Friendship and Relations

On May 13, 1787, the Friendship, a brig of 278 tons, left the harbour of Portsmouth carrying seventy-six male and twenty-one female British and Irish convicts. She arrived at Port Jackson, Sydney, on 26 January 1788, minus the female convicts who had been transferred to other vessels at the Cape of Good Hope in order to make space for livestock. The Friendship was part of the First Fleet, the first eleven ships that sailed to Australia to found a penal colony that would become the earliest foreign settlement there. About 1,000 convicts and sailors arrived in Botany Bay in early 1788.

While the part of my family that is Australian can’t be traced back to the First Fleet, there was at least one ancestor who arrived there as a convict. The story goes that he was convicted for stealing a (lady’s?) kerchief, a fact that my father jubilantly declares as an aesthetic crime, most definitely laying the foundation for his profession as an architect. My father used to sing Australian convict songs (he is not a good singer) to the effect that I can still sing along to a couple of them. I tried to find some good recordings, but they all fail to fulfill my recollection of the sadness and strangeness of the songs, probably because I am searching for the rather disharmonious versions of my memory.

Once, a couple of years ago, we went to search for my father’s father’s family history, in Batley near Leeds in Yorkshire. My grandfather (whom I never met) emigrated to Australia in 1929 as an engineer of the British Electric Transformer Company and then started his own transformer business in 1937. It still exists today: Wilson Transformers. My uncle sent us a package with Wilson Transformer merchandise a while back.

Back in Yorkshire, my nuclear family went to the town hall and asked for a copy of my grandfather Jack’s birth certificate. The family legend had been that my great-grandfather was a rag-and-bones-man, however the documents list him as Assistant Grocer. It was my great-great-grandfather who is recorded as a Rag Merchant in 1873 on the birth certificate of my great-grandmother Susan. By the time my grandfather was born in 1905, his father, Dan, had become Grocer’s Manager.

My grandfather (after serving in the war, fighting against the troops of my maternal, German grandfather) returned to Europe in 1955, together with his wife Betty and his two sons, my uncle and father. The trip on the boat to England took several weeks, and for me is filled with adventurous stories of my five-year-old father, one of them told and re-told especially: a magician makes an egg disappear only to then pull it out of my father’s trouser leg — trauma of his life. The two kids then stayed in London with their nanny, while my grandfather Jack and grandmother Betty (who called Jack John) travelled on, to Naples, Pompeii, Paris… In Paris they went to see Marlene Dietrich sing (who many years earlier had sent Sigmund Freud this note). My grandmother wasn’t impressed, and wrote so in her diary. Maybe she would have been, if Marlene had sung this:

Bound for Botany Bay

Farewell to old England for ever,
Farewell to my rum coes as well,
Farewell to the well-known Old Bailey
Where I used for to cut such a swell.

Chorus:
Singing too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,
Singing too-ral, li-ooral, li-ay,
Singing too-ral, li-ooral, li-addity,
And we’re bound for Botany Bay.

There’s the captain as is our commander,
There’s the bo’sun and all the ship’s crew,
There’s the first- and the second-class passengers,
Knows what we poor convicts go through.

‘Taint leaving old England we cares about,
‘Taint cos we mis-spells what we knows,
But because all we light-fingered gentry
Hops around with a log on our toes.

These seven long years I’ve been serving now
And seven long more have to stay,
All for bashing a bloke down our alley
And taking his ticker away.

Oh, had I the wings of a turtle-dove,
I’d soar on my pinions so high,
Straight back to the arms of my Polly love,
And in her sweet presence I’d die.

Now all my young Dookies and Duchesses,
Take warning from what I’ve to say:
Mind all is your own as you toucheses
Or you’ll find us in Botany Bay.