About the author, co-researcher and editor

Alison Choy Flannigan, BA, LLB (Hons) is an Australian multi-award winning lawyer of Chinese descent, born in Sydney.
 

For over 13 years Alison has been researching the history of her family through various generations, and the communities in which they have lived, through National and State archives, birth, deaths and marriages and community records in Australia and overseas.  This has included the history of Cooktown and the Palmer River Goldrush and Thursday Island with its fishing and pearling industry in the late 19th Century.

Alison is a partner of Hall & Wilcox Lawyers and is a corporate commercial lawyer advising the health, aged care and life sciences.

She previously held the positions of partner with a major Australian and international law firm and General Counsel of Australia’s largest private hospital operator.
 
For every year since 2008 she has been named as one of Australia’s best lawyers in health and aged care in Best Lawyers International and the Australian Financial Review.
 
Alison has a Bachelor of Arts (Sydney University) and a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from the University of Technology, Sydney.  She has a keen interest in Australian history.
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Malcolm Oakes, SC is married to Alison’s sister. He is a senior counsel practising at the New South Wales Bar who has a lay interest in Chinese-Australian history. He has previously published a paper on William Lee, who in 1938 was the first barrister of Chinese descent admitted to the New South Wales Bar –see [2015] (Winter) Bar News 73 http://www.nswbar.asn.au/docs/webdocs/BN_022015_lee.pdf and presented a paper at Dragontails 2017 on Otto Kong Sing, who was admitted as a solicitor in New South Wales in 1895 and is the earliest identified person of Chinese descent admitted as a solicitor in any of the former Australian colonies.
I am saddened to advise that my brother in law,  co-researcher and co-author Malcolm Oakes, SC passed away suddenly in November 2023.

Malcolm attended Lismore High School and then the University of Sydney Law School, where he was a resident of St Andrew’s College. He spent several years practising as a solicitor in Sydney at Allen Allen & Hemsley and in London at Allen & Overy. Malcolm was called to the Bar in 1980. He commenced practice at Tenth Floor Chambers (then Ten Wentworth). After short periods at other chambers including 13 Wentworth, he returned to Tenth Floor Chambers, where he spent the majority of his career. Malcolm took silk in 1994 and, later in his practice, specialised in Schemes of Arrangements.

Malcolm was a loving husband to Beverley, father to William, Warren, Georgie and Alistair and grandfather to Josie, Teodor, Clementine, Eloise, Lachlan and Eleanor.

https://nswbar.asn.au/the-bar-association/publications/inbrief/view/9e292ee2fc90581f795ff1df011c216b

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Denise O’Hagan, BA (Hons), MA (Bibliography and Textual Criticism) is the manager of Black Quill Press, set up in 2015 to assist independent authors to publish their books in historical/cultural subject areas.

She has a background in educational book publishing, both overseas (Collins, Heinemann, and Routledge & Kegan Paul) and in Australia (Harcourt Brace, Cambridge University Press, and the State Library of NSW).

A member of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), she has published several short stories (Papyrus Publishing), edited two books by her late mother, novelist Joan O’Hagan, and is currently working on, among other things, a Mini Style Guide to assist writers and editors with the fundamentals of good writing and manuscript presentation.