The conservationists are all leading sophisticated recreational lifestyles elsewhere. Tasmanians have to live somehow, or leave. Perhaps they too are under a curse. For forty thousand years this tiny shield of rock supported forty thousand blacks, hunting and gathering in small, intricately woven kin-groups; in forty years they had been all but exterminated by the Cornishmen, the Irishmen, the Scotsmen, the Englishmen and the miners who came from everywhere. Beside the coast road near Triabunna I found a dead Tasmanian devil, still soft and warm in his glossy black coat with its clergyman’s collar of shining white hairs.
‘Forgive us,’ I said to his dead smile full of needle-sharp teeth. To myself I said, ‘We have no business here.’
Melbourne Again, December 1986
What seas what shores what rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
T.S. ELIOT. ‘MARINA’
The hall I sat in was long, three times as high as it was wide, and yellow, with an arched ceiling of corrugated iron, which once perhaps was glass. Opposite me was another counter, not so much a pawnshop this time, more like a bank.
The young people behind the counter were very cheery and relaxed as they went about the work of protecting Victoria’s public records from the public who owned them and might wish to consult them. They knew little of the protocols governing the collection of these records, but they were expert in getting money out of their nervous clients. For the exorbitant sum of $18 they would agree to undertake a search, but such a search would need at least five working days to complete. None of their clients knew enough to know that if the search took half an hour, it was already unusually long. I watched as people who had made the initial visit, paid their $18 and now returned to collect their documents were told to wait on the hard bench beside me. The hum of lazy chit-chat on the other side of the barrier would be momentarily stilled as a clerk would get languidly to his feet and stroll out of sight. This barely perceptible movement signalled in fact the beginning of the ‘search’, which was after all only a flip through a microfilm. For $18 the client bought an artificial wait and the privilege of making another visit. For an extra $19 the clerks would graciously consent to look out and copy the documents ‘today’.
Family history is said to be already the most popular hobby in the United States, and the number of enthusiasts continues to grow exponentially; what happens in the United States invariably presages what is to happen in Australia. As long as the demand for replicas of official documents came principally from lawyers there might have been some justification for high charges; most family historians are pensioners, who are as poor in Australia as they are elsewhere in the English-speaking world. The Registrar-General’s department is fast hauling back the pittance doled out to retired people by the state. What they could be doing with the money was more than I could guess, sitting on a hard bench in the makeshift hallway, waiting for a piece of paper that had cost me $37.
If I had only known, they were already extending to me a degree of privilege, for Australian children are not entitled to see their parents’ marriage certificates upon request. In Australia the only people entitled to see the official record of a marriage, as of right, are the parties to the marriage. The purpose of such legislation (if indeed the practice is enshrined in law and not merely the rule-book of the Australian civil service) seems to be to allow bigamists to bigamise without fear of discovery. There is no stigma on illegitimacy, which is at least as common in Australia as in all other English-speaking countries. The regulations hark back to a more hypocritical and neurotic era when Australians were less interested in their family history than they were in claiming a respectability their families had never had.
Despite the atmosphere of casual kindliness, I could not stop the flutter in my chest. If compiling family history was now the favourite pastime of retired Australians, it was not mine. The old ladies beside me on the bench kept up a running chatter about their grandfathers in the Victorian goldfields; I listened enviously as they discussed the whereabouts of the mining claims their forebears had filed, parish records in Daylesford and a certain Mary who may or may not have been white and may have been wife to more than one man at a time. For them it was all a wonderful adventure; for me it was the primal elder’s curse all the way.
I distracted myself by trying an ethological study of the genus ‘Victorian Civil Servant’. The uniform adopted by almost all those I could see was stretch jeans, trainers and windcheaters, for male and female alike. The windcheaters were insulation against the chill south-westerlies funnelling down the city streets; the jeans were sexual display; the trainers did not noticeably speed up the pace of the individuals who chose to cross and recross the hall with files clasped to their windcheaters, but they did allow a slow motion version of a walking racer’s provocative hip-roll.
I tried guessing which windcheater was pressed against my family record. I heard a microfilm being rewound and my heart wound itself up tighter. One of the old ladies at the counter was pleading, ‘This is my third visit. On my pension I can’t afford all this travelling.’
The beardless bureaucrat gave her the classic response, ‘Insufficient information. You’ll have to pay another search fee.’
‘The surname could be spelt without the “e”, and sometimes it’s “ea” or “ie”,’ ventured the old lady.
‘Then you’ll have to make applications in the different names.’
The old lady took some forms and turned back to the bench.
‘And you’ll have to pay a search fee for each name.’
The old lady put the forms back and walked away down the hall.
I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to ask why the indexes to the records could not be made public, so that anyone could search and find out if a document was held. Concern for privacy could come into operation when permission to see the document was requested. The system that allowed them to screw money out of us all was cruel and idiotic. I longed for good old St Katherine’s House, where we all toiled through the indexes side by side, lawyers’ runners, family historians and searchers for missing persons alike. If you wanted to read all the Greer births from 1850 to 1950 you could. I had. After a morning of heaving bulky volumes and fighting for space at the reading benches, while my ankles swelled from standing with my bag on my feet so nobody could walk off with it while I made notes. I had the names of all the Greers born in England and Wales between 1900 and 1910, whether in Aberystwyth, Alverstoke, Ashton Park, Aston, Barnet, Barrow-in-Furness, Barton Island, Bethnal Green, Birkenhead, Brentford, Camberwell, Canterbury. Cardiff, Chorlton. Devonport, Edmonton. Epsom, Fylde. Gateshead, Godstone, Grimsby, Halifax, Hendon, Holborn, Kensington, Lambeth, Lanchester, Leeds, Lewisham, Liverpool, Manchester, Medway, Middlesborough, Milford, Neath, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oldham, Ormskirk, Paddington, Poplar, Portsea, Portsmouth, Preston, Prescot, Prestwich, Romford, Runcorn, St German, Salford, Settle, Sheffield, Shoreditch, Southwark, South Shields, Swindon, Stoke-on-Trent, Tonbridge, Toxteth, Tynemouth, West Derby, West Ham, Whitechapel, Whitehaven, Wigan, or Woolwich, 266 Greer babies in all, 139 of them boys, and none of them an Eric Reginald.
By lunchtime I knew for sure that wherever Eric Reginald Greer was born, and my grandparents were born and married, it was not in England. Simply to confirm that my father was not born in Australia would cost a search fee to each of seven state record offices, and would not eliminate the possibility that his birth was registered under a slightly different name or guarantee that the relaxed young persons entrusted with the job had done it with due diligence, or checked possible alternate spellings.
This time I did not make the mistake of suggesting that Australians adopt the English system. I waited cowed and obedient. During the time I sat on the bench I saw only one person come away from the counter with the document she had paid for. As my face burned under th
e stares of the clerks who came out from the inner office for a look at me. I scribbled desperately in my notebook. What if it was all an act? What if Daddy’s dignified, standoffish manner was all invented, modelled on some movie hero, some member of the royal family, or the Saint by Leslie Charteris? They called him the Toff, a fictional title for a fictional man. What if he pretended to be upper crust, top drawer, and invented the kind of past for himself that could never be checked? Perhaps he stayed in his dead-end job among advertising men because he was unlikely to meet anyone who would see through his act? If Daddy had ever claimed an ancestry or hinted at a claim, I would find it easier to believe that he was a phony. He said nothing, after all. He wore no old school tie. He made no attempt at social climbing. His toffishness was evinced mostly in his reluctance to hobnob with hoi polloi, and his treating himself to a bespoke tailor.
To be a Greer is not to be just anybody. Greers are not Smiths or Browns or Greens. The name has a history and a meaning, whether it is encountered in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa or the United States. Or the Isle of Man.
The Greers can trace their line back to the Scottish kings. The Greers who care about such things (of whose number Daddy was not) believe that they are descended from the ancient Highland clan McAlpin, via the third son of King Alpin, who was called Prince Gregor. Prince Gregor’s elder son, Dongallus, married Spontana, sister of Duncan, one of the Irish kings, and their firstborn son, Constantine, married his cousin Malvina and they called their son Gregor. Gregor, standard-bearer to his uncle, Malcolm I, was killed by the Danes in 961. His wife Dorigelda had given him a son John, who married Alpina, daughter of Alchaius, brother of Kenneth the Great. The line continues through the seventh generation with Gregor, Laird of Glenurchy, who married the daughter of Lochow, ancestor of the Dukes of Argyle. His son Gregor was Bishop of St Andrew’s. The line continues through Sir John McGregor, Laird of Glenurchy, one of whose sons, Gregor, was Bishop of Dunkeld and Lord Chancellor of Scotland in 1157. His eldest son, Sir Malcolm McGregor, married a kinswoman of the king, and his heir, Gregor, married and had a son Malcolm, whose second son, Gilbert Gregorson, took the name Grierson and on 17 May, 1410, received the lands of Lag, Dumfries-shire, from his cousin, the Earl of Orkney, which were inherited upon the death of his eldest son in 1457 by his second son, Vedast-Grierson. His son, Roger Grierson, married a great-granddaughter of Lord Darnley, and by this alliance the Rockhall estates came into possession of the Griersons, who hold them still. Roger’s son, Roger, a member of the Scotch parliament in 1487, was killed at Flodden in 1513. The line continues through Sir John Grierson who died in 1566, and his son Roger, who died in 1593, to Sir William Grierson of Lag and Rockhall, and then things get a little muddled.
In 1593 Sir William married Nicola, daughter of Sir John Maxwell, fourth Lord Herries and second son of Robert, fourth Lord Maxwell by Agnes, his wife, who was Lady Herries in her own right, daughter of William, third Lord Herries, and a granddaughter of Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus. The sons of this alliance were called Grier. Sir James Grier, of Capenoch, Dumfries-shire, and Rockhall, and Alnwick in Northumberland, married a clergyman’s daughter, Mary, who was the widow of Thomas Grier of Barjarg Tower, Dumfries-shire. By this time, 1626, there were Greers in Ireland as well as other Griers in Scotland, descended from junior branches of the family. The stock was tough. Despite religious persecution and exile, and for many of the junior branches of the family, grinding poverty, they hung on.
The Greers are amongst the oldest of the Ulster Scots families. In 1622, there were 70 British families, 60 of them Scots, in that proportion of the Barony of Fews which then belonged to John Hamilton, brother of James, first Viscount Clandeboye, many of them Greers. Hamilton bought a thousand acres in Magharyentrim from Sir James Craig in 1615 and he exchanged land in Cavan with William Lauder of Belhaven, Kilruddan, Fews. The muster rolls of 1630 show many of the Greers as having survived Irish attacks that had decimated the settlers.
Once the clan had been parted from its heartland the wandering went on. Ulster was not the end for these rebel Scots, from there they embarked again to America with the Quakers, to South Africa and Australia, fleeing famine, following gold. Where the traumas fell, memories were obliterated. Teenagers arriving illiterate in the new world put their shabby gentility behind them, rolled up their sleeves and set to work, unmindful of the antiquity of their line. They were conscious only that famine and destitution make nonsense of crests and mottoes. For generations the matter was forgotten, until now genealogy has become the hobby of their prosperous descendants.
The motto of the Greers descended in the direct male line from King Alpin is Memor esto, ‘Be mindful of your ancestors’. My groaning files bear witness to the fact that many a Greer follows the motto to the letter.
My father would have called it all ‘guff’. He wore no ring on his little finger showing the crest of an eagle displayed ppr., charged on the breast with a quadrangular lock. If he knew who the Greers were, he gave no sign of it. He chose no blue-blood for a wife and he made no inquiry about her ancestry when he chose her. Her name was in fact more ancient than his, but neither he nor she had any notion of how she came by it and neither cared.
And nor do I. It was hard to convince the genealogists, riding on the crest of their international wave, that I was not anxious to prove my descent from the kings of Scotland. Librarians assumed when I crept in to continue my father-hunt through the electoral rolls and newspapers in their custody that I was playing family history. They could not grasp what I was saying when I told them that I had no family to write the history of. ‘Where is your grandfather buried?’ they would ask, with exaggerated patience. Or, ‘What does it say on your father’s birth certificate?’
One of the reasons I did not order a heavily embossed copper plaque with the Greer arms, ‘On a field azure a lion rampant or, armed and langued gules between three antique crowns of the second, on a canton argent, an oak tree eradicated, surmounted by a sword in bend sinister, ensigned on the point with a Royal crown, all ‘parti per rect’ to hang in the den, or ‘embroidered in gold and silver bullion wire thread on a velvet mat blazer badge’ is that Daddy would have sneered at such foolishness. Another is that I have no den to hang it in or blazer to sew it on to. Yet another is that the Great Greers might descend on me and trash me for my insolence. I had not even established my right to the name, let alone the arms.
The instructions to family historians are plain: before undertaking any research you must interview all the elder members of your family and write down all they can tell you. You must acquire certificates of births, deaths and marriages, in order to verify the information you have been given. You should try to find the family bible which would have been kept by your grandparents and their parents, if not by less godly generations, and you should locate the family graves. You should consult parish records. In Australia it is essential to do all this, because you cannot search the official records until you already know where to find what you are looking for, so you can then pay someone else an exorbitant sum to look where you tell him.
The genealogists and registered search agents could not understand that I had no one to ask. The only member of his family that I had ever met was my father and for him I had not a single document. I possess nothing of his except a copy of the studio portrait made on his retirement. I did not know the names of his brother and sister, or the name of the school he went to. I had never met anyone who knew him before he was in his late twenties.
I was luckier that day than usual. My thirty-seven dollars paid for a photocopy of the certificate of marriage of my parents made on special paper with an all-over pattern saying ‘State of Victoria’ a few thousand times. On 27 March, 1937, Eric Reginald Greer, bachelor, newspaper representative, married Margaret Mary Lafrank, spinster, milliner, at St Columba’s Catholic Church in Elwood. That much I more or less knew. He was thirty-two; she was (barely) twenty. That too I more or less knew.
What I had paid my $37 for were the sections ‘Birthplace’ and ‘Parents’ Names’. My father’s birthplace was given as ‘Durban, Sth Africa’, his father as ‘Robert Greer Journalist’ and his mother as ‘Emma Rachel Wise’.
At last, I thought, irreducible fact; economical with the truth though he may have been, I would never have believed that my father would say the thing that was not. Surely he would not have lied to the woman he was marrying, who trusted him enough to give her whole life into his keeping. He was after all a Houyhnhnm. I was (I had to be) sure of that. He looked like a Houyhnhnm with his long ruminative face, and, more to the point, he behaved like one, ‘looking with a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence’ of word or deed. Like a Houyhnhnm he had ‘not the least idea of books or literature’ as far as I could tell. Gulliver found it difficult to explain the idea of improbability to his Houyhnhnm master:
‘And I remember in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood, in other parts of the world; having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant; although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now if any one said the thing that was not, these ends were defeated; because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black when it is white; and short when it is long. And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying so well understood, and so universally practised among human creatures.’
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 7