In 1992, I went to Russia and Kazakhstan on what was supposed to be an Australia-USSR science agreement exchange program visit (the USSR had ceased to exist at this time, so the Australian government paid for the whole trip). A Russian researcher had come to Australia to work with one of my colleagues and me in 1990. We had moved into a new house a week before I hopped on the plane to Moscow, leaving behind my partner and our two little boys aged 6 and 3. I took a couple of books to read in what I suspected would be a fair bit of down-time. However, most of my down-time wasn’t; I spent it ‘reading’ some of the Russian papers and books I had been given by those people I had visited. This ‘reading’ comprised a bit of translating, but mostly consisted of looking at the pictures of fossils and making notes comparing them with specimens I had studied in Australia, as my Russian wasn’t that good. As a consequence, I only waded through one ‘recreational’ book in my time in Russia, and it was ‘A Fortunate Life’ by Albert Facey (1894-1982)1,
which was published in 1981, some 9 months before he died. Although he believed his life to be fortunate, it was a hard life. He was the youngest of 7 children; his father died when he was 2; his mother remarried and took no further role in his upbringing; he was raised by his grandmother (his grandfather had died when Albert was 4); at the age of 8, he was put into service in an adjacent farm, but the owner turned out to be a violent drunk, and horsewhipped him, such that Albert ran away and subsequently worked as a farm hand and drover in other places. He joined the army in early 1915 and fought at Gallipoli where he was badly wounded and two of his brothers were killed. He was initially told he would probably die from his wounds in a year or two, but he survived another 65 years. He married and had seven children, one of whom was killed in the Second World War1.
I was in Russia and Kazakhstan for 9 weeks and being away from my partner and my two little boys I felt extremely lonely, no doubt exacerbated by my limited Russian language skills. There was some conversation with a couple of American historians, one of whom was researching the period of Russian history known as the time of the ‘false Dmitrys’2,
while the other was working on the time of the murderous psychopath Stalin. However, this was small consolation, as the loneliness was almost overpowering, and there were a couple of times when I was on the verge of chucking it in and booking a flight back home. This was when Facey’s book came into play. I thought that if he could cope with the privations of his life, I could cope with a few weeks of loneliness, so I didn’t pull the plug on my trip.
When I arrived home, my partner had organised our boys and my mother-in-law to make a banner with ‘Welcome Home Daddy’, and my parents had arrived from my old hometown that same day. When I arrived, my parents told me that I simply pushed them out of the way to get to my partner and my little boys. We all laughed about it after I had hugged them, and my mother-in-law.
Facey’s book made me realise how intrinsically interesting is everyone’s life, for his life was not uncommon for his generation in the farming communities of Western Australia. The same is true for my parents too. They both lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. One of my mother’s friends was killed flying bomber aircraft over Germany, while one of her cousins was killed when he was a wireless-air gunner in Sunderland flying boats hunting German U-boats in the Bay of Biscay3.
My father, as well as being in signals in the army from late 1941, about which he never talked very much, lived during the Great Depression and did it fairly tough. He and his father used to go out into the bush and capture brumbies, and my father used to break them in, and they would sell those that they didn’t keep (he did keep two; Star and Nell). In addition, down the hill from my father’s home was one of the rail lines that used to transport coal to the port of Newcastle. Because the rail line had a slight incline, the train had to slow down significantly. My father and grandfather would walk down to the rail line with a hessian sack; my grandfather would hop up onto one of the slow-moving coal carriages, and start chucking lumps of coal off the carriages, while my father walked alongside the rail line picking up the coal and putting it in the hessian sack. The coal was used to heat the home and to cook meals.
One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I could not convince my parents to write their life stories. Not only would their lives be generally interesting as being from another time, as was A.B. Facey’s, but it would be something that would certainly be interesting to me but also to my children and perhaps their children, despite the latter having never met them.
Sources
