My Family
The Richardson family, from your left:
- me
- my brother Martin Charles (a lawyer in Melbourne),
- my sister Jocelyn Frances,
- my father, the Reverend Edwin Thomas John, a recently retired priest in the Anglican Church of Australia,
- my mother, Lynette Anne, B.A. (Hons), a recently retired senior high school English teacher who interrupted her teaching career to spend seven years working at the Mansfield Courier; the many afternoons I spent there after school account for my interest in newspapers.
Jocelyn is married to Adam, but editorial power has been exercised: he is too tall and too good looking. We a short family, good peasant genes, but we don't trouble ceilings very often.
Family History (some quick notes)
We go back to five generations of Australian settlement on my maternal side. This goes back to my German ancestors who came as free settlers, ending up in the Western districts of Victoria as farmers. The family name is Baum. There was a large reunion of the descendants when I was about seven years old. My mother's main ancestry is Irish. My father's ancestry is English; his paternal grandparents were born in England and came out to Australia as a young married couple.
My maternal grandfather, Harry, grew up in the Collingwood area of Melbourne, which at that time was a working class area; there were slums. It was in this atmosphere of solidarity and identity that the Collingwood Football Club emerged as a powerhouse of the Victorian Football League. My grandfather was an early member of the club, and had a lifelong passion (shared by his wife, my grandmother, and many of his children and grandchildren). His cousin, Dick Lee, was one of Australian Football's greatest full-forwards. Harry, or Grandpa as he was to me, was a second generation fishmonger at the Victoria Markets, where he had a stall. I went with him once on a workday. We woke up a 4.00am to go the fish markets by the docks and buy fish for the day, and then to the Vic Markets to get ready for the day's trade. Grandpa didn't like fish a great deal, and they weren't common food in the house. Fishmongering was a tough business in Australia, with little money. Soon after he married, he and his young wife, Ester, moved to one of Melbourne's outer suburbs, the semi-agricultural Camberwell. My grandmother already lived out there; in fact, in her whole life she has not lived further than two miles from where she was born. Her cousins had orchards, including at what is now the Victoria Police Academy. Camberwell (which is now a prosperous middle to upper middle class area in the innermost of the Melbourne's public transport zones) was very primitive. There was no sealed roads leading to the house when they first moved there, which didn't matter much because no one had cars; this must have been around the Great Depression.
Grandpa was a lifelong Communist, and was one of the first westerners into China after the revolution; he went as part of a trade-union delegation. After the excesses of Stalin became known, many Australian Communists became Maoists, my grandfather among them. In the 1950s and 1960s, Communism was a prominent issue in Australian politics. The Labor party was rent asunder, astutely guided by Conservative forces, and the hysteria of the Cold War gathered momentum. My mother's two brothers had to leave the Boy Scouts because of their father's well known politics, and my mother would make her friends wait outside while she threw a blanket over the pile of Communist Party newsletters on the back porch. There were also death threats sent via letter. Robert Menzies, the Conservative leader who exploited this mood to keep the Australian Labor Party split and weak passed legislation to ban the Communist Party. In a watershed High Court case, this legislation was ruled to be unconstitutional. Menzies then held a referendum to alter the constitution, the climax of the Cold War in Australia. Somewhat remarkably, the Australian electorate rejected the constitutional changes. My mother says that almost overnight, the harassment of their family stopped. The issue was dead. The Catholic fringe of the Labor Movement faded into obscurity, the ALP regrouped and Gough Whitlam brought an end to nearly 30 years of Conservative rule with a mercurial three year term that has been described as the greatest change a country has gone through short of civil war. I'm sure my grandfather was extremely pleased.
After world war 2, one of the great waves of Australian immigration began, with migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arriving in their millions. Many of them were used to fish as an important part of their diet, unlike the Anglo-Australians. The seafood market rapidly grew in importance and wealth, and my grandfather found himself in a prosperous business. Likewise, the area they were living was rapidly gentrifying. My mother grew up in a comfortable family. She was the first member of her family to attend university; she did a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Melbourne in History, and her father was extremely proud of her accomplishment.
Grandpa was a very talented amateur photographer. He was president of the Melbourne Camera Club, and won many awards. When I knew him, was loved taking landscapes, particularly trees. When he would visit us in Mansfield, the the two of us would head into the farmland in his sporty green Alfa Romeo, and then park by the side of a promising paddock and tramp out. He normally used Hassleblads, double reflex cameras with large negatives, and only black and white. He was a very quiet man, and both of us hated flies intensely, which Grandma always found amusing.I discovered after he died that in his younger days he was a champion amateur cyclist, with many trophies and medals. I wish he had known how often I cycled at random for many kilometres along the unsealed country roads surrounding Mansfield.
My grandfather and grandmother was Methodists when they were married. Both had signed the "Pledge" when they were teenagers, and they never drank. Grandpa became an atheist, but he never touched a drop. His father was an alcoholic. Grandma also dropped out of the church scene, but she also has never had alcohol.
My father grew up in Blackall, in the Queensland outback. His father's family were established the town as the local iceplant owners, and makers of bottled cordials. The iceplant business was essential in such a hot climate, before the advent of refrigeration. Blackall gets its water from bores reaching down to the Great Arterial Basin, and the water comes from the earth hot. On the roofs of Blackall's houses, people have cold water tanks, where the water cools. My paternal grandfather was a natural mechanic, and a bright man looking to the future. He was fascinated by aeroplanes, and was extremely excited when Charles Kingsford Smith flew into Blackall. He met the great aviator, and later received a personal letter from him, which my father has stored in a bank. My grandfather was also fascinated by the new developments in small portable refrigeration, and saw it correctly as a huge challenge to the family business. Unfortunately, the family merely saw the threat and became very defensive. He left to go to Brisbane with his young family, where he became a refrigeration engineer with a firm called Warburton Frankie. During the war he had a lot of contact the US soldiers stationed in and around Brisbane. My father's mother, a teacher, had aspirations for her family, and my father was sent to "Churchy", the Brisbane Boys Anglican Grammar School, the most prestigious of Brisbane's private schools, then and now. Dad didn't like it very much, taking more after his father. My father left school to become a linesman (electrician with the public electricity utility). He must have been having a great time; he had a beautiful British Racing Green MG and looked an incredibly dashing figure. His involved with the Anglican church was also very important, and in his young twenties he felt the calling of the church, and travelled to St Michael's College in the Adelaide Hills to study theology. He was ordained and took up a curate's role in Coburg, Melbourne. Unfortunately, theology students can't maintain expensive cars like MGs, and it was sold. However while in Coburg dad was introduced to Peugeots through one of his parishioners, and also by the success that Peugeots were having in the Round Australia rallies (travelling around Australia was a incredible test of driver and machine in the 1950s. Peugeots earned a reputation in Australian they have never lost as being well suited to rugged roads, just as they have in Africa). Soon after moving to Melbourne, the first Peugeot was bought, and Dad has never really driven anything since. Somewhat coincendetally, my first car was a Peugeot 405. My younger brother just bought his first car, and there was never any doubt in Martin's head: he wanted the sports model of the 306. My father is an outstanding driver, and my brother is too. I don't do Peugeots justice, but the less said of my driving the better.