-ABOUT US, (warts and all) part 1-

You know I have lived most of my life away from the Oz. I came to Canada first in 1961. I talk a few other languages to some degree and have absorbed Quebecois,  American , Latin- American, Filipino and other cultures, yet when I sit down to write with these two overworked fingers, I am an  AUSSIE.

It never left me, mate!  I saw a rerun of Gallipoli the other evening and I was crying…an old man crying for his country and a home I can’t go back to and children I will never see again and grandchildren I don’t know about.

 That is torture, I tell you. But in this life for some things you don’t get a second chance. Grin and bear it. Just like those poor buggers in Gallipoli who had to go over the trench and attack the Turks, who mowed them down. Except that those men were heroes, which I am not.

It was painful when I lived in the Philippines and I heard a mob of Aussies up there for a good time (like everybody) and when I approached them and said in my hybrid Canadian accent “Heh, fellahs, I’m an Aussie, too, born in Sydney, mate.”

A silence of skepticism came over them and then someone  barked “Go back to Yankie-land, yer bloody bullshitter.”

 There are compensations though. I became short of money in the Philippines when I was getting my last son out of there and was waiting months for a passport for him from the slow Canadian Consulate.   A French-speaking Quebecois, I hardly knew, offered a loan of several thousand dollars (which I later repaid) saying “Meme que t ‘es Anglophone,  t’es un de nous,  copain.  Et ton fils est Quebecois deja. C’est pour le petit gar que je le donne.”

 I was very grateful and I got my son to Canada, though his mum married someone else. He can call her on the cell-phone when he wants. He is now in grade 12, his final year, is already an apprentice carpenter and is a whiz on computer animation and design.

 The Aussie government which cancelled my citizenship when I became Canadian, told me I had to apply for a visa if I wished to travel to Australia (as a visitor) “And I advise you it could be refused,  Cedric,” said the official on the phone from Ottawa, where the Aussie Embassy  is situated.

 I could then eventually apply for citizenship “If I relinquished my Canadian citizenship…”

 Not likely. I cherish this country. It had been good to me. I was a screwed-up bastard in the Oz, but not here. Things have gone right.  I guess I won’t be going back to fill a plot in Woronora cemetery, after all.

   So long Australia, land of my ancestors, pioneers and convicts and maybe some dark people flitting through the red-gums, where they hunted for the last forty thousand years.

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  When I was a kid there was a phone in the lounge room and I wasn’t allowed to use it, but I didn’t know anyone else who had a phone anyway, except Mrs Johnson, a friend of mum’s, who was the wife of a shoe manufacturer and who went in later years on a cruise trip to Japan and the Philippines with her.

  Dad stayed home that time, but he and mum went off on a cruise ship to America and then down to Costa Rica where they visited Pat and family in San Jose. Dad left early and flew back to Los Angeles and went to the racecourse there Agua Caliente. That was his big moment , because he had only been to Randwick and Flemington and a few other racecourses in the country back in the Oz.

   Dad was a punter and was often talking about some new system  for winning.  For a while it was clues he found in the Daily Mirror cartoon. There was always much talk about starting price and odds and form and who was the dam out of whatever champion and what was the weight and handicap.  My dad knew so much about racehorses, yet he must have lost many thousands over the years, but as mum said, “It keeps you from running after other women Hector.”

   I happened to know that dad was very loyal to my mum.  The only other girlfriend he ever had was Patsy Derry, whom he knew before he married mum.

Even when he went away during the war up to Darwin to work, he was faithful.

 He told the story, though, that if you wanted to have some time with a native girl you tapped the railway line with a lump of steel and the sound went for miles along the line. That was the signal that one of the workers wanted to do some business with a dark girl and sure enough after a half hour or so, several would be coming walking along the railway track.

  I was only about eleven when he told that story on his return home from the Northern Territory, but even at that age I was cynical and wondered if my dad had tapped the line himself.

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  Back to telephones, I could not care less about phones. Now the only people who call me seem to be women doing surveys with East Indian accents or others who are asking me about my investments. How do they know about my investments? I don’t tell them and I always deny I have any, but the buggers must have found out somehow. That is why I have discontinued doing banking online. It is not secure. I should know. The old telephone trick and bank con was an intimate part of my operations twenty or so years ago.

 Technology changed all that, didn’t it Pat, my poor  brother,  dead at sixty six, an old man to anyone else but still my little brother to me? How did you die in the gold coast of Australia. Won’t someone tell me?

         My son cannot leave home without his cell phone. And I find I am starting to carry one of them around with me, not that I get many calls at my age. I have it so that I can check up where my seventeen year old son is at any given time, but I am aware he has found out how to evade me when he wants.

  Brian’s story is an interesting one, but he has not yet given me permission to tell it.

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   I’m one of the many descendants of John Williams, who was a reluctant soldier, a Welshman in the English army and his wife Sarah, daughter of William Nash, a marine in the First Fleet to Australia, 1788, and Maria Haynes, convict (or not a convict) according to which family history you read)

  He ran off after being brutally flogged but was recaptured and sentenced to penal servitude and transported to the convict settlement of Port Jackson, now Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

    His story is documented on the web sites of “Our Williams Story” by Kieran Williams and also Carol Baxter’s on the descendants of “William Nash and Maria Haynes, First Fleeters.”

  There must be thousands of cousins, firsts, seconds and so many times removed, all stemming from John Williams’ dislike of the English army and being flogged.

 We have been a prolific lot and there are about seven generations, since coming to Australia.

   Most of these times there was no radio, T.V. or electric light to read comfortably by, so the family went to bed not long after dark.

First they were washed, littlest first in the big dish with hot water from the wood stove, or in even earlier times from the kettle suspended on a hook and chain over the fireplace. Then the middle sized kids and finally the biggest would wash themselves and by that time the water, though replenished, would be far from clean. “Did you wash behind your ears and the soles of your feet, Harold? I don’t want them sheets dirty before Monday wash.”

 There were no bathrooms in most houses and the people who had them were considered uppity or effete. Bathing daily was far from universal.  I recall an outback witticism “Only dirty people wash.”

    Saturday night was bath night when the big tin bath was dragged outside and they kids were soaked and scrubbed and de-ticked and maybe d-loused and de-bedbugged and de-fleaed if necessary.  Any scrapes, sores or scratches were cleaned and Friar’s balsam applied or sometimes sulphur and lard or Conde’s Crystals.

 A dose of castor oil was given from time to time….horrible stuff with dire consequences having all the kids running to the dunny several hours later. “To keep the body pure.”

  When the children were abed, sometimes three in one big bed and the whispering had stopped and the snuffling and breathing told waiting parents the kids were asleep, Doris would turn to her weary husband, who would just as soon just go to sleep  “Do you still love me, George?”

  Then the dutiful coupling began, till sleep overcame them and often another small addition was started this way.

  There was nothing else to do in the evenings and anyway at first light, the pioneer mother would stir, arise to start the fire with the last coals she raked out of the grate, then put on the kettle for tea.  She would feed the chooks ( hens), give the cat some milk to stop it meowing and rubbing against her ankles and prepare the oatmeal, fried bacon and eggs she collected from the fowl-yard.

 Breakfast for the whole family. Sometimes she had to milk a cow also and when the family had a dairy she had to make butter and cheese also.  After breakfast the man might go off to check the paddocks to see no stock had wandered or renew some fence posts in the lower paddock that a  cow had pushed over scratching its back to get the ticks off. .

 Often there was an abo waiting for the bossfella at the back door, the horses already saddled.  This abo would have been up at piccanini daylight, eaten his damper near the big pond  black’s camp, where they used to hold corroborees before the practice was banned.   That was when the tribe still had a real community, not like the sickly half a dozen hangers-on now holding onto life in despair.

  He drank his sweet tea the lubra  prepared him and  went to catch the horses, who were hobbled at night I the holding yard.

   They would mount and wheel away for another long day in the searing Australian heat, a white man on a saddle and an abo  bareback on a brumby, steering with his knees and a  rope halter, just like I used to do riding bareback to school every day.

  A working station aboriginal hand would get about ten shillings a month, cast-off clothing, some tobacco, an occasionally bottle of cheap wine (plonk) (though it was illegal supplying it,) and flour, sugar and baking powder to make damper.

       When a bullock was killed he could take the offal, the head and feet of the animal and also the bones,  that were not reserved for the blue cattle dogs, Australia’s own canine breed with dingo strain.

   Horns and hide were kept by boss. The hide was pegged out to dry, becoming infected with blowfly maggots within a few hours.

 The abos considered these maggots a delicacy. They also ate big moths at certain times of the year and grubs from rotten logs and grasshoppers and cicadas too.

 Snakes and goannas were eaten and the newest fast-spreading animal immigrant, the rabbit.

    Rabbits  were not eaten fast enough to keep them in check,  so the government in its wisdom put in hundreds  of miles of rabbit- proof fences, which really did not work, since rabbits are digging animals, aren’t they? Nothing stopped the rabbits which spread even into the arid outback, where they ate the roots of spinifex and spiked acacia to the detriment of  bandicoots, wombats and any other desert animal.

   During the nineteen fifties, myxomatosis was introduced  killing off the bunnies in their millions and only the hardier ones survived.

      The aboriginal stockman or roustabout distributed  his largesse of cast-off clothing , flour, sugar and tea with his relatives hanging around down near the water-course, always  scrounging for food,  as most hunting was curtailed,( although this land had been theirs to hunt for thousands of years, since the Dreamtime and the Bigfella Rainbow Snake. )

    Estimation of Williams/Nash etc. descendants:

     If you consider there were probably five children per generation in our pioneer families (sometimes there were eleven.) I estimate there could be several hundred thousand descendants already, mostly in Australia, some in New Zealand and even in Canada, thanks to exiles like myself.

Nitpicking about similar sites.

    Now, I don’t dispute the contents of the Nash/ Williams and related families of other websites. A lot of research has gone into the family tree and relationships.  Carol Baxter has put in years of her life researching, so we rightly feel she has much of a monopoly on our family history. I wish I had not crossed her as she sent me a scathing letter which deflated my ego considerably (luckily only temporarily.).

  One point I made to her was that she had not mentioned anything about the original inhabitants of the family cattle leases, or their part as stockmen and servants. I have received a frosty reception from her ever since.

 Another matter I complained about was that she had sent her very excellent book ($59) to me via a United States address, when Canada is not actually part of the U.S.A.  (fortunately, not yet).  I wish we could get over our differences, Carol, as I admire your research and writings. Still there are other sides to history that are not available in musty old government records.   By the way did you know births did not need to be registered in N.S.W. until 1853.

   That leaves a lot of leeway and indecision when deciding who was or wasn’t in a family.

    Most pioneer Aussies, were not habitual churchgoers, as they came from Britain’s lower classes, and were not known for reverence of religion.  That was the domain of the middle classes, while the richest social segments  used religion to hold onto their high positions of power and land and money. Superstitions and religion have always been used to bamboozle the plebs and keep them in their place.   

   These pioneers had their children baptized as the easiest way to establish a birth notice. The struggle for life’s necessities gave them little time either for education or church-going, but they became experts at fencing a few acres, chopping wood, washing babies’ bottoms and cooking kangaroo-tail soup among other things.

   Some other things would include how to get bush ticks out of cattle and kids, and giving birth without medical help and dying far from clergy.

   It is not surprising that the Australian psyche evolved with a disdain for cant and dogma but with an underlying sense of fair play and social justice.

   This attitude eventually was belatedly directed towards the Aboriginal original inhabitants, but it took a long time.

  In the early days, brutality was so common from government administration down even towards ordinary citizens, and blacks were considered subhuman vermin, to be contained, bred white,   worked with little pay and otherwise ignored.

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