A few years back I worked with a second cousin to trace all the descendants of the common ancestor migrant to Australia whose name we both carry.
He arrived in his late teens from Ireland in the 1850s, made a success of himself in his chosen business and became father to twelve children - six boys and six girls. That much was always readily available from his death certificate. What was far less easily established was what happened to those twelve.
Along the way we established just two wholly happy stories. Taken along with the two we were not able to trace that leaves eight with stories that from this distance look almost unliveable.
One girl disappeared after being witness to an older sister's wedding. The older sister's details on the wedding certificate were an intriguing distortion of the truth as though she were making a half hearted attempt to disguise her identity while quietly hoping to be found at a later date. The married sister died less than a year after the wedding in childbirth. Another married but had no children. She died penniless in an asylum not far from where two of her brothers were living prosperously. The eldest married, gave birth to four children but buried three of them as infants. The youngest had two children one of which died as an infant. The second oldest girl married well, had six children of which five survived infancy; but one died as a teenager shortly before the family migrated to South Africa where she died and was left in an untraceable grave.
Of the boys the youngest was always known to have died from complications arising from his alcoholism. Of the other five my great grandfather appeared to have a happy marriage and successful life. He and his wife of 51 years marriage brought 8 children into the world and raised them seemingly well. His immediate younger brother similarly seems to have prospered and been happy. The next youngest brother has not been traced and for a long time we could not find either the eldest or the second youngest.
I eventually did find a record of a marriage involving the second youngest, taking place when he was in his mid-thirties in a remote mining town in another state to a 'woman' only in her teens but already the mother of an illegitimate child. Then a distant cousin turned up to finally point us in the direction of this uncle's death record. He died impoverished and so raddled by his life that those guesstimating his age had written him off as almost twenty years older than his true age. That, together with the wrong name for his mother was why I'd never made the connection between the missing uncle and the death record. The illegitimate child had been his, by the way, and the mother had left it behind with her relatives to pursue the feckless father and get him to marry her.
The eldest of the six boys was the last to be found. Curiously he had been staring us in the face all the time. No real discrepancy between the details we were looking for and those on the official record. To this day I'm not sure why we missed him over and over again when scouring the indexes.
Nevertheless the full details on his death certificate when it came through were appalling and only the beginning of a difficult story. John committed suicide in the late 1930s when he was in his 70th year. Quite why he'd spurned the advantages of the excellent education his father had provided him with (the boys were sent back to Britain to a boarding school) and not inherited the property when the old man died (instead it was my great grandfather) were the two main mysteries.
The precise and full details will probably never be known. No family journals or letters have surfaced. No one seems to have spoken quietly and passed down any oral history. Instead they all seem to have suffered in silence. John's later life, after he left the family property and began drifting can be charted episodically through what are probably only partial court records.
In the early 1880s when John was reaching adulthood in Victorian England was recodifying its sodomy laws and instituting a clampdown on the prevailing metropolitan homosexual 'sub-culture'. Oscar Wilde was only the highest profile and most spectacular victim of this muscular reassertion of the 'traditional' view of homosexual practices (unless you count the unfortunate member of the royal family who is sometimes credited with the 'Jack the Ripper' crimes).
Where Victorian England led Victorian, um er Victoria (and New South Wales and Queensland et al) followed. Whereas at least in certain courts and at certain times in the colonial past a certain pragmatism had prevailed in respect of men brought to book for private conduct the climate changed now as Australia stood on the cusp of nationhood. Thus would it be for the rest of John's life. Finally in the course of his last arrest John reacted so violently and was so badly injured that he was taken to hospital for treatment and there he was able to get the sharp implement with which he stabbed himself in the neck.
I didn't know any of this when I attended my paternal grandfather's funeral and wake in the mid 1980s. This after all was the man with the Bowdler Shakespeare in the bookcase. But I did know that I thoroughly enjoyed the company of one of his nephews. By this time my father had died and I hadn't previously met many relatives on my father's side as a result. But Jeff and I clicked and bumped into one another several times afterwards.
Then he vanished. Mum told me he'd died of a heart attack. That made sense, sadly. Jeff was a classic bon viveur; bearded, overweight, preferring his Fiat over any other mode of transport, better versed in menus and wine lists than exercise and diet regimen.
The truth, though, was that Jeff committed suicide.
Up to a certain point 'Australian' law relating to homosexuality is state-based matter and so the history of decriminalisation is a patchwork of steps forward and stalls and occasional leaps. The history, though, is throughout one of 'decriminalisation' rather than legalisation and the distinction is an important one even if making no great legal difference. The former term merely means that the offence is no longer deemed to be 'criminal' and punishable on that basis. It doesn't remove absolutely the connotation of an offence of some sort being committed.
Homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in the southern island state of Tasmania until as recently as 1997 (though to be fair Tasmania has since gone at least as far as any other Australian state in terms of equalising rights and enshrining that equality in law).
South Australia (1975) and Victoria (1980) were the first two states to decriminalise when Australians were still convulsed by the Duncan drowning (something I remember) and the object lesson of change in the UK (belatedly responding to the Wolfenden Report) was still relatively fresh. By curious coincidence 1975 was the year my late father's only brother became a father for the first and only time.
The boy born that year is my only first cousin on my father's side. Ben's now thirty one and a lawyer with political aspirations. The younger brother of the cousin with whom I worked to establish the family history recounted at the top is a good deal older than Ben (and indeed a bit older than me). Like Ben he's single. Both of them look likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Now neither of them necessarily harbours aspirations to settle down, though in Ben's case the lack of a spouse could prove to be something of hindrance in the pursuit of his career in politics.
I happen to feel that in a country which has finally decriminalised homosexuality, where no civil barriers exist to forming homosexual relationships it is illogical as well as inhumane to withhold access to the civil contract of marriage. Churches and other faiths can do what they please right up to the point where 'doing what they please' comes into conflict with civil law - at which point civil law must prevail. There seems to me to be a precedent for this in what happens at the other end of the 'happy ever after' where Roman Catholics who want one can obtain a 'civil' divorce even if their church doesn't recognise divorce.
I'd really prefer that the last suicide has already happened and been recorded on the family tree. It would be rather pleasant to think that the struggle for the safety of those who are homosexual is over, with the last battle fought, but it looks like the worst of it might be yet to come.
Three weeks after the government of the Australian Capital Territory (which is like a State only smaller) attempted to introduce its own very particular (and heavily trailed) version of a non-marriage civil partnership-ish type thingy the Federal Attorney General has issued its response which you can read
here. It was of course utterly predictable that Ruddock, who is after all pipsqueak Howard's tame rottweiler on this question, would react in this way.
Elsewhere President Bush in his call earlier this week for an amendment to the American constitution that would prohibit same-sex marriages ended his address (which you can read in full
here) with the following words: "We should also conduct this difficult debate in a matter worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger. In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and good will and decency."
What are the odds?
What is certain is that the constitutional amendment Bush is calling for will not make it through Congress let alone achieve the required number of State approvals. On the other hand it is equally certain that the Australian Federal Government will be successful in slapping down the ACT proposal.
That's the limit of state authority in the matter of gay rights.
I know gay marriage won't guarantee the end of gay suicides.
I also know banning gay marriage will send a loud and clear signal that homosexuals are 'different', distinctively so, and judged by the federal government thereby incapable of being party to a civil marriage. Sane, balanced and moderate Australians won't regard homosexuals any differently as a result of such a ban; but it isn't the sane, balanced and moderate who pose a potential threat and for those who do pose a threat the ban will an affirmation of their prejudice and a green light to ramp up the aggression. My suspicion is that we'll be grappling with another Professor Duncan (or rather fishing his body from one or other river) before this is over and I'd be grateful if that person isn't a relative of mine.
PS I'm aware I've veered between 'homosexual' and 'gay' throughout. This isn't because this week the word 'gay' means 'lame' or 'rubbish' in playground-speak and I've remembered that some of the time. It's because I'm not up on current usage and to me the two are interchangeable and I'm too lazy to go back through the whole piece at half past midnight and make the usage consistent one way or the other. So there. And I can't be bothered fixing the typos at this time of the night.
