My head holds dead people. I have fallen in, unwittingly, to a pastime
I am sceptical of - searching for my roots. I see people in libraries and
archives and Family History Centres, obsessed with finding traces of family
in microform, in scraps of paper either official or arbitrarily preserved
for posterity. Going blind, forgetting about their own lives, learning
to love a different intensity of light in this search for clues. The linking
of ourselves with strangers, through our blood. What value is there in
that?
Why do I want to know about people dead for over one hundred years,
people who left so few traces? What if I find unpalatable evidence: betrayals,
madness, cruelties? I don't imagine I'm looking for any grandeur here,
no kings or popes or buried treasures.
Am I trying to validate myself through these people?
The stories my family told about themselves and how they came to be
here, in this place. Well, they didn't: they told no stories beyond those
of kitchen cupboards, lost fortunes, bus timetables, the sanctity of silence
in families. Shame drove this: a common enough story.
Theodore Krakouer, my grandmother's grandfather,
arrived in Perth, the Swan River Colony, in 1851, twenty two years after
the British invaded. He arrived as a convict on the Mermaid. Let me tell
you, at the beginning, the scant details. He was already married, had a
son, and a variety of occupations including wool sorter, and he had been
convicted of stealing clothes and money. He spent time in Portsmouth Gaol
before making the journey to Fremantle. He was literate, a Jew, and, in
his convict papers it is declared that his state of mind was hopeful.
So, starting with Theodore, I ask myself what it is that I want from
these dead people? Not just dead, but long gone. Aren't my extended, living,
family enough for me?
Jews in Perth in the middle of the nineteenth century. Can you believe
that? Just a handful of them, without community. To begin with, they were
from different classes. I can only wonder where their faith was placed
in that isolation. I consult a book about the history of Jews in Australia
and it tells me that none of the Jewish convicts sent to the Western Australian
colony remained after their indentured period. My great-great grandfather
did, though. He died in the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum: so much for an escape.
I can think of more artful ones.
The first story I need to tell myself is about me: how I was formed
and where I belong. I may need a little fortitude to absorb the details
from history, of their exclusions and hardships that have not been part
of my life.
I am attempting to return to my roots. I may have to invent most of
it.
My transformative moment in my family saga happens this way. A weekend
away in two towns named Katanning and Broomehill. Homage to dead people
who had done some good deeds. It is 1993. The Broomehill Historical Society
has been planning a centenary celebration for at least twelve months to
honour the men involved in the Holland Track, an invaluable passage between
the wheatbelt and the goldfields opened up during the Gold Rush. Two of
the four men who took that journey are my kin: my great-grandfather David
Krakouer and his brother Rudolph.
We had organised a contingent, including two of David's daughters, the
eldest and the youngest, the only ones still living. I travel with family
and we stay in a motel in Katanning. A motel room that holds all the smells
of the life that was there before us, and more fleas and bed bugs than
the six adults sleeping in its three rooms can cope with. We don't sleep
well.
The next morning we drive the thirty minutes to Broomehill. This marks
the beginning of my story, where its focus is found. In a full day's proceedings
that we are ill-equipped for with memories of scratching and tossing and
turning in bed, there is a moment of awakening for me. Here, in my own
time, many of the practices of the past seem to come together and subtle
exclusions are enacted. We are gathered together in a Shire Hall with soup
and roast chicken meals to remember our forebears. It may be that nobody
else in the room takes affront as I do. I am sensitive to how people are
positioned in a community, who is allowed in and who is not, how decency
works.
The Krakouer men were as important as the other two on the expedition,
some say that Rudolph even bankrolled it. But in the speeches, in the acknowledgments,
and in the plaques that spelt their surname incorrectly, was this marking
out, this judgement. And it read to me as a roll-call: sons of convicts,
Jewish, merchants, outsiders. As well as the legacy of just how many Aboriginal
people came to have this same funny Polish name. One hundred years after
the event, Mr Holland and Mr Carmody managed to be handed most of the responsibility
for the heroism of the six month journey. There we were, proud of our two
men, the largest family gathering in the big Broomehill hall, and what
I received was a diminished message, that there was something lesser in
their effort because of who they were. But perhaps I am just too sensitive.
The second story I tell myself is Theodore and Brina's, and I had to
make most of it up until now.
The parents of David and Rudolph.
Theodore Krakouer.
The pronunciations:
Krack-hour.
Crack-over.
Krak-ooer.
Cracker.
And Brina Israel.
He came on the second convict ship to this colony; she arrived at the
age of 20 with her younger sister Esther on the Travancore two years later
than him . Their first baby Abraham was born in the same year of her arrival
and, I suppose, their first meeting. He is the first Jewish baby born in
the colony; that at least is the claim. Eight more children were born,
the last being my great-grandfather David
in 1869.
To come on such a long and difficult journey and to end up a wreck.
First a convict, then in gaol, and in the asylum as a lunatic. Sun-struck,
worked too hard, under too much pressure and isolation. Theodore was born
in Cracow, Poland between 1818 and 1820, was educated in Berlin, Germany
and somehow made his way to London. For his twenty two years here he carried
these names: Convict, Ticket of Leave Man, Expiree, Free, Colonial Patient.
Twenty-two years of hard living and then he goes mad, out of control with
syphilis, alcoholism, the works. Poor old man, younger than my own father
today. Dead at 59 in 1877 after four years in the loony bin.
Delusions of grandeur: a family in Berlin. His wife, Jane,
and a son, Samuel, living in London. They never came; he might not have
wanted them here. Too harsh. Too wicked. A wild west town.
But here is my gift when I sift the records: a set of correspondence
on microfilm, letters back and forward between a woman who signs herself
Mrs Brina Krakouer and the Colonial Secretary. About who was to pay for
the keep of a lunatic in the asylum. They wanted her to pay, and she was
a wily woman and they kept saying she could pay but would try to get away
with it if at all possible. Does this mean 'Jew'? I keep wondering as I
read these reviews they made on her ability to pay. Her loopy handwriting,
her articulate argument and then her desperation and sense of justice:
that shocked me. It was easier to think of her as illiterate and compliant,
an alien to me.
The family has followed an obvious 'Jewish' occupation in Fremantle
and along the Williams Road, as teamsters, merchants; it appears that they
had got on and worked hard. When Theodore is locked up, mad, Abraham's
labour keeps the family together. Brina says, in one of her letters
about who is to pay:
How willing I should have been to do so had I not been left with
a large helpless Family & the only dependence I have is in my eldest
son a Lad of twenty years of age who has to work very hard to support us.
(Most people say great credit is due to him.) Too much put on him must
be the cause of him wishing to leave the colony. He my son is willing or
am I if we can get some assistance from Government to send my Husband home
to his native country to his relatives in Berlin for the present it is
as much as we can do to keep out of the Poor House.
I do not know who paid for his food and care for the four years.
Krakouer. Still seven listings in the Perth White Pages. The most famous
individuals with that name since 1942 are Nancy
Rachel Krakouer and the brothers Jimmy
and Phil Krakouer, renowned footballers. We are all family. Nancy was
my great aunt.
The third story researched by me involves politics and Nancy Krakouer,
and the observation, without surprise, that all of Theodore and Brina's
nine children who married chose non-Jewish partners, even though some of
them were buried as Jews. Un-surprising? To maintain the faith, and to
find a partner across the social distance of free and convict classes must
have been impossible.
Nancy, my great aunt, David's daughter, who died in 1987, was a failed
political activist. She fell in love with a man and she followed his calling.
Her infamy is so topical in the highly charged Australia of 1996, which
is currently wearing racist simplicities boldly, and getting away with
asserting them again in public. Graeme Campbell, a failed politician, has
just formed a new political party, the Australia First Reform Party. It
seems a homage to the party that Nancy's membership of allowed her name
to be printed four times in the New York Times in 1942. The
Australia First Movement - Western Australian branch. With only four
members: a merry little band of rabid fascists. Perhaps Nancy was simply
lovestruck, smitten, and didn't think through the consequences. She wouldn't
have known about the logic of the Nazi Party at the time: that her two
Jewish grandparents would have made her a mischling , first degree and
therefore non-exempt from the Final Solution. It was lucky that the diaspora
meant Nancy's daddy had been born in Fremantle and not Cracow or Berlin.
Nancy was interned. In my childhood when I was told stories of Nancy
as a wild woman, the coda involved the punishment for being wild. Nancy
had been deported out of Australia for her bad deeds. I never asked where,
as an Australian citizen, she could be deported to, because I liked the
mystery too much. Later, it is always later, I read of her dislike of Jews,
her desire to see Roman Catholic priests put on road-work and the church
hierarchy shot. The New York Times , covering the treason trial, records
that the group had drawn up a list of persons to be assassinated.
Nancy Rachel Krakouer, a post office employee and the only woman
among the defendants, was said to have suggested that the victims be tortured
before being shot.
In the proclamation of an 'Australia First Government', which included
a welcome for the Japanese and relief at liberation from the Jewish domination
of Australia, Nancy was to be appointed minister of all women's organisations.
She was acquitted in their 1942 trial on the charge of conspiring to assist
the Japanese forces, but ordered interned under national security regulations.
Do I even want to go into the detail of her kindnesses, her generous
actions. Her manipulations when she returned from three decades of exile,
her 'deportation' to Melbourne, the prodigal
aged aunt come to clear up her business and prepare to die. Her final
Will and Testimony? What about her complete eschewing of the notorious
past she had lived?
The fourth story I could tell you might be about legacies, how things
are made, a synthesis in an age of cynicism about synthesising anything.
A story with elements of madness, of being locked up, of handing down to
a child a birthright.
(I'm still deciding if I will tell it. Bear with me.)
In 1994, I worked with a group of women artists: writers, visual artists,
historians, performers. We set out in our project to recover the presence
of women in two institutions that were now museum sites: the Fremantle
Lunatic Asylum and the Fremantle Gaol. The curators found an absence of
evidence that women had ever been incarcerated in these places: the traces
were diluted, indistinct. We found ways of re-spiriting these lives, redressing
history's oversights and its collection of information and detritus. Through
our own expression we called up the spirits of individual women and worked
around social and political implications of their presence, and their absence.
I was interested in making links between how women are locked up now and
how it might be different from last century. Our research period stretched
over a long hot summer in the grounds of the old Asylum, now the Fremantle
Arts Centre. I came to my conclusions early: that for women who are locked
up change happens slowly.
What I thought of in this female-centred space we built for ourselves
over those months was the old man, Theodore, who had died in the building.
The moment of discovery for me was in the State Archives: his certificate of lunacy, signed by HC Barnett in 1873.
Theodore was suffering from delusions, was in a state of delusional excitement,
and told the doctor that he "hears a voice operating from his belly
giving him messages from God Almighty to destroy the world". His death
certificate in May 1877 gives cause of death as Softening of the Brain,
Paralysis and Exhaustion. His age is recorded as 57.
My quest is a simple one: to name these people, my family, to invoke
their spirits, and to reclaim a little space in a town that was governed
in every sense by Scottish men, a place where public office was often a
matter of birthright and some lucky fathers and sons could work a productive
partnership.
(Note: an earlier version of this story was published
in Westerly No. 4, Summer 1996 in a special Jewish writing issue
of the journal.)