Few things are so moving for an Australian as a wreath laying ceremony at ANZAC Cove. I was asked to jointly lay a wreath at a dawn service in Turkey and make a speech to the other people, just eight, who were on a tour of Gallipoli campaign memorials. Even though I had made many speeches over my professional career, I could only speak in broken sentences such was the sense of occasion.
I was conscious that my grandfather and great uncle had fought in the Gallipoli campaign. Both survived. I vaguely knew one of them personally, although the other was killed in an industrial accident before I was born. But in the moment, I was acutely aware of them both. I was confronted with past generations weighing like mountains on my mind. That moment is the real origin of this book.
Unravelling my ancestor’s stories came to the fore of my thoughts and soon enough my actions. I thought family history was a simple task, at first, because my aunty had completed an extended family tree. Who begat who was seemingly already complete. But the work was less complete than it appeared. Delving into my ancestors lives I came across many and varied and often competing tales. For some time, I focused on establishing the ‘facts’. I soon learned that family stories include some myths and legends. All of which are interpreted through values and perspectives of the person telling the story.
But what most captured my imagination were the things omitted from the storytelling. As I wound my way back in time, I reached what I call “the Great Forgetting”. Tasmanian families talked little about certain parts of their past. This included those families who worried they were tainted by the stain of convictism. It also extended into a distinctly Tasmanian denial, until recently, of the indelible stain left by the genocide perpetrated against the islands first nations people.
In my family lore the convict stain especially was swept under the carpet. I recall vividly my father declaring that a D9 bulldozer should be used to push all remaining historic buildings at Port Arthur into the sea. We should ‘just forget about the bloody place’, he said. Behind this rather controversial statement lay layers of emotion and reasoning. At one level even in the 1970 s, it was evident that we didn’t want to be associated with a convict heritage. At another level my father was probably trying to deal with, in his words, ‘the cruelty of the bloody place. He had been on a tour of Port Arthur and left halfway through the tour. He had read, more than once, Marcus Clarke’s famous novel, For the Term of his Natural Life, and had watched at least one of the early films of the book.
As with many Australians, my father had a rather one-dimensional view of the convict era. He thought the Port Arthur experience was the norm, as many Australians still do. But he didn’t find the Port Arthur experience distressing just because of that. He knew that three of his great grandparents were convicts. Whatever happened was not many generations away from his own.
I now know that the experiences of my convict ancestors were more varied than the Port Arthur stereotype of popular memory. Some were at Norfolk Island while others were in and out of the Female Factories. Many were assigned to landowners. After serving their time some managed to become influential and respected members of their local communities. They became sealers, farmers, business owners, and even a police officer. They successfully raised large families. Some became foundation members of local churches and were instrumental in building local schools. But others wore the trauma of transportation into their final years of “freedom”, dying as lonely, alcoholic old lags in a foreign land. The ‘bloody cruelty and brutality’ of the system left them disillusioned with no hope for their future. Resentment got passed down the family like a particularly Tasmanian heirloom. This is the inheritance that this book sets out to rediscover. If the Gallipoli generation helped me engage with my own family story, they also helped me realise what was missing in Aunty’s earlier research. The emotional, and historical baggage those men took to Gallipoli, passed on to their children and grandchildren. That was the real twist in my family tree which I wanted to resolve.
