NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Dec 16, 12:20 +1100
Mike Hannibal wrote:
maybe it's an Australian thing but on any Saturday at our small
yacht club I would see friends and others who have circumnavigated. We probably
have 4 or 5 boats that have circumnavigated with a few more on their way now.
We regularly sail in company with one boat and crew that have circumnavigated.
In addition we have other friends further afield who have done the same.
Is this an antipodean thing? I'd be interested in other comments.
Australians generally are great travellers.
Apparently tourism to Oz is restricted by the perceived great distances involved,
eg; from Europe and
I suspect its as much a state of mind as
anything else. My favourite story to illustrate this is that of Mary Reiby. She
was a gutter-snipe, a street kid living by her wits from the filthy alley-ways
of eighteenth century
The secret of her success, once you know a
little more of her story, is that unlike most women, then or now, she knew men.
She understood the point of view of men; the way their little minds work, as
few women ever do. In her formative years she had lived with them, she had starved
and stolen and plotted and done business with them, and she had slept beside
them, listening to them belch and curse and fart – expressing their
minds, so to speak. What good is a horse in
On the streets of
As Mary grew rich and became a pillar of
the community she yearned, it seems, for respectability. She tended to marry
off her daughters to clergymen, and managed to marry one of her grand-daughters
to a bishop. When I tell my French, and thus catholic relatives this story, the
idea of marrying a priest or bishop seems quite outrageous and scandalous to
them, but in the Anglican (Church of England) world it implies deep family respectability
and living at the pinnacle of social success.
While not all convicts were as
spectacularly successful her general story was a common one, albeit usually
more modestly expressed. So many of these people who were considered human
detritus did well in the colony, leading quietly constructive lives, moving
ahead, becoming respectable, having large families. The irony is that their
guardians were notoriously venal and corrupt, and this extended all the way up
to the governors, who were mostly a poor lot. Bligh of the Bounty is an
example. One who was an exception was Lachlan Macquarie, and in gratitude
nearly everything in
Escape from the colony wasn’t much
of an option, but that didn’t stop people trying, setting off into the
interior hoping
I think being sent to the end of the earth
had a liberating influence for many, then and now. Immigrants tend to think
that, having had to start from scratch and re-invent their lives, anything is now
possible – as it is when you believe this and are willing to put in the
effort.