In 1911 a lodge of the international Hung League opened an impressive building in Mary Street, Sydney, looking west along Campbell Street towards Paddy’s Markets where many of its members earned their livelihood. The Hung League – or Triads as they are often known in English – had grown over the five decades since setting foot in colonial Australia from a loose affiliation of rural clubs into an organised social network with a prominent urban profile. With the opening of its new headquarters in Sydney, the New South Wales Hung League put on a respectable public face under the English title impressed on the building’s façade: Chinese Masonic Society.

Mounting a respectable public face was a considerable achievement for an organisation that all ‘decent’ people were inclined to deride as thieves, thugs, and opium addicts. Not long before the Sydney Masonic Hall was opened, members of the more respectable See Yup native-place association^[2] in Victoria took objection to the criminal behaviour and stand-over tactics of the Hung League in Melbourne and established a rival league to do battle with the triad fraternity. Gangs took to fighting one another in the streets. Sydney also had its share of Tong Wars but these were well behind it when the Hung League announced it was emerging in public as a Masonic Society.^[3] The Chinese Masonic Society of NSW was working to become the kind of organisation that respectable men would consider joining.

The ideal of respectability was one of the most powerful forces working for social transformation among immigrant communities in federation Australia. Drawing on the work of British social historians, Janet McCalman has observed that a cluster of social traits associated with the idea of respectability (including self-reliance, independence, and self-discipline) were popularised among all classes in the industrial revolution before being transplanted to Australia ‘by immigrants hoping for dignity and prosperity in a new land’.^[4] The struggle for respectability crossed class, gender and ethnic lines among the inner-urban communities that staffed and ran the factories, utilities, wharves, warehouses and markets of early twentieth century Australian cities. Immigrants who did not harbour aspirations for modern respectability before they arrived were not long in acquiring them after arrival. Children of immigrants from the pre-industrial counties of Ireland, for example, struggled to escape the stigma that attached to the name ‘Bog Irish’. Incentives for achieving respectability were particularly strong in societies where migrating settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland mixed with one another (and with the occasional Russian or Chinese) to a degree rarely replicated in their countries of origin. Opportunities beckoned not only for prosperity but also for achieving equal recognition for themselves, their families, and their particular religious and ethnic communities.^[5]

Despite its attempts to achieve respectability the Hung League has yet to gain recognition that its growth and transformation were in any sense comparable to those of other community organisations transplanted to Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter questions both Australian and Chinese historiography, and uses a transnational approach to develop a new interpretation of the origins, history, and significance of the Hung League. In seeking explanations for the organisation and conduct of Chinese secret societies it is tempting to look to China for motives and precedents; certainly the rules, rituals, hierarchies, and patterns of internal organisation of secret societies were similar from one place to another. But when the New South Wales (NSW) Hung League went public under the title Chinese Masonic Society it was responding to forces at work not in China but in Sydney, and possibly also in Auckland and San Francisco. The NSW League sought recognition of the rightful place of a Chinese community organisation in a European settler country and it sought acknowledgment that the working men of the Hung League were no less decent than the Chinese-Australians who looked down on them. By focusing on the distinctive local features of secret societies in Australia, rather than turning to China for generic explanations, we gain some sense of what was ‘Australian’ about Chinese-Australian communities, and we open a window on federation Australia that goes beyond the spectre of a closed and autarkic European enclave that wanted, above all, to keep Chinamen out.

The argument of this chapter is not entirely consistent with Chinese historiography of secret societies either. The role ascribed to secret society networks in China’s republican revolution is circumscribed by two common assumptions. One is that secret societies were essentially social in their aims, character and activities. The other is that their limited political aspirations never rose above atavistic notions of imperial restoration, as is suggested in Howqua’s deposition to the Victorian commission in 1855, which begins this chapter, specifically referring to the overthrow of the Manchu ‘Tartars’ and the substitution of a native Han Chinese emperor who could realise the League’s aspirations for egalitarian brotherhood. It follows from both these assumptions that if and when secret societies were to come out on the side of the republican revolution they needed to be prodded along by Sun Yatsen’s republican movement, which introduced modern nationalism to the Hung League and converted its members into proto-revolutionary allies for the republicans’ assault on the Qing Empire.

The notion that modern revolutionary ideologies needed to be imported into overseas secret society networks from outside the networks themselves is not borne out by the Australian case. To be sure, the Chinese Masonic Society of New South Wales is not generally known for engaging in partisan political activities. By reputation it is a community organisation that provides social support for its members, that takes a patriotic stand on current events in China, and that occasionally engages in stand-over tactics against those who deny its authority. A similar reputation attaches to national branches of the Hung League in North America and Southeast Asia. In the Australian colonies, however, members of the Hung League appear to have been capable of politicising and depoliticising themselves, and to have borrowed as freely from Anglo-Australian institutional networks as they did from Sun Yatsen’s Chinese nationalist organisations. The Chinese Masonic network of New South Wales had an indigenous revolutionary history long before it adopted a respectable public face. Further, there is reason to believe that the Australian Masonic network was deradicalised by the time Sun Yatsen’s nationalist movement rose to prominence. In New South Wales, when republican nationalists called upon local lodges of the Hung League to support their revolution, they confronted not atavistic notions of imperial restoration but rather an organisation that had shrugged off a revolutionary past and had come to embrace the Australian ethic of egalitarian respectability.

Evidence for this argument is summoned from two sets of sources. The first includes an oral legend about an early leader of the NSW Hung League who died in 1874 and the historical records of his followers in south China later in that century. The second set relates to the consolidation of a statewide Chinese Masonic network early in the twentieth century and to its links with English, Scottish and Irish Freemasonry.