Chopping down the tall poppies

It was the year 1800 and Joseph Holt, a well known United Irishman had been convicted and transported to New South Wales for his role as self proclaimed leader of the rebels. Holt had been given privileges from the outset on his arrival and on this day went walking with some of the authority figures in the colony.

I saw, at a distance of about half a mile, about fifty men at work, and from their appearance, thought they were dressed with nankeen jackets , but to my surprise, found it was the colour of their skin. The sun takes such an affection that it colours them to such an appearance. They all work naked, only a loose trousers to cover their parts, so I looked at them with the eye of pity. These men were working with large hoes, about nine inches deep and eight inches wide, a small handle about as thick as the handle of a shovel, and they turned up the ground somewhat like it would be dug with spades and left to rot in winter time. Six men to the acre. In the day’s work they can’t wear any shoes when at work, nor any clothes on them in the heat of the day, so this must be very unpleasant to your farmer’s sons at their first commencement in that country.

The gentlemen walked about and at length Captain Johnston says: “Mr Holt, you are a proper farmer sir.”

“I understand tilling the ground with horses and oxen, but with men I do not.”

Doctor Thompson says: “Don’t you think them men would know what you say to them better than horses or bullocks?”

“Yes sir, but give me leave to tell you, I think it is a brutish comparison.”

“Well sir, you will think nothing of it by and by.“ ( A Rum Story – Joseph Holt)

A large number of those men doing the back breaking work were Irishmen charged with trying to re-establish their human rights over the British oppressors in the only way available to them at that time. The easy “Protestant” way to deal with that issue, after executing many of them, was to banish them to a faraway land and put them to work, once again, for their British masters.

This is how Australia’s modern appearance was founded. This scene that Holt (admittedly well-known to embellish his stories) describes in his memoirs is typical of what our forebears went through. But that over powering class distinction of the first years in Australia has slowly been eroded thank goodness. Oh, don’t think there isn’t a class system in Australia, it’s there, but it’s more subtle, more politically correct in this day and age. Australian’s have inbuilt desires that a lot of other cultures don’t seem to understand at first hearing. We cheer for the underdog. We secretly want to cut down tall poppies. We instinctively help out a mate. It is un-Australian not to give everyone a fair go. It comes from those early days of being twice oppressed and learning how to overcome it; it comes from that genetic disposition that our convict forebears unknowingly passed down to us.

For many generations we disowned our convict ancestors as a sign of a flawed family. We’ve grown up since then and we now know that those men and women, so cruelly abused by their English masters, were in fact, the real royalty of the colony. They built the infrastructure, they developed the language, they shaped the culture, they taught and parented the first generation of Australians all under the cruelest, harshest conditions imaginable.

I’m proud to have convicts in my family tree and I’m excited to find them. The joy of genealogy is learning. While that learning doesn’t always bring forth happy details, it enriches my life through compassion and thankfulness that I have, in my veins, drops of blood from these heroes and those drops will be passed down further through my descendants.