George Barrington, committing the crime for which he was transported.
An ancestor of mine was one of the 162,000 criminals “transported” to Australia in the 19th century. As a fellow felon, pickpocket-turned-playwright George Barrington, put it, “True patriots all; for be it understood, We left our country for our country’s good.” Apparently my five-or-more-times great grandmother stole a bucket. An empty one, presumably; had it been full, she’d probably have hanged.
In a few weeks, our daughter Louise is making the same journey, though in her case by choice. She’s always liked Australia; as a toddler, she petted kangaroos before she ever touched a sheep, and in kindergarten described herself as “une petite Australienne." She and her companion intend to stay at least a couple of years. To do so as an alternative to execution I could understand. But voluntarily? One can only shake one’s head in bewilderment.
Louise and friend Maxim in New York recently.
My generation couldn’t wait to leave. To be born down there felt like being at the bottom of a well, with the real world a tiny disc of light high above one’s head. But getting out in 1969 was no picnic. Louise’s trip, even allowing for a two-hour stop-over in Hong Kong, will occupy a day or two – a considerable improvement on the seven weeks it took us….good grief; was it really fifty years ago?
Back then, the rich boarded one of the big Sunderland flying boats and hop-scotched across the Pacific and Asia in comfort. The rest of us improvised. Some friends made the trip in a British double-decker bus. It survived Afghanistan but expired in Athens. Others hopped a freighter to Vladivostock, took the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow, another train to St Petersburg, crossed the Baltic to Helsinki, and travelled by a further series of trains to London. A girl I knew tried it. Time weighed heavily during the eight-day crawl across the USSR, but on the bright side she improved her chess game and had sex with a Russian soldier who spoke no English but boasted a full set of stainless steel teeth.
Like the majority of Aussies London-bound, my girlfriend and I submitted to the long, slow voyage on a pre-war American liner, re-purposed by a Greek shipping line to carry emigrants in one direction and hopeful Aussies on the way back. Accommodations varied. Our double cabin was sufficiently far above the water line to include a window, but a fellow fugitive, journalist Clive James, shared a cabin with five strangers and the crankshaft, with so little floor area that, if one wanted to get out of bed, the others had to get back into theirs.
There were times, it’s true, when our plodding progress made the relative speed of a train sound like heaven, but just as talk on deck edged towards mutiny, we docked for refuelling in Fiji or Acapulco or Miami and dissipated our frustration in a frenzy of postcard writing and sampling the local beer. In between, I wrote a novel, the sale of which supported us, precariously, during our first year in Britain.
All ports are exotic, but none seemed so strange to me as Southampton. Its tantalising similarity to parts of suburban Sydney just made it that much more alien.
The first Australian architect of any talent, Francis Greenaway (transported for forgery), had no doubts about what constituted a proper building. Hardly had he put the last tiles on the roof, however, than blistering sun and torrential rains attacked them, while rapacious bugs began gnawing at the foundations.
Few of his houses survived, and those that did were museum pieces. Yet whole roads here were lined with them. Shivering in my too-light topcoat, I wandered through the February night until I came to a roundabout, in the middle of which stood the remains of a Roman wall. Barely avoiding being run down – didn’t drivers realise they were on the wrong side of the road? - I crossed to it and stood in awe next to the oldest man-made construction I’d ever seen. I bent to touch it a colonial. I straightened up a European.
Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in WOMEN IN LOVE. They’ve only been wrestling. Really.
At the next roundabout was a cinema. The film showing was Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, of which not much remained after the Australian film censors got through with it. Here all its gaudy sexuality was intact. Within a year or two I’d be writing Russell’s biography, evidence of the gibe often leveled at expat Australians, that we were pushy, brash, tried too hard, didn’t know our place. A touchy lot, the Brits. (They didn’t like the Romans either.)
I wonder what Louise will make of Australia. I feel like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, warning Joseph Cotten about going to Chicago. “The wind comes howling in from the lake and there’s practically no opera season at all and the Lord knows if they’ve ever heard of Lobster Newburg.” Well, the wind is warm there, she isn’t that much into opera, and its seafood is one of Australia’s culinary delights. Maybe she’ll be OK. But I’ll be watching.
With lobster at Andre’s in La Rochelle recently.
Love the background story. Good luck to Louise.