Unless you've lived it, I am not necessarily sure people would get this. But as a mixed-race person, and one who has grown up Aboriginal, in my brain there have always been two sides of my family: the black side and the white side.
The black side has, of course, been populated by my paternal side. Being visibly non-white, and growing up in this colony, it has also been the part I have had to fight hardest to be proud of. As I was growing up, there were plenty of forces and people who were ready to make me ashamed of it, plenty of school classes that erased it, plenty of newspaper articles that demonised it. Yet there were also plenty of freedom fighters that stood up, said no, and reinforced that our heritage was something to treasure, to be proud of, and to fight for. And thus, so it all began.
As my previous entry showed, however, within a single generation in my family, I have family members whose lives were controlled by the NT wardship acts. Within two, I have stolen generation members. Within three, I have the frontier and the anthropologists. There are Scottish Australians who claimed land, exploited Aboriginal labour, and created descendants, some of whom are still finding their way home. And yes, I also now have a very unexpected Irish heritage - one that connects me to County Cavan, and which saw members of my family as a curiosity, as knowledge people, but also, essentially, as not long for this world.
The "white side" of my family, however, has always been just that - white. We knew some members of it, but given that both my maternal and paternal grandfathers died in 1981, I am the only child in my family who got to meet them. My memory of either man is blurry. I know that I used to call my maternal grandfather "cocky" rather than poppy (my hearing difficulties were dealt with a little later in my life), and I have a vague memory of where they lived. I only have a memory of my paternal grandfather smiling while holding me. That's it.
Perhaps it's because whiteness, after colonisation and then generations of the White Australia Policy, is the default in this country, that it wasn't considered necessary to know very much about where these white people who led to me came from. We knew that they were free settlers who came to Victoria, and that they came roughly five generations ago, in the main. We knew that they were working class, that they were mainly English or Irish, and that if they weren't working at the Carlton United Brewery, they worked in bootmaking factories. We also knew that they lived in areas like Collingwood and Clifton Hill when these places were factory worker slums. More on this later.
My grandmother was born Lorna Waller in 1922. She married my grandfather Ernest Tuttleby (more on that lot later too) when she was 18 years old and had four children, of which my mother Lindal was the third. Her parents were Harold Waller and Avis McVeigh (pronounced McVee). Their marriage was short-lived, and though she was essentially brought up an only child, she had a half-brother, Raymond, from her father's second marriage.
After digging around in her family tree, I am convinced that nanna knew very little about her background. She knew, via her mother, that she had Irish heritage, and due to both record checking, and guess work, I have traced her McVeigh surname back to Belfast. This was not without problems - though I am convinced I have found the names of Lorna's great-grandparents in NSW records (her grandfather was born in Surry Hills), there are inconsistencies in spelling of the surname. This was allowable though as, via checking the marriage record of those I suspected were her great-grandparents, I found both signed their certificate with a simple 'x', thus highlighting that they were likely illiterate, and I additionally found that her likely great-grandmother (a woman named Mary Murphy - I doubt I will ever be able to trace her!) lived in Surry Hills. Precisely where nanna's grandfather John McVeigh was born. These same people then reappeared in a Victorian death certificate for a William McVeigh - they had moved to Melbourne when John was about one, and his father had died a couple of years later. John married a woman named Eliza Louisa Hibbert who was born in Panton Hill, Vic, and they had four children - Avis was their only daughter. This family lived in Northcote, in Bastings St, and then Raleigh St, the latter of which is where my nanna Lorna was born.
There are some mysteries that remain there - with both the McVeighs and the Hibberts - and these are not made easier by the fact that Eliza had an older sister (18 years older) whose name was Louisa Elizabeth. There is also no birth record for Eliza, but her parents names appear on her marriage and death certificates, along with her age, her mother was giving birth well into her 40s as evidenced by an even younger brother, and Louisa has a marriage certificate of her own to a George Podesta. I was therefore able to correct some erroneous information that other descendants had entered into the system. The Hibberts had married in Australia, having come over from England and met here. For now, this is where I will leave Avis (she is getting her own entry!).
I therefore thought, with the mysteries and twists and turns with Lorna's maternal line, her father Harold Waller may prove an easier line of enquiry. I was right, but for completely wrong reasons. I made the assumption, for example, that Harold's family were likely English, and were stonemasons given the surname. Harold did indeed have some English ancestry, but as I watched his family tree stretch out in front of me, and do so in a remarkably easy way, I knew I was dealing with something much more.
I need now to return to the title of this post. I have named it such because it refers to a slur that my nanna Lorna experienced when she was at school. There was no real reason behind it, kids just noticed that nanna had a bit of an olive tint to her and some darker features. Given she lived in Melbourne, it was just assumed she tanned easier than other kids - not a huge deal in a place with this UV rating. Mum noted that she and her siblings also tanned up quite readily. Her poor father, on the other hand, died in his early 60s from melanoma.
Nanna knew she had Irish and English heritage. I am convinced, however, that beyond this, she knew nothing. There was talk from nanna of some nebulous "Prussian" heritage - no one had further information about this. And as I watched nanna's paternal Waller line unfold easily in front of me, I knew there utterly no truth to this idea whatsoever. It was actually amazing just how documented this "unknown" bit of history was. I crosschecked everything with the available birth, death and marriage records, and it was all correct as marked.
Nanna's father was, as mentioned, Harold Edmund Waller. Harold was a jeweller and bootmaker, and he was born in East Melbourne to James Emanuel Waller and Amelia Sanders. He was the youngest of four children - of his siblings, one brother died in childhood, his sister Ethel Mina Waller married a man named Joseph Melbourne Ogden, whose father was the president of the Felt Hatters' Union, and they had two children - Edna and Edmund. Edmund died in infancy, while Edna died from reproductive cancer in her mid-40s. She never married, and had no children, but remained close to her cousin Lorna, and was my mother's godmother. Harold's other brother, Arthur, I have found no other records for. I only really know that he also died quite young - about 39 years old. So despite only living until he was hit by a truck on Hoddle St, Harold making his mid-60s was comparatively old-age in his family.
James Emanuel Waller's parents were a man named James George Waller and his wife, Caroline Hodges. Caroline was born in Bristol, and I believe came here as a sponsored domestic servant in the early 1850s, before meeting and marrying James George Waller in 1858. They lived in Prahran and had 9 children together - 6 daughters and 3 sons. James was their third-born child (1863) and their oldest son. Of his sisters, his oldest sister Harriet married a man called Ebenezer Coventry - of the famous AFL family - and their first-born daughter Elsie died in infancy. Both her grandparents were interred with her in a plot in St Kilda Cemetery, but for decades, James George Waller had been incorrectly recorded in the cemetery records as John George, and it wasn't until I started searching that this was corrected and we had a resting spot for my great-great-great-grandparents. Caroline passed away in 1894, predeceasing her husband James who lived until 1909.
There were a couple of things that struck me about James George Waller. The first was though he occupation was a "clerk" according to marriage records, in his will, he was not only listed as a "gentleman". This suggests he was a man of independent means. In his will, he he divided up his worldly possessions equally regardless of sex, leaving portions to his 8 remaining children, and one portion to the widow of a son who had predeceased him. He was, therefore, a progressively-minded fellow, it seemed. The second thing was though he was listed as a "British subject", he was born in Java, Indonesia. I cannot find a record of him arriving here, but I believe he came from England, which was where his parents had settled after having the majority of their children in Indonesia.
His father's name was also James George Waller. He was a master shipbuilder who was born in Chatham, Kent and who died in Totnes, Devonshire. A eulogy available of him and visible on findagrave, states he died of "cancer of the cheek", and gives his title as Esquire. Certainly, this perhaps explains why his son had some money behind him. With his wife, he had numerous biological children (half of which survived to adulthood) and one step-child from her prior marriage. These children, rather like James, ended up scattering across the world. One sister emigrated to Canada, another to Jamaica - they were definite seafarers.
Here's where I solve another mystery: the elder James George Waller's wife was a woman named Hermina Wilhelmina Quint Ondaatje. She was honoured in subsequent generations of the family by multiple girls being given the name "Mina" - which she was fondly known as - as either a first or middle name, all the way down to Harold's sister Ethel Mina. "Ondaatje" immediately grabbed my attention - it was a decidedly non-British name, but also, it was a name I recognised. Hermina was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, but had spent vast chunks of her life in the Dutch colonies of Sri Lanka and then Java. She was the youngest daughter of Christina Hoevenaar and her second husband, Pieter Philip Jurriaan Quint Ondaatje - better known as "Quint Ondaatje".
It was with uncovering this line that I found out that not only am I the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of an incredibly famous Dutch revolutionary and forefather of Dutch democracy, but that the "white side of my family" was not actually completely white. Quint Ondaatje was, very famously, a Dutch Burgher man, born in the colony of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje itself is a Tamil name, that had been translated into Dutch, and Quint was a descendant of a Tamil physician (in Dutch) who, on being successfully able to heal the Dutch governor's wife of a mystery illness, was engaged as the official governatorial physician. This man adopted the name Michael Jurgen Ondaatje, married firstly a Portuguese colonial woman named Magdelena Croos, and secondly, a Sinhala woman named Eega Juri, and then became the progenitor of the entire Ondaatje family. When Quint stormed the Utrecht town hall and threw out the Orangists, he was already famously a Dutch-Burgher man. Far from nanna being of "Prussian descent" - her real ancestor rather crucially fought the Prussians!
This ancestry therefore means that as well as Dutch-Burgher heritage, I have some distant Tamil and Sinhalese ancestry. My ancestors in this line spoke Dutch, English, Tamil, Malay, and Portuguese. It also means that I am indeed distantly related to writer Michael Ondaatje, his brother Christopher, Sri Lankan-Canadian rhythmic gymnast Anna-Marie Quint Ondaatje, and many others. I am a descendant of a distinct ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and as such, have learnt a lot more about the differences between English and Dutch colonisation. I cannot wait to travel to these areas - Netherlands, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia - and learn more.
So Waller was not a "blackfella", but nor was she white. In my introductory post to all this, I mentioned some hurt over the years, and I have to say that finding out that not only was my "white side" not completely white, but actually, I am the descendant of such an incredible man of colour, has been affirming and wonderful. Due to the prominence of this family, there was no denying this heritage, nor my descent from them, as they were incredibly well-recorded. I have to wonder how, in the intervening generations, this information was so very easily forgotten. I cannot help but think that had the White Australia Policy not been in force for so long, it may not have been.
Photos: Lorna Waller Tuttleby, the grandmother of the writer and the great-granddaughter of James George Waller, firstly in the year before she passed away, and secondly with the writer in the early 1980s
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