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Post by lagatta on Aug 21, 2018 22:35:23 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Aug 21, 2018 23:29:17 GMT
Pot calling kettle black? “(American) history includes plenty of genocide, slavery, and just a dash of prison folk — and the latter may be news to many Americans who wouldn’t hesitate to make jokes about Australia being populated by the descendants of criminals. But Australia really wasn’t special in that regard. Shipping criminals halfway around the world was part of America’s sordid history, too.” paleofuture.gizmodo.com/britain-sent-thousands-of-its-convicts-to-america-not-1707458418
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 21, 2018 23:39:32 GMT
That fancy phone don't do no backward scrollin'? We are not taught in American schools that all non-Aboriginal Australians are descended from convicts. We were taught that criminals, meaning many people who committed "crimes" such as stealing a pocket handkerchief or a loaf of bread, were transported to the colonies, including to what is now the US. I admit I laughed at the commentator's crack -- perhaps offensive, but too clever to forego. I knew a motormouth Scotsman here who more than once informed me that the US was populated by the criminal dregs of Scotland and England.
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Post by questa on Aug 22, 2018 1:38:27 GMT
Funny how perceptions change. When I was a kid it was shameful to have a convict in the family tree. Then the post WW2 floods of migrants and the current refugee/illegal migration shows that 75% of the population have a parent born overseas. Those of us who have a convict ancestor are now proud to say we are 5th or 6th generation Ozzies, even if we are a minority in our own country.
The numbers of free settlers far out stripped the convicts, and for any convict transported there were hundreds kept in UK prisons. The chances are you are more likely to have convict blood if you were not transported.
As for the BBC chap's repartee, any Ozzie would have given a wry chuckle and accepted him as an Honorary Ozzie on the spot. Ironic wit is the mark of our humour, and cricket commentary is full of examples. I am sure there would have been a matching back answer if the officer was "one of the 25%".
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Post by Kimby on Aug 22, 2018 2:50:57 GMT
That fancy phone don't do no backward scrollin'? I did see your post, bixa. I just wanted to post the results of my research on the topic. Interestingly the British initially shipped convicts to the American colonies, until the Revolution made that difficult and they started sending them to Australia. Eventually 3 times as many ended up in OZ.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 3:30:13 GMT
The French shipped their convicts to French Guiana, and yellow fever and malaria did the rest. Those who did survive prison wee generally obliged to stay in Guiana and not allowed to return to metropolitan France.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 4:37:09 GMT
Oh, that is interesting, Huckle! I don't think I've heard of that method of getting to the colonies before. Coincidentally, I'm watching a tv series right now which includes transportation to the colonies for one of the characters as an act of mercy, to spare the character being hanged.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 4:46:25 GMT
I believe that was an option regularly given to British prisoners.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 4:51:03 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 5:42:31 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 6:01:55 GMT
Neither of the two links address whether or not a person could ask to be shipped off instead of being hanged, though. In the Quora link:
Andrew C. Worthington, Academic economist, father, interests in travel, history and politics Updated May 31, 2017 The individual convicts certainly had no choice. Transportation often resulted from the commutation of a death sentence (not that the convicts had any choice in that either), so in one sense it was often a preferable outcome.
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Post by questa on Aug 22, 2018 7:39:56 GMT
My ancestor was sentenced to be hanged but it was commuted to 14 years in the Colony. (He was a head gardener in a Big House where the Owner had gambled away the workers' salaries. He demanded his wages, Boss produced a pistol which discharged a shot into the ceiling when both men were struggling for it. Judge knew the whole story hence transportation rather than death.) Sydney had big food shortages and most convicts and guards were city folk. Ancestor was able to get food crops going and had teams of men doing the hard work in different soils around the colony. He was freed early and given parcels of land including in the super fertile Hunter Valley. Became Squire of the area, married daughter of genteel settlers...kids became veterinarians, horse breeders etc. My Father's great grandfather (I think.)
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 10:02:24 GMT
When I was little, I was aware that "party lines" existed for the telephone, but I don't think we ever had one. We certainly didn't by the time I was old enough to use a telephone. I looked up how they worked, since I never really knew. Apparently each subscriber had sis/her own ring sequence to be able to identify if the call concerned them. But there was nothing preventing other people from picking up a phone and listening in if they found it in use. Big Brother would love it! And of course there was the problem of people who received 10 calls a day compared to people who received one or two calls a week, since everybody sharing a line had to listen to the ringing.
I was rather surprised to read that party lines continued to exist in the United States until the early 1990's.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 22, 2018 11:04:40 GMT
Harking back a bit, it wasn't just criminal convicts (as we would understand them today) who were transported. Way back, those defeated in (I think) Monmouth's rebellion were sent into slavery in Barbados, and there's a community of their descendants there still. Later, some of those involved in the Irish rising of 1848 were transported to Australia, and decades later Queen Victoria was not at all amused to learn that the new chief minister of one of the colonies had been one of them. My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
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Post by questa on Aug 22, 2018 13:32:54 GMT
A friend of mine had a great-something uncle who was sentenced to the colony for "biting the nose off a policeman during an Irish uprising".
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Post by lagatta on Aug 22, 2018 13:35:26 GMT
And from the Patriote rebellion here in Québec in 1837. Not surprising that those deportees (the song "Un Canadien errant" is about one of them) fell in with the Irish rebels, for political and Catholic religious reasons.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 13:38:03 GMT
Gee, some of you are a hundred or two hundred years older than me to be remembering all this stuff.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 15:46:01 GMT
That's right, Sonny. Ancestor was able to get food crops going and had teams of men doing the hard work in different soils around the colony. He was freed early and given parcels of land including in the super fertile Hunter Valley. Questa, you are so lucky to have all those details of your family history. Also, that's a great illustration of what the first commenter in the Quora link tells about the make-up of those transported to Australia. Harking back a bit, it wasn't just criminal convicts (as we would understand them today) who were transported. In the Nunhead Cemetery thread, I showed a picture of the Scottish Political Martyrs memorial, with a link to the story of those men who were transported to Australia. That link goes on to LaGatta then referenced Les Patriotes of Canada, who suffered similar fates. Re: party lines ~ I remember we one when I was around 14, I think. As far as I know, they were mostly in rural areas by then, although we were living in a town. A friend of mine who lived out in the country near that town related that her family waited a good while for a phone, as they had to pay the large fee for running a line out to their house, which was far off the main road.
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Post by Kimby on Aug 22, 2018 17:35:09 GMT
Huckle, where in Northern Wisconsin?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 22, 2018 18:14:02 GMT
The French shipped their convicts to French Guiana, and yellow fever and malaria did the rest. Those who did survive prison wee generally obliged to stay in Guiana and not allowed to return to metropolitan France. Many of them were also shipped to Louisiana when it was under French rule.
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Post by Kimby on Aug 22, 2018 20:04:28 GMT
Just south of Superior near a tiny town named Gordon on beautiful Clyde Lake.
My sister and I loved the cottage because it was like living in the pioneer days we studied in school. My mother was less than thrilled.
Yeah, rustic cottages make a lot of work for moms, giving their kids experiences to remember.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 20:13:03 GMT
It's funny that now it is a badge of honour for a lot of people to have a place so remote that it doesn't have electricity (at least in countries where more than 99% of the people have electricity).
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2018 22:24:23 GMT
I don't know if it's so much a badge of honor, as that getting to be in a place with no light pollution is a rare treat. Years ago I was at Hierve el Agua, way up on a mountain, when the electricity gave out. You could practically see every star in the milky way & for a night or two, going to bed by candlelight is fun. But at heart I worship elecricity. On the property we also had an ice house where people stored ice to use for their ice boxes. The ice in huge blocks was cut from the lake in winter and wrapped in straw for keeping. In town in S. Wisconsin we had block ice for our ice boxes delivered and as children we begged the delivery man for slivers. Fascinating, Huckle. I can imagine that was paradise for you kids, but way more like drudgery for your mother. Coincidentally, last night I was digging out old pictures for a cousin and came across this one. Unfortunately, the ice is nearly invisible. This was in a logging town in Mississippi. No idea where their ice came from.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 22, 2018 22:28:24 GMT
In any case, I'm sure that my family was far from the only one that called the refrigerator the "icebox" throughout my childhood.
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Post by questa on Aug 23, 2018 0:00:03 GMT
The seaside town that I grew up in was south of Sydney and built on solid sandstone.This meant that any underground services and infrastructure were difficult and very expensive to build. So not only did the railway line stop at my town so did anything else that involved digging a trench. We had party telephone lines until 1950s, and the sewerage system went through in the early 1960s. The bitumen road became 4 lanes of highway in the late 60s and the developers moved in.
Now the place is big and busy, but has the benefit of letting other towns make the mistakes of over-development and loss of character. My childhood town has kept its art deco buildings, parks and gardens, family shops and raffish feel of a seaside holiday town. Even the supermarket is tucked away from the main street.
Sometimes it pays to be a late developer.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 23, 2018 0:38:52 GMT
Oh, that makes so much sense about the ice coming on barges -- thanks!
That is the loveliest memory about the northern lights, Huckle. We lived in Alaska when I was four and five and I can remember seeing the lights. One of our neighbors was a young married woman who my brother and I thought was beautiful and wonderful. We called the northern lights "Margaret's rainbow" in her honor.
Kerouac, my family called it ice box also, although my grandmother frequently referred to it as the Frigidaire.
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 23, 2018 3:58:24 GMT
I remember the day they paved the street in front of the house. It was exciting. I hadn't started going to school yet. My mother told me to be careful and to go nowhere near the asphalt, but I got some on my shoes anyway.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 23, 2018 6:28:42 GMT
In my childhood we had an old icebox, complete with its lead lining; and a meatsafe in the cellar. The icebox hadn't been used since probably before the war, but I don't recall a fridge arriving until some time in the 1950s (not that I'd have been particularly aware of it). Now, as for washing machines.. My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
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Post by questa on Aug 23, 2018 12:42:56 GMT
Older houses in Oz had separate buildings away from the main house in which to do the laundry. These were built of bricks and cement, with concrete floors and a raised area which held a large copper tub. Under this tub was a fire place and beside it was a stone bench and 2 concrete tubs, each with its cold water taps.
Early morning the fire was lit and the copper filled with water soon heated to boiling. Detergent was added and the 'whites'put in to boil. After some poking and stirring they were levered out with a 'copper stick' and dropped into a concrete tub to cool and rinse. Then the coloured clothes had their turn with the fire out and cooler water. After 2 rinses the whites were given a short soaking in water coloured deep blue with a substance called Reckitt's Blue. The washing was fed through a wooden mangle which rolled out excess water, then wheeled in a basket trolley to the clothesline.
The line was usually a length of rope tied between trees or fences. Where it sagged in the middle it was supported by a 'prop' to hold it high. A man would go house-to-house selling props which were trimmed strong tree-branches with a natural Y shaped cleft at the top to hold the line. Carved wooden clothes pegs held the washing to the line, these were also sold door-to-door by the carvers.
The hot water was bailed out of the copper with a 'dipper' and used to tip onto weeds on paths and gardens.
The laundries soon disappeared when the washing machines took over. There was extra room in the yard to be used. We washed like this until 1956. OH...the reason for the separate building...If the fire got out of control, it wouldn't burn the house down.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 23, 2018 14:24:50 GMT
Oh dear me, yes, I remember my mother using the old "copper" (fortunately we did have running hot water at least, no fires underneath it!), the mangle and the rotary washing line in the garden. No wonder she leapt at the option of using the launderette at the bottom of the street as soon as it opened up - and got me to take the laundry down there and get it done, from time to time. Eventually she got her own twin tub and spinner at home. My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
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