Rather His Own Man Read online

  My very first political instinct was republican, when as a sun-struck schoolboy I was crammed into Sydney Showground on a sweltering summer’s day in 1954 to wave limply at Elizabeth II as she sped past in her royal jeep. That she might be a distant relative (of which more later) never occurred to me. I married into Australian royalty: Kathy Lette can boast an impeccable convict lineage, with a drunken burglar from the First Fleet who married another convict – a thieving ladies’ maid, who came out on the Second. She has enough common blood – she really is the crème de la crims – to shock Dr Shockley.

  I have spent most of my life in a state of deliberate ignorance about my ancestry, with my knowledge of my own forebears going back no further than to my dear, undistinguished grandparents (although one of them had been secretary of the Dapto Dogs – a mark of considerable distinction in the Wollongong area). The Robertsons, I knew, were poor Presbyterians who had come to Australia from Scotland in the 1830s as free settlers, but nothing about them had piqued my curiosity until Who Do You Think You Are? made me an offer I decided not to refuse. This program was devised for British television, where it proved very popular. The trick was to take well-known people back to their roots, confronting them with the carefully researched behaviour of their distant relatives, who would turn out to be heroes or criminals or slaves, or whatever could elicit a great-great-grandchild’s joy or tears, caught on camera. The show proved an absorbing way to understand history, in particular the social history of ordinary folk, and for that reason I agreed to be one of its first Australian guinea pigs. Its systemic weakness was that it concentrated on people with a degree of celebrity – actors, singers, sports heroes, newsreaders and the like, and rarely on surgeons or politicians or lawyers. The latter were in fact invited to participate, but usually declined for fear that researchers would turn up something unpleasant or embarrassing about their ancestors.

  I, however, was quite happy to take part when I was asked. My mother expressed concern – ‘What if they find a dark secret in our family?’ – but I was aware of none and, besides, rather wanted to bone up on any skeleton in our closet. My former girlfriend Nigella Lawson had done the show and been delighted to find herself descended from a petty criminal. And the production company was offering all-expenses-paid travel not only to the Isle of Skye but (intriguingly) to Berlin and Potsdam. Which thread of DNA, I wondered, would trace back to Deutschland?1

  My great-great-grandparents, Alexander and Christina Robertson, were part of an influx of poor Scottish crofters – there were four thousand of them – and they came out on the William Nicol from Skye in 1837. They hailed from Scalpay, an island of the Inner Hebrides that was hit, like the rest of the Highlands, by the great potato famine of 1835.2 They would have been part of an under-class of peasants who paid rent to a rapacious absentee landlord in return for a modicum of land, and shared their hovel with a few sheep and goats (I was shown the type of small dwelling in which they would have lived, with their creatures at one end and the family at the other). Their annual potato harvest was stored to last them throughout the year. Except there were no potatoes in 1835, and by 1837 men and women and children were dying of starvation throughout the Highlands. The government of Britain – wealthy beyond measure as the industrial revolution churned out its profits – was well aware but entirely unconcerned until the Reverend Norman McLeod, moderator of the Presbyterian Church, came down from Glasgow to challenge London society with a fire and brimstone sermon at London’s Mansion House. Something had to be done, he threatened, or those in government would go to hell for their inaction.

  This remarkable event became historic, thanks to the presence of a young Presbyterian clergyman from Sydney, the Reverend John Dunmore Lang – one of the true heroes in Australian history. He had come to England to give evidence to a parliamentary committee on the appalling treatment of Aboriginals in the colony, testimony that is devastating to read even today, as he describes atrocities in Tasmania and the massacres in New South Wales which, as the committee famously reported, would leave ‘an indelible stain’ on Britain. As Dunmore Lang listened to McLeod’s speech, a profound idea came to him. He had been much exercised by the corruption that infested the exercise of power in Sydney: the officers of the New South Wales Corp – the ‘Rum Corps’ – who had ousted Governor Bligh were back in control, with the help of a gang of former convicts, mostly Irish. These were godless men, and Dunmore Lang had already called for a Protestant Immigration Scheme to counter their corruption. Now he realised that this pool of poor, devout Presbyterians might, with government assistance, be brought to Sydney to combat the criminal Irish. The two goodly and godly men were observed in earnest conversation, and subsequently McLeod used his influence to make Lang’s hopes a reality. The government advertised for contractors to take impoverished Scots, as assisted voluntary migrants, to Sydney Town.

  The William Nicol anchored in the harbour at Skye and on the appointed day Alexander and Christina Robertson embarked, with three hundred other destitute Highlanders. All the islanders turned out for the occasion and bagpipers played the ship off the jetty. The local newspaper covering the exodus lied brazenly – perhaps for the peace of mind of the emigrants’ relatives – about a ‘ship fitted up in the most commodious manner, with every comfort minutely attended to’. In fact, the greedy contractors (paid per passenger head) had massively overloaded the vessel and did not stow sufficient food, water or medicine: on the two-month journey to Cape Town ten children died from diarrhoea and other curable ailments. There were complaints, but the contractors brushed them aside – critics ‘did not understand the habits of the peasants’.

  It was with great relief that the Presbyterian pilgrims came ashore in Sydney, refugees from a country that preferred to get rid of them rather than to feed and clothe them. However, as Robert Burns puts it, the best laid plans of mice and men – not to mention ministers of the church – ‘gang aft agley’. Dunmore Lang and McLeod had planned for these shiploads of Bible-bashing Presbyterians to impose a measure of decency and civility on vice-ridden Sydney Town, but they reckoned without simple human psychology – the need felt by lonely émigrés, halfway across the world, to recapture at least the atmosphere of their homeland. Alexander and Christina and their shipmates were born and bred beneath mountains capped with snow, and they soon set off to find the equivalent – some 700 kilometres away, by the Snowy River, in the shadows of Mount Kosciuszko. There they found fertile land, so much more impressive than their rack-rented acre in Skye, and thanks to the 1836 New South Wales Squatting Act they could claim a right to tenure on parcels of unfarmed countryside.

  So Alexander and Christina built a makeshift house, and raised two sons, ‘Sandy’ and ‘Red Bill’ – called after their hair colour. (‘Red Bill’ or ‘Red Robbo’, my great-grandfather, handed down his follicles: when I grew my hair fashionably long in the sixties, my sideburns came out red. Indeed I was sometimes called ‘Red Robbo’ – but that was because of presumed left-wing tendencies.)

  Red Robbo became a wild colonial boy, a daredevil horseman of the mountain ranges, a man from Snowy River. Indeed, the first poem I ever learnt by heart, and can still flawlessly recite, was taught to me by Red Robbo’s son, my grandfather. It was Banjo Paterson’s verse:

  There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

  That the colt from old Regret had got away,

  And had joined the wild bush horses – he was worth a thousand pound,

  So all the cracks had gathered to the fray …

  And so on and on, naming the princes of the bush (Harrison and Clancy of the Overflow) as if they were heroes on their way to Valhalla. In a sense they were to a small boy in the city, taught to dream of the bush as a kind of folk memory. But horsemanship had to be taught rather than inherited. I was first seated upon a horse when I was twelve, whereupon it bolted, and my fear was such that I never wanted to sit in a saddle again. When I am seen to crack a whip and ride daringly down the moun
tain on replays of Who Do You Think You Are?, it is in truth a stunt double. Every respectable lawyer should have one – a doppelgänger who can live out the fantasies he dares only to dream.

  Living was not easy in the Monaro. The Robertsons had some years of plenty counterpointed by years of drought. The house burnt down, and ‘Red’ went back into the flames to salvage a mirror. When asked why, he’s said to have replied, ‘So I can watch meself starve.’ The house was rebuilt – I found bedsprings and perfume bottles among the ruins – but another drought convinced the Robertsons that their children would have more luck in ‘the big smoke’. So, half a century too late for the purposes of Dunmore Lang, they came back to Sydney, to the industrial suburbs of Drummoyne and Leichhardt.

  The Robertsons came to Australia out of necessity; my father’s line began when they married into the Weston family, who emigrated as a result of love. Squire Weston was a landowner in West Sussex, with a large mansion outside the village of Horsley. The house was once owned by the son of Sir Walter Raleigh and remains resplendent, having reopened with much fanfare in 2017 as the site of Grange Park Opera, Britain’s latest music festival. My ancestor, William Francis Weston, was the squire’s second son, and the family’s stately pile was bound under the laws of primogeniture to go to his elder brother. William was a gambler and a gamboller, squandering his share of the family fortune on the Paris gaming tables and returning home to make hay with Elizabeth, one of the serving maids, who in due course became pregnant. At this time in England the unexpected progeny of the upper-middle classes usually suffered a cruel fate: illegitimate babies were quietly given to baby farmers, members of a clandestine profession, who, for a fee, would place these infants for adoption. In reality, they often killed them, or at best left them at the door of the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury. But West Horsley was not Downton Abbey, thank goodness, and there a most unusual thing happened: the maid was delivered of a baby, named John, who was two years old in 1817 when his mother became Mrs Weston – William married her.

  It has to be assumed that he acted out of love, but their union only inflamed the prurient prejudices of West Sussex society. Once a bastard, always a bastard in the eyes of these intolerant parishioners. William determined to take his young bride and their baby as far away from social shame as possible. They boarded ship to Sydney.

  They were made welcome by Governor Macquarie, delighted to have a member of the English squirocracy as a free settler in what was still a colony of convicts and jailors. He asked no questions about the pedigree of Elizabeth or the birthdate of John, and generously provided them with 500 acres of land, running from Mount Kembla to Marshall Mount, in what is now the Illawarra. Like the Robertsons twenty years later, there was a certain pining for home, or at least for the mansion: William planned to build ‘West Horsley Place’ at the township of Dapto, along the Bong Bong Road (how I love these names!) but died in 1826 aged only thirty-three. Elizabeth married a convict and built the house, modelled on the stately pile in which she had borne a child with ‘him upstairs’. Horsley Homestead is still there today, one of Australia’s earliest historic houses, its ‘Georgian-style farm complex and garden’ visible from Bong Bong Road on the ‘Dapto and District Heritage Trail’.

  Baby John grew up to marry the daughter of the crooked commander of the Rum Corps, George Johnston, and inherited some of his corruptly acquired land, stretching as far as Yarralumla in today’s Canberra. (When occasionally invited to Government House, I look enviously on the gardens that might have been my patrimony.) They had a lot of children – John spread his seed whenever he could and there are horrifying tales that he forced himself upon several Indigenous women. But one of his daughters married Red Robbo, and my grandfather, Harold Lancelot Robertson, was, at the turn of the century, the result.

  On my mother’s side of my family, there hangs a great question. Her father’s ancestry is clear: Harry Beattie (the sometime secretary of the Dapto Dogs) was one of fourteen children of a Tumut farming family first brought to Australia by the gold rush, a common demographic. But Mum’s grandmother was Jane Dettman, the daughter of a mysterious Prussian woman, Agnes, who had come to Sydney, first class, with her new husband, Louis Dettman, in 1848. That was the year of European republican revolutions, including in Berlin against the King of Prussia and the royal family. Could they be in any way connected?

  The most delightful surprise when making Who Do You Think You Are? was to be presented by the archivist of the New South Wales Parliament with a tiny red shoe, and shown a picture of a moppet, aged about six, wearing it while standing on the steps of the Legislative Assembly. This turned out to be Jane, who was born in the Assembly Buildings in Macquarie Street, Sydney, in 1866. In this photo Jane is clutching her somewhat severe-looking mother. Agnes Dettman was, along with her husband, Louis, the chief steward at the Assembly, in charge of the food, drink and creature comforts of the state’s MPs, including the Reverend John Dunmore Lang MP and the ‘father of Federation’, Premier Sir Henry Parkes. There are pictures of Agnes and Louis standing proudly beside the building that served as Australia’s first elected parliament. My forebears played their small part in Australian democracy by looking after its early democrats.

  So far, so good. The arrival of Agnes and Louis in Australia in 1848 seemed at first blush to be another result of love. Agnes was the second daughter of Joseph Kroll, an impresario who ran a big establishment in Berlin – an opera house, no less, with elegant restaurants surrounded by pleasure gardens. Louis was Kroll’s chief pastry chef, and it was put about that he and Agnes had eloped, marrying in London and setting sail immediately for Sydney. There they opened the colony’s first tea and sweet shop, selling delicious pastries that soon became the talk of the town. This culinary fame enabled them to branch out into a catering business that provided dinners and luncheons and sundry confections for Sydney society do’s, frequently mentioned in the social pages of the newspapers. There they were, pastry-cooking for the Sydney Yacht Club’s annual dinner, the inter-colonial cricket match, the Government House ball – where ‘a most elegant repast was prepared by Mr Dettman … the tables laid out with the finest taste, the ornamentation was chaste and beautiful, and when the room was crowded with the gay assembly, the “tout ensemble” was striking and magnificent.’ Although the tout ensemble was inspired by Berlin rather than Paris, the Dettmans provided a touch of European taste – in both senses of the word – to the boring ‘meat and two veg’ English cuisine of the colony.

  In 1865 this celebrated couple was offered the jobs of chief steward and deputy steward of the New South Wales Parliament. Our elected representatives, even in those days, wanted to put their snouts in the best available trough. After Louis’ death, Agnes stepped up to the plate to refresh the MPs, earning such approbation that when she retired in 1879 Sir Henry Parkes provided a glowing reference – she could do any similar job, he said, as well as any man.

  I am addicted to cakes and opera and must admit to being a bit chuffed when I heard of my relationship to the Kroll establishment. Pictures and early photographs show it as a magnificent palace, seating up to five thousand in three concert halls, with fine restaurants and walks through flower-strewn gardens. The composer Johann Strauss – Joseph’s wife, Caroline Strauss, may have been a relative – came from Vienna to provide music, and the ‘Blue Danube’ – the world’s most famous waltz – had its premiere there. After Joseph’s death in 1848 the Kroll Opera continued under one of his daughters, and in the late 1920s its music was famously supervised by Otto Klemperer, the resident conductor. In those Weimar years its operatic repertoire became world famous, with avant-garde directors, sets commissioned from modern painters, and works by contemporary composers. Klemperer’s Fidelio was its last gasp of defiance against the Nazis. They took it over after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and used it as their makeshift parliament: Goering presided and Hitler made from its podium in January 1939 his wicked speech which first threatened ‘the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe’, and on 1 September his declaration of war. The last session of the Reichstag, held in my family’s opera house in April 1943, gave Hitler absolute power over the judges and the law. It deserved its obliteration by Allied bombing a few months later. But its posters and billboards, from the 1840s onwards, are preserved in German museums as a testament to the vision of Joe Kroll. I was rather pleased to learn that he was my great-great-grandfather.

  Or was he? There are cracks in this story, which point to a much less likeable forebear. For a start, Joe’s eldest daughter was born, so church records (which do not lie) tell us, on 15 November 1823. Agnes, so family records (normally reliable) say, was born on 30 January 1824 – ten weeks later. Some mistake, surely? If Agnes was his daughter, obviously she was not conceived by his wife, named in the church records as mother of the older girl. Then there was Joe Kroll’s unbelievable good fortune. There he was in Breslau (the city was then located in Prussia, but is now known as Wroclaw and in western Poland) with heavy debts, running a Wintergarden, consisting of swimming baths and one shabby restaurant. Suddenly, on the recommendation of Prince Wilhelm, he was vouchsafed by the King of Prussia the best piece of vacant land in Berlin and enough money to build an entertainment complex that today would cost the equivalent of many millions of dollars. He must have done a very great favour for the prince, or for the king, or for both, to become virtually overnight the city’s cultural czar and one of its wealthiest citizens.