THE CURIOUS CASE OF MAUD & MISS YOKO
Tie Cum Ah Chung—known by many names. To some she was Mrs. Ah Kim, to others Nellie Bew, and most curiously of all, “Yokohama”, a Japanese name she carried though she was, in truth, Chinese.
Her story in the colonies began in Hobart, where she worked as a servant until one ill-fated evening when she helped herself to a bag of biscuits. For that small theft, and for denying it before the court, she was sentenced to two months’ gaol. The newspapers of the day, never kind to a foreign name, twisted hers into a dozen forms and mocked her as “a Jap in trouble.” It was an early lesson in colonial life: if one did not master the tale, the papers would happily write it for you.
By 1906 she had appeared again in Launceston, speaking neat, careful English and carrying herself as though her former troubles had been packed away with the past. Before long she was gone from Tasmania altogether, and rumour held that she crossed the water to Melbourne under the name Yokohama. There she found her way to the lively back lanes of Little Lon, settling in a small cottage at 17 Casselden Place, where she earned her living as a lady of the night.
She was once hauled before attention after Charles Ah Hing complained that she had thrown a bucket of water, though most suspected it was her bedpan, over him while he was relieving himself against her fence. In retaliation he marched to the police, declaring her a gambler and a woman of ill repute. Yet Constable Hickling, well acquainted with Ah Hing’s habits, spoke in her defence and declared her a woman of decent standing. In Little Lon the truth was seldom tidy, but boldness was often enough to carry the day, and Nellie possessed that quality in abundance.
In later years she was said to have joined company with a woman named Maud Compton, of whom history tells little. Maud and her companion, Ernest McCauliffe, kept a sly-grog house at the same cottage in Casselden Place from about 1911 until 1915. Their trade continued quietly until Constable Hickling, old acquaintance though he was, returned to charge them with selling liquor without licence, and the house was soon cleared.
At some uncertain point in those lively years, Yokohama herself reported that a bullet had once whistled past her head, perhaps fired during one of the illicit gambling gatherings she was said to host. Such incidents were not unheard of in Little Lon, where fortunes changed hands nightly and the boundary between mischief and danger was thin indeed. Through it all, Nellie Bew, Tie Cum Ah Chung, remained a figure both elusive and resolute, a woman who moved through the shadows of the old quarter with wit, nerve, and a remarkable talent for survival.
