Home again

     It’s time to go home.

            It’s June, and the days are getting short. It’s dark by 5pm and even in Sydney it’s getting chilly.  Australians don’t heat their houses, or not so you’d notice. They don’t seem to think it’s necessary. Sydney is one thing, but Canberra gets to below freezing at night-time in the winter. Some people have heaters in the ceiling, which seems an odd place to put them unless you’re a fly, and in order to keep the air circulating so it actually reaches ground level they have to install ceiling fans. 

            I feel slightly dissatisfied and a tad depressed. Now that it’s on me I don’t really want to go home. I haven’t finished with this place yet. On the other hand I’m going back for work, and the prospect of having a job of work to do after all this time is really appealing, believe it or not.

I had hoped in the three plus months that I spent here that I’d have discovered the ‘secret’ of Australia, and of Australians. But I haven’t come near.

            What can I say about them?

            They are like us, but not like us. They ask you how you are rhetorically. They are generally friendlier than us and the service is generally better. They are becoming gradually more American – trousers used to be ‘strides’ and now they are ‘pants’. They ‘verb’ their nouns, as in ‘farewelling’ somebody who has just died.  They stand on the left hand side of escalators. They have electric sockets in bathrooms and think nothing of plugging in heaters right next to the hand basin.

            They are direct, but secret.  They are open, brash and tough and have a predilection for chintz.  They call their bric-a-brac ‘antiques’.  They are sophisticated, suburban, multi-cultural, xenophobic, just like us, and proud, not like us.  They denigrate themselves as we do – I was in Oz the year of the Olympics and the word was the Games were going to be a total disaster: nothing was going to be ready, the trains didn’t work, the organisation was steeped in corruption, the budget was going crazy – ah, how familiar that sounds.

            They have the same problems with multiculturalism that we do, and other problems – to do with the aboriginal people, whom they both revere and fear – that we don’t.  Their food is cheap and luscious and their pharmaceuticals are expensive. They import too much of their television from overseas – ABC drama is mostly BBC drama – and while what they do produce themselves is by and large pretty good it doesn’t seem to get exported, which of course is more of an indictment on us than it is on them.  They have a TV channel dedicated to European programmes, which is more than we do. Their theatre, what there is of it, is excellent (in Sydney at any rate), but there is not that much of it – not compared with London of course.

Goodbye Oz. It’s been good being here. Looking forward to seeing you again in a few months, maybe.

           

The traveller

 

The traveller is not just fulfilling his own dream, he’s fulfilling other people’s.  People are constantly telling me how lucky I am – which is true, I fully admit it, though it’s ironic that what I am doing really is driven as much by necessity as choice – but some of those people, if not most of them, are in a position where they could do what I am doing if they wanted to, which makes me think that actually they don’t really want to.

            Travelling, freedom, not working – all these things sound like paradise. And they are. But there are other aspects to doing what I am doing, some of which I did not anticipate.

Friends:            You don’t make friends when you travel. Or rather, I don’t. I am not the sort of person who meets someone in passing who becomes a lifelong friend. Almost all of my friends – here and back home – go back several years, and almost all of them I met through work. If you are not working, or you’re not staying somewhere long enough to become part of the local scenery, making new friends isn’t that easy.

I harboured the fantasy where I’d jump into my (hired) SUV and go driving around the New South Wales countryside dropping into pubs and chatting to the regulars. Ho hum. I’m not the sort of person who can do that, never was. In times past when I lived here I spent days, weeks, months on occasion driving up the coast and through the outback, and the one thing I dreaded was not breaking down in the middle of nowhere and dying slowly and painfully of dehydration; my biggest fear was that I’d have to speak to – or worse, have to ask for help from – strangers. Weird maybe, but that’s the way I was. Am.

New people:     The new people you do meet – usually friends of friends or friends of rellies – are not really interested in you and what you are doing.  Most people are really only interested in their own lives, their own family, friends, and what’s happening to and around them. I’m not saying people are generally self-absorbed – though they are of course, we all are – I think it’s that they cannot relate to someone so far outside their own frame of reference. It’s not surprising that many people who travel the world – gap-year backpackers in particular – find they make more friends among people like themselves than they do among locals. I am generalising of course, but I think it’s fair to say we are by and large drawn to people who are a bit like us, or doing what we are doing,. And not many people I meet as I travel are doing what I am doing. 

            Or maybe it’s just that I am not as interesting as I thought I was.

Adventures:      There’s a pressure to be doing more than I am doing (such as driving around the countryside in a SUV etc.). After all this is meant to be an adventure, and adventures mean doing adventurous things, not going shopping in the local mall with cuz.  Waking up in the morning to no fixed plans is exhilarating, and terrifying. You are constantly having to invent, to find new things to do every day. After all you have that precious thing, freedom, and if you don’t fill your days with wall-to-wall excitement you are abusing not just your freedom but the proxy freedom of all those people who’ve been telling you how lucky you are.

            I am in fact a really bad traveller. I am scared of things going wrong, and it’s really when things go wrong that a) you make friends and b) you discover what you’re made of, and most of all c) you have adventures.

So there are inevitably moments of crashing loneliness. There are moments, many of them, when I wonder what on earth I’m doing, where all this is leading; times when I miss my kids so badly it hurts, and my friends back home. On the other hand there’s nothing like being away from people and places to make you value them.

                         

The Australian male

I’m going to be making some monumental generalisations here, so bear with me and don’t argue.

            A year ago I was having dinner with a (female) friend on Valentine’s Day in Coogee, which is a beach suburb of Sydney, when a couple sat down at the table next to us clutching a ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ balloon.  He was a fair bit older than her, in his mid forties probably, and she Scandinavian and in her twenties.  He started to chat to us and discovered we were friends through our respective kids, who at the time were going out together, which he thought that was really interesting.  He told us he had split up with his wife and had walked out leaving her and the kid and the house, and he was now living in a hotel.  His new (we assumed) girlfriend was smiley and sweet and didn’t seem to mind too much that her boyfriend, on Valentine’s Day, was spending most of the evening talking to two middle-aged women.

            Then my friend happened to say something like, ‘It must be tough leaving your son behind like that’, and without warning he burst into tears.  It only lasted half a minute, and he then recovered and carried on as if nothing had happened.

            I tell this story because to me it perfectly personifies the archetypal Australian male.

            The archetypal Australian male is bluff, friendly, casual, wry, sometimes sly, extravert, secretive, and at the drop of a hat, deeply emotional.  He generally prefers the company of men to women, which possibly has its roots in his upbringing, in those pioneering days when men worked together and relied on one another for their survival. I suppose I am referring mostly here to country men. City men I suspect are much the same the world over.

            While preferring the company of men to women the Australian male loves women, in fact he loves them sometimes to excess, and preferably more than one at a time.  This possibly comes from watching the behaviour of the animals on his farm at ‘joining’ time, as they call it.  With rams for instance there is a ratio of 1.5% of males to 98.5% female, which means that if you have a flock of 150 ewes  – actually they seem to call them ‘mobs’ here rather than flocks – you need two rams to service them, which makes it by my estimation 75 ewes per ram.  I’m not saying farmers are emulating their animals to the letter, or rather to the number, but in my admittedly limited experience – and in the experience of many women I know – the Australian male does not seem to think it odd, or in any way reprehensible, to have more than one woman at a time, and if she doesn’t like it, well ….

            There is also a strong streak of sentimentality in the Australian male, and possibly in the female too.  I was listening to the radio one recent afternoon and they were going on and on about an interview they had had earlier in the day with a farmer, talking about the drought.  How moving it was, they said, the pride he had in his land and in his country; his positive attitude, his good humour, his poetry.

            I eventually heard the interview.  The farmer was bluff, friendly, casual and wry, and yes, he did become quite poetic, especially when describing the effect a bad drought has on the earth.  Droughts he said were necessary for the well-being of the soil: when the drought causes the earth to crack, and form fissures, this means that the rain when it does fall penetrates right through to nourish the soil well below the surface. Actually I may have got the details a bit wrong – and I have to say my farmer friend debunked this theory completely – but what obviously impressed the people in the studio was his almost matter fact attitude of acceptance, his good-humoured determination to see the best in everything and his overwhelming love for his land.

            And then people started calling in, listeners who had heard the interview, and I heard more than one of them saying – It makes me proud to be Australian.

            Australian are proud to be Australians, and not afraid to say as much.  I don’t think a Brit could ever say he was proud to be British without sounding as if he was taking the piss.

            Aussie pride shows itself in different ways.  Australians celebrate tradition far more than we do. Anzac Day, which falls on April 25^th every year and is a bank holiday, and which commemorates the part played by Australians and New Zealanders in the various wars, and Gallipoli in World War 1 in particular (hence the date), is a much bigger event now than it ever was, particularly among young people, many of whom make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli itself.  There are ceremonies held at dawn in every city and major town in the country. Then there’s Australia Day, on January 26^th, which celebrates the arrival of the First Fleet into Port Jackson (aka Sydney Harbour) in 1788. They also have a day off to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday in June. And then there’s Mother’s Day, which is a much bigger deal there than it is here. Not to mention Reconciliation – or ‘Sorry’ – Day, which this year fell on May 26^th and was especially significant because it marked forty years since the aboriginal people were eventually allowed (thanks to a referendum held among white people) to vote in elections and thereby to be regarded as citizens of the country they had lived in for 60,000 years.

 

           

It depends where you’re coming from

 

I’ve been doing a bit of driving between Sydney, Canberra (where cousin Libby lives) and Wagga Wagga, where my brother Tony lives with his family.

            Wagga Wagga is about 500 ks from Sydney, just about equidistant between Sydney and Melbourne. It’s the biggest inland town in New South Wales with a population of around 57,000. My brother has lived there for a long time now. Personally I wouldn’t want to live there, as I wouldn’t want to live in Canberra, the seat of federal government (population around 250,00, purpose-built less than a century ago and designed in a series of concentric circles, very easy to get lost in).

            One thing I’ve noticed about Wagga and that is the people I’ve met who live there seem very happy to live there. In fact by and large I’d say they are happier than the people I’ve met who live in London. I don’t know if this is cause and effect, or effect and cause. If you weren’t happy to live in a quiet, easy-to-get-around place where not a lot happens then you wouldn’t live there. Does that make sense?

            The people who live in Wagga by and large don’t want to live somewhere like Sydney, or even Canberra, because of the people/noise/traffic/crowds/difficulty of getting around. I can understand the appeal of being able to drive to the post office in a couple of minutes and park right outside and when I listen to them talk I sometimes wonder to myself why I don’t go and live there.

            I have lived in London almost all my life and I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. Sometimes I think the only reason I go on living there – apart from the fact that most of my friends live there, it’s where I work, it’s the cultural centre of the world, it’s where things happen and I know my way around it, parts of it – is because I am afraid if I ever left it I would never have the courage to come back.

            So when I hear people talking about Sydney traffic jams and chaos and noise and too many people, I am tempted to say buddy you should see London. But then I think about American students telling me how slow and quiet London is compared with New York.  It all depends where you’re coming from. When a friend (Australian) who’d recently arrived from London complained that Sydney was like a graveyard – nobody about, nothing going on – having just arrived from places where there really was nothing going on I found myself defending the place. Maybe I’m becoming a Sydneyite.  Before I know it I’ll be standing on the left hand side of the escalator.

Anyway as I said I’ve been doing a bit of driving around the New South Wales countryside. There is something hugely appealing about country Australia – you can drive for hundreds of miles and the scenery barely changes. Or so it seems.  The more you drive the same highway however the more different it looks. There’s a world of difference for instance between the green, wooded countryside south of Sydney and the bare, brown hills around Wagga.

Australia has been suffering the worst drought in living memory. You can see the devastation as you drive.  The drought has been headline news more or less constantly all the time I have been here.  A couple of weeks ago it broke; that’s to say some rain fell, in some places quite heavily.  But one fall of rain does not break a drought like this one.

            Farmers have suffered worst of course.  I’ve been told a farmer kills himself every four days.  There is very little support from the government or state, and being Aussies, and largely male, they find it difficult to ask for help. Many of them are extremely isolated. 

            I stayed on a farm for a few days.  The farmer, my friend, was then spending $1000 a day – one thousand dollars a day – on feed for his sheep, in lieu of the grass that wasn’t growing. While I was there the police called round to talk to his manager. Apparently the manager’s ex boss had had a breakdown, and the police were calling to see whether or not the manager might have lent him a gun.  This is what they are doing, farmers, some of them – shooting all their stock and reserving the last bullet for themselves.  If somebody asks to borrow a gun, says my friend, on no account do you lend them one. If they say they want it to shoot their stock you offer to do it for them.

            When I drove through the same part of the countryside a few weeks later the difference was marked. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to bring the green back, but it may only be surface green – ‘painted on’, as my farmer friend said.

            It’s a very tough life, being a farmer here. Wool was what first put Australia on the map, back in the 19^th century. Now farmers are going under. Nobody seems to know if the drought is just part of some general weather cycle, or something to do with El Nino and La Nina, or global warming, or whether this – the drought – is the norm and the balmy years when rain fell were exceptions.

 

I love the Australian bush. I was going to come and live here once.  I had a vague ambition from an early age to marry an Australian farmer, someone living on thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere. It was the connection with the land that I found so appealing. As it happens, sadly, it didn’t work out. I will never quite know why.  

Buffers

 

Dammit to hell.  Or as Libby (my Canberra coz) would say, bugger shit bum.

            Several bad days on the trot.  Bad as in research. Bad as in time spent, wasted, reinventing the wheel; not just any wheel but my own wheel. Bad as in wasting an entire day and $12 on a trip to Manly (so-called, by the way, by Governor Phillip to describe the natives he first saw there).

            Manly is on the north side of Sydney Harbour. It’s a bit like Blackpool with a glorious beach, and wonderful surfing if you’re into that kind of thing. It has a kind of seedy, worn-at-the-edges glamour, or perhaps tackiness would be nearer the mark.  It’s a lovely trip across the harbour though, except the day I went was overcast and quite cold, too cold to sit outside and enjoy the views.

            I was heading for the library to try to discover more about my great grandfather and my great great grandfather, both of whom lived there, in the same house called ‘Fairlight’, though not necessarily at the same time. My great grandfather in particular was quite a notable local I believe, and was partly responsible for the planting of the Norfolk pines fringing the surf beach. He also gave away part of his land to the council for which he was made an honorary lifelong member of the local cricket club, though to my knowledge he had no particular interest in cricket. And since ‘Fairlight’ was rented, it did not belong in the family, I’m not sure where the land he gave away came from. It’s that and other details I am here to discover.

            But the nice young librarian tells me I should have booked an appointment.  I’m not sure who with, because she explains there was a ‘volunteer’ who could help with family history, only he or she is away on leave. There was also a local enthusiast who was passionate about the history of Manly apparently and spent almost all of his time in the library, though not today regrettably.

            So I passed a desultory hour or so in the family history section, logging onto obscure websites and looking through some of the books on the shelves and occasionally coming upon the odd reference to my great grandfather which, as it turned out, had already been come upon by my aunt Barbara several years ago. That’s what I mean about reinventing the wheel. The moment I found a reference – ah! – it turned out I’d read it before. I don’t think I discovered anything new all day.

            The next day I spent in the Mitchell Library. Most of the time I’ve spent here has been trying to uncover something my aunt Barbara has not already uncovered.  So far the only ‘new’ things have been to do with the local history of the period, gleaned mostly from the Historical Records of New South Wales.  I am a lot more interested in the historical context than aunt Barbara was, partly because she lives here and no doubt knows about it already, and partly because I cannot see how any book about one’s ancestors can be of any interest or make much sense unless there is a canvas to place the pieces onto, to use a clumsy analogy.

            I did come upon one ‘new’ and interesting item, the original of a letter written to my ancestress Mary Pitt by a Lieutenant Braithwaite, who went to visit her on board the ship Canada while she was waiting to sail to New South Wales.  They had not met before but he visited her at the suggestion of a mutual (unnamed) friend to fill her in on life in the colony, where he had served several years in the army. Precisely what he said to her is not recorded, but he must have put the fear of God into her because the following day she wrote to her cousin George – whose idea it was she migrate in the first place – to say how much she was dreading going to ‘that wicked place’. This letter, which I was allowed to transcribe in pencil, was written by Braithwaite to cousin George describing some of the conditions allowed to free settlers in the new colony (although with no details of ‘this wicked country’).

            So that was quite a good start. Next I ordered up some documents purporting to be the original letters written by Lord Nelson and Co concerning my ancestress’ migration, but they turned out to be handwritten copied transcripts, oddly tacked onto a family tree in such an obscure way that it took me several goes through the microfilm to see them, and there was also something about land granted to Thomas Pitt in the early 1800s which I think is inaccurate.

            So that was another day gone. Yes, it took that long, to fill in the slips, wait at the desk for someone to hand them in to, go away for half an hour while the items were fetched up, wind the microfilm through the machine, look at the stuff, fail to find what you’re looking for, look through it again, in one instance seeking help because the item in question clearly was not there (it was, I just couldn’t find it), going through the whole rigmarole again because you can only order three items at a time, and at the end of it realising you’ve learned nothing new, nothing at all, all you’ve done is reinvent your auntie’s wheel, or in fact in the case of Margaret Catchpole reinventing your own wheel, that’s as in going over the same old stuff time and again.

           

So now I am asking myself – why am I doing this? Who gives a damn?  It’s hard work, it’s time-consuming, it’s frustrating, exasperating, boring, and for what? What makes a family interesting? Why should anyone care about where and who they came from? All it is in the end is a list of names and places. Meaningless.

            On the other hand. My family is interesting. Extremely interesting, actually. First, they were genuine pioneers. They were some of the first people to build a new country, to go where nobody, no white man that is, had ever gone before, to farm land that had never before been farmed and build where no building had ever stood. If they needed a hospital, or a school, or a shop even, they had to get together to raise the resources to build it.  There were no safety nets, no welfare state, it was every person for himself, making it up as they went along.

            So they were entrepreneurs.  They had to be. They built things out of nothing, they had to.  They had energy, and courage, confidence, creativity and … all the things I don’t have. So what happened? Where did it all go wrong?

I’ve managed to track down a distant relative who is writing a book about the Pitt family. She sounded reasonably friendly and reasonably interested to hear from me. Her book, which she is just finishing off now, covers all of Mary Pitt’s offspring, all five of them, which is a pretty huge task, or ask, seeing as how many children her children and her children’s children produced over the centuries, which is why she has been working on the book for five years.

            Five years! I’ve only been doing it for three months and I am already thinking I’ve had enough. She has been through all the land titles, discovered who owned what piece of land and when and for how long, whose in-laws ran what companies and lost what fortunes and goodness knows what else.  I have asked her to send me her book, or extracts from it, so I can fill in any ‘gaps’.  I don’t suppose for a moment there will be any gaps, I’m sure she’s done a very thorough job; what I’m really wanting is to get information from her, especially about the boring stuff like land titles.

            But is this fair?  Is it fair that someone should have spent so long poring over documents to do with titles and grants and probates and collated all the information only for somebody to come along and pinch it all?  I feel vaguely bad about this. I don’t for a moment believe there is anything I can tell her she hasn’t already uncovered.

            It’s a tricky one. It’s a question I could have raised at the Society of Genealogists, which I had intended visiting yesterday.  But when it came to it .. to be honest I couldn’t be bothered.  After two virtually fruitless days I didn’t know what I was going there for, even though really the purpose of going was not to discover anything specific but just to look, and maybe discover something of real interest, maybe not. SAG, as it is endearingly called, is a place where people who’ve been researching their family history can log their findings, so other people can have access to them. I know aunt Barbara has done this, and it’s possible other members of the (vast) Pitt family who I don’t know about have done it also.  But I never got there, so maybe I will never know.

            Where is the Pioneering Pitt spirit when you need it??