I had a huge hunger to know more. What sort of life did he have in London? Why did he steal when he knew the consequence? Was he desperate, or greedy?
I decided to spend some time on the internet. The Mormons—for whom genealogy is important—have a massive database of births, deaths and marriages. It’s all online: you type in a name and a date and, bingo, there’s your ancestor.
The name was easy. The date wasn’t quite so certain: at the trial his age was given as thirty, but I thought this might have been approximate, so I searched a few years either side.
It was a shock to find twenty-nine Solomon Wisemans. I decided to ignore the ones not born in London (although my Solomon Wiseman might not have been born there) and weeded out the repetitions. Even when I’d done that, there were still seven.
I printed out the search results and began to study them.
Several Soloman Wisemans were born—in different years—in Bermondsey. Several had parents called William and Elizabeth, one had parents called William and Catherine. One had parents called Richard and Jane. Two were born—in different years—in Bermondsey and had a spouse called Jane. One was born in Essex and had a spouse called Jane. One was christened at St Mary Mounthaw, wherever that was, another at St Mary Somerset. One record asserted that Solomon Wiseman had married Jane Middleton at Spitalfields Christ Church in 1799. Another gave him an address—Butler’s Buildings, Bermondsey—and a son baptised at St Mary Magdalene, Southwark.
I already had two Solomon Wisemans: my mother’s and my own. From this search I now had nine. But somewhere behind my sources—the family story, the Old Bailey records, and these terse and perhaps unreliable entries on the Family Search site—was the real man. He had lived and died not as a story or a set of entries on a website, but an individual as precisely himself as anyone I knew. I hungered to find out who he was.
The search for him pointed towards London and, by a stroke of extraordinary luck, at just that time I had the opportunity to go there.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the separate colonies that made up Australia federated into one nation. It was a big moment in our brief history.
The Australian government marked the occasion of the Centenary of Federation in many ways. There were re-enactments: of the arrival of the First Fleet, of the opening of the first Parliament. All over Australia, country towns strung up bunting and had parades in period costume. And in London there was to be a showcase of Australian culture in June 2000. There’d be wine and dance, paintings and theatre. And writers, a dozen of us, giving readings and talks on the South Bank.
One of the writers was a young Aboriginal woman I’d met once before, Melissa Lucashenko.
We first met at a literary festival—the writer David Foster introduced us. Since then I’d read some of her fiction and essays. She is a terrific writer and a thought-provoking essayist.
Like many white Australians, I’d never really known any Aboriginal people. I’d met the poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and the actor and dancer David Gulpilil. In my long-ago days as a film editor I’d worked on a couple of documentary films on Aboriginal subjects and I’d met the people involved. But I’d never had a sit-down conversation with an Aboriginal person. (Not knowingly, anyway: I’d probably met plenty of Aboriginal people without being aware of their ancestry.)
So when we arrived in London for the Centenary of Federation, and I spotted Melissa having lunch in a café near the hotel, I asked if I could join her.
Rather to my surprise, she remembered our meeting, and made space beside her at the table. We hadn’t been talking long before she asked, ‘Where’s your family from?’
I stared at her, could feel my mouth open trying to find an answer. She watched me and waited.
At the next table a man crouched over his plate of pie and chips as if afraid someone might snatch it away. Along from him two women pursed their lips towards their thick cups of tea at the same moment, like synchronised swimmers.
In my mind Melissa’s question was unfolding into other questions. What family do you mean, me and my brothers and parents? Or family in the sense of grandfathers and great-grandfathers? What do you mean from? From Sydney, where I live now? From Gunnedah, in northern New South Wales, where my mother was born? From London, where my great-great-great grandfather was born?
I had no answer, and turned the question back to her. It turned out not to be simple for her, either. Her father’s family was Ukrainian, her mother’s family were Bundjalung people. She lived in Brisbane, but her country—Bundjalung country—was the far north coast of New South Wales. That was where she was from.
I was surprised by a sudden savage envy. In spite of all the damage that had been done to indigenous families and their connection to their country, she could go to a particular spot on the planet and say, this is where I’m from. So could all those English people around us: that man feeding chips into his mouth as if it were a shredder, the synchronised sippers, now both sliding the cups onto their saucers. If you asked them, they’d probably be able to tell you about some village in Cheshire or Yorkshire or Wales where their ancestors were buried. That would be where they were from.
So I sat gawping at Melissa, who was waiting for me to work out a response to the simplest question in the world. By way of answer, I told her a bit of the Wiseman story. ‘My great-great-great grandfather was born in London…’ I began. I got to the bit about ‘he was freed and took up land on the Hawkesbury’.
‘What do you mean “took up”?’ she said. ‘He took.’
He took up land on the Hawkesbury. They were the words from the family story: a formula, unquestionable. I’d been repeating them for years.
Took up: you took up something that was lying around. You took up something that was on offer. You took up hobbies and sports.
Took had many more possibilities. You took something because it was there, like a coin on the ground. You took offence or flight or a bath. Or you took something away from someone else.
The words took up were standing in for some set of actions. The words weren’t the thing itself, they only pointed towards it. The thing itself lay behind the words, an object behind a screen. Of course I’d always known that. But the lack of fit between a word and the thing it stood for had never before come to me like a punch in the stomach.
Took up—suddenly it felt like a trick.
The trick itself was bad enough. The fact that I’d let myself be taken in by it was worse. Melissa and I had exchanged such small and harmless words. Family. From. Took up. But they were turning out to be grenades.
Twenty-five years earlier, I’d arrived in London on a working holiday visa. For my generation, it was what you did: you went to Britain, because Britain was what you knew. I’d grown up learning by heart the Kings and Queens of England, the Principal Industries of Nottingham and Sheffield. I knew all about daffodils and cuckoos, about Biggles and the Battle of Britain. The cultural landscape of my generation was almost wholly British. It made for an awkward lack of fit between the cultural landscape—so vividly real in your head—and the one outside the window.
So it was a relief, twenty-five years ago, to be in the place where they matched. I saw daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze, I heard my first cuckoo of spring, I felt the dread as a sunless English winter closed in.
It felt that I’d come home.
I bought English clothes and an ancient English bicycle, heard myself acquiring something of an English accent. Would rather