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??

  

Citizenship

 

For several years now I’ve been looking into becoming an Australian citizen. With an Australian mother (now dead), you’d think it would be straightforward. After all I lived there once, admittedly a long time ago. An Aussie who wants to live in the UK only needs to have an English grandparent as far as I can see. How difficult can it be?

            The website says anyone born to an Australian parent after 1949 is eligible to become an Australian citizen.

            - But what if you were born before 1949?

            - So long as your Australian parent was an Australian citizen at the time of your birth you are eligible.

            - What’s the significance of 1949?

            - Before that date there was no such thing as an Australian citizen. Australian citizenship only came into being in 1949.

            - So how can my mother have been an Australian citizen at the time of my birth (1944) when there was no such thing as an Australian citizen?

            - So long as your mother was an Australian citizen at the time of your birth you are eligible to apply to become an Australian citizen.

            - Are you listening to me??

            I wasn’t quite that rude, I wouldn’t dare. But that is the gist of the kind of conversations I’ve been having over the past year or so.

            They were supposed to be changing the law in January but for some reason they’ve put it back. I don’t know if it’ll make any difference. I’ve been talking to migration lawyers in the UK and here and nobody seems to know even as much as I do. I guess they’re making it deliberately difficult in order to deter people like me. Well the more difficult they make it the more determined I am.

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.