Letters Home: The Family Tree

The day was brisk. A day with high grey clouds and lots of light. We made our way across the yellowed grasses of the park, to the sandstone obelisk, for the memorial service. It had rained overnight and the clay soil was soft and moved slightly underfoot. Puddles contained slip-like water that coloured my gumboots when I walked through them. I clearly remember that the park had only one or two very old gumtrees and the rest was bare land.

I had travelled with my mother in her red Lancia to a family reunion in the country town of Bathurst, west of Sydney over the Blue Mountains. This town, the name, saying the name and remembering the place, had always resonated with me. My mother was born in Bathurst and had been brought up on an orchard farm called ?Cavan? on the O?Connel Road near Kelso, just outside Bathurst. She and her two sisters would cycle the 15 miles return journey to their convent school ?rain, hail, or shine? she would always say. Her brother, the only son, had boarded at the big Catholic boy?s school in the town and hadn?t needed to cycle to school.

We had come here as children to visit our cousins, so many times. Being city children we loved to learn their country ways ? staying out playing ?till sunset, knowing the next door neighbours well enough to drop in and say hello without our parents, riding horses with matted manes, overgrown hoofs and names like Rocket and Flash. I was amazed to learn that one of my sisters had been allowed to watch as the neighbours? cat had kittens, in the back laundry. ?

My parents had married in Bathurst. I poured over my parents wedding photos admiring their youth, beauty and the cut of my mother?s dress. Every single time we drove past that church we would all say ?Look, that's the church where Mum and Dad got married!? for the younger ones it was always ?Where, where?? ?Oh you?ve missed it, maybe next time?.?

When you drive out of Bathurst, away from the river, you come to a T-junction (where the Coles Supermarket is now). This is where my mother fell out of the family car when she was seven years old. ?Always lock the car door, other wise you?ll fall out like I did and get a huge scab down the side of your face. It hurts you know?.

We could never argue that the car she was in hadn?t had proper doors and had only been going something like three miles an hour.

Everywhere you went the footpaths were made up of crushed, milky white quartz. In summer and winter the quartz would sparkle and glisten and always crunch when you walked on it. Further out of town you could see lumps of quartz on hills, roadsides and everywhere on the farm where my uncle kept his horses with the cows and the sheep. From a distance the quartz could be mistaken for snow or the remains of a sheep or lamb. It could be found in slight shades of pink and brown. I always took a quartz specimen home with me.

This place was part of my family. When I came here with my Year 8 Geography class to study topography and ecosystems, I was able to direct the coach driver like an old hand.

Now what I remember most was how cold it was in winter. The crisp chilled air that turned your breath into dry-ice fumes and numbed your fingers, ears and nose. When you ran, the cold air muffled the sound of your footsteps. The sky was grey and low and mist clung to trees and hillsides. We all wore duffle jackets with hoods and scarves and my cousins didn?t seem to feel the cold. The farmhouse was always crowded when we came to visit and we all shared beds or slept in the sitting room on the sofas or the floor. I admired the fuel stove, and in particular the grill on the door that was lined inside with mica. This shiny substance was thin and the colour of olive oil. Mica was used on fuel stoves and heaters in this way as it was a slow conductor of heat, wouldn?t crack unless you pushed your fist through it, and it allowed you to see the glowing fire behind the door. I also had a specimen of mica in my rock and mineral collection.

And here was the family, my mother and her siblings at a memorial service in Bathurst. As it turned out, our family had been settlers here long before Pa Pa, (my mother?s father) had set sail from Ireland to Australia as a merchant seaman at 14, transferring to the Royal Australian Navy during WWI and obtaining a ?Soldiers Settlement? block on O?Connell Road. The wife he took on 30th September 1922 was the descendent of a convict named Richard Mills, who had settled in Bathurst with his family around 1818. The family re-union weekend had been organised by another family, duly descended from Richard Mills, who had made contact with my uncle via their genealogy passion.

A road had at last been cleared for passage to Bathurst in around 1815 and ?Governor Lachlan Macquarie was seeking young men ?of middling sort? with small families to cross the mountains and take up these grants? writes Dorothy Raxworthy, in her paper ?Richard and Ann (Langley) Mills, Bathurst Pioneers 1818: A family history?. She goes on to say ?Macquarie, in June 1815, wrote a long letter to Earl Bathurst, outlining his plans for the gradual establishment of the ?new discovered country?. The first settler farmers would grow grain to feed the next wave of settlers, arriving 18 months later; these two groups supporting the large pastoralists (such as John Macarthur & William Cox), who would live further away from the township, on land that was suited only for grazing.?

Governor Macquarie?s diary entry for Monday 2 February 1818 reads: ?I this day inspected and selected ten new settlers for Bathurst, half of them young men born in the colony and the other half, free men who have been convicts. These being the first ten settlers selected for being sent to the new discovered country, I have agreed to victual themselves, and ten Government men [convicts] to be allowed them for 12 months! To give each of those ten settlers fifty acres of land as farm, a town allotment in Bathurst of two acres each, a gift of one cow and 4 bushels of seed wheat from Government to begin with?.?

Another entry in Governor Macquarie?s diary gives Cox?s list of ?New Settlers at Bathurst?, April 1818, initialled by Macquarie on 23rd April 1818. These men received the first land grants in Bathurst. And these names were carved on the obelisk. Listed number 5, was ?Richard Mills [conditional pardon].

Nineteen year old Richard Leveret Mills said to be from Beaumaris, on the island of Anglesey off the north west coast of Wales, had been tried at the Old Baily, London, England on 8th May 1799 for: ?feloniously making an assault on the King?s Highway upon Henry Kemp on 2nd April [1799], putting him in fear, and taking from his person eight pieces of money, called penny pieces, and twenty half pence, the property of the said Henry?.

Details of the trial are published in the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace, Old Baily Session Papers.

Despite being picked up after the crime was reported, shown to have no booty on his person and released ? he was again picked up a few weeks later, tried and now despite signed character references, sentenced (with his ?accomplice? John Bevan) to hang. His death sentence was commuted to transportation for life, to New South Wales. Charles Bateson in his book The Convict Ships, records the Royal Admiral?s eventful voyage (illness, death, suspected mutiny and a battle with two French frigates) of 181 days prior to arriving in Sydney Cove on November 22, 1800. Eventually Richard Mills went to work for a free settler named David Langley who arrived in New South Wales with his wife and two daughters, aboard the Rolla in May, 1803.

It was the families descended from the children of Richard Mills and Ann Langley, (the eldest daughter of David and his wife Nancy), who had gathered together for a church service and family re-union in Bathurst, that weekend. After the obelisk, we all drove to the community centre in Kelso. People had brought along mounted photographs of family-members now long dead, sketches of homes that were no longer standing and the never ending diagrams of family trees. I passed through these chilly rooms, welcoming the sweet tea, now being passed around in polystyrene cups. How could all these people call this place ?their home?? We ?came? from here and I did not recognise a single face.

The re-union dinner was to be held at a parish town hall in Bathurst itself, later in the evening. So, in the meantime I went for a drive with Mum and her brother and sisters up the O?Connel Road to the ?Cavan? Orchard. The earth was still soft and the air moist as we walked through the gates of the old farm.

After saying hello to the farmer who owned the place we walked around a bit, looking at the outbuildings first. ?Look, it still has the chicken wire Dad put up to keep the possums out,? said my Aunty Mary. I looked hard, craning my neck, up to where the high walls of the shed met its? sloping roof. My Pa Pa had built this timber and corrugated iron shed and I remember that as I stood there searching for that chicken wire I wanted to remember every detail of it. Because he had made it with his own hands, I felt it was part of me.

The same went for the mess of mud bricks and caved in tin roof, the remains of the main house, that could still be seen from the road. My mother pointed out the side room that had been built-in from part of the main verandah: ?That was Uncle Roger?s room?.

We went inside and saw where the kitchen has been, the girls room where they had slept 3 to a bed and Granny and Pa Pa?s room. The house had dirt floors and the wooden frames for the doorways were still standing. I could see that as more rooms had been needed, they got built onto the back of the house. I knew this place from some old photos my mother has kept of herself as a child. I?m tying to see this old house, here in the middle of this old orchard farm, as it once was. As it was when it was lived in.

I ask my mother so many questions ? what room was this? What happened here? Was this part of the house built when you lived here? I am trying to see past the house to the people who lived here. Who they were is important to me. I am looking for a sense of them.

We trudge back to the cars, myself and the wobbly sisters and brother ranging in age from 60 to 70 years old. I feel more a child than I am, hearing them talk of their childhoods.

After an afternoon nap and another cup of tea we dress in our glad rags and meet up at the parish church hall. The place is set up once more with the family re-union ?exhibition ? pieces from the afternoon and long tables are designated to the different lines of the Mills family tree. It strikes me that the place is fairly well filled up with the ?old folks? of the families. My child?s view of the world remains with me.

After dinner we mingle and scrutinise family heirlooms and I listen sceptically to heroic family tales. A tall handsome woman approaches me saying, ?With your broad face and high cheek bones you must be part of the Marainna Mills side of the family?. I?m sorry to disappoint ? ?Harriet Mills?, I say.

My granny, Gertie Young, married William Fitzsimons, the seaman, and moved to Kelso. Her mother Kate was the daughter of Scotsman Christopher Reid Young and an Irish woman named Mary Slattery, both free settlers. Kate married Edwin George Young, the son of Johanna Hogan and George Bathurst Young (so named after his uncle, the first white child to be born in Bathurst with a plot of land from the Government to prove it), who was the son of Harriet Mills and William Young. Harriet was the eldest daughter of Richard Mills and Ann Langley. There are too many people, I thought.

All of these individuals had many brothers and sisters. Some married twice over. Some were still having children while their children were having children. It was like the cat?s mixed litter, happening over and over again. I would never get to know them or remember their names, or know what they wore or thought or said.

We duly purchased a family re-union commemorative spoon and headed off down the highway towards home, after mass, the following day.

I still pour over my mother?s old photos and demand she write the subjects names underneath. I tell her, that once she is gone no one will remember who is who. Do it now, I say, before old timers disease makes you forget. A group of people in an old photograph holds no meaning unless you know who they are. Then they become ?someone?. A mother, daughter, father, son. I roll their names around my tongue and look for my likeness in their faces.

I don?t think we are careful enough of these people from the past. We let them languish in old boxes under the house and let the old grandmother burn the still earlier photos of her family in the backyard incinerator, because sho thinks no one wants them.

When we travelled overseas as a family, my father would always take us on a trip to Ireland ? home of the ancestors (the family tree on my mother?s side has proved there is a variation on this). He loved the place and told us stories of when he would retire there. And always the same joking warning to me, when we went out for our walks ?Please be careful, don?t get lost. We would never find you out there as you look like every body else!?. I wore the taunt like a badge, with honour.

2001

Source: http://lettershomev1.blogspot.com/2012/02/family-tree.html

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