18
The box with the dull pink ribbon
Late one morning in 1983, aged twenty, I sat at a table in a modern, well-lit reading room as a librarian placed before me a shoebox-sized document container. I remember no more details of her, except that she wore a bottle-green cardigan and, save for the soft clink of her two very fine, very old-looking gold bangles, went about her work in complete silence. Mouthing a silent ‘Thank you’, I directed my attention to the box. It was secured by a dull pink ribbon, a little like a legal document. More than its appearance, however, I remember its smelclass="underline" musty, with a hint of musk or cedar.
Earlier that day, I had taken the main line train from Waterloo station, preferring it to the underground as it allowed me to take in more of the London which, as a hopeless young anglophile, I’d pictured incessantly since childhood. Arriving at Kew Gardens station, I had been overawed by London’s gargantuan Public Record Office, a sprawling postmodern labyrinth of concrete and glass situated on the outskirts of the city.
As I entered the PRO’s looming grey facade, it occurred to me that somewhere amongst these miles of rooms and corridors, built to house the millions of documents recording the rise and decline of a nation and an empire—from luminous thousand-year-old parchments, to scribbled musings on Cabinet notepaper of long dead Prime Ministers—something pertaining to my own family lay hidden. My job was to find it.
As I began to tackle the complicated knot of ribbon, I pondered how many years had passed since some unknown hands had first tied it. Ten? A hundred? I felt myself to be at the end of a long, but private, quest. In fact, it was just the beginning.
My father, who I resemble in myriad ways both good and bad, but particularly physically, enjoyed a successful career in newspapers, though I suspect he preferred to think of himself more as a writer rather than a journalist. His forte was human interest. Even in such roles as court reporter he had a knack of bringing the emotional drama of a trial to life, rather than simply offering the usual dry procession of witnesses and judgments. Inheriting that gene myself, at school I found writing was the only thing I was remotely good at, and my father agreed. My writing became to him something of a project. In high school, he would mark up my essays and stories with the mysterious signs and symbols of a newspaper subeditor. He was ruthless, but when praise came, I knew it was genuine and hard-earned. In the end, writing became a bond—perhaps the only bond—between us.
One night he told me a story of his own. It was a true story, that of the terrible journey of the ‘plague ship’ Ticonderoga, and the dramatic arrival of the first of our family, our clan, in this country—my great-great-grandfather, James William Henry Veitch. In solemn tones, he spoke of the awful disease which erupted on board the overcrowded vessel, how death stalked the passengers, carrying off entire families, and the miracles our revered ancestor performed among the sick and the dying, both at sea and later in quarantine. It sounded like a dark and heroic epic, which of course is how it had been told to him. ‘This is your story too, you know’, he said. ‘You should write about it’. I agreed with him wholeheartedly. But I never did.
It was only several years later I came to appreciate just what the Ticonderoga story must have meant to my father. In all, Dr James William Henry Veitch and Annie bore nine children, six of whom survived. Their last, Henry, lived to the venerable age of 92, dying only in the year I was born, 1962. For reasons long forgotten, however, a family feud had split him from my grandfather, Alfred, and the two were not reconciled until late in life.
It was only well into his adulthood therefore, that my own father encountered his grandfather, Henry. Although he had always been aware of the Ticonderoga story, it was for him inchoate, and in fragments. Only after meeting Henry did it become something of an obsession for him.
A gentle and, by all accounts, beautifully spoken man, Henry Veitch told my father of his life growing up in central Victoria in the late 1800s, of his father, then a respected councillor, of his mother’s lilting Highland brogue which never left her, and of the harrowing account of their journey to Australia on board the Ticonderoga. Why my father did not seek out Henry earlier—feud or no feud—remains a mystery to me, as is the reason why he never attempted to write the story himself.
Many years later, as I prepared to leave for Europe as a twenty-year-old backpacker, my father requested that I chase down some of the original documentation pertaining to the Ticonderoga and James William Henry Veitch, which he suspected to be held in London. I gave him a half-hearted assurance that I would try, though in fact barely intended to keep the promise. In the weeks leading up to my departure, however, it was virtually all he talked of. Over the previous weeks, he had corresponded furiously with the Kew Public Record Office via mail, tracking down files and catalogue numbers, distilling them all into a folder, which he pressed solemnly into my hand a few days before the flight. As I passed through the airport gate, the look of expectation in his eyes made me realise that, like it or not, I too had now been burdened with the saga of the Ticonderoga.
A few weeks later, I lifted the lid of the box marked ‘54829 Colonial Correspondence—Victoria—Colonial Land and Emigration Society, 1852–53’. Inside was a pile of official letters, folded longways into rectangles and all written with a steel-nibbed pen in the long-vanished hand of copperplate. Some were bound by more pink ribbon. I opened the first one, smoothing out the century-and-a-half-old crease, quietly amazed that I was not required to wear special white gloves, or at least be watched over by the librarian. My own enthusiasm for the quest now thoroughly awakened, the contents of the box seemed far too precious to be handled by someone such as myself.
Although exquisite, the handwriting was at first almost impossible to decipher. Only after a few minutes could one word be made out, then another. Then, gradually, like cracking a code, the sentences appeared to almost shift into place and come alive. The first few documents seemed of little relevance, being written by one or other unknown government official concerning such topics as schedules and ships’ insurance tables, but a third of the way through the pile, one word on one letter leaped off the page. ‘We have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 17th instant, enclosing a Despatch from Lieutenant Governor Latrobe relative to the mortality which occurred among the Emigrants by the “Ticonderoga” both during her voyage and in Quarantine.’[1] It was written by Sir Thomas William Murdoch, the Board’s then chairman, to Herman Merivale, Permanent UnderSecretary for the Colonies, and dated June 29, 1853. It runs for fourteen pages, without a single mistake or correction, and represents the Board’s initial reaction to the report of the Ticonderoga disaster, which Murdoch had received only a few days earlier direct from Victoria and penned by Governor Charles La Trobe himself.
1
British Parliamentary Papers, 1854, vol. XLVI, pp. 52, available from: www.mylore.net/files/Download/Parl%20Papers%201854.pdf