MY FAMILY

 

I have been discovering some interesting facts:

1)         My ancestress Mary Pitt emigrated to New South Wales in 1801 as a widow in her fifties with five children.

2)         Nobody quite knows why, though it’s presumed it was because she had been left penniless back in England.

3)         Mary’s cousin was married to Lord Horatio Nelson’s sister, which is how she got to come here with letters of recommendation in order to be granted land.

4)         She was given a grant of 100 acres on the Hawkesbury River. So was her only surviving son Thomas.

5)         Her four daughters, none of whom had dowries (hence perhaps one of the reasons for her coming here) all married ‘well’.

6)         Her grandson and great grandson were genuine pioneers.  They were the first to ‘take up’ (a possible euphemism for ‘take’) land in remote regions and to develop businesses that went on to make a lot of money.

7)         I’m not sure what happened to it (the money).

Those are the bare facts, gleaned mostly thanks to my aunt Barbara, still alive at 95 and living in North Sydney, who spent 17 years researching the family genealogy.

Here are some even more interesting facts:

1)  In 1801 the colony was 13 years old and the ‘European’ population was around 5,000. (I don’t know why historians call them Europeans because in fact they were entirely British and Irish.)

2)  Of those 5,000 only around 30 were free settlers. The others were convicts or officials, marines or soldiers.

(I don’t know what’s happened to the spacing here by the way, it seems to have doubled itself without my permission.)

3)  Men outnumbered women by six or seven to one.

4)  New South Wales was originally settled as a penal colony only. There is no indication the British intended it as an outpost of Empire.

5)  The original colony very nearly did not survive. Not surprising, when you consider how it was planned, or rather not planned.

6)    Free settlers could not be persuaded to go there, not until well into the 19^th century. It was tough, harsh, and an awfully long way from home.

 

7)  I could go on …

This is all genuinely exciting.

I’ve spent many days in libraries in Sydney, Windsor and Canberra, poring over documents and microforms and discovering very little that my aunt hadn’t already.  What is exciting is the historical context. I simply had no idea. I had no idea for instance that my great great great great grandfather (Mary’s son) was involved indirectly in the Rum Rebellion; or that my great³ grandfather was responsible for the first ever pipe line to carry water across Sydney Harbour to north Sydney; that the same man founded one of the first ever stock and station agents in New South Wales, that was still in existence until the 1970s; that my great² grandfather was partly responsible for planting the Norfolk pines along the beach in Manly; that he and his father were aldermen of St Leonards and Manly respectively.  Is this all boring?  Probably.  To anyone who is not part of our family, of course. That’s the problem with family history, it’s very easy to get boring about it.

It’s taken me a long time to get round to doing this.  I took not a blind bit of interest in my family history when I lived here way back in my twenties – it’s not something you care about when you’re young, for some reason.  So why now?  It isn’t just the history, remarkable though that is. I want to know why I am the way I am; why my mother and her two sisters were so – how shall I say? – strange. Why she (my mother) and my surviving aunt were such snobs?  (Australian are meant to be the most egalitarian people in the world, aren’t they?  Aren’t they?)  Why the two ‘English’ sisters did not speak to the Australian sister. Why we, my generation – my brother, my two female cousins and the two male cousins I don’t know – are who we are.

Someone once suggested history should be taught backwards.  That we should begin by talking to our own parents and if possible our grandparents, to whom we can relate, and work back from there. It makes a lot of sense to me, because you begin with the people you know and then look back at the forces that shaped them. One of the problems with ancient history is trying to get your head around a world to which you have no frame of reference. I do remember as a schoolchild having a good old laugh at old-fashioned spelling – ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’ – and the ‘s’ shaped like an ‘f’, as in ‘Fhakefpeare’ and fo on – and the feelings of superiority we felt towards these primitive ancestors who had no notion of hygiene, or electricity, central heating or the internal combustion engine.  And while this may seem like a digression (it is), there is no question Australia is a very special place, not like any other place.  And the people – both men and women, in their different ways, are not like any other people I’ve ever met.  So maybe by looking back over the 230 years that have shaped them I might get to understand them a bit better.

THE HAWKESBURY THEN

 

 

The Hawkesbury River was first ‘discovered’ by Governor Phillip in 1789, the year after the First Fleet landed. He and his team sailed up the coast to Broken Bay and explored the district on foot. They planted potatoes, Indian corn, melon and other seeds, which subsequently flourished, as a result of which Phillip said he “knew now that the ultimate success of the colony was assured. The end of fears of food shortages for the people was in sight.” [1]

            However Phillip and Co also noted signs of extreme flooding in the area, so he advised against its settlement until several more explorations had been made. His successors weren’t so meticulous though, so the first farmers arrived in 1794. Ever since then, and up until fairly recently despite the building of dams, the Hawkesbury has flooded on a regular basis.

            When Mary and Thomas first arrived there they would have first had to clear the land.  There was no farm machinery in those days. ‘The farms at this time were cultivated by hoe. The land had been cleared by cutting down the trees and leaving the stumps. The ground was then turned over with a hoe and wheat seed was scattered and hoed in. The number of stumps and the scarcity of bullocks or horses precluded the use of the plough. Harvest took place in December when the wheat was reaped, bound up into sheaves, then carried by men to a stack or barn. It was thrashed with a flail and marketed.

            ‘Farms had no fences. There was no need for them as the settlers had no livestock except pigs…’[2]  The houses were small and extremely primitive: wattled and plastered walls, thatched roofs, and the floor was just the bare ground.

            And then came the floods. They were so bad, and so frequent, that in January 1802, in response to reports from Governor King of the plight of the Hawkesbury farmers Lord Hobart (Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs) made a suggestion:

            ‘It has occurred to me,’ he said, ‘that the very causes which have contributed to produce this effect might be brought to operate in favour of the cultivation of an article of food that would not be much less advantageous to the public of the individuals than that of bread corn. It is perfectly well known that rice will only succeed in ground that is occasionally inundated; and as the plant rises in proportion as the water rises, without suffering material injury, it would seem to be better adapted for the banks of the Hawkesbury than any other corn. By removing the buildings to the higher grounds, and selecting for cultivation such parts as appear to be least exposed to the rapidity of the water, I should apprehend that a very beneficial change might be effected in that district.’[3]

            In October 1802 King responded:  ‘Respecting the advantage of rice being cultivated on the low grounds at the Hawkesbury, which are so liable to be overflowed, there is a probability it might answer … if we had the means of giving the grounds the necessary irrigations; for although the banks of the Hawkesbury are inundated twice or thrice in some years, yet in others the rivers and creeks seldom rise above the ordinary level, which is at least twenty feet from the top of the lowest banks.’[4]  The Australian climate, don’t you love it?

 

It would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wattled wall of Mary’s primitive hut, to hear what she thought of this brave new country that her cousin had dispatched her to.

           

‘It was a very small and primitive yet faction-torn Sydney that Mrs Mary Pitt found in 1801 when “Canada” came to anchor in Sydney Cove.

            ‘A few barrack-like structures on the headland to the right; on either side of the tank stream, houses of slabs, weatherboard or brick-nog set in large allotments, for each citizen was expected to cultivate a kitchen garden to eke out the scanty food supplies of the colony.

            ‘Soups of wallaby and ’possum bones, rhubarb or pumpkin pie, with wholemeal bread baked in dripping was the worker’s Sunday dinner. Blue seemed to be the only paint available. Houses were sometimes painted a lightish shade white caste, water-butts and barrows were a few tones darker.

            ‘Bertie (whoever he may be) says: “The inhabitants were hard drinking, crotchety, narrow-minded, ignorant and often tyrannical, impressing their narrow views on each new batch of settlers.”

            ‘There was no real settlement beyond Port Jackson (Sydney) and the Hawkesbury outside a strip of country eighty miles long and about half as wide. To the west the Blue Mountains were an impregnable barrier, and the terrain between them and the sea offered little more than a subsistence to its scattered inhabitants.

            ‘To these hard conditions of life from the comparative luxury of Britain came the hardy stock from which we are sprung. Grimly determined men, devoted, self-sacrificing women, each sustained by a faith that almost passeth understanding, confident and content in some vague fashion that a generation yet unborn, reaping where they had sown, would hold them in high honor as the founders of a great nation.’[5] 

 

When Mary and family arrived in 1801 the colony itself was thirteen years old. A muster taken in 1801 just before she arrived showed a total population of just under 6,000, of which only around thirty-four were free settlers (although records of free settlers are, unlike those of convicts, rather vague). The remaining population comprised convicts and officials, and men outnumbered women by at least six to one. 

It wasn’t a place free people wanted to migrate to – why should they? – it was a very long way from home and conditions were dreadful. For the first few years of its existence the colony had been on the brink of starvation, and although Governor Phillip, the first governor, urged the British government to encourage free settlers to migrate they (the government) did not take a lot of notice, partly because, frankly, they had other more important things to think about, such as the Napoleonic Wars.

           

It is extraordinary, when you look at this beautiful country, to think that as recently as 200 years ago no Europeans could be persuaded to come and live here.

  

---

[1] Macquarie Country, Dowd

[2] Ibid

[3] Historical Records of Australia Series 1 Vol 3, p369

[4] Ibid p 587/588

[5] Country Life 20 Sept 1929, Australian Pioneers II, the Descendants of Mary Pitt, Archdeacon Oakes

The Hawkesbury

We are in Richmond, an hour or so north of Sydney, on the Hawkesbury River. We’ve – that’s my cousin Libby, my 95 year old aunt’s daughter, who lives in Canberra (Libby that is) and I – to investigate our family roots.

            It is here in 1802 that my great great great great grandmother Mary Pitt and her son Thomas were first granted 100 acres each of land, thanks to the auspices of Lord Horatio Nelson.  We weren’t expecting to find anything very much here, other than the odd gravestone – a whole bunch of our ancestors were buried in Richmond – but we thought we’d come and soak in the atmosphere and if possible check out the site where our ancestors had first tilled the soil, expecting it to be buried beneath a multi-storey car park, or now part of somebody’s back garden.

            This morning we stopped off at the Hawkesbury Library in Windsor, where the local librarian is also the local historian and has published several books on the district. She knew about our family. She also told us quite peremptorily that the original site of ‘Bronte farm’ as it came to be known as (Bronte was the title given to Lord Nelson, as in Duke of Bronte) was still there but in ‘private ownership’. In other words don’t go there.

            Anyway we were driving along and came upon a sign ‘Historic Bronte 1809’ on the side of the main road, and the gate was open so we drove up the driveway to the farmhouse. We realised we were trespassing and that it was quite likely the owner, if she was there, might produce a shotgun and tell us to ‘piss off out of it’. 

            The owner was there, a middle-aged woman whose name, fortunately, I just remembered from a newspaper article I read this morning – Margaret Betts.  But she didn’t produce a shotgun. When she heard what we were there for she invited us in, showed us the thick file containing documents all relating to the Pitt family – of which she knew more than we did – compiled from visitors, several sets of them, who have over the years made the pilgrimage before us.  She showed us round the house, which she was in the process of restoring, lovingly, then after she had jumped on her quad bike and driven down the hill to move the cattle from one paddock to another, she sat us down, made us a cup of a tea and told us her story.

            Remarkable fact number one: the 100 acre site we were on, which was once the property of Thomas Pitt, Mary’s son, was almost intact. Previous owners had sold off 25 acres of it but the rest remained exactly as and where it originally was. Remarkable because every other plot of land in the district, this being extremely desirable farming country, has been divided up and sold off.

            Remarkable fact two: Margaret had inherited the place from her parents, who had farmed it since the mid 1950s (she showed us pictures of her mother on a quad bike, still working the farm in her 90s), and she worked the land single-handedly. This was not the original farmhouse, there had been two before it, but it dates back to the 1840s and it’s a classic of its time – single-storey, sloping metal roof and wide verandahs. The inside was a bit of a museum piece and the bathroom had been added only recently – added mind you, not renovated – and was accessible only by going outside. (And it gets cold in New South Wales in winter, at night.) 

            ‘I will die here,’ said Margaret. Despite disputes with the local council, the drought, the problems of farming a property that size single-handedly, she was determined to carry on until she dropped, for the sake she said of her parents.

Ah, Margaret Betts.  Modern pioneer woman.  Tough, resourceful, resilient, argumentative, generous, warm-hearted, Australian.  It seems fitting, and flattering, to know that such a woman now inhabits the very same patch of ground our pioneering ancestors first sat on over two hundred years ago.

Oh, and a PS: when we arrived the reason Margaret was standing gazing at what looked like the middle distance is because she was watching a cow she believed was about to give birth. The same cow’s last calf over a year ago was stillborn.  While we were inside the farmhouse chatting about families that same cow was giving birth to a healthy calf, who hadn’t yet quite got to its feet by the time we left.  It was a lucky omen, said Margaret.

TRAVELLING

This afternoon I spent almost entirely inside a shopping mall in a suburb of Sydney called Bondi Junction, which is shopping paradise or, depending on your point of view, hell on earth.  It was a very large shopping mall it has to be said, very easy to get lost in, which I did; but what I was doing was I was looking for one thing, for an adaptor – not the one I left behind in Perth, I’ve replaced that already – but a particular kind of adaptor, one that’s not too large; because when they are too large it is very difficult to plug them into a socket that is next to another socket without having to unplug the device that is plugged into the next door socket, which you may not want to do.

            But the point of all this is that as I schlepped from shop to shop, rejecting everything I was offered, I realised I wasn’t shopping at all; I wasn’t even looking for an adaptor, not wholeheartedly; I was killing time. Not consciously, not really. What I was really doing was putting off the moment when I had to decide – What do I do next?

            Writers are used to not having strict regimes; rather they are used to creating their own, and I suspect the only reason writers do have strict writing regimes, which they do seem to have, most of them, is so they don’t find themselves wandering around shopping malls looking vainly for the right kind of adaptor.  This is what is known in the trade as a displacement activity.

            Travelling is hard work.  I’m not just talking about the upheaval, though there is that of course, and never really unpacking a suitcase and not being able to find anything, particularly your adaptor – which, useful tip: should be packed right on top, because it’s possibly the first thing you’re going to be looking for, and if I’d done that I would not have needed to unpack and pack my suitcase three times only to find I had left the adaptor in Perth; and useful living-out-of-a-suitcase tip 2: pack all your undies together, and your T-shirts, and your trousers, rather than dot them around, as you (I) usually do. It makes them much easier to find.

And when I say travelling is hard work I’m not talking about finding your way about; finding your way about, and getting lost, is partly what travelling is all about. And I’m also not talking about meeting new people, though that is a part of it, a very important part, which I will get to later.

            The problem with travelling is the freedom.  The freedom to do what you want, go where you want when you want. The freedom to say I can do absolutely anything I like today, nobody is telling me what to do, nobody is relying on me for anything. So I’d better fill this day with absorbing things, otherwise I am abusing my freedom.

            I have come here to research my family history and to do some writing. The writing I have done so far has been random, and frankly not very good. The problem is I don’t know what I am writing or why.  I don’t know whatever made me think I was a writer. I used to think I was a writer, I even learned a living from it for a while, but now I don’t even know what the word means.  Is a writer someone who writes, or someone who makes a living out of writing?  Prevailing thought says you shouldn’t write to make money, but if you’re not making money then surely writing is just an indulgence, isn’t it? What justification is there for that? Who does one think one is?

            I think the problem is I don’t know what I am trying to do here. So let’s not get too hung up on what a writer is, or should be, let’s just shut up and do it.

           

SYDNEY

Ah, Sydney.

            Sydney is another place altogether. Well of course it is, it’s 4000 ks away from Perth.  It’s 36 years since I lived here and things have changed a tad.  Not everything – the harbour is still there, busy as ever, the bridge, the hills, the sunshine, the beaches, the constant glimmer of sun on water, the sudden glorious sight of the harbour through gaps in the houses – but there’ve been big changes. When I lived here there was something called the Opera House lottery. The state government was having problems raising enough money to build this ridiculously expensive and totally unnecessary opera house, which nobody wanted or could see the point of, right there in the heart of Sydney between the Botanic Gardens and Circular Quay, and they were desperately looking for ways to cover their costs. 

      

 

     

Other rather less iconic but generally huge buildings have arisen in the centre of town over the past thirty odd years, of course they have, and the old working piers have been turned into swanky hotels, or parades of classy shops and restaurants.

            But the suburbs, part of them, the best parts of them, have remained surprisingly unchanged.  The further down the market you go, ie the cheaper the suburb, the more charming it is, because they are more likely to have retained what to me are the icons of Sydney, the little two-storey 19^th century colonial terraced houses with their tiny balconies with the beautiful wrought iron railings. I used to live in one.  There are shopping malls now – there were then of course, but not many – but the parades of shops on the streets with their tatty hoardings and ancient looking signs are still there.  And they aren’t all what they look like.  A kebab shop often sells mouth-watering salads and freshly-squeezed fruit and veggie juices, and even their kebabs are deliciously packed with spicy lamb with crisp salad and any kind of sauce you can think of.

            There is another change: the local corner shop, that used to be run by Greeks or Italians, is now invariably owned by Chinese, with often very little English. I asked one of them where the nearest bus stop was and he hadn’t a clue what I was talking about (it was outside his shop, as it turned out). Another had a heavy machine clunking away in the back which I was told was for ‘ripping newspapers’.  Couldn’t they find a smaller paper shredder, I thought?  ‘Beco Sat’day newspaper very heavy.’ ( She meant ‘wrapping’.)

            Sydney is so beautiful.  Along with the harbour, the ocean and the Opera House there are the parks and the colours – the bougainvillea, the hibiscus and the frangipani, with its delicate, perfect flower. I’m staying in Bronte in the Eastern Suburbs (posh), and everywhere you look there’s a beach. It was always a wonder to me when I lived and worked here that you could catch a bus from the centre of the city and be on a beach in half an hour.

            I’ve been back to visit Sydney since I first lived here, but they were fleeting visits and there was always someone to hand to drive me around, so it’s been a while since I had to find my way from a to b. Sydney has no underground system and I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but I don’t half miss the London Underground.  Amazing to think you really can get across a city the size of London in half an hour.  Here, most journeys involve at least one bus ride followed by a train and it takes twice as long to get half as far.

            Last Wednesday, my first day in Sydney, a broken down train caused a bit of mayhem on the rail system, but you’d think it was Armageddon the way the news reports went on and on.  Of course, there being a state election pending the opposition (Liberal) party has turned it into a political issue. (That’s opposition as in State rather than Federal. Each state in Oz has its own government, and it so happens that every state government currently is run by the Labor Party, whereas the Federal government, headed by John Howard, is Liberal – which confusingly here is the right-wing party, what we would call Conservative.  The result is the Labor-run state governments are at permanent loggerheads with the Liberal-run Federal government, which of course they would be wouldn’t they.)

            Today, Sunday, Sydney Harbour Bridge, fondly known locally as the ‘coat hanger’, turned 75 years old.  Huge crowds were expected to watch the celebrations, so I thought I’d mosey along to see what was up – not something I would normally do in my home town I have to say, but watching a foreign city celebrating has to be worth the ride.

            The city was deserted.  The crowds were all around the harbour shore, by the Opera House and Circular Quay, which is the Grand Central Station of the harbour ferries.  Some of the people were wearing yellow caps, but otherwise you wouldn’t think there was anything happening at all.  At one point an ancient-looking plane flew overhead and out jumped a couple of parachutists with flares attached (the smoking kind), which caused a bit of excitement. But that was it. Rather a let-down I couldn’t help thinking, especially when compared to the original opening back in 1932.

            The building of the Harbour Bridge, like pretty well every other iconic structure, was a contentious business. It was the brainchild of a Sydney engineer and a London designer and the whole project was only made possible thanks to the tenacious determination of the then State (Labor) leader, Jack Lang.

            Lang had many enemies, among them and in particular a right-wing paramilitary organisation called the New Guard. The official opening ceremony was steeped in controversy even before it happened: there was a dispute about who was actually going to cut the ribbon – strictly speaking it should have been Sir Philip Game, the Governor of New South Wales and His Majesty (George V)’s representative – but Lang insisted on doing it himself (he was that sort of chap).  A special pair of opal-encrusted scissors had been prepared and at the point of cutting another, much larger ribbon, stretched across the bridge from one pylon to the other, was set to detach and drop down into the water, which in turn would give the signal to a fleet (is it a fleet?) of airplanes to fly overhead in salute. 

            The New Guard had threatened to prevent the opening from taking place at all, so the organisers were aware something might be about to happen.  Nonetheless nobody seemed to notice – neither the organisers, the police, nor the 750,000 people who turned out to watch the official, four-kilometre long procession – the lone horserider tagging along several metres behind the Governor-General’s mounted escort.

            When it came to the moment of ribbon cutting the lone horserider galloped along the bridge, past the official party, and with a cry of ‘I declare this bridge open on behalf of the decent citizens of NSW!’ he sliced the ribbon through with his sword.

            What a gesture!  And how Australian! – the bravado, the sheer bloody-minded mockery of officialdom. The fact that the man – his name was Frank de Groot – turned out to be an Empire-loving right-winger, who thought Lang was betraying his people, only slightly detracts from the theatricality of his two-fingered salute.          

            In the official guide to the Grand Opening, which was published soon after, there is no reference to de Groot anywhere.  At the time, while he was being dragged off his horse and arrested, the ribbon was hastily retied then ‘officially’ cut, the second ribbon gave the signal to the pilots who performed their fly-past with immaculate timing.  These events are all recorded.  But of de Groot, not a mention.  He had been air-brushed out.

            Talking of which:

History

When I used to tell my English friends I was half Australian they’d say ‘So you’re a convict!’  And I would have to admit that my ancestors were not convicts but free settlers, which was a shame because I always thought it’d have been cool to have had convict blood.

            Now that I’ve been looking into it a bit more I realise we do have convicts in our family: some of my ancestors married daughters of convicts, which was a pretty brazen thing for a free settler to do in those days. So in the recent past, up until I suppose twenty years or so ago, it was considered decidedly ‘uncool’ to have convict ancestry so this part of our family tree was air-brushed out.  In fact apart from the children of those convicts nobody in the family since – up until around twenty years ago – either knew of or admitted to our convict antecedents. 

            This manipulation of historical events is fascinating, because it tells us so much about the times we are (or were) living in.  What version of history can you trust?  Right now we are up to here in post-colonial guilt, and recently-written versions of Australian history reflect this.  But as recently as fifty years ago historians were talking about the arrivals of the colonists as the beginnings of the ‘civilising’ of Australia.

            Each time I’ve visited Australia I’ve found a different place.  When I first came here, in 1968, I didn’t know or frankly care much about the aboriginal population.  Nobody really talked about them.  Nobody mentioned the fact that they only got the vote in 1967, that before then they never even featured on censuses, they were ‘non people’ in effect.  Nobody I knew had ever met one, not so far as I was aware. And the only aborigines I had ever seen were drunk, and living on the streets of Sydney.

            When I came here in 2000 the topic of the day was Reconciliation.  Thousands of people marched across the Harbour Bridge in support of aboriginal rights – I saw it in TV when I was in Darwin and I was moved to tears, even though I wasn’t sure what it really signified other than a gesture of support. At that time the then (and now) Prime Minister John Howard was being asked to say ‘Sorry’ to the aboriginal people, which he absolutely refused to do.  (A meaningless gesture perhaps, but symbolic too; presumably a lawyer somewhere had advised him that saying sorry to the aboriginal people for stealing their land meant he was prepared to give it all back again. I’ve since been told that Howard’s view is that rather than apologising for something that happened all that time ago (actually only just over 200 years ago, but nobody alive now was alive then so clearly could not be held responsible) Aussies should be celebrating the glory of their Aussieness, at having turned this uninhabitable country – which aborigines had previously found perfectly habitable for the past 30,000 years, or maybe even 60,000 – into the paradise it is now.)  The next time I came here, in 2003, aboriginal rights were no longer headline news.  Then it was the war in Iraq.  And since then, the economy, immigration and asylum seekers, the economy, and threats of terrorism.

            But the blood is on my hands too, because as I’ve been finding out, when my ancestress first arrived here in 1801 she was given a grant of 100 acres of land, as was her son, which was of course ‘stolen’ from the aboriginal people. 

Local news

While I was in Sydney recently Nicholas Stern, the British economist, was visiting and speaking to the powers that be about climate change.  He told them, as he had told us a few months ago in the UK, that if we didn’t drastically change our ways in the next decade, or even sooner, we would experience an economic depression worse than anyone could possibly imagine. So far as I could tell he wasn’t giving us any new facts about the environment; what he was doing was appealing to our pockets, or rather threatening them.

            And so the powers that be (in Australia) said get lost, it is impossible to cut carbon emissions anything like you are suggesting without drastically threatening our economy and causing massive redundancies in our coal industry, which is considerably larger than yours, you Pommie twit. And moreover, if the USA isn’t going to sign the Kyoto agreement, not to mention India and China, then why should we? And one or two commentators added Who do you think you are (you Pommie twit), coming over here and telling us what to do?  We’re not bloody colonials any longer, matey.

            And so the leader of the country of Australia, which surely has the means (and the space) to provide endless supplies of renewable energy, and which is in the throes of the most horrendous drought – the worst since Federation, 100 years ago, so bad that every four days a farmer kills himself – gives the two-finger salute to climate change.

Then a week later, or maybe the same week, there was something called ‘Earth Day’, where for one hour on Saturday night, from 7.30 to 8.30pm the residents and commercial businesses of Sydney were invited to turn off all their lights and other electrical equipment, as a gesture towards climate change.  And so for an hour the city was plunged into darkness (apart from the street lights) and the savings on energy were huge and everyone rejoiced.  And it was then that I realised why the city of Sydney is so magical at night – all the buildings are lit up.  Not like they are in *London, floodlit; here they just leave their office lights on; every single one; which makes for a very lovely sight but goodness only knows what it’s doing for climate change. I was for a moment tempted to write to the local paper to point this out, but I didn’t want anyone telling me Who do you think you are, you Pommie twit, coming over here and telling us what to do?

*Actually I’m not really sure this is the case. I’m not sure we don’t keep our lights on as well – I’ll have to check when I get home. Meanwhile I had better keep my pommie trap shut.

PARADISE …

 

 

Is Perth.  In summer the sky is almost permanently blue and unlike the east coast the temperature is dry, and typically in the mid-thirties; and just as you’re thinking it’s too much along comes the Fremantle Doctor – a southerly breeze – to cool things down so you can sit on your terrace drinking wine and watching the sun go down over the Indian Ocean.

           

Perth is one of the remotest cities on earth: closer to Indonesia than to the rest of Australia, 4000 kilometres from Sydney and nearly 1500 from Adelaide, its closest major Australian city.  A resident described it to me as an island, with the ocean on one side and desert on the other. In the old days nobody wanted to go there;  now the population is soaring (along with property prices) .

            It’s not surprising. The beaches of Perth are out of this world.  Endless stretches of white sand as far as the eye can see, interrupted here and there by clusters of rock or small harbours; and not at all like the Med. Perth beaches are sports arenas, with life-saving competitions, beach sprints (for all ages up to 80) and all manner of surfing competitions – board, kite, wind, body.  In the afternoons when the wind gets up the ocean is speckled with kite surfers racing through the waves at astonishing speeds, performing acrobatics, never colliding with one another or with the humble (in my case very humble, rightly so, and it wasn’t always thus) swimmer.  Which brings me naturally to the topic of:

The Ocean

It’s been said, only half-jokingly, that each year a dozen or so Germans, Scandinavians and British tourists drown off the beaches of Perth.

            The ocean is magnificent, mysterious, carnivorous. On a quiet day it ripples, deep turquoise blue, clear, smiling, beckoning.  On a slightly rougher day, or in the afternoon when the wind has got up, it begins to roll a bit, or maybe quite a lot, but it still looks friendly enough, manageable, at a distance anyway.

            But stand in it up to your knees and you’ll meet the monster that pulls your legs from under you and drags you, helpless, off-balance, into the path of the approaching wave which in its turn picks you up like a piece of flotsam and hurls you right back in the opposite direction and dumps you smack on your bum on the sand. These waves are called dumpers, and the trick is (so everyone tells me) to get out beyond them, beyond the point where they break, beyond the point where you can feel the ground under your feet, beyond the point where any sensible person with part of their life ahead of them would ever want to go.

            And then there’s the rip. I am not totally sure what the difference is between a rip and the undertow.  The rip is what I believe picks you up at say Scarborough Beach and transports you, without a fee and certainly without permission, northwards – it’s invariably north – to the next beach along, or maybe the one beyond that or who knows, Indonesia eventually.  The trick to the rip (I’m learning as I go) is not to swim against it but swim across it, because rips don’t go on forever and sooner or later you’ll find yourself beyond it.  Needless to say this requires a certain presence of mind.

            That is why – the undertow and the rip – swimmers are advised on all Australian beaches to ‘swim between the flags’, which are planted on the beach to mark the bit of the ocean where it’s safe to swim because if you do get into trouble a professional lifesaver will be on hand to save you. If like me on my first visit to (eastern) Australia you disregard this warning because you reckon the bit between the flags is, not surprisingly, too crowded, you run the risk of getting into deep water, literally, where without meaning to, or even knowing how to, you find yourself swimming backwards, away from the shore, far far away across the ocean towards Fiji, or maybe New Zealand.  In which case you raise your hand and wave (and in my case my boyfriend, misinterpreting, waves back) until suddenly some strapping young thing comes pounding superhumanly through the waves and tows you back to dry land, where he tells you, in his cute, rough-diamond Aussie way that you only did that in order to meet a lifesaver, dincha?

 

 Dog Beaches

Dogs are banned from most beaches in WA (and everywhere else).  My friend with whom I am staying – my oldest friend, we once shared a place in Kilburn and now here she is, living in a unit (they don’t call them flats here) with a 180° view of the ocean – is looking after another friend’s dog, so we have to make for a designated ‘dog beach’. I was expecting to be wading in knee-deep dog poo but amazingly, or perhaps not amazingly, Aussies being what they are, everyone but everyone carries a poo bag. 

            If you want to know how to cope with the Indian Ocean waves, watch the dogs. Today I saw one man wading into the ocean carrying a Jack Russell under each arm, which he proceeded to throw as far as he could.  I thought (with some alarm) perhaps he was trying to dispose of a litter – but no, the dogs just paddled like mad on top of the waves and landed on shore without a dump or a gasp of breath. There were dogs on surf boards, dogs body surfing. If they can do it why can’t I?

           

Local News

The headline news every day since I arrived concerns a local government corruption scandal of impenetrable complexity involving both sides, Labour and Liberal (which in Australia is Conservative).  I can’t understand the half of it though it seems to concern an ex-premier of WA, now a lobbyist by the name of Bryan Burke, who is presumably the devil since anyone and everyone who has spoken to him, lunched with him, smiled at him or for all I know passed him in the corridor, from the Federal Opposition Leader down, is apparently tainted and forced to resign (but not so far the FOL).  Something to do with bugged phone calls revealing pressure put on certain ministers to make certain things happen in return for cash in hand, that sort of thing. 

            I don’t know if corruption at government level is endemic in this country, any more than in any other.  Perhaps there’s not a lot of difference between this and our very own ‘cash for honours’ scandal.  But it does seem every time I come here that there is something dodgy going on, very often concerning the same people, some of whom nip into gaol, do their time and come out again and carry on as if nothing has happened.  Perhaps it’s a relic of the old pioneering days when people were too busy surviving to pay much attention to the niceties of law and order and came to be known, proudly, as ‘larrikins’.  A larrikin is a word of Irish origin meaning a chancer, a man (invariably) who plays close to the law and is admired for breaking the rules and getting away with it.  At least that’s what I think it means. Perhaps the Bryan Burkes of today will be the Ned Kellys of tomorrow.

 

Leaving

I’ve been here a month now and it’s quite enough. No disrespect to Perth, it’s a beautiful place, as I said, but there’s not a lot going on here in the way of what you might call culture. Odd in a way, because the Perth Festival, an annual event that attracts companies from all round the world and that’s just winding up now, sold out well before it opened. I wanted to see Paul Keating the Musical (Paul Keating was a one-time Labour Prime Minister here, better known overseas as The Man Who Put His Hand on the Queen’s Back), but no chance. I can’t help wondering why, since there is obviously an audience here and a need for such things, there is so little going on for the other ten months of the year. Perhaps it’s those beaches. Perhaps there’s not much need for culture in paradise.