Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Why do I blog?

I have been reading an analysis of nineteenth emigrant's century shipboard diaries titled Sailing to Australia, by Andrew Hassam. (MUP 1995). It's quite a useful book inasmuch as it encourages consideration of why diarists do what they do. In this I include myself and the effort I put into this daily weblog.

I have a nineteenth century ancestor named Joseph Wright who wrote a shipboard diary aboard the Lady Elizabeth when he sailed from London to Fremantle in 1873. His was not one of the ones considered by Hassam.

I've transcribed Wright's shipboard diary and a series of 42 letters written
from Western Ausralia to relatives at Dudley, which was his birthplace. Unfortunately I did them in the very early days of personal computing - the early 1980s - on a now obsolete Commodore 64. Sadly I am unaware of any way I can move the files to my Macs or any other modern computing system.

The original letters and a hard copy of the transcriptions which was printed on a dot matrix printer are now in the Western Australian State Archives. The letters are a unique and detailed record of an "ordinary" man's observations about life in the still young colony of Western Australia. Like so much of our ordinary history they tend to be ignored by "real" historians, who even these days still wallow in their platitudes for the most conspicuous individuals who have sought fame and fortune in this state. They have little interest in the "nobodies."

Joseph Wright married Henrietta Quindlan who was an Australian born daughter of an Irishman William Quindlan, who had been sentenced to seven years in Mountjoy, then transported to Fremantle in 1853 on the Phoebe Dunbar. His crime was stealing a sheep in 1849, at the peak of the Irish potato famine.

William and his wife Margarette both died prematurely and the orphaned children were split up by the Catholic Church and dispatched to orphanages and domestic and rural service situations throughout Western Australia. One of them was my great-grandmother Henrietta, who married Joseph Wright. They had six children, one of whom was my grandmother Constance Norris. She turned out to be the second writer in the family and her scribblings, mostly done in hindsight as reminiscences, have made a valued contribution to the historical knowledge about the port of Geraldton, north of Perth.

I can remember as a child staying with her in her small house at Bassendean and seeing her almost illegible spider scrawls in exercise books. I suspect she would have been fascinated to see how her grandson's opinionated Fremantlebiz weblog or "blog" has evolved - now on the way towards two million words and not an ink blot in sight. I feel sure she would approve, and were she alive today she would have her own blog. She would be 119 years old. She died on 19 December 1955.

I wasn't allowed to attend her funeral/cremation, being considered too young for such things by my parents. My mother told me in later years that the coffin had stuck on the rollers as it was about to finally pass through the curtains of the crematorium. A man's hand had emerged through the curtains and dragged it through. It upset my mother because she immediately thought of the Devil at work.

But back to the writings. Constance's differed from mine and Joseph Wright's inasmuch as our efforts have been much more immediate accounts of what we have observed. However, the main thing is that both of my ancestors took the trouble to record something of their experiences which can be enjoyed by future generations, and that in essence is what I am doing.

All three of us have been relatively obscure. None of us have sought literary fame. We have simply written for the pleasure of telling the story, as I suspect most other diarists might understand.

Compulsive diarists differ from most people in this respect, because most people don't write very much about anything. People are born, they exist for a while, then they die. Nothing much else beyond the statistical entries in official records is recorded of them.

Even with the proliferation of weblogs - Livejournal, the host of Fremantlebiz claims 11,677,221 startups since 1999 - most of the ones I have looked at seem to be fairly superficial as social records. There is little depth or continuity. There have been a few interesting ones by mass murderers, but they tend to be short lived themselves.

I just did a Google search on Fremantlebiz and came up with 761 hits. I also did one on Ian Thorpe, the Australian Olympic swimmer, whom aged 24 has just decided to pull the plug and go find a real life. He returned 4,240,000 Google hits. Poor man.

© MMVI Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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