TRAUMA TOWN PART 6: There are slippery migrants in this town that I loosely associate with my own ancestors. There is a myth in my father’s family about arriving early in Sydney. It was 1792 when the first ancestor on the maternal side, Captain Thomas Rowley, arrived on the Minerva. There was nothing glorious about the Minerva. Its journey to Sydney started in Cork in Ireland, where I presume my obedient ancestor must have assisted the then British government with transporting 200 united Irishmen to the colonies.
These Irishmen were full of beans from the latest rebellion the Red Coats had just put down, and now it was time to get the malcontents left alive out of Mother Ireland. My noble ancestor’s first duty to Sydney was to land 200 Irish ratbags on our shores and then go off looking for real estate.
Remember, this was the Sydney of Grimes and not many proper buildings, but being a captain carried a certain cachet. Not much has changed. The Cock-n-Bull Hotel in Bondi Junction on a Friday night is still a good place to find 200 Irish ratbags, and it’s not far up the hill from where Captain Rowley dropped off our family’s load.
Another family myth was that my ancestors were clean living urban types. Working as an urban planner in Sydney, I have come across my ancestors’ paths in the voluminous heritage reports now demanded by NIMBY councils for everything. Captain Rowley got some land in Burwood; basically, I could have inherited a Metro Rail Station if my people had been long term players. But we were not; trauma is more easily passed on.
As I grew older and learnt to understand Australian history and how brutal it was on the First Nations people, I had a sense of uncertain relief that we didn’t get out there and do all the rounding up, dispossessing and claiming others’ land as our own – we pretty much stayed in Sydney.
The family myth is that my father’s family were industrious business owners, lawyers and then doctors. It was a climb up from a grubby but successful business to more respectable and cleaner professions. The Rupert Murdoch figure in my family myth was a William Bull of the 1850s. He made the first fortune selling cart wheels. William Bull was the Bob Jane TMart of mid 1800s Sydney, selling wheels to free settlers heading west with land and genocide in their eyes, and probably a few goldminers off to Bathurst, Sofala and Hill End. If we didn’t sell them, someone else would have.
He built a large freestanding Victorian place in Hereford Street, Glebe, that’s still there. The Twin, my uncle and I walked past that place years ago. It used to be a group house for nurses and was now a private residence. The Twin looked at my uncle, and I said, “let’s have a look”. We were a bit hesitant, but he pointed out to us that he was a middle-aged gay man with poor impulse control. The Twin knocked, and my uncle and I stood behind him. The current owners were in and happy to see us. We had a look around another family pile. The Twin grabbed a cowrie shell from the bathroom as a souvenir.
The real family dream house was built by William Bull’s brother, Reginald Arthur Bull. He hit the jackpot and built a grand pile called Carthona in Drummoyne, which was a large harbourside mansion in the early Victorian style (now demolished and replaced by a block of flats). And to date, the high point of the family real estate story. Reginald Bull’s children built houses on the three corners around Carthona, perilously trying to connect with the water and family grandeur. Dad’s generation were the children of those corner houses. All gone now. Like Narcissus, we fell into our own pond.
My father’s father, Cecil, was the last generation to have all that wealth, or rather a strong sense of the privilege of the grand times. And by all accounts, his generation went a bit soft and full of themselves. In the 1920s, grandfather was a bit of a Fabian socialist who enjoyed playing golf at Royal Sydney Golf Club in Rose Bay. All the indicators point to Cecil being responsible for the final liquidation of the William Bull cartwheel inheritance.
So, as he was hanging out in a lot of Sydney’s posh clubs, he was being laughed at by its members, who didn’t agree with his soft politics and were full of snobbery and must have found his fall from grace in real time amusing. Everyone goes and has a sticky beak at the ambulance. Cecil was the third generation after William (the money), the one that lost it, so the family myth goes.
Migrants bring their own family myths with them. A friend from Pakistan would talk about his family house in Karachi. His father had been a colonel in the army; they were of Arab heritage, which makes you posh in Pakistan. The house was an old colonial pile with a garden. His harbour was a grove of ancient mango trees. The Karachi place had so much land that every time his family took their eyes off the place, someone went down to the local magistrate with a dodgy title deed and a bride, and that bit at the back disappeared. I felt his pain.
There’s the Pommy swagger types, those that come over for a gap year before university with an on-the-make southern England accent, some smart gear from London, an Oasis T-shirt. Those guys that cut your lunch. We all know them in this town.
The other day I was in the municipal sauna. Sweating it out, enjoying the heat and relatively uncrowded space. There were two other middle-aged men of indiscriminate European origin with me. One of my sauna companions started talking about his DIY projects and getting tradies off a website that bids jobs out. He was complaining loudly about “the quality of the tradies, all Lebanese (Lebs) and dodgy”, on and on and then a general criticism about people of the Middle East. I suppose you don’t like kebab? I came here to relax, not listen to 2GB.
I have noticed that these small, nominally homogeneous groups of semi-naked people in a sauna entice people to talk freely. That’s how it affects me, so I let him know his real problem: “You’re blaming your tools – you just can’t pick the good ones.”
Who’s doing the work in this town these days anyway?
It’s that weirdness about migrants, the so-called locals maintain, in what I see as a dishonourable practice. Take the benefits and complain about the slightest perceived disadvantage.
Think of the Aussie freedom marchers against migrants who pick up some Thai takeaway on the way home. I think that’s the pommy swagger: undervalue the buy, overprice the sell, the Anglo- mercantilism of this city, its PR, its planning. I am glad my family stayed out of that.
Next week, a look at Sydney’s changing industrial landscape.
Philip you are a gifted writer if not raconteur – wasted on planning – hilarious & nasty streak of honesty
Bruce
I love Philip Bull’s writing – truth told with wit and humour.