My Mum once made a passing remark about my son’s girlfriend (now wife) being ‘foreign’. The remark wasn’t intended as criticism. To my mother it was just a fact because my future daughter-in-law’s mother came here from Sri Lanka.
I knew from experience that Mum always accepted people at face value and never judged them on where they came from or what they looked like, but only on their actions. She was always very social and made friends easily. She was that person who talks to strangers in the supermarket queue, and she found differences in people’s background interesting, if sometimes confusing to her simple view of the world.
In this era of political correctness or wokeness or whatever we choose to call it, many people would still call out such a comment as racist and that was probably why my immediate reaction was to try and change my mother’s opinion, by pointing out that I was exactly as ‘foreign’ as my daughter in law.
We both were born in Australia, and each of us had a parent who, while not indigenous had a history here dating back a hundred years or more, and both of us also had a parent born in another country. In my case though my father’s family came here from Scotland, which to my mother at least ‘felt less foreign’ than a country where people spoke a different language and had social and cultural customs that she had never experienced.
I am not sure I really convinced Mum of the similarities, and at the time I just accepted that she had old fashioned outdated opinions that I couldn’t change. Now as think about it, I am struck by how the time in which she grew up was so vastly different to today’s world or even the quaint dated world of the 1950s and 60s that I grew up in. In the last 60 years changes in Australian society have accelerated to the point where we are far more similar to he rest of the world and I don’t believe that has always been for the better.
Mum grew up surrounded by people with a very British heritage, all the overseas ancestors she knew about at that time had come here from England or Scotland. The stories they told, the food they ate, the traditions they followed were all based on a thousand years of British history. Christmas back then was all fir trees and Roast Turkey and Plum Pudding in spite of the blazing summer temperatures outside.
Distance was also different then, people didn’t travel in the way we do now. She was born and grew up in South Melbourne, got married there, lived around the corner from her parents house and didn’t move out of the suburb until she was nearly 40 years old. Ironically when we moved in the 60s to the outer fringes of Melbourne we lived just one suburb away from Greensborough where Mum used to go on family outings as a child when it took all day to get there and back in her father’s Model T Ford and Grandpa would take his ferrets to catch rabbits for them to eat and share with neighbours who had as little as they did during the depression years.
Even when she met my Dad he had been here since the age of two and shared the same sort of background and traditions. Her future father-in-law would tease her by exaggerating his Scottish accent and using Scots words and sayings to make it harder for her to understand him but that was the extent of her exposure to a foreign culture.
Mum developed dementia in 2013 and died at the beginning of 2020 and so she didn’t get a chance to see her great grandchildren grow up, but one thing I’m sure she’d agree with is that the interesting mix of what she would call ‘Australian and Foreign’ heritage has produced two very attractive, and funny and smart kids. Of course I may be a bit biased about that.
Categories: Genealogy opinion Pieces of History
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