He had many labels written in Chinese on each bottle describing its contents and what cures it could accomplish. I was rather put off, however, to see a number of young chicken embryos in the middle of the herbal medicine, but then again I am quite sure if I went to many modern pharmaceutical companies I might be put off by the origin of some of their magic medicine.
The flood waters came and surrounded the area. Everybody else was flooded out and shifted to church halls and emergency accommodation but Tomire stayed safe and dry with his hot soup.
One day Tomire did not come round with his vegetable cart. He did not make any appearance that day nor the next either. I then heard that he was in hospital. The previous Saturday, while he was at the Victoria Market selling vegetables, he had taken a stroke. I felt sorry for Tomire. I wondered who would go and visit him. So I decided that I should.
When I went into the ward at the Royal Melbourne Hospital I was his first and only visitor. Tomire recognised me with a movement in his eyes but he was unable to move any other part of his body. He looked a desperately, lonely, thin, old man with tubes and monitoring equipment attached to his body. He was not able to talk so I talked to him simply and had a prayer with him. He had tears in his eyes, and although he may not have understood all that I was saying, he deeply appreciated the visit. I went back to visit him over the next days and was delighted to find him recovering. He had use of one arm and was able to feed himself.
It suddenly occurred to me, however, as I looked at the plates of westernised food, served in typical hospital fashion, that this must be totally unappetising to him and I thought of his own good soup at home, and of his rice and vegetable dishes. I spoke to the doctor in charge of the ward and asked if I could arrange to bring some special Chinese food in. The doctor agreed.
In the congregation at the that time was Mrs. Gooey, a Chinese widow, and I put on to her Tomire’s special need. She cooked up a plentiful supply of hot soup, plenty of nourishing meat and vegetables and noodles and then other dishes all sealed in little Tupperware containers. Mrs. Gooey went into the hospital every day and left about nine dishes, which the nurses heated him for his next three meals, and took home the empty ones in return.
That really made Tomire’s life happy, and he and Mrs. Gooey spent a few moments every day talking in Cantonese.
Then to my surprise I heard that Tomire had died in hospital. He had taken another stroke and had passed away during the night. I rang Mrs. Gooey and she told me that the day before Tomire had said that if he were to die he wanted me to bury him. She told me that he had a special plot in the Melbourne cemetery next to his parents and grandparents where he wished to be buried. He was Buddhist but he wanted me to conduct his funeral.
I knew of no other relatives but at the funeral there were quite a number of Chinese people contacted by Mrs. Gooey and it seemed the whole Chinese community in the Newmarket, North Melbourne and Flemington area came out to pay tribute to our travelling greengrocer. After the service I was asked to come back to a young man’s restaurant where everybody would gather for a meal. I was told it was important that I should come. At the meal, which was really a Chinese banquet, I was thanked most profusely by the Chinese people present. They gave me gifts of food and money and flowers. But that was not the end of it.
Shortly afterwards another Chinese member of the community, also a Buddhist, died and I was asked then if I would conduct his funeral. And then a Chinese lady, and then a young girl, and before long I was the unofficial chaplain to the Chinese community. And with what generosity they treated my visitation and ministries. Goods, Chinese meals and flowers appeared on our doorstep constantly. I was overwhelmed with embarrassment at this generosity. We received constantly invitations to go to people’s homes and the more we went the more we were invited. My young wife and I suddenly discovered some of the warmest friendships that we had ever known in our lives and we entered into an entirely new culture, quickly learning phrases in Chinese and ways in which we could share in their hospitality and in turn invite them to our home.
One young man, Henry Ho, came to our home to show us how to cook Chinese meals properly and became the chef for a mini banquet. As the years went by those few Chinese were to grow until today we have literally hundreds of Chinese friends and at one banquet several years ago, were given a distinctive Chinese honour which made me, in their own words, “Father of all the Chinese people”.
The contacts lasted and I have now been involved with three generations of those Chinese families, and in the year 2006, I will conduct the wedding service of a grand-daughter of one of those families nearly half a century after I first came to know Tomire.
I thought about that some years later when, on a nostalgic trip, I went driving around the old streets of Newmarket and down behind the racecourse to the Maribyrnong River. Today there are only mud flats where the Chinese vegetable gardens supported a family for three generations. A couple of rusted old car bodies and car tyres, beer bottles, plastic bags and accumulated junk litter the landscape.
Over where the rose bushes once grew in profusion there was nothing but weeds and prickles and eight stumps sticking out of the ground, the original piles on which Tomire’s house had stood, which had been the house of his father and his grandfather before him. Nothing else remained.
But I often thought of Tomire’s cry of “Fresh vegies, fresh vegies, rettee, tomatee, carrot, parsnip, turnip, caurifrower, cabbage, Chinee rettee” and his old horse with his straw hat and his ears poking through, and Tomire wrapping up a handful of peas in a sheet of newspaper and charging one bob for everything, keeping his money in the side pockets of his waistcoat, as I walked out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES