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  The Shiva Lingam worship of India which so shocked Victorian England, the rites of the Roman Priapus worshippers and the worship of the perceived sources of life in various ‘pagan’ cultures may well be much closer to the real truth than are the fundamentalists of the twentieth-century Western and Middle-Eastern worlds. A mild form of ancestor worship, thanking our forebears for our existence, would be one type of ‘religion’ that would make some sense: in paying our respects to our forebears we would be acknowledging that we are like links in a chain, we are the result of what has gone before, and are responsible for what will come after. We are grateful for the existence that our forebears have given us and we have responsibilities – civic, social and personal – towards our own and future generations. The acknowledgement that we are in a way responsible for others, not only for their creation and continued existence but also for their happiness, might well eventually civilise our warring world more effectively than any religion has done so far.

  In the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus developed the theory of atomism, the idea that the world is made up of tiny particles of matter, in vast quantities swirling through space. He suggested that the earth and a tree and a man and so on, all ‘things’, are simply fleeting combinations of atoms that come together for a time and then drift apart. My impression is that modern science increasingly suggests that he was basically correct. In other words, we are indeed mere specks of dust, stardust if you like, drifting through the universe, combining, separating, combining again. At least one phrase from the Christian burial ritual is very apposite: ‘Dust to Dust’! Admittedly, this is not a comforting concept for unhappy people and can’t compete with the promise of ‘pie in the sky when you die’, or of being reincarnated or recycled, coming back again in one form or another to have another shot at happiness … more wishful thinking, I’m afraid. If only it were not so! If only I could look forward to being with not only ‘God and His angels and His saints’ but also with my mother and father and other loved ones who have already died. Alas, it cannot be so. We can but treasure their memories and must make the most of life while it lasts.

  Our best chance of happiness probably lies in trying to conform to our nature, in being good links in this endless chain, in trying to be respectful of our ancestors, supportive of our contemporaries, and responsible towards future generations. Ancestor worship, to use slightly melodramatic terminology, is really just the acceptance of the facts of life: we exist because of our ancestors’ actions, and those who come after us will exist (or not exist) because of our actions. This is the reality, a reality we must accept.

  The old adage about treating others as we would wish them to treat us, helping one another ‘in the pursuit of happiness’, as Jefferson so neatly put it, has much wisdom in it. Another American president had much the same message for his people when he urged them to ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’,49 i.e. to think of others. That is what our schools and educators should be teaching today’s children: the way to be happy is to help others to be happy.

  Late in life have I finally grasped this axiom. Why did I not learn it sooner? Perhaps because I did not look at the lessons to be learned from the lives of my forebears. My Great-Grandmother Fanny, my Grandmother Gell and my own mother, Athen, all devoted their lives to their husbands and children and all left behind memories of them as happy and fulfilled people. Fanny’s two daughters and two granddaughters, four nuns, devoted their lives to the work of their convents, helping others – as did my father’s sister and two cousins, also members of teaching or nursing orders. My grandfather Will and my father Jim were both men who spent their lives helping others. All these people, whether celibate nuns and priests, married or unmarried men and women, seem to have found happiness by trying to help others to be happy … so marriage and sexual fulfilment were not essential ingredients in the recipe. My Great-Uncle Frank, who was overcome with melancholy and died without speaking for the final twelve months of his life, and my Great-Great Uncle Thomas, who committed suicide, were both married men with children, yet they were both, at least towards the end of life, patently, desperately unhappy. My Grandmother Elizabeth, the only one of this latter group of unhappy souls whom I knew well, outlived husband, daughter and son and was always sad. Poor thing, she devoted her life to her children but from the time of her husband’s early death she seems to have been bitter rather than fulfilled and to have been unable to accept that the next generation (particularly her son, my father) must lead its own life and find its own happiness. Dad’s marriage clearly made him happy … and broke his mother’s heart!

  What can I learn from my foray into genealogy and genetics? What went wrong with these forebears, especially with Elizabeth? What went right for the others? What could I learn from their lives, what can others learn from mine? Most people have ups and downs in their lives and some people have more of one than of the other, usually more downs than ups. Grandma Lizzie was in this latter group and did lead a melancholy existence … but what made her so bitter? I am her grandson, of her flesh, I carry her genes and have a behavioural as well as a physical genetic inheritance. My guess is that the problem was an inability, or an unwillingness, to communicate, to relate to others. Whether it is a genetically inherited trait or one developed in early life surroundings, shyness and a difficulty in connecting with others are certainly characteristics discerned in some of my forebears … and in myself. They are dangerous and destructive characteristics. Grandma Elizabeth, at age ten, saw her mother die and her father quickly remarry and start a second family. The new wife showed little affection for her step-daughter and Lizzie seems to have retreated into the lonely world of chief drudge and babysitter, a world from which she tried to escape by marrying the first man who proposed … a man who died four years later, leaving her a lonely widow. I feel that I have inherited from my grandmother this shyness, wariness, suspicion and hesitation in relating to others, and I suspect that these communication difficulties arise from a sense of fear, fear that one’s person, one’s identity and even one’s existence are somehow threatened by those around, by the external world. The defence tactic chosen is to disengage, to retreat behind a barrier of silence and feigned disdain, to set up a sort of glass wall between oneself and the world of others. The better tactic may well be, as my Uncle Bert advised me when I was setting off to do my National Service, to take the plunge, to step outside the safety zone of one’s self, to face the others and the world, to ‘grasp the nettle’ and to learn, to adapt, to change, to evolve.

  I now see that that is the tactic that my mother adopted when my father suddenly died; she opted not for the life of frugal widowhood many expected her to lead and instead, after twenty years of comfortable existence as the wife of a popular doctor, chose to go back to work and to earn the money necessary to continue running a happy home for her children, an hospitable one where dinner guests, lively conversation and new ideas were always welcome. While I am sure that my mother treasured the memories of her life with my father, those memories remained part of her private world. Her focus was on the day dawning, on her children, on her friends and the very many people she met; her focus was on the present and the future. The lesson she was teaching, by example, and which I was so slow to grasp, was that the acceptance of change and even the enjoyment of change, is the secret of how not only to ‘survive’ but to live happily in an ever-changing world. It is the clearest lesson we can learn from our forebears and the most important one we can pass on to those who come after. Accept, adjust, adapt, evolve. Evolution is a story of change, and our ride through life and space and time will be all the smoother when we strive to be in harmony with the everchanging harmonies of life, of the planets and of the universe.

  Appendix 1: The voyage to Australia

  The Lightning did not leave Liverpool until 14 May under the command of Captain Forbes who had done so well in the Marco Polo. Her departure was recorded in the diary kep
t by one of her passengers.

  Sunday 14th May 1854. With a tug on each side and one ahead the clipper Lightning slipped down the Mersey from Liverpool at noon, to the boom of guns from the Marco Polo and shore batteries and to the strains of the ship’s band playing ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’, many joining them in chorus, flags flying, many full hearts leaving their native land forever – away we go. Divine service in our saloon and ditto after tea – too much ranting and praying. We cannot get fresh air for the crowds who at tend. We get our meals in great discomfort and without order – everyone for himself and many are rough and rude. Several sails were set without wind to fill them. One tug returned to Liverpool on Sunday and the sec ond on Monday with a large mail from the passengers, but the third remained until the ship was off Cork on Tuesday. With every sail set we present a fine appear ance even with only a light wind.

  9th June. Following on several trifling squalls during the day, a much stronger one at 10.30 p.m. carried away the jib topsail and by 11 p.m. white thick clouds were rising to a fresh cool breeze. The ship was almost covered in sail and as the breeze became stronger she gradually set herself to it, at the same time going quicker and quicker. Men were stationed at the halyards and I went below to keep dry. The ship was nearly on her side when the Captain came on deck; … what a roaring of wind, thundering of flapping sails, dashing of spray, shrieking of orders there were before we were snug again. The ship trembles very much when she dashes against a wave. T… thinks we ought to petition the Captain to keep us under less sail, for he sees very little difference between frightening a man out of his wits and killing him outright.

  Friday 7th July 1854. We are somewhere off the Mozambique Channel and had a tempestuous night, going at a fearful rate at times. Main topmast halyard gave way making a terrific noise until the sail was stowed. Lee scuppers a long way under – sea high – many a heavy dash over into the main deck. An extra lurch and 20 men leaning against the weather side went flying down to leeward, some on their feet and some on their sterns. 9 p.m. the ship seems to be going faster than ever – absolutely flying from under one. 10 p.m. the blocks, 18 inches above the lee rail, are frequently under water. The deck is on an angle of 45 or 50 degrees and you only get along hand over hand, by the belaying-pins on the windward side. The second mate, whose watch it is, says ‘Now this is what I call carrying on!’50

  Appendix 2: Hockeys and Sullivans

  My maternal great-grandmother, Fanny Hockey, was born in South Australia in 1844 to a young couple who had arrived there in 1839, just three years after the establishment of the colony. They had come from the picturesque village of Montacute in Somerset, England, on the sailing ship Asia and in Adelaide they opened up a small grocery or general provisions store, initially in a tent. After fifteen difficult years in the fledgling colony, they decided to move on and to join the gold rush to the neighbouring colony of Victoria. They piled their possessions onto a cart, harnessed up their one horse and, with their six young children in tow, set off walking the 700 or so kilometres to the diggings. My greatgrandmother, the second of five daughters, was aged ten at the time; her baby brother, the family’s first son, died along the way. The family eventually reached the goldfields at Maryborough, and that is where Fanny grew up and met and married, at the age of seventeen, my great-grandfather, James Sullivan.

  Fanny spent the rest of her life in Maryborough while two of her sisters moved to nearby Dunolly and Tarnagulla, having married the sons of the proprietors of hotels in each town. The Railway Hotel, then run by the Nicholls family, is still in business in Dunolly. The rather grand-sounding ‘Victoria Hotel and Theatre’ in Tarnagulla, run in the 1860s by the Bool family, also from Montacute, is also still standing but is now delicensed and has become the Tarnagulla Public Hall. The village of Moliagul, where in 1869 two lucky fossickers unearthed, just five centimetres below the surface of the soil, the ‘Welcome Stranger’ nugget – a staggering 71 kilo lump of pure gold and the largest nugget ever found in the world – is only a few kilometres away. Like many of the other gold rush ‘hot spots’ around Maryborough, Moliagul is now little more than a name on the map, but would have been familiar territory to my great-grandparents when the nugget was found.

  Great-Grandfather James Sullivan had come to the goldfields from County Carlow in Ireland, arriving in Melbourne in 1855 in the sailing ship Blanche Moore. He did some fossicking at first, but soon opted for a position as a warder at the first prison built in the area, on the outskirts of Maryborough. This would have been less than a year after the Eureka Stockade uprising in Ballarat and at a time when (as almost always) security, particularly for nervous members of the Establishment, was a growth industry. For an Irishman to ‘take the king’s shilling’, i.e. to work for the English Crown, was a little surprising and remains a little disconcerting for the writer, a strongly republican descendant, but the little we know of him suggests that James was a very practical, level-headed fellow and such genes are also useful in life. It does not seem to have taken him long to realise that a public servant, no matter how lowly, had a more certain income than any digger. It also seems that he managed to do some fairly successful prospecting, or speculating, in his spare time, and after about ten years as a prison warder he resigned and became a full-time ‘investor’, buying and selling shares in local goldmines. When he married Fanny he was referred to on the Marriage Certificate as a ‘constable’, and when some twenty years later on their children started to marry, he was referred to, on their marriage certificates and under the heading ‘Occupation of Father’, as ‘Gentleman’. How very British it was for an increase in fortune to turn a constable and part-time fossicker/ speculator into a ‘gentleman’! I never met him, of course, as he died when my mother was only eleven years old. She remembered him as a tall, bewhiskered, well-dressed man with a head of silvery hair and a blackthorn walking stick … which he shook at her on finding her swinging on his garden gate. ‘Get down from there, you young Terryalt,’51 she recalled him saying. An autocratic and patriarchal figure to her, he was nonetheless clearly loved by his large family, his youngest daughter referring to him always as ‘Dearest Da’. He died in 1911, with Fanny by his side. ‘Cover me up, Fanny, I’m cold,’ are reported to have been his last words … the last directive of very many to his dutiful wife.

  To marry James, Fanny had somewhat distanced herself from her family in that she converted to Catholicism and became a devout parishioner of the Catholic church in Maryborough. To the end of her days, she never missed Sunday Mass, in her last years having a permanent booking on Sunday mornings with a local (horse-drawn) cab company to take her to Mass and to bring her home. She was something of a traditionalist and had not welcomed such new-fangled things as motor cars or, for that matter, hats (she always wore a bonnet), gas stoves, hot water systems or even armchairs, always sitting on a straight-backed chair if away from home and her favourite rocking chair. ‘I’ve never accustomed myself to lolling about,’ she said to my mother, who tried to steer her towards something more comfortable than a kitchen chair. Only with great difficulty was Grandma Fanny persuaded in her last years to accept the connection of electricity to the matrimonial home in which she lived till the end of her days. A typical weatherboard miner’s cottage with a galvanised iron roof, the house had grown along with the family. Initially of two rooms, it soon acquired two more, then another when a new kitchen was attached at the back, then a return verandah at the front and side, and then a new room at the end of the side verandah, always referred to as ‘the big room’ where the boys slept. The children included five girls (one of whom died in childhood) and seven boys; as a child I often wondered how the two parents and twelve children had ever fitted into such a small place. Of course, by the time space had to be found for the younger children, the older ones had already left the nest and gone out into the wide world … all except the eldest daughter, Daisy. She had announced her intention of entering the convent but was told by her father to wait at home, helping her mo
ther, until the youngest child, her brother Ray, had grown up. Daisy did as she was told and waited, entering the Brigidine convent in Echuca, that order’s first house in Victoria, in 1908, toiling faithfully in the Lord’s vineyard until her death in 1957.

  The second-youngest child was Bert, my Great-Uncle Bert whom I remember very well as unforgettable and a little aweinspiring: he had no arm in the right sleeve of his jacket! He had served in the Australian mounted cavalry in the World War I, had been decorated for bravery at Gallipoli and had lost his arm in Egypt. As a six-year-old, I wondered how on earth one could lose an arm, and I then and there classified Egyptians as a strange race, somehow involved in stealing, or else in failing to find, my uncle’s arm. Great-Uncle Bert was a school teacher and indeed, when I first met him, a Headmaster. As I had just started school, I found him a little intimidating. He had a deep and beautiful speaking voice, one of the Sullivan family traits, contrasting strangely with the almost rasping voice of his wife, Auntie Alice. Alice was incredibly ‘jolly’ and was given to shrieks of laughter and to poking one’s ribs, and was at times almost dangerous to be near. She called her husband by the abbreviation ‘Sul’ rather than ‘Bert’, not ‘taking the mickey out of him’ but nonetheless keeping his feet on the ground. Even as a child, and later on as a teenager, I was aware of them as a truly happy, loving and indeed inspiring couple, as two people so close to each other in their old age that they each seemed to know what the other was thinking and feeling and was going to say next.