As I have grown older, my family has been more lax with exposing information about themselves. When I was little, my family seemed like this dreadfully uptight collective authority figure who never did anything more scandalous than a quiet fart and whose lives revolved around kitchen renovations.
Wrong.
My family is technically my adopted family, but I am too lazy to say “adopted family” all the time and it doesn’t sound right to me anyway.
Like most Anglo-Saxon Australians, they’re a hodgepodge of European descent. With a colourful past. Dun dun DUNNNN!
Crime, fights, hippies, babes and general awesomeness under the cut.
- Ever watched Underbelly? I haven’t, but Underbelly fans might know this guy:
George Freeman was a “colourful racing identity” in Sydney. He was an organised crime man – drug dealing, illegal casinos and gambling, prostitution rings, may or may not have been involved in the odd murder or two.
He’s also my Dad’s uncle.
Oh, how we LOL’d at our links with organised crime when the press reported Peter O’Brien would portray him in controversial Aussie TV drama Underbelly. I watched an episode at a friend’s place once.
“That’s my great-uncle!” I said.
He didn’t believe me.
- Dad finally figured out how to use the internet a few years ago and is fascinated by family tree websites. He recently discovered that the first person in his family to come to Australia was a convict from Scotland. Convicts back in the day were commonly imprisoned for petty crimes like nicking a piece of bread. My parents thought the same about Dad’s ancestor. But no! Turns out he killed someone. So the solution was to take him to Australia. Oh dear. Sorry, Australia.
- By now you might be getting a terrible impression of my father, what with being related to these dreadful criminals and all. Nah. Not only is my Dad a pretty nice guy, but the only time he ever nearly got arrested was for doing something awesome. While walking home from a footy match with some friends, some yob harassed his friend from Mauritius.
“Eat that, you black bastard!” said the horrid shithead, grabbing the Mauritian man’s hot dog and throwing it into the dirt.
Outraged at this most disgusting racism, Dad punched him. They landed on someone’s car. The owner of the car wanted to charge him for the damage, but Dad was let off. I really like that story. Although I don’t condone violence, I admire Dad for standing up against racism for his friend.
- Over on Mum’s side of the family, another uncle of ours was also involved in the horse racing game in Sydney. I don’t know much of the details, except for giggling over trunks full of money and his wife spending it on a brand new kitchen! And thus, my family’s obsession with home renovations was born…
- This is a sad one. Mum’s great-grandmother was institutionalised because she had menopausal depression. By the time she felt okay again, her stupid doctors decided that she couldn’t return to society because she had been institutionalised for too long. Which was bullshit. Mum’s great-grandmother was the first woman in our family to go to university and became very wealthy. Sadly, she lost most of her money to the state after being institutionalised. Really makes you appreciate how far we’ve come in treating mental health and women, doesn’t it? (I am the second university-educated lady in the family. NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING, GUYS.)
- Dad went to the first Sunbury Pop Festival (aka “Australia’s Woodstock”) in 1972. Mum constantly snuck behind the toilets at her strict private school to smoke cigarettes. Dad won a cross dressing competition at a pub for his ingenious use of a coconut bra. Mum constantly snuck into nightclubs while underage. My aunt (Mum’s sister) fondly recalls falling down a double-decker bus in London in her underpants after too many cocktails on a Contiki Tour. My uncle once owned a rather suss panel van (it was the 70s, you figure out the rest) that his mother knitted curtains for. Another uncle was imprisoned for refusing to go to the Vietnam War when he was drafted. In comparison, I’m a total square.
- My grandfather quietly rebelled against his strict Irish-Catholic upbringing by skipping Catholic school to ride the train around rural Victoria. Dad’s old aunts, who died when I was little, were glamourous Sydney babes who were often photographed on the street – the old school version of fashionistas getting posted all over fashion blogs, I guess. They also slogged it out in factories and pubs for the war effort. Like me, my bartending aunt in the 1940s dealt with unruly sorts by sharply telling them GTFO. Before they died, they ran small farms in rural NSW.
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