The China Project

279 WILLIAM YANG: LIFE LINES William Yang was born William Young in Mareeba, on the Atherton Tableland in far north Queensland, in 1943. His paternal grandfather, Ah Young, had emigrated from Guangdong Province in southern China to Cooktown during the 1880s gold rushes, eventually owning a cane farm and bringing out a wife, Quong Dee. Yang’s maternal grandfather Chun Wing, also from Guangdong, had immigrated to Pine Creek, south of Darwin, around the same period to work as a miner; he also brought out a wife, Ung See. Yang’s parents, Charlie Young and Emma Wing, met in Cairns and moved to Dimbulah on the Atherton Tableland in the 1930s, where they married and established a general store and, later, a tobacco farm. Yang, his brother Alan and his sister Frances grew up in Dimbulah, and were encouraged to suppress their Chinese ethnicity and to assimilate into mainstream white society. They spoke English at home and did not learn Chinese, partly because Yang’s father spoke Hakka and his mother spoke Cantonese. At school, Yang was teased for being Chinese, his first realisation that he was different. Yang went to high school in Cairns and remembers it as ‘perhaps the worst period of my life. I experienced a kind of overt racism at a time when I really wanted to fit in, to belong’. 1 He was given his first camera at the age of 15 by his cousin Les. It was an obscure English brand, a prototype of the modern Instamatic, simpler to use than the Box Brownie . . . I was thrilled to receive it. In my first roll of film I took photos of a turtle down the river where we lived. I was so excited . . . but when I got the result back, the turtle was just a speck in the frame whereas I had imagined it close up. So I experienced with full bitterness something that is very common in photography: the photos don’t always come out the way you want them to. 2 In 1962 Yang moved to Brisbane to study architecture at the University of Queensland, graduating in 1968. While there, he bought a Pentax camera and a range of lenses, taking photographs of ‘buildings, architectural details, shows that I directed (I was interested in theatre), and portraits of people’. 3 His favourite subject was young men, although he took these pictures sparingly, fearing the discovery of his emerging homosexuality. Yang moved from Brisbane to Sydney in 1969 to become a playwright, working with the experimental theatre group Performance Syndicate to produce plays that included Orestes and 10 000 Miles Away . Politically, it was a time of gay liberation, enabling Yang to live openly for the first opposite My brother Alan, me, and my sister Frances, c.1948. Photo: Charlie Young 2008 Digital print, ed. 1/20 / 42.5 x 56.2cm / Collection: The artist Cairns High School, 1990 2008 Digital print, ed. 1/20 / 27.7 x 40cm / Collection: The artist above Photos of Dad & Mum, house at Dimbulah, 1930s 2 framed photographs / 14 x 10cm each / Collection: Alan Young William at Queensland University, 1968 (from ‘GoMA self-portrait’ series) 2008 Digital print, ed. 1/20 / 60 x 40.2cm / Collection: The artist William Yang biography russell storer