Ordinary People’s History

Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation
by Nick Brodie
Hardie Grant, 2015, 370 pages, $29.95

Nick Brodie, in Kin, has attempted, generally successfully, to tell the history of Australia through its mostly unsung “average Australians” with an extended history of his own family dating back more than two hundred years.

The nearest he comes to fame among his forebears is a candidate for the “real” Man from Snowy River. But over a dozen generations their life, times and sometimes faces are there as convicts, farmers, station workers, an Aborigine, a coach driver, butchers and bakers, nurses, teachers, wartime servicemen. At the top of this extended socio-economic scale are a country GP and a dentist—who learned his craft as an apprentice around 1900—and a Brisbane pioneer family who reached temporary prosperity and the local social pages.

His Brodie forebear was a young Scottish seaman who sailed into Sydney in the 1860s, married the daughter of a Danish-born Balmain boat-builder, became a mildly prosperous Pacific trader, but was lost at sea in 1894. Nick Brodie knew little about this slightly exotic great-great-grandfather until he went through the newspaper files. But although acknowledging the politically correct view, he finds through Neil Brodie’s career that British influence in the Pacific islands was often beneficial for the locals in bringing more law and order and improved living standards to a troubled region.

Nick Brodie found pure gold in the ancestor stakes with his earliest Australian forebear, Thomas Kennedy, an Irish “Defender” and political prisoner, transported from Dublin to Sydney in 1796 for forceful political activism during the French Revolutionary crisis. Kennedy’s grandson was the Monaro stockman Jimmy Kiss, who Brodie sees as one of several on whom Banjo Paterson’s Man from Snowy River might have been based.

Fittingly for a historian of Middle Australia, Brodie was born in Wagga on the Murrumbidgee and grew up in nearby Junee. Most of his kin lived in southern New South Wales or adjoining parts of Victoria, though there were Sydney and Brisbane branches. He identifies as Catholic, through a line coming down from Thomas Kennedy, but his family tree is strewn with Catholic-Protestant inter­marriage and ethnic mingling, especially Irish-English.

One awkward kinsman is the Rev. William Dill Macky, the strident Ulster-born anti-Catholic stirrer, British super-patriot and evangelical hard-liner who was minister of Scots Church in Sydney in the decades around Federation. Brodie regrets this great-great-grandfather’s fanatical views but finds good points. The cleric argued forcefully that Aborigines were the intellectual equal of whites, at a time when Charles Darwin’s legacy put this in doubt. He was also a great supporter of troubled children. And, as is so often the way, Dill Macky’s apparently feckless father was of republican disposition, emigrated from rural Donegal to the Victorian goldfields, and was suspected of deserting his family.

The probability of an Aboriginal ancestor comes through James Kiss, an English ex-convict of more criminal background who became a small farmer on the Hawkesbury frontier around 1800 and is shown in the records as having children but with no mother named. This sort of situation arose often enough in those days; white and Aboriginal records were kept separately and inadequately; people of complicated background, like Aboriginal partners of whites, could fall through the administrative cracks. A son of this union married old Thomas Kennedy’s daughter, and the Monaro horseman Jimmy Kiss was their grandson.

Most of Brodie’s immigrant forebears, though, were, like so many of us, from humble rural backgrounds throughout the British Isles, but mainly England, who came on assisted passages in the 1830s and 1840s, well-behaved and hardly noticed, an inconspicuous and often personal bridge between the older convict-era stock and the gold diggers.

“History from the bottom” and “people’s history” have been long-standing aspirations for historians, but rarely get beyond hopeful ideas or abandoned theses. It is just too hard. There are too few records apart from the limited official ones; and when other records do exist they are so scattered as to bring to mind needles in haystacks. The contrast is stark with the rich official and newspaper records relating to big people, big issues and decisions, colourful statements, big troubles and tragedies. These inevitably bias the way the past is presented.

Nick Brodie’s fine achievement in getting beyond the archivists has been assisted by the internet, especially the National Library’s “Trove” tool for searching digitised newspapers. It has helped Brodie find his forebears in obituaries and accident reports, at war and peace, in school and livestock prize-giving, at country balls, playing sport, standing for councils, fined for misdemeanours. He has blended this material with copious official records, family records such as letters and reminiscences, and interviews with older kin. His training as an archaeologist no doubt helped.

Some tragedies and scandals emerge, but not many. Apart from the—all too common to most families—occasional examples of excessive drinking and gambling, his forebears have been too busy bringing up families, growing crops, driving vehicles, slicing meat and baking bread, fighting in the Boer War and two world wars. As well as mothering, his womenfolk have often been nurses or hospital workers. There was one nun. His parents were teachers.

In some, especially callow, eyes, Australian history is dull because there have been no revolutions, civil wars or invasions. To others it is confrontingly ugly, with whipped convicts, dispossessed if not murdered or stolen Aborigines, and a raped environment. Kin is much nearer the truth. It is about generally well-behaved ordinary people overcoming moderate setbacks, mostly liking each other, getting ahead a bit, helping make the world a little better.

A tough edit and an index would have helped. Brodie too often interrupts the strong family material with garrulous, preachy politically-correct dissertations on the general history which are not always as accurate as they should be.