Gladys Sym Choon a thoroughly modern business leader and an exotic style setter in Adelaide from 1920s
Gladys Sym Choon brought style in a exotic fashion to Adelaide throughout her life.
When teenager Gladys Sym Choon opened her own China Gift Store at 235a Rundle Street, Adelaide, in 1923, she was the first woman to incorporate a 20th Century South Australian business and the first to import goods from overseas.
Sym Choon balanced opposing factors in her life. Born in the Adelaide suburb of Unley of Chinese parents, she was successful in a male-dominated industry and met the demand for oriental luxury goods in the racist White Australia era. Sym Choon emphasised her Chinese heritage in advertisements, holding Chinese lanterns and wearing traditional dresses, but was thoroughly modern in her outlook: interested in permanent-wave hairstyles and flapper fashions.
For more than 60 years Gladys Sym Choon’s Rundle Street shop offered Adelaideans a taste of the exotic. She sold an eclectic range from napery, fine embroidery, lingerie, lace, ornamental china, and oriental jewellery, to chopsticks, paper lanterns and sandalwood soaps – all sourced on regular trips to China and Hong Kong.
The success of the Rundle Street store allowed her to open another shop in Regent Arcade in 1928 that operated until the early 1950s. In 1939, Sym Choon had married Edward (Teddy) Chung Gon, who had a similar business in Tasmania where she moved and worked as well as continuing to stock and supervise her Adelaide store with regular visits.
In 1979, Syn Choon gave the Adelaide store to her daughter Mei Ling Niel, who managed it until 1985 when it was then bought by fashion designer Abdul Razak Mohammed and his partner Joff Chappel, who renamed it Miss Gladys Sym Choon, to maintain the spirit of its founder.
Gladys Sym Choon had entered business on the back of hard work by her father John from the British colony of Hong Kong who (with his Australian-born children) had to apply for a certificate of exemption from the White Australia dictation test to gain residency.
John Sym Choon found work in Adelaide as a hawker, walking with a hand cart to buy East End markets produce that he sold door to door. Later he rented a room in Rundle Street, close to the markets, and bought a horse and cart. He brought his wife So Yung Moon from China and, in 1906, they set up Sym Choon & Co, on Rundle Street, selling Chinese goods, including tea, fireworks and handicrafts.
The Sym Choon children opened more shops in Rundle Street, with Gladys and her younger brother accompanying their father to China on a business trip in 1921. When he died a year later, Gladys’s mother and brother George took over the business, with the other children joining them when they finished school.
In 1912, a young man was arrested after stones and wood were thrown through the windows of the Sym Choon business but, late in life, Gladys Sym Choon said that she couldn’t recall any racism and said the family had been well respected in the community.
