16 March 1923, churned into a bizarre courtroom circus under the steely gaze of Melbourne Magistrate Knight, the air thick as Vegemite. Mrs. Ah Kim, alias "Yokahama" from the shadowy lanes of Little Bourke Street, was dragged into the spotlight, taking the stand as the clock struck post-lunch lethargy. Her crime? She was accused by the hawk-eyed Mr. L.W. Orford of the Federal Income Tax Inquisition, of skirting around a piddly £18 in taxes—money tainted by the spectre of illegal gambling.
Dressed to the nines, as if she was prepared to attend a cotillion at Vue du Monde, Nellie Bew, as she claimed her name was amidst the legal circus, with a command of the Queen’s English that could put the native tongues to shame, asserted her identity with the poise of a seasoned gambler flipping a rigged game on its head. Her late husband, Mr. Bew, had vanished back to China, she claimed, leaving her the dubious inheritance of widowhood and the supposition of illicit earnings.
Orford, the tax man with eyes like slot machines paying out suspicion, pressed that gambling was her bread, butter, and occasional caviar. Knight, flabbergasted as if he’d seen a ghost or worse, a tram inspector, demanded confirmation of this scandalous livelihood. Orford nodded, grim as a funeral, pegging her yearly take at a neat £250.
Mrs. Ah Kim—or Bew, depending on the angle of sunlight—flashed a smile that could seduce fate itself and declared her innocence with the charm of a snake oil salesman. “I dabble in fan tan, sure, but live off it? Never raked in £5 a week, let alone survived on such a sum. I have no fixed income.”
With a flick of judicial nonchalance, the case evaporated into the musty courthouse air. But let it be scribbled in the margins of this madcap legal ledger that this wasn’t Nellie’s debut or final dance with the gavel. Her story is as twisty as the Great Ocean Road, and twice as slippery.
This tale, a saga steeped in the brew of ingenuity and enigma and reverberating with reinvention, was a lesson in patience, tenacity and a touch of madness. It is as much Nellie’s story as it is mine, a chronicle of my own rabid obsession—an unhinged safari through the wreckage of time. I am the mad archaeologist of the modern age, not in search of golden idols or sacred tombs, but hungry for the tales locked behind faded signs, the ghosts residing in discarded artefacts, the skeletal remains of long-dead architecture, and, in this case, the haunting image of a 120 year old mug shot.
So here I am, deciphering the hieroglyphs of urban decay, piecing together the jigsaw of history one haunted fragment at a time. Why? Because the past is a puzzle box crafted by madmen and geniuses, and cracking it open—unleashing the stories marinated in mystery—is the most divine madness of all.
Our story pirouettes around a solitary brick cottage marooned in the asphalt jungle of Melbourne’s CBD. Nellie Bong Bew, an eccentric dame with a penchant for both the dice and the dark, once called 17 Casselden Place home. Now, this same haunted plot hosts Little Lon Distillery, a place where gin is conjured like spirits from the ether, named after the notorious Little Lonsdale area—a warren of laneways, a veritable rat's maze that once sliced through the heart of the city from Spring to Exhibition, bookended by Lonsdale and its diminutive twin.
Rewind to the 1840s, and you’ve dropped into a hodgepodge of working-class sweat and entrepreneurial gambles. This patch of Melbourne was infamous, a notorious nucleus of sin and vice by the 1850s, where every shadow held an element of danger and every corner was a potential prologue to disaster. Sanitation was a crude joke played by the city planners on its inhabitants. Houses boasted nothing but a glorified hole in the ground for a toilet, and the luxury of piped water was just a pipe dream.
Amid the stench and squalor, the streets swarmed with disease, filth, wayward children, and vermin—human or otherwise—all mingling with the kind of careless abandon only found in places forsaken by decency. By the 1860s, this enclave was dubbed an overcrowded slum, bursting at the seams with the city’s poorest souls, a melting pot of immigrants scrabbling for a foothold in a new world.
This city within a city played host to a lurid lineup of houses of ill-repute, teeming with prostitutes, gamblers, and opium dens—a Disneyland for the depraved. Here, in this shadow city, Nellie Bong Bew lived like a queen in the kingdom of the fallen, thriving amidst the chaos and carving out a name for herself - but which name was truly hers?
How did a woman as silver-tongued and charming as Nellie Bew wind up in the gnarled heart of Melbourne's seedy underbelly? Her saga unfurls in 1903 in the land under Down Under, in Hobart, Tasmania, a narrative laced with the smoke of mystery and the sharp tang of desperation. At the age of 18, Nellie, under her real name, Tie Cum Ah Chung, toiled as a domestic servant in the teeming, windswept streets of Hobart—a far cry from the dark corners she would later inhabit.
Her police dossier paints a picture of a woman marked by life and history: standing a mere 160 centimetres, her face scarred by the ravages of smallpox. The record cryptically notes her origins as Yokohama, Japan—a blatant lie, a desperate sleight of hand in her high-stakes game of survival. The truth, as sordid and tangled as the streets she would come to roam, was that Tie Cum had drifted in from China, fleeing a past murky with shadows, and had chosen Tasmania's capital for her rebirth.
What darkness chased her from her homeland? What spectres haunted her, driving her to reinvent herself in a city as raw and rugged as Hobart? These questions swirl around her legacy like the thick Tasmanian fog, each answer as elusive as the next. But one thing is clear: Nellie Bew was a woman of grit and guile, carving out a space in a world that offered few havens to a stranger with a fabricated past. In the labyrinth of life’s underbelly, she navigated with an artful dodge and a close-held secret, her history a patchwork of truths and fictions, as complex and compelling as the woman herself.
In the murky witching hour of a cold night in 1903 Hobart, when decent folks were tucked away in their beds, Tie Cum Ah Chung decided to indulge an irrepressible craving for biscuits. It wasn't just hunger that drove her—it was the game, the thrill of the chase in the small hours of total darkness.
She slithered into the cramped confines of Mrs. Meredith's shop, the bell above the door chiming like a herald of minor doom. The time was 11 PM—a time no sane person finds themselves desperate for biscuits unless propelled by ulterior motives. With the casual charm of a seasoned grifter, she ordered a pound of biscuits. Mrs. Meredith, perhaps perplexed or too weary to question the odd timing of such a nocturnal snack run, weighed out the biscuits.
But the plot, like the bag of biscuits, was about to overflow. "Another pound," Tie Cum declared, pushing the envelope, her eyes darting around the small shop with calculated nonchalance. By now, the bag was a straining testament to her greed—not just for the pastries but for the thrill. Sensing the moment ripe for escalation, she demanded a larger bag. As Mrs. Meredith turned her back, the bait was set, the trap sprung.
In that split second, with the agility of a street cat, Tie Cum seized the overstuffed bag of biscuits and bolted—a shadow melting into the night. The bell above the door clanged again, this time a knell for the petty theft committed under the guise of midnight munchies. Mrs. Meredith, returning to find neither customer nor the biscuits, stood a moment in bewildered silence—a victim to the whims of a biscuit bandit, a nocturnal creature driven by more than mere appetite.
In the hallowed and harrowing halls of justice, where the small-time crooks often dance to a tune played by the gavels of grim-faced judges, Tie Cum Ah Chung found herself caged for a month—a slap on the wrist by the standards of hardened criminals, but a slap nonetheless. Her crime? The audacious, midnight filching of biscuits—a heist so petty it would be comical if it weren't for the clanging cell doors that echoed her folly.
But our biscuit bandit wasn't content with a simple stint in the slammer; no, she spun tales so tall in her trial that the courtroom seemed to shrink in the shadow of her fabrications. Charged with perjury, she took the stand, looked the judge square in the eye and did all she could to deny, deny, deny. She dove headfirst into the role of a liar with such gusto that it earned her another month in the bleak confines of incarceration—a back-to-back booking in the bedlam of the penal system.
This was no mere misdemeanour mishap but a defiant middle finger to the powers that be, a statement that if one must fall, they should fall spectacularly. Tie Cum, with her flair for the dramatic and her disdain for the mundane, turned her trial into a circus, her sentences into scenes, ensuring that if justice is blind, it certainly isn’t deaf.
In the chaotic echo chamber of the press, Tie Cum Ah Chung’s identity was butchered and reborn with each reprint, a staggering display of incompetence that would give even the most seasoned linguist nightmares. At the time of her arrest, the sensationalist rags of the day couldn’t decide if she was Chinese or Japanese, bellowing racism in headlines that shrieked “A Jap in Trouble”—a sorry testament to their editorial standards.
Her name mutated under the pens of the witless scribes like a virus in a petri dish, a parade of increasingly grotesque distortions—Ah Chung Ti Cum, Tiecom Ah Chung, Tiecome Ah Chung, Tya Cum Ah Chung, Tie Gum Ah Chung, and Tie Gum Ah Chong. It was a journalistic massacre, an obliteration of identity at the hands of newsroom drunks who probably couldn’t fact-check their way out of a paper bag.
These reporters, with their tenuous grasp on reality, seemed as adept at fact-checking as a Sky News correspondent on the tail end of a three-martini lunch—each article a further plunge into the abyss of factual anarchy. In less than ten articles, Tie Cum's name was twisted and turned into a dizzying array of aliases, each version a slapdash attempt at phonetic spelling by some bleary-eyed hack with a deadline and a hangover. This wasn’t just sloppy journalism; it was an all-out assault on the very concept of accuracy.
By 1906, the spectral figure of Tie Cum Ah Chung resurfaced from the murky depths of anonymity, this time as a key witness to a brazen shooting that shattered the deceptive calm of Launceston's streets. There she stood, amidst the chaos of screaming bystanders and the acrid smell of gunpowder, an oasis of eerie calm in the storm.
As she delivered her deposition, the court scribes scribbled feverishly, stunned into begrudging respect by her flawless English. It was as if the bullets had carved out a stage for her, and she, in turn, commanded it with the poise of a seasoned actress. The irony was as thick as the blood on the pavement: here was a woman, so often dismissed and diminished by the press and public alike as an outsider, now speaking the King's English better than the King's own enforcers.
This moment, sharp as the crack of the gunshot itself, highlighted the absurd theatre of society’s expectations. Tie Cum Ah Chung, with her mosaic of names and identities, once vilified and caricatured, now stood as the most reliable narrator in the unfolding drama of violence and chaos. The papers, which once could not pin down her name or heritage, now hung on her every word, recording her testimony with a clarity previously reserved for those of higher social standing. This was not just a testimony; it was a performance, a defiance, a critique of every uttered slur and every headline that had tried to confine her to a stereotype. She was not just a witness to a shooting; she was a mirror reflecting the contradictions of a society too gun-shy to recognise its own failings.
This next twisted bit rears its head from the murky abyss of online echo chambers. The tale of Tie Cum Ah Chung—alias upon alias, spiralling into the depths of digital folklore—has become a beast of modern myth-making. Allegedly, and take this with a healthy dose of skepticism, our protagonist was either summoned back to China—Shanghai to be exact—or shoved out of Tasmania for reasons as shadowy as the underbelly of an overfed cat. This is where the facts start to disintegrate like sanity at a Trump rally.
The legend goes: She reportedly docked in Port Melbourne from Hobart, shook off her past like a snake sheds its skin, and rechristened herself ‘Yokohama’ in a desperate bid to outmanoeuvre fate. But the ghosts of her past were not to be outdone. A so-called police report, as elusive as the truth in a Scott Morrison press conference, claims that Yokohama, entrenched at 17 Casselden Place circa 1920, unleashed a torrent of water from a bucket onto Charlie Ah Hing as he relieved himself in her yard. Ah Hing, in a retaliatory strike, painted her to the police as a gambler, opium aficionado, and a tempest of violence, allegedly plying the oldest trade in the book.
The plot thickens, curdles, and overflows as veteran Constable Charles Hickling steps into the fray, defending Yokohama's honour against Ah Hing’s accusations. Hickling attested that Yokohama ran a tight ship, her dealings as clean as a whistle, while Ah Hing himself was steeped in sly grog, prostitutes, and a character so rotten you could smell it a street over.
Take it all with a grain of salt, or perhaps the entire shaker, because in this whirlwind of tales and digital reprints, finding a primary source is like hunting a Great White in a swamp. The truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction but also harder to pin down. In the end, what we have is a narrative cocktail—part truth, part fiction, all chaos—a fitting tribute to the wild, elusive spirit of Tie Cum Ah Chung.
So, in the murky waters of historical sleuthing, the enigma of Tie Cum Ah Chung vanishes into the fog of the past after 1906. Like a ghost ship disappearing into the mist, she slips out of the newspapers, Trove articles, and the cold, clinical grip of official records. But the saga doesn't end there—no, it twists deeper into the labyrinth.
Transformed, Tie Cum, alias ‘Yokohama,’ this mysterious Asian woman who stakes her claim in this den of iniquity and survival, plants her roots. Her death certificate, a clue from beyond the grave, cryptically confirms her father’s family name as Chung. The pieces of the puzzle slam together with the force of inevitability: Tie Cum Ah Chung, the Houdini of Hobart, had reinvented herself as Nellie Bew, escaping the Tasmanian chill for the seedy embrace of Marvellous Melbourne.
But who was she really? Was Nellie Bew merely a shadowy figure walking the tightrope between respectability and infamy? A prostitute, or perhaps the cunning madam of a house of ill fame, orchestrating her empire of the night with the skill of a seasoned conductor? The whispers of her profession, like the rumours of her past, swirl through the air, as tangible yet as elusive as smoke.
Yet, here's the rub—the heart of the story: in a world quick to label and judge, where women like her are often boxed into categories of saints or sinners, Nellie’s true legacy remains as shadowy and multifaceted as her identities. In the end, whether villain or victim, sinner or saint, Nellie Bew, née Tie Cum Ah Chung, crafted her own narrative with the cunning that only those who’ve danced on the fringes can ever truly know. And in that dance, she remains, forever elusive, a spectre of defiance against a world eager to define her.
The final time my eyes spotted the last vestige of Tie Cum’s former life was on her marriage certificate. In the faded gold-dust town of Rutherglen, the last whispers of her old identity were exchanged for a new gamble. On the 24th of November, 1909, under the watchful eyes of fate and bureaucracy, George Bew, a son of Canton, China, stood by a woman known only as X Chung. Here, amidst the remains of Victoria's greed-fuelled frenzy, Tie Cum shed her skin, stepping boldly into the persona of Nellie Bew. With nothing but an enigmatic X as her signature, she folded her past behind the poker face of her new moniker, a gambler's shield against the probing eyes of the world.
This union, sealed in the quiet corners of Rutherglen, was less about the merging of hearts and more a strategic ante in the high stakes game of life. Nellie, with a gambler’s resolve, bet it all on the future, discarding her former self like a bad hand at cards, ready to bluff her way through the societal saloons of her chosen world. Her life thereafter was a masterclass in the art of concealment—a series of moves so deft that even those who thought they knew her could only guess at her true intentions.
Decades later, when the final curtain dropped and the dealers called time on her earthly bets, her death certificate offered one last nod to her elusive spirit. Listed simply as the wife of "Bew," and daughter of “Chung”, Nellie departed with all the mystery with which she had lived. No grand revelations, no folding of hands—just the cryptic echo of a life played close to the vest, in a world where she insisted on setting her own rules. Thus, in the shadowy backrooms of history, Nellie Bew, née X Chung, formerly Tie Cum, completed her transformation, leaving behind a trail as baffling and bold as the legacy of any outlaw who ever dared to rewrite their destiny on their own audacious terms.
The year is 1910 and the scene shifts to the grimy streets of Geelong, where our heroine, Nellie Bew, finds herself entangled in the tentacles of the law once again. Charged with vagrancy—a conveniently nebulous term that the constabulary could twist to mean anything from suspected prostitution to simply loitering with intent to exist—Nellie is caught in the company of two other dames, Maud Edwards and Maud Gunter, a duo as notorious in Little Lon as they were enigmatic.
The two Mauds, veterans of the seedy underbelly that pulsed beneath the city’s veneer of respectability, were no strangers to the darker narratives penned by the local press. Maud Edwards, though seemingly the quieter of the pair, floated through the margins of the Little Lon saga without the stain of criminality. Maud Gunter, on the other hand, was a walking headline—a regular feature in the scandal sheets since she was sixteen, found dazed and drooling in the opium-soaked shadows of an infamous den.
Their notoriety painted in broad strokes by the sensationalist press, these women navigated the perilous waters of public life where their every misstep was fodder for the next day’s papers. In a town where a woman’s reputation was as fragile as the glass of whiskey she wasn’t supposed to drink, Nellie and the Mauds were cast as characters in a pulp fiction that wrote itself each night in the bars and back alleys of Little Lon.
So there they were, the three musketeers of misfortune, likely embroiled in nothing more scandalous than a night out on the town, sharing drinks and dodging the heavy hand of the law. The charges of vagrancy, as elastic as the morals of the time, could easily have been code for simply having too good a time while female. In the eyes of the law, their real crime was not soliciting sex, but soliciting freedom in a world that offered them little.
Thus, in the grand tradition of all good outlaws, Nellie Bew and her compatriots, Maud and Maud, toasted to their infamy, knowing full well that to live outside the law, you must be honest, or at least as honest as the world will allow.
A year on the lam from respectability, and Nellie, our renegade duchess of debauchery, finds herself once again in the clutches of the law, this time alongside a fellow traveler in the fast lane, May Smith. Charged with the nebulous crime of "having no lawful means of support," they were swept up in the dragnet of societal expectations—a term so broad and so blandly menacing that it could mean anything from outright prostitution to the simple sin of existing without visible means in a world that equated poverty with moral failure.
But let's not mince words here: Nellie was embracing her new life with the zeal of a convert, out to squeeze every drop of juice from the forbidden fruit of freedom. The charge, a catch-all cudgel wielded by the powers-that-be, was as much an indictment of her lifestyle as it was of her economic status. In the ledger of the law, Nellie and May's real offence was daring to dance on the fringes of a society that preferred its women either invisible or inane.
So there they stood, Nellie and May, grinning like Cheshire cats at the absurdity of the charges, knowing full well that the real crime was not their lack of lawful support, but their unapologetic pursuit of happiness in a world that had little to offer them but chains. They were outlaws in the truest sense, living a life that was less about avoiding the law and more about avoiding the mundane, every arrest another badge of honour in their merry march towards infamy.
In the same year, Nellie’s future home base, that notorious den of iniquity, 17 Casselden Place, burst into the scandal sheets yet again. This time, it was Maud Compton who was caught stirring the pot, charged with peddling sly grog from the premises—turning what might have been a humble abode into a throbbing artery of the city’s underground booze market. Number 17, already a beacon for the battered souls of the night, was carving out its reputation with a big, dirty knife as the go-to joint for anyone seeking solace from the tyranny of temperance.
By 1913, the address was more than just a number—it was a symbol, a flag planted firmly in the murky soil of Melbourne’s back-alley economy. The joint was confirmed, through whispers and wary nods, as a full-fledged sly grog house. Here, amidst the clinking of hidden bottles and the soft hiss of taboo transactions, the city’s thirsty found their oasis.
This tiny cottage was a minuscule fortress of silent rebellion against the dry tyranny of the times, when the infamous six o’clock swill laws — keeping pubs open for those mere 12 hours, initiating a wave of bing drinking and all the woe that come with it — were in full effect. As the law pounded at the door with its righteous indignation, inside, the revellers raised their glasses in quiet revolution. In the shadowy corners of 17 Casselden Place, they weren’t just selling booze—they were selling liberation, one illicit bottle at a time.
One fateful night in December 1913, under the cold light of the moon, a peculiar gathering took shape in the shadowy laneway of Casselden Place. The players in this nocturnal charade? Undercover cops Albert Smith and Francis Kidd, seasoned in the art of deception, joined by an entourage that included two other men and a woman, their roles ambiguous, their intentions cloaked in mystery.
Their mark was Edward Ryan, a man of the night, who, unbeknownst to him, was about to host a party peppered with policemen in plainclothes. Ryan, with the easy charm of a seasoned sly grog seller, welcomed the motley crew into the infamous den of number 17, where he proceeded to sell them beer—liquid gold in the dry desert of temperance.
The night unfolded like a scene from a degenerate ballet, laughter mingling with the clinking of glasses, a thin veil of camaraderie masking the treachery afoot. A good time was indeed had by all—until the facade crumbled under the weight of the law. In an abrupt crash of reality, the cops shed their disguises and clamped down on Ryan, dragging him off to the slammer, his night of commerce curdling into a nightmare.
But the saga of number 17 was far from over. Two weeks later, the stage was set again, this time for Ernest M’Auliffe, alias James Colligan, alias William Lamont—a man with a rap sheet as long as the desperate line at a festival toilet. Charged for the same offence in the same cursed house, M’Auliffe’s fate was sealed by the same twisted game that ensnared Ryan.
This was no mere crackdown; this was an absurd, cyclical parade of cat and mouse, played out in the small confines of number 17, where the law was both jester and judge. In the end, these were not just arrests; they were ritual sacrifices on the altar of the temperance movement, each one a testament to the futile, ongoing war against human desire and the eternal dance of the defiant under the boot of authority.
Earlier that fateful year, before the cops and robbers routine unfolded in the notorious sly grog house, Nellie Bew found herself yet again at the centre of the news cycle, thrust onto the stage of another sinister act in this urban theatre of the absurd.
There she was, a mere spectator in the anarchy of her environment, when the crack of a gunshot split the night, a sound as sharp and sudden as the breaking of bones. In that razor-thin moment, a bullet—like some demonic messenger from the netherworld—whizzed over her head, its message clear and lethal. The air it cut through might as well have been the fabric of reality itself, fraying at the edges as Nellie ducked, her life hanging by the thread of that near-miss.
Where did this dance with death occur? Where else but Casselden Place, that cradle of chaos, where the shadows held more than darkness and the walls whispered with the sins of the city. Nellie's brush with oblivion wasn't just a footnote in her saga—it was a stark reminder of the perpetual roulette played in the underbelly of Melbourne, where every shadow could harbour the angel of death and every moment could be your last.
In this corner of the world, ruled by the whims of chance and the cruelty of circumstance, Nellie's testimony to the police was not merely a statement of fact; it was a declaration of survival, a testament to her enduring presence in a place where existence itself was a gamble against the grim odds of the streets.
Here we find Nellie, ensconced in the notorious Casselden Place, a veritable hive of scum and villainy where the law is just another street hustler trying to make a buck. By 1920, Nellie had made her home at number 17, a notorious address in the dark underbelly of Melbourne's urban jungle.
In this labyrinth of vice and shadow, Nellie navigated the narrow alleys of legality with the agility of a cat burglar. Surrounded by characters shady enough to blot out the sun, it's true that none of her immediate circle were notorious enough to be immortalised in mugshots or scandal sheets as prostitutes. However, the whispers of the street spoke of other talents—of Nellie turning tricks, perhaps, not just with cards but in the more carnal sense of the word, to keep the wolf from her door.
But let’s not reduce her to mere survival tactics. Nellie had a gambler's soul and a hustler's heart, allegedly raking in the cash at the gambling dens with a deft touch and a sharp eye. This wasn’t just about making ends meet; it was about mastering the game, playing each hand with the finesse of a seasoned pro, whether it was cards or life itself.
In the gaslight-lit, sin-saturated streets of Casselden Place, Nellie Bew wasn't just living—she was thriving, in her own defiant, unapologetic way. Each day was another roll of the dice, another card turned. In a world that treated her as just another piece on the board, Nellie played like a queen, and Casselden Place was her kingdom.
The curtain finally fell on Nellie's tumultuous escapade in August 1929, under the glaring spotlight of the very last kind of drama she needed. There she was, deep in the throes of a domino game—caught in the criminal act by the twitchy fingers of law enforcement, eager to make an example out of anyone they could catch. As the dice clattered and the dominoes danced, the cops came crashing in with a bang, eager to snuff out her small rebellion against the prohibition of pleasure.
Nellie, our ever-defiant queen of the underground, was slapped with a fine of £50 plus £3 in costs—a toll for her audacity to keep the game going in a world determined to shut it down. In a final act of petty larceny by the state, the bench ruled that £1 from the sum found in her possession be confiscated—because apparently, the house always wins, especially when it's the courthouse.
Her last known dance with the devil of dominoes written into the annals of the press, Nellie disappeared from the public eye, the chapters of her life closing one by one until her death in 1946 in Fitzroy. She exited the stage at the age of 60, of heart failure, leaving behind a legacy etched in the smoke-filled rooms and back alleys of Melbourne's gambling houses.
In her time, Nellie Bew was not just a participant in the city's shadow economy; she was a matriarch of the midnight hours, a ruler of the under-table empire where fortunes were made and lost between the flick of a card and the fall of a domino. Her life, a vivid tapestry of risk, defiance, and survival, serves as a reminder of the raw, uncensored human spirit that thrives in the face of societal disdain and legal persecution.
Her life before Hobart remains an enigma, but we can make a few guesses about her reasons for fleeing her homeland. In a declining China, suffocated under the iron heel of foreign domination, a young Tie Cum Ah Chung saw the writing on the wall. The year 1900 was marked by the fires of the Boxer Rebellion, a desperate, bloody uprising led by the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, lashing out against the encroaching shadows of Western and Japanese imperialism. As the chaos unfolded, Tie Cum—a name just one among millions, yet destined to carve out a path of her own—gazed beyond the smoke and ruin of her supposed homeland, Shanghai, a city clamped tightly in the vice of international greed.
Her escape was not just a flight across seas; it was a metamorphosis. First a stint in Hobart, then, landing in Melbourne, she sloughed off her old skin along with her family name, reborn as Nellie Bew—a phoenix rising not from ashes, but from the stifling confines of a past life. Here in this new, raw land, Nellie embraced the persona of the free spirit, her life a canvas on which she painted strokes of bold defiance and vibrant survival.
The dwellings were cheap, the company criminal—not the sinister overlords of pulp fiction, but scrappy survivors, hustlers at the fringe, each playing the hand they were dealt with a gambler's resolve. These were her people, her community, where she was not an outsider but a participant, thriving in the underground labyrinths of gambling dens hidden from the prying eyes of a society that had no room for the likes of her at their respectable tables.
In this shadow economy, where European women were barred from the bars and the betting parlours, Tie Cum, now Nellie, found her arena. The law that sought to exclude her from the mainstream had inadvertently granted her a kingdom in the underworld. Here, gambling wasn't just a pastime but a lifeline—a cultural thread woven tightly through the fabric of her community. And it was here, in the clandestine flicker of lamplight over the cards and dominoes, that she was eventually caught, her fingers still on the pulse of the game.
To the authorities, it was a crime; to Nellie, it was simply another day in the life of a woman who had traversed worlds to rewrite her story on her own terms. Caught red-handed, yes, but unbroken, her spirit a testament to the enduring will to forge one’s path, even—or especially—when that path led through the shadows.
This saga, months in the forging, burns with the need to be told—not just to unravel a tantalising mystery, but to cast light on a shadow figure, a woman who in another era would have been swallowed whole by the blind indifference of history. It’s for those spectral souls, the nearly invisible ones, who clawed at the margins of society and carved out spaces where none seemed to exist. It’s for the outcasts and the outliers, the ones who refused to be smothered by the stifling norms of their days.
On a crisp, early July day in 2024, the kind that slices through the veneer of the everyday with its chilly clarity, my daughter Quinn and I ventured into the solemn expanse of Melbourne General Cemetery. Our mission was simple, yet steeped in the mystery of a life once lived on the fringes of recorded history. We were searching for Nellie Bong Bew, a spectre from the past whose story had been a gambler’s shuffle of truth and myth.
With only a pixellated internet map to guide us, we traversed the sprawling cemetery, a silent city of the dead where every stone told a tale of a thousand silent voices. The air hung heavy with the scent of eucalyptus and the unseen weight of centuries, as we wandered through this necropolis, searching for the final chapter of a woman who played her life like a hand of poker against the fates.
Finally, in a quiet corner, we found her—Nellie Bong Bew, her name worn almost to oblivion on the cold, hard marble. A life reduced to dates and a name, yet brimming with the untold story of a woman who had lived defiantly on her own terms. Quinn, with the solemn grace of the young who feel the depth of history’s heartbeat, laid a flower on her grave. It was a simple tribute, yet profound—a single bloom placed for a mystery woman who had navigated the twisted labyrinths of life with the stealth of a cat and the courage of a lioness.
As we stood there, the silence enveloping us like a cloak, it felt as though the very air whispered secrets of the woman who had once been Nellie Bong Bew, Tie Cum, a ghost of many names and many lives. In that moment, beneath the vast Australian sky, the past reached out, a tangible thread connecting us to the enigmatic spirit of a woman who had gambled everything to mold her destiny with her own hands. Here, in the hallowed ground of the Melbourne General Cemetery, Nellie Bong Bew’s legacy was sealed, not just in the earth, but in our hearts, forever part of the wild, intricate tapestry of human endeavor.
So here’s to you, Mrs. Ah Kim, aka Nellie Bong Bew, aka Tie Cum Ah Chung, with your name butchered and rehashed more times than the law allows. Here’s to the tenacity of your spirit, the audacity of your will, in a world that offered you no favours and fewer opportunities. You, who manoeuvred through the shadows of Melbourne, dodging the harsh glare of prejudice and the sharper edges of the law, crafting a life in the back alleys and dimly lit rooms of history’s forgotten corridors.
Tonight, I raise my glass—filled to the brim with something potent, no doubt—to that relentless spirit of yours. To the art of survival, to the fierce joy of living on your own terms, and to the mystery and the woman behind it all, who stitched her identity together with the threads of defiance and determination.
Here’s to you, the indomitable lady of many aliases, otherwise, Yokahama.
You keep finding these trails in the northeast goldfields right when I've just left them!!
What a fascinating woman though. I can't tell if the immigrant journey has become easier or harder ever since! I strangely love that despite all these travails she had a girl gang to wind up in court with. Good for them.