Never question ancestry

Robert
Treborlang
Australia

Never question ancestry
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In some Eastern European countries, every couple of years the Government issued a new textbook in which all past events have been thoroughly altered to suit the ruling dictator's immediate political needs. This not only helped the country's leader hand onto his job, but saved the trouble of having to interpret the present in terms of the past, as the past has obliginly adapted itself to suit the present.

  By contrast, the history of Australia is a very simple affair. The truth can be neither altered nor denied. It is so widely known that a newcomer to this country need not even read the actual books. Just by talking to people, you can pick up all the historical background you need to know.

  It is common knowledge, for instance, that the condemned convicts on that First Fleet were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of officers sent over to guard them. This ratio discrepancy can easily be verified even now, two hundred years later, simply by talking to the huge number of families who can trace their lineage back to the officers of the First Fleet.

  It is also commonly known that the country's early settlers, even if sent over as convicts, were generally guilty of crimes no worse than stealing a loaf of bread or a leg of ham, crimes which, owing to the harshness of the British judicial system of the times, were enough to have them most unfairly exiled to the Southern Hemisphere for life.

  By strange quirk of nature, those few convicts who were indeed guilty of heinous crimes and ended up on the shores of Botany Bay, proved to be either sterile or homosexual. This fortunate correspondence between criminality and incapacity to produce offspring was one of the future nation's lucky breaks. It saved countless generations from having to come to terms with any unpleasantness in their background.

  Though there was a fair amount of interchange between early settlers and the local Aborigines, the relationship seems to have remained on a platonic level, with the two sides being more involved in deciding whether the suburbs would bear English or native names, rather than in setting the common foundations of a new race of people. This evidently why during the last two hundred years of Australian history, no prominent personality, political or artistic, has ever come forward and admitted to any Aboriginal ancestry - unless they were Aboriginal, of course.

  Later another stroke of luck befell the future nation. Waves of young aristocrats descended upon the colony. Eccentric third and fourth sons of British earls and baronets, they came over for the sole purpose, it would seem, of sireing a host of middle-class families with double-barrelled names.

  The descendants of these enthusiastic youngbloods are usually reticent beings who do not like to bring to light their elevated lineage. Instead they spend their time hiding from public glare (i.e. embarrassing questions) in clubs and associations designed to remind everyone of English upper class conditions of 150 years ago.

Copyright © 1991-2002 - Robert Treborlang

Robert
Treborlang
Australia

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