Some of the ships of the First Fleet sailed to China, to get cargo there,
to take back to England, rather than sail back empty, as there was nothing to export from Sydney in 1788.
Chinese were present in NSW in minuscule numbers before 1848, however much the hard-core political correctness dweebies would like to posit otherwise. There was an African and a Latvian on the first fleet too. There was the very well known John Shying, and three shepherds working for Macarthur, and ... undoubted some more but the records have been covered up, don't you know?
http://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/docs/chinesehistory.pdfMy great-great gradfather Alfred Cluney was buried by an undertaker called Shying.
Furthermore, a second-generation Chinese person born in Australia is not all that likely to have gone by the chinese-form honorific Ah Hoy which as several people have pointed out, is not actually a name.
A death certifcate assertion about place of birth is only a reliable as the knowledge of the person providing the information, which is highly variable.
By 1855, there were 100,000 Chinese in Australia, compared to maybe 1000 ten years earlier ( and all invisible in any documentation ) . In the absence of any other evidence, a supposedly 80 year old man dying in 1922 is far more likely to be a member of the first category, rather than the second.