the Chinese government raise the issue of maltreatment of Chinese residents in Australia with the British government. He campaigned against the opium trade, and in 1883 went on an investigation to the Chinese camps in Southern New South Wales. The report revealed widespread opium addiction, and on 24 April 1884, Quong Tart presented a petition to the colonial secretary requesting the ban of opium imports. In June that year Quong Tart also tried to win support for a ban of opium in Melbourne and Ballarat, Victoria. In 1887, he presented a second petition to parliament, and produced a pamphlet titled A Plea for the Abolition of the Importation of Opium. He was also part of the NSW Royal Commission on Alleged Chinese Gambling and Immorality and Charges of Bribery Against Members of the Police Force from 1891 to 1892. Early life Mei Quong Tart was born in 1850 in the village of Shandi (), Duanfen () in southern Taishan, Guangdong province, China. His father, named Mei Kuoyuan, was a fairly successful merchant dealing in ornamental wares. Quong Tart immigrated to Australia in 1859 with his uncle, transporting a shipload of miners to the goldfields around Araluen and Braidwood in regional New South Wales. Once in Braidwood, Quong Tart lived at Bell's Creek in the store of Scottish Thomas Forsyth. In the following years, he was taken in by the wealthy family of Robert Percy Simpson, whose wife Alice Simpson, née Want, was charmed by his Scottish accent. Under the Simpsons, Quong Tart learnt to behave as a proper English gentleman and converted to Christianity. Aged just 21, Quong Tart built a cottage at Bell's Creek with a small fortune developed from investing in gold claims and was prominent in sporting, cultural and religious affairs. On 11 July 1871 he became a naturalised British subject, joined the Freemasons in 1885, and in 1877 he was appointed to the board of the Bell's Creek public school. In 1881 he returned to Taishan, China at the request of his family, and visited Canton and Nanking to set up operations for a tea trade to Sydney. On returning to Sydney, he established a chain of silk stores and tea shops. The tea shops were intended to provide customers with samples of tea, but became so successful that he turned his shops into tea rooms, the first tea rooms in Sydney. In February 1882 he