OF ELSEWHERE

INDENT #127

Two guards flank her now. Iron at the wrists catches courthouse light, throwing fractured reflections across stone walls. Surrey Assizes, 4th August 1831. Sweat, ink, and piss. Sentenced in seconds. Guilty. Stealing coins from employer. 7 years transportation. Age 18. Blue grey eyes. Fair to ruby. Few Freckles. Tattoo upper right arm - MKJS. It‘s time for the empire to clean the streets of London‘s poor. The gravel hits. Three months rotting in pre-departure limbo. Woolwich dockyard is only a few short weeks away.

Right then,

you whores!

On your feet Burns.

Shackle her tight.

Into the Black Maria you thieving sluts!

Ann turns her head, just slightly, to look back at the city. She will never see it, nor her family, ever again.

The Pyramus Vessel.

Departure: 8th October 1831. 149 women loaded in batches from 40 different prisons. 8 women to a berth. 8 women to a single gallon of fresh water weekly for washing. Five grueling months.

The machinary of class punishment.

The coded language of sailors drinking below deck that caused “mischief”. Rape, Harassment, Power Abuse. Arrival: 5th March 1832, New South Wales. Mrs Moore already pre-applied before the ship even landed. A convict asset at your service, assigned like stock.

Reassigned to a convict man at 24. Spinster on certificate. 1837. Arrested for drunkenness and public exposure. All that‘s left is defiance through self-destruction. Her name doesn‘t even make the death record. Thrown in an unmarked grave. 1855.

God? Queen? Country? Australia never officially had African chattel slavery like the Caribbean or American South. It had a different, similarly brutal system. Just bureaucratically rebranded: Convicts, Blackbirding, Stolen Generations.

Máire Áine Ní Ghiolla Ghannáin. But on a ship manifest, just write Kilgannon. Easier to file. Easier to forget. Donegal says she left. Sydney says she arrived. 1861 or earlier. A British Trident. And with all that hunger one might die mid crossing. Irish Catholic.

Of Old Gaelic Order.

Daughter of the devotee of Gannán. In these borderlands, The sí, The banshee. And did a Christian God force you underground? A kind of cutting. What did the Empire require you to write down? A holy well or a rag tree? Her name came from Tireragh. A Moy-side hill people.

Abhainn na Muaidhe.

The River of the noble one. A heart of Gaelic memory.

And I almost missed the Gaelic in Ballina. Béal an Átha. So close to Lennox Head. A mouth in New South Wales. Another in Killala Bay. Maybe prison for theft in Darlinghurst, 1874. But the ink runs, and the clerk‘s cursive is just too tight. You took the name Abrahams. A new story. Then childbirth took you. Age 27. 1882.

And Hyam was selling tchotchkes in the Middlesex curiosity shop. Robin Hood Lane, East End Near the Docks.

Trinkets, clocks, broken combs, lockets, thimbles, crystal paperweights, skeleton keys, pressed flowers in frames, sealing wax stamps, chipped teacups.

First or second wave of continental Yekkish immigration, post-Napoleonic. Westphalia? Hesse? Bohemia? And the Empire had already made its own mess. NSW was short on women who weren’t chained. And that deep social ceiling. Opportunities are drying up. Oh Ann! Rachel’s on her way. The Mary sails. 1839. The two sisters. 28 and 22. Rachel and Rebecca. And Joseph, Charles, Jane and Lewis.

From Port Adelaide, half a world away, Jane records in the South Australian Register. DIED. On the 1st of May, 1858, at Poplar, Blackwall, Mr. H. Hains, aged 80. Deeply regretted by a numerous circle of relatives and friends. Late of the German Jews‘ Hospital, Mile End.

And that shipping list retyped decades later. Still stamps it in black:

JEWESS

His hands, stained with leather and loss, sign their ketubah. Their halachic promises witnessed by Michael Hyam, a London Jew turned colonial bootmaker. In 1842, 3 years before York Street Synagogue was founded, Rachel and Abraham marry from within a fragile Jewish colonial network. They are among the first to speak ancient vows under Southern Cross stars.

Convict era, gold rush, self government, and federation. From Whitechapel to Jamberoo to Surry Hills.

-1811-1902-

Mormons try to hijack history. They tried to buy your soul. In a hundred years the record will suggest that you converted. Mid 20th century, Mormon archivists steal ship manifests and transcribe global migration records. For baptism by proxy. The retyped LDS Immigration record for Rebecca and achim v‘achayot. For posthumous spiritual trespass. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and millions of others. Names stolen, records pilfered, forced conversion attempted after death. They offer obfuscation and lies to conceal the truth. They‘ve only marked themselves for the accounting. Every harvested record is another charge in the ledger. Some debts collect with compound interest across eternities.

Cogs in the booming infrastructure push. From Tile Makers, to Sewage Workers, to Tramway Motormen, to Coal Miners, to Green Grocers. Mercians of Staffordshire. ARP. Stray Horses Fine.

Warm breath across apple skin, soft flannel working in circles until the surface gleams. Hold to light, rotate slow, best fruit forward in perfect pyramids, polished to mirror shine.

Trenchard’s Brats

At 16 years old, 1939 enlisted, Cecil entered the RAF’s Aircraft Apprentice Scheme. A prestigious but grueling track for working class boys with mechanical promise. Education, escape, and transformation. Metallurgy, wiring, mathematics. North Africa and Italy. 1943-1948. As the Allies pushed up the peninsula, the RAF followed. Cold weather engine overhauls. Replacing rivets. Replacing undercarriages. Dust choked hangars. Patching punctured hydraulics. Greasing pistons. Loud with labor.

Aircraft engineering. Specialist skills. The backbone of RAF ground crews.

Then return as a Mawby fruitiere.

Warm breath across apple skin, soft flannel working in circles until the surface gleams. Hold to light, rotate slow, best fruit forward in perfect pyramids, polished to mirror shine.

And Dorothy. Nurse at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary. A gold medal for all round performance in theory and practice. A respected identity. Duty and aspiration. A postwar girl seeks meaning in service. Some kind of freedom and independence. Her brother‘s letters from Cairo shaped familiar duty. And Guy’s Hospital by 1954. A leap across class and county lines. From Staffordshire grocer’s daughter to London-trained nurse. Then the 1960s passenger list. Aboard the Iberia. £10 assisted passage scheme. Fremantle, Western Australia.

robbins

...Administrative vandalism?

Mistype that extra b! Convict names don‘t merit imperial accuracy. Thirteen years old. Disowned by Parents. Bristol City Quarter Sessions. Charged with stealing a picture. Grey eyes, brown hair, smallpox scars. Right arm, anchor and a mermaid carved in ink.

Marched in irons from the prison hulk.

Bussorah Merchant. 24th March 1828. England to New South Wales. One hundred seventy convicts packed below deck. Dysentery pooling in the hold. Rats feeding on open sores. Bilge water and blood sloshing underfoot.

Arrival July 1828.

The Carter’s Barracks Boys. Institutionalisation, correction and reform of convict boys.

Carters‘ Barracks assigns him. Brutal school for boys. Leather trades and leather lashes. Juvenile reform through birch switches cutting skin.

The first colonial prototype. The same ideological and practical DNA of what would later force institutionalise Aboriginal boys. Forced Bible readings, rote learning, hymns, manual labour.

Correctional floggings. Corporal punishment under the veil of moral reform. Turn them into useful imperial subjects already.

If you want to cure a boy thief, send him where there is nothing to steal. Generally thieves from the time they could walk or talk.

Will the prayers they are compelled to say, and the hymns they are compelled to sing… accomplish such a moral phenomenon? It is imbecility of mind alone which can believe such a thing.

Send them into the interior. When their parents come to know their offspring will be lost in the interior of Botany Bay… they will hesitate to continue to breed up their children to the trade of thieving.

Then assigned Burns, Spinster, by the Colony. And then reassigned another quickly again, within a few months of the passing.

And the son, the second. Breeds game cocks. Drinks down the wages. Flogs the children with cold water and switches to drive out all that sin.

Religion, fear, control. Well done, Crown. You stitched it in tight.

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee Portrait Earrings

Booming with gold rush aftershocks. Vere from Madrid to Australia. Leaves Spain in 1863. Thomas sails at twenty. Collapsing behind him: Carlist wars, royal coups, economic rot.

Vere. A classic French Norman name, knightly, patrician. From the town of Ver in Normandy. Brought to England in 1066 by Aubrey de Vere, riding with William the Conqueror.

But what was a Vere doing in Madrid by 1825? After the Peninsular Wars, stationed there, or stranded. Identity anxiety soaks in. The Vere drops to Lee only. Reinvents. Migrates.

A full colonial life claimed. To marry the daughter of a transported convict on the Cook Vessel, and on the other, the surviving child of the Layton Plague, under the Poor Law migration.

MACFHIONGHUIN

MACKINNON

At the edge of their past in smoke and ash. Feeling for warmth that‘s no longer there. House to house through Kilmuir, then Glendale, then Stenscholl. The last Skye born, 1888. All gone after the Highland Clearances. Before forced diaspora.

Mac Fhionghuin. Son of Fair Born. Isle of Skye. Isle of Mull. Generations between Kilmuir, Glendale, and Stenscholl.

Severed from language, land, and ancestors. Violent and humiliating.

To Birmingham, a loud, soot-choked industrial city. A place of rising opportunity. Carrying MacKinnon into a new world.

Fought on Western Front, Gallipoli, Salonika, and Middle East campaigns. Highland Light Infantry. Tartan flashes, Highland bagpipes, and a proud martial tradition. 1914-1920. Highlanders were often placed in frontline assaults due to their regimental reputation. Once tied to the Jacobite Rebellion, now fighting for the Crown.

Then to carry a Gaelic name like Mac Fhionghuin through anatomy halls in Dublin. Ronald MacDonald MacKinnon. Angus Ian MacKinnon. William Ewen MacKinnon.

Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Patience, Highlander.
You have done well. With heart, faith and steel. In the end there can be only one.

Although their remains rest in Australia, all 3 are Men of Skye.

One of the oldest clans of the Isles. A branch of the Siol Alpin, those clans who claim descent from Alpin, father of Cináed mac Ailpín, first King of Scots. Fighting alongside Robert the Bruce during the Wars of Scottish Independence. Legend holds that Bruce found shelter with the clan while evading capture after the Battle of Dalrigh in 1306 and awarded them land for their loyalty, bravery and protection. Then onto Bannockburn with MacDonald in 1314. Aligned with the powerful Lords of the Isles, becoming hereditary abbots on Iona and defenders of Gaelic traditions. In the 18th century, they were ardent Jacobites: fighting at Culloden in 1746, where their support for Bonnie Prince Charlie led to severe reprisals. Their ancestral lands on Skye and Mull were gradually lost after the failed uprisings, and like many Highland clans, they were scattered by the Clearances.

And the island tapestry spreads. MacDonald. And MacLeod. And even Norse-blooded Lamont, Argyll-forged. Cuimhnich Bàs Ailpein! Cuimhnich Bàs Ailpein! Cuimhnich Bàs Ailpein!

Ó Siadhail

Keeper of bodies, keeper of words, the unbroken line between healing and remembering. Siadh meaning peace or síol meaning seed. Originally from Ulster, especially counties Donegal, Tyrone, Antrim. Hereditary physicians, scribes, or poets in Gaelic courts. Under the patronage of ancient dynasties like the O’Neills or O’Donnells.

Rent arrears during the hungry months when no coin could buy what the earth wouldn‘t give. Famine and land clearances. The long scattering.

Once echoed in bardic halls. Anglicized for colonial paperwork. Shiels under pressure to assimilate.

And in 1947.

No surviving name passes to her children. Folded into the settler mainstream of Patrilineal erasure.

Unmarried Male Immigrant. Abraham Abrahams. Brought out by Marshall. Native of London. Son of Israel and Sophia. 21 years. Good health.

Lord Western. Port Jackson, Sydney, New South Wales. 3 October 1840. Bounty Immigrant. Boot and Shoemaker.

Working-class Jewish immigrants from London found their footing in the leather and shoe trades. The earliest threads of a colonial fashion industry down under. An explained connection to Michael Hyam, the London born bootmaker and community elder who offered both soles and blessings. A trade connection, a cultural anchor. And under Hyam’s guidance, Abraham marries Rachel at the Five Islands.

A later life mystery. At some point, a disappearance from the Sydney records. Rachel remains listed alone in the directories for decades. A re-recorded name from Abraham to Joseph. Maybe he died between births and directories. Maybe he stepped out and never returned. A silence sewn into the ancestry line.

Convict pulse threads Ashkenazi marrow that braids through Gaelic lightning. And that Highlander granite flows through Staffordshire merchants into a Norman blade of Irish Scottish soil. And fiercer now, the pattern blazes electric. Ignite the live wires of my patchwork veins. So much voltage surging still, tomorrow. All this blood thunder, genetic memory, compressed and buried and renamed. I carry the weight forward. Every severed root, every salt crossed ocean. I am a Daughter of Skye, a Son of Fhionghuin, immigrant struck, Australia forged. This is the heart that dances within a million chambers.

The Australian Colonial System teaches people to mistrust their complexity.

Depth can only be dangerous.

To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget. To bleach. To forget.

Until what remains fits neatly in the margins of someone else’s story.

That is not truth.

Just colonial inheritance speaking.

A fluid register persists.

I will never look away.