Penny Wong, an Australian politician, is both an immigrant to Australia and a direct descendant of South Australia’s earliest white settlers on her mother’s side.
Her mother, Jane (née Chapman), is an English Australian whose ancestors arrived in South Australia on the Cygnet in 1836.
And her father, Francis Wong, is a Malaysian Chinese man of Hakka heritage who stayed in Sandakan at the time of Japanese occupation of British Borneo.
Foreign Minister, Penny Wong’s parents had met in the early 1960s when Francis Wong was a Colombo Plan student at the University of Adelaide. Wong grew up speaking Malay, Chinese (most likely Hakka Chinese), and English dialects.
She started attending Kinabalu International School when she was five years old. When Wong was eight years old, her parents divorced, and she relocated to Adelaide, South Australia, with her mother and younger brother.
