A little over a year later, Goon was gulping down German drift gas in the trenches of the Western Front, and he was hospitalised for months. He returned to the Belgian front in time to take part in the last battle of the war involving Australian troops.

The persistence of Goon, my great-uncle, may be some kind of record.

“Multiple rejections, I’ve come across,” said Emily Cheah Ah-Qune, who curated an exhibition and research project on the Chinese Anzacs (the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Amy Corps) for the Chinese Museum of Melbourne.

“But eight times … I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who went through so many rejections. He must have felt strongly about serving.”

‘Good enough to live in, good enough to fight for’

The story has long held a place in our family lore. According to my late grandmother, Lucy Chong, her brother Fred supposedly walked 700km (435 miles) from their home in the gold-mining town of Bendigo, Victoria, over the state border to Dubbo in New South Wales because Victorian enlisters rejected him for being Chinese.

But the facts of this tall-sounding tale emerge via wartime documents and newspaper clippings, in a search triggered by my sister’s recent discovery of a photo of Goon in uniform in a biographical atlas of Chinese families in Bendigo, put together by the city’s Golden Dragon Museum.

Uncle Fred stares out in sepia tones, handsome and young, the collar of his greatcoat rakishly flipped. I had never seen his face before.

As Australia and New Zealand mark Anzac Day on Thursday, honouring their troops’ service, Goon’s story bucks assumptions about the forging of Australian nationhood on the distant battlefields of the first world war. It is a history that once overlooked the likes of Fred Goon.

Despite the barriers that he and others faced, there appears little doubt about the patriotism of Chinese-Australian troops.

Benjamin Moy Ling, another soldier identified by the Chinese Anzacs project, was rejected several times because of his race, according to an account by the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs. But he was eventually granted special permission to join by a senior officer.

“‘If Australia is good enough to live in, it is good enough to fight for,” Moy Ling was quoted as saying in a newspaper in a 1917 report about his enlistment.

Researcher Edmond Chiu, who assisted Cheah Ah-Qune on the Chinese Anzacs project, which was started in 2014 and continues to tour Australia, said it was important to show that Chinese-Australians were part of the nation’s history in ways that defied expectations, “including fighting for this country”.

Chiu said at least 250 Chinese-Australian troops served in the first world war.

Goon was the son of Louey Fong Goon, a merchant from Taishan in Guangdong who joined the 19th century Australian gold rush. In Bendigo, he married Elizabeth Johnson, daughter of Irish immigrants, in 1896 – three years after she had given birth to their son, Fred.

My great-grandparents’ pairing was not unique; there were 28 marriages between Chinese men and Irish-born women in Victoria in a five-year period at the height of the gold rush, and many others involved Australian-born Irishwomen like Johnson.

But Fred was born into an Australia where racism was already endemic – anger about Chinese men marrying white women had helped trigger violent unrest, including the infamous 1861 Lambing Flat riot, in which Chinese miners were expelled from goldfields by white diggers. By 1901, the White Australia Policy was enshrined in law and would prevent most Chinese immigration for almost 50 years.

Cheah Ah-Qune said that when the first world war broke out, Chinese-Australians “desperately wanted to fit in” – and supporting the war effort was one way to do so.

Goon did indeed sign up in Dubbo, far from the family home, his enlistment papers in the Australian National Archives show. Cheah Ah-Qune also sent me a clipping from the Dubbo Gazette and Wellington Independent, dated January 16, 1917, describing Goon among the latest recruits there.

“Goon was anxious to enlist when the war broke out, but eight times he was passed out,” says the article. Goon was previously rejected for not being of “regulation measurement”, it says.

He stood just five feet, two-and-a-half inches (1.59 metres) and weighed 122 pounds (55kg), according to his medical records – diminutive, to be sure, but clear of the five-foot-two minimum height for Australian soldiers that had been in force since 1915.

Cheah Ah-Qune said the racism faced by ethnic Chinese would-be recruits was institutionalised, but application of the European-origin rule was up to individual recruitment medics. Some were sticklers. Others would bend the rules.

“One might say, well, you’re Sino in appearance, you have an olive complexion, but your heart is in the right place, so let’s put you in. It was discretionary … especially as the war progressed and more and more men were needed,” she said.

Some Chinese-Australians went to great lengths to enlist, said Cheah Ah-Qune, citing one recruit who travelled from Melbourne to Queensland to sign up, at least 1,700km north.

So did Goon really walk 700km to enlist? The record is ambiguous, but it’s possible, said Cheah Ah-Qune. Although the Gazette and Independent says Goon had worked for a Dubbo grocer for two years, Goon may have spent that time trying to sign up after his long odyssey. “I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,” she said.

Goon worked as a produce buyer – a semi-itinerant job requiring wide travel – and a blend of reasons may have led him to Dubbo, on foot or otherwise.

“Your uncle might have gone to Dubbo because he was rejected [elsewhere] and decided to try somewhere different,” said Cheah Ah-Qune. “Or he may have gone to Dubbo to work, and decided to have another go at enlistment there.”

Gassed on the Western Front

Whatever the case, Private Fred Goon posed for a photo in his new uniform on June 17, 1917, and four days later, he boarded the troop ship HMAT Suevic in Melbourne, bound for war.

His experiences in the trenches of Europe are sketched out in his archived service records.

Goon arrived at the front in Belgium on December 29, 1917, in the aftermath of the devastating Battle of Passchendaele, in which both German and British-commanded sides suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and tens of thousands of deaths.

The worst of the fighting was over, but on March 18, 1918, Goon was overcome by poison gas and extracted by field ambulance. He was rendered mute, and sickened so badly that he would spend 79 days in hospital.

Few other details of his condition are described – certainly no mention of the family tale that he was blinded by the gas – but Goon recovered sufficiently to return to the front with his unit in the 20th Australian Infantry Battalion on September 12, 1918, then took part in the Battle of Montbrehain three weeks later.

It was one of a series of battles that would breach the German Hindenburg Line and bring about an end to the war, and was the final fighting involving Australian troops.

Goon arrived back in Australia on June 19, 1919.

The exploits of some other Chinese Anzacs are better known.

The most famous, by far, was Billy Sing – one of the deadliest snipers of the war. The Queensland-born crackshot reputedly shot dead almost 300 Turks at Gallipoli, although Cheah Ah-Qune said that “after the 150th kill they stopped counting”.

The film, also known as Gallipoli Sniper, was never released, after the casting prompted outrage – although a promotional trailer lives on as a tribute to the pitfalls of whitewashed history.

Branding the Sing casting “stupidity”, Cheah Ah-Qune said that “when it comes to the Anzacs, people have this notion that they were quintessential [Anglo] Australians … they couldn’t have been indigenous, or German, or Greek, or Chinese-Australians”.

The popular understanding of the broader Anzac legend – as a story populated solely by stereotypical Anglo-Australians – was wrong, she said.

And that state of denial even extended to some descendants of the Chinese Anzacs.

Cheah Ah-Qune said it was difficult to definitively establish the number of Chinese Anzacs because many used ambiguous or Anglicised names, and some mixed-race families today did not even want to acknowledge Chinese heritage.

“Some refused to participate, and one family just said, ‘Strike our names out, we are not [Chinese],’” she said. “I’ve seen Chinese-Australian families where half of them are going, ‘Yes, we embrace this part of our family history,’ and the other half are going, ‘Nope, we don’t want any part of it.’”

By contrast, Cheah Ah-Qune said she had never heard an account of Chinese-Australian soldiers suffering racism at the hands of their comrades.

She quoted a white veteran of the second world war who told her race did not matter to frontline troops. “He said: ‘we’re fighting a war. We don’t care what colour your skin is. The fact is that you’re here fighting alongside us’.”

My great-uncle Fred died in 1941, aged just 47; “it would seem likely that … his life was shortened by the effects of his war service,” the Golden Dragon Museum’s biographical notes say.

I never knew him. But his service and sheer persistence are sources of pride, not denial, among his family.

And his dogged journey towards enlistment more than a century ago echoes the long march of Chinese-Australians towards their rightful place in their nation’s wartime history.

Ian Young is the South China Morning Post’s Vancouver correspondent