HISTORY
My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family
Graeme Davison
The Miegunyah Press, $50
All human history is family history, though professional historians tend not to talk about families per se unless it is some grand dynasty such as the royals, Roosevelts or Rothschilds. The reason could be simple: a bit like other people’s travel yarns, it’s hard to summon much interest in the story of anyone’s family but our own – unless, of course, they are the rich and powerful.
To capture the attention of a wider readership, a family history involving ordinary folk, like travel writing, needs to be very well written indeed. Conscious of the enormous popular interest in family history in recent decades Graeme Davison has made productive use of his position as Emeritus Professor at Monash University to chronicle his own forebears.
Graeme Davison has written the second volume of a family history.Credit: Edie Jim
Like countless other Australians of a certain age, Davison has done the return-post DNA test, trawled during lockdown through the online genealogy archives accessible to subscribers, and gone on a road trip in the old country to tour the ancestral stamping ground.
The net result of that effort is two impressive volumes about the author’s people. If nothing else – and Davison is not claiming his family as more or less special than anyone else’s – these books in terms of the sheer quality of writing provide an object lesson to anyone who is contemplating telling the story of their own family. Without a genuine sense of history, the words of the family narrative will fall dead from the page.
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The first book in the Davison’s diptych, Lost Relations, explored the author’s mother’s family, the Hewetts, who migrated from England to Castlemaine in the 1850s around the time of the Victorian gold rush. In My Grandfather’s Clock, Davison explores his father’s family, which is predominantly Scottish in origin, who arrived in Melbourne in the early 1900s. This book ends with an outline of his autobiography, which he characterises as the story of a pre-boomer (defined as someone born during World War Two).
The motif of the clock that has been passed down the generations is a genius move. It is not just that a clock is an object likely to be treated as an heirloom – my mother’s family has retained a slightly battered French slate mantle clock that was presented to an ancestor upon his retirement as one of the first Anglican clergymen in Victoria.
The associations between old clocks and the passage of time is fertile ground for a meditation on the passing of the generations. Moreover, the mechanism of the Davison clock was manufactured in England, while the case, which had to be replaced after the family migrated, is made of Australian hardwood. The clock thus becomes emblematic of Davison’s sense of himself as a British-Australian whose family out here have largely been skilled tradespeople.
Davison was a young man in England – in the 1960s he went there as a Rhodes Scholar – and discovered that he wasn’t really British. In a sense, Davison journeyed to Britain in order to re-enact the voyage undertaken by the ancestors. Decades later, while visiting the borderlands of Scotland, he realised that his father’s distant ancestors included outlaw characters equivalent to bushrangers, while the Australian descendants were uniformly respectable.
How many other Australians before and since have established a sense of identity by default? This is happened to me when I went to study at the same university in Ireland attended by my clergyman ancestor. I felt right at home in Ireland while realising I was not Irish.
Not every generation of the one family experiences life the same way. As a pre-boomer, Davison is aware that he belongs to possibly the luckiest cohort that has ever lived. He received a very good state school education and attended the University of Melbourne at a time when history was a subject that could lead to a stable academic career. Just being at The Shop, as Melbourne Uni is known, he recalls, instilled a confidence in graduates.
Davison realises that what brought his parents together – membership of the Methodist Church in the part of Melbourne centred on Essendon – represents an aspect of mainstream Australian life that has all but vanished.
So much of what previous generations of Davison’s family took for granted is destined to disappear forever, and yet the clock, which is newly restored, remains to be handed on.
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