Allen Lowe Lin

Allen Lowe Lin NAASP42/1, C1919/442

Allen Lowe Lin, or Lin Lo as his Chinese name may have been, arrived in Australia in 1898. He was around 19 years old.

Lin spent 10 years at the small town of Uralla in the New England region of NSW. There was a considerable Chinese presence in that area because of the gold mines at nearby Rocky River and tin mines at the small town of Tingha, which had its own temple. A Chinese store was opened there in the 1880s by one Ah Lin. It's unclear whether there was a family connection. In Uralla, Lin worked for Dickson's retail company.

Lin returned to China in 1908 and stayed till 1911. He was in North Sydney by 1916 running a greengrocer's or fruiterer's shop at No. 97 Walker Street for just a year and then moving to No. 100, where he would stay until 1924.

Lin applied to visit Hong Kong for 12 months in 1919, although it is not clear if he actually left Australia. His name remained in Sands Directory next to the Walker Street address throughout. The identification portraits taken by Australian Customs at this time show a well-dressed young man with a starched winged collar and tie and a well-fitting suit jacket. Lin's hairstyle is modern, short and oiled. That there is no sign of the Chinese queue is unsurprising given the time Lin had spent working in retail and interacting with a 'white' clientele. Furthermore, in China the Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911 and the country was in the throes of a period of modernisation, championed by Sun Yet Sen, the leader of the new Republic of China and founder of the Nationalist Party of China [Kuomintang or KMT]. That organisation would enlist many followers in Sydney's Chinatown in the 1920s. There they built their own prominent party headquarters in Quay Street. That building survives. Whatever his political affiliations, Lin appears to personify the modern spirit of the times.

Allen Lowe Lin disappears from the North Sydney records in 1925. Sands Directory lists Lowe and Leong, grocers, at 116 Oxford Street, Paddington in 1930.