Louey and Kate O'Hoy were part of the early Chinese immigrants who came to Australia during the gold rushes.
The O'Hoys — their name was Anglicised on arrival — came to Bendigo from Canton, China, in 1860.
By then, Victoria's population had swollen to one million, a tenfold increase since the discovery of gold at Bendigo, Ballarat and elsewhere in 1851.
It utterly transformed the growing colony.
"Bendigo became one of the richest goldfields in the world," said Dennis O'Hoy, Louey and Kate's grandson.
Canton to Australia's Big Gold Mountain
Dennis, 84, is a retired university art teacher, cultural custodian of the goldfields' Chinese and an authority on the lives they led.
"They had their own name for Bendigo — 'Dai Gum San', translated it means Big Gold Mountain," he said.
Australia — to the Chinese — was called "Sun Gim San", "New Gold Mountain", Mr O'Hoy said.
The Chinese name for "Old Gold Mountain" was applied to the Californian gold rush of 1849.
However, the Chinese presence, and their influence, on Australian goldfields is often forgotten or overlooked.
"A quarter of the population in Bendigo was Chinese-born during that gold rush period," Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum's Leigh McKinnon said.
"And, in a lot of goldfields, sometimes that proportion was much higher."
Chinese entrepreneurship
The museum showcases relics of world significance and stories of the Chinese on the goldfields and in the decades that followed.
Today, the most impressive exhibit is Loong, thought to be the oldest, five-clawed imperial dragon in the world.
It dates from the 1890s and, for many years, was the centrepiece of Bendigo's Easter procession.
The annual Easter Fair began in 1871, to raise money for charities, including two hospitals and an aged persons' home. It is still a major tourist attraction today.
"My grandfather, Louey O'Hoy, was one of the originators of the Chinese Association and Chinese procession," Mr O'Hoy said.
The entrepreneurial Louey O'Hoy prospered in Bendigo.
"Grandfather became quite successful, he started many, many shops in Sandhurst, as Bendigo was then known," he added.
"Gradually, he had butchers' shops, grocers' shops, pig farms and market gardens."
After the gold rush ended, the Chinese took on important roles in all walks of life: everything from merchants, rural labourers and traditional Chinese herbalists.
"Many of them were from farming backgrounds and they transferred those skills and adapted them to the local environment and were often very skilled producers of fresh fruit and vegetables, often in very trying conditions," Mr McKinnon said.
Louey O'Hoy's enormous civic contribution was recognised by the imperial government in China.
In 1889, he was conferred with the rank of a mandarin, roughly equivalent to a knighthood.
Racism and injustice
By then, Australian society was changing. The aftermath of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat — where disgruntled miners fought government troops — had won the diggers reforms such as the right to vote.
However, by the 1890s, the push to Federation and Australian nationhood saw those egalitarian and democratic ideals fade.
Ultimately, it led to the White Australia policy that discriminated against anyone not deemed a "British-born citizen".
The O'Hoy family felt its injustice.
Dennis O'Hoy's father, Que Lan O'Hoy, came to Bendigo in 1894, aged 19, to carry on the family's work.
He married in China in 1910, but Australia's stringent immigration laws prohibited his wife from joining him in Australia.
"In 1901, with the Federation of Australia, the Immigration Restriction Act was brought in," Dennis O'Hoy said.
"My mother, Que Lan's wife, was only allowed to stay in Australia for two years, so living in Bendigo and every couple of years she'd have to go back to China."
The Immigration Restriction Act was finally abolished in 1958. By then, the number of Chinese in Bendigo and elsewhere in Australia had dwindled.
Preserving the rich history of the Chinese in Bendigo fell to a few families, descendants of the gold rush days.
In the early 1960s, Que Lan O'Hoy's family donated the land — a large city block — on which the Golden Dragon Museum stands.
In 2016, Dennis O'Hoy was awarded the Order of Australia for his contribution to preserving heritage and civic service.
He's an almost daily visitor to Bendigo's White Hills Cemetery, the city's largest.
At the entrance, he pays homage to his ancestors by burning joss sticks and candles in a brick burning tower.
In the cemetery grounds, distinctive stone tablets mark 950 Chinese graves.
Three times a year, Mr O'Hoy continues the family tradition of observing important religious rituals.
He brings wine, chicken, pork, drinks and biscuits to the cemetery and lays them there as gifts.
Australia has been good to him and his family, he muses.
Even if, they and other Chinese were not always treated equally.
"It's my way, of Chinese people, to venerate their ancestors."
Watch this story on ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on ABC iview.
