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 19th 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.
