Wong Ming

Two Brothers. Two Gallows. One Mother Who Never Knew.
In Canton, China, a seventy-four year old woman waited for the monthly money her son Wong Ming faithfully sent from Australia. For fourteen years he had worked the market gardens of colonial New South Wales, sending what he could back home to support her. She had no idea that half a world away, in a small workers hut in a camp at Warren, her son's life was about to end in blood and violence.
She also had no idea she had already lost another son to the gallows.
In 1886, Wong Ming's brother Wong Tong had been hanged at Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane for the shooting of their own brother Cock Tow. Now, twelve years later, Wong Ming was walking the same path — condemned to hang at Dubbo Gaol on 13 December 1898, at the hands of New South Wales' infamous state executioner, Nosey Bob.
His crime was jealousy. Wong Ming and Joe Mon Jom — two Chinese market gardeners who had known each other only days — came to blows over a British woman named Alice Spong. Wong Ming stabbed Alice first, wounding her in the breast and arm. When Joe Mon Jom stepped in to separate them, he fled the hut — only for Wong Ming to chase him seventy-five yards down the street with a hunting knife and stab him in the abdomen and forehead. Joe Mon Jom died instantly.
The Life & Death of Wong Ming tells the complete true story of both men — from Wong Ming's birth in Canton in 1858 to his final days in Dubbo Gaol, where his greatest anxiety was not his own fate but that word of his disgraceful ending might somehow reach his elderly mother in China. Author Helen Cottee traces every detail of the crime, the inquest, the trial and the execution, while also uncovering the extraordinary parallel story of Wong Tong's hanging in Brisbane — painting a portrait of a family touched twice by the gallows, on opposite sides of Australia, twelve years apart.
Richly illustrated with historical photographs, maps and documents sourced directly from colonial records, the book concludes with the complete family trees of both Wong Ming and Joe Mon Jom — two men from Canton who met briefly in a workers camp in Warren, and whose lives ended violently on the same dusty afternoon.
Part of the Life & Death series — preserving the untold stories of colonial Australia, one execution at a time.
For readers who love Australian history, colonial true crime, and the forgotten souls whose stories deserve to be told.