The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Alexander told me about a long series of Tasmanian social maneuvers, all designed to section off the present from the past. Most obviously the island changed its name from Van Diemen’s Land, well known back in England (from different sources including songs about convict hardship) to Tasmania. If visitors called the place Van Diemen’s Land, they would be corrected. The word “convict” became unutterable too—and the existence of the convict colony unacknowledged. Newspapers and speakers used all sorts of linguistic dodges to avoid the C word. People wrote of “doubtful origins,” “different regimes,” and a “gloomy phase” in the island’s history. (In Sydney ex-convicts were known as “government men.”) The point, of course, was that the locals would know what was meant, while people outside the colony would not.

  For a few decades after the convict system ended, there were no histories written of the colony. Even private diarists and memoirists—who were surrounded by convicts everywhere they turned and were likely descended from convicts, if not ex-convicts themselves—hardly mentioned them. No one spoke of anyone else’s ancestry, let alone their own, and it was considered rude to ask. The obituaries of the best-known and longest-lived convicts did not mention how they had gotten to Tasmania, as if they had always been there; in some cases they simply lied, claiming they had emigrated.

  • • •

  How did people talk about Tasmania’s history after transportation ended in 1856 and the Port Arthur settlement closed in 1877? In the climate of silence, completely outlandish ideas about the founding population became somehow credible. Alexander cites John West, a Tasmanian government minister and historian, who in 1852 claimed there was almost no trace left of the original convict population. They had mostly died, he said, and anyway they had borne few children. “They melt from the earth,” he wrote, “and pass away like a mournful dream.”

  But even though personal information about convict ancestry wasn’t passed down, the threat of ridicule was. In 1942, after more than twenty thousand Australians had died fighting for the Allies, Australia’s prime minister said it was time for his country’s troops to come home. In response, Winston Churchill, who wanted them to remain on the battlefront, declared that the Australians were “bad stock.”

  In the 1960s, when Joe Mauch fled the oppressive silence of postwar Germany and came to Australia, he was fascinated by the nation’s convict past and asked his new Australians friends about it. But in an echo of what he went through growing up after the war, no one would give him a straight answer until someone told him, “We don’t talk about that,” and he didn’t ask again.

  Eventually the prolonged period of not knowing came to an end. At some point after the 1960s, when the civil rights and antiwar movements had penetrated most corners of the world, when many of the children of the last convicts shipped to Australia had died, when it became acceptable to belong to the working class, and when Australians stopped caring quite so much about what the British thought of them, the shame of having a convict relative lifted, to the point of even becoming part of the high school curriculum. In this too Alexander demonstrates that family historians led the way. Little of the history would be known if many individuals hadn’t begun to research their own ancestors. Their experience shows that tracking personal history can force an awareness of the bubbles of knowledge in which one exists and the way information moves through time and space.

  Perhaps the most compelling measure that some kind of great family historical cycle has been completed, or has at least moved into a different phase, is that we live in a time of trying to uncover what our antecedents so carefully concealed. A similar process took place in Ireland in 1995, 150 years after the Irish famine. Although the famine has been described as a great chasm that divided the Ireland that came before it from the one that came after, and despite the fact that its impact has been likened to that of Cromwell’s invasion a century earlier, it was the subject of relatively little research and only a small trickle of books and articles. In 1985 interest in the topic began to slowly build, peaking a decade later. No doubt the arrival of a significant anniversary accounts in part for the trend, but what can explain the lack of interest before it? The famine killed one million people, more than two million people fled the country, tens of thousands were evicted from their homes, an entire social class disappeared, and poverty, fever, and mental and physical violence spread like the blight. Family members turned on one another to survive, isolating those who were ill or acting as landlords’ agents. People begged for the money just to bury their dead.

  A huge number of oral histories and private diaries from the period have survived. They describe experiences like coming upon a group of corpses on the road, mothers and children clinging together; a young girl standing dead against a gate; a pile of bones in a deserted cottage that suddenly moaned and moved and revealed itself to be a whole starving family. Records from government documentation, social analyses, and workhouse records exist too. Yet until non-Irish historians began to reexamine the era in the 1980s, hardly anyone spoke of it.

  The Irish famine and the Holocaust were traumas of unprecedented scale, and while many aspects of the respective events obviously differ there are important comparisons. Although many second-generation Holocaust survivors suffered because their parents would never speak about what they had experienced, Jewish society has conscientiously developed a culture of remembering, lest so terrible a tragedy ever happen again. Modern historians have suggested that the newly opened dialogue about the famine may mean the Irish are finally coming to terms with their loss.

  • • •

  Anyone who still wonders if Francis Galton was right and criminality is heritable need only examine Tasmania to find the most complete, natural experiment of crime and genetics in the history of the world. Were the people of Tasmania a little like Robert Bakewell’s Dishley sheep? Did their intermarriage over the course of a hundred years make the criminal stain darker over generations?

  Apart from one rather peculiar outcome, Alexander told me, there is little to distinguish modern Tasmanian society from others that were not founded almost entirely by criminals. The settlement certainly didn’t develop into a community of organized crime, where generation after generation was indoctrinated into the family business. In fact, the only tangible effect was that, for a while, the people of Tasmania were the most law-abiding in the world. According to Braithwaite, by the end of the nineteenth century Tasmania was “one of the most serene places on earth.”

  Despite the fact that the late-nineteenth-century rate of imprisonment was higher in Tasmania than in any nation in the modern world, the rate was lower than that of any developed country by the second decade of the twentieth century. Between 1875 and 1884 there were twenty-two convictions for murder, but over the next three decades there were none; no one was convicted of homicide again in Tasmania until 1916. No wonder everyone was willing to believe that the convicts had actually vanished. The pattern was true of Australia overall. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, as the U.S. imprisonment rate dramatically increased, the number of people sent to jail decreased in Australia, and in the 1930s crime rates across the country were at an all-time low. Presumably Tasmanians were taking great pains to demonstrate that they were personally unlikely to have descended from criminals. Of course, they were all lying, but that was not a punishable offense. After a while Tasmanians relaxed a little and stopped being quite such model citizens.

  Remarkably, some people still maintain the criminal stereotype of Australians, only to find that the label no longer sticks. In 2007 Australia’s then most senior Muslim cleric, Taj el-Din al-Hilali, told a local Egyptian TV show, “The Anglo-Saxons arrived in Australia in shackles. We came as free people. We bought our own tickets. We are entitled to Australia more than they are.” Al-Hilali was well known for making inflammatory remarks, but the reaction to this particular statement was not outrage but hilarity. He later insisted that al
l he meant was that “we love Australia so much that we choose to be here. We were not forced to be here.”

  • • •

  I finally learned what Michael Deegan looked like when a second cousin showed me a photo of him. I hadn’t even imagined that one might exist, and it was an amazing feeling to finally see the face of the man who had survived so much. At Point Puer he learned how to be a sawyer. I found out much later that somewhere along the way he lost a hand. He was released in 1848 and moved to the southernmost mainland state, Victoria. He looked small, even impish. He grinned at the camera, and it was easy to detect a twinkle in his eye. I also saw a photo of Ann McGrath, convict wife, possible convict herself, mother of ten. She had light eyes, like her husband, but their demeanors couldn’t have been more different: She looked exhausted.

  It looks like Deegan’s strategy succeeded. It took a few generations, but the pain is gone, and the history that was actively, perhaps desperately, hidden has faded into a history that has simply been forgotten. My own nonscientific observation is that in this respect my family doesn’t seem to be very different from the families of people with whom I grew up, some who immigrated a long time ago, some who arrived more recently, and presumably only some of whom have a colonial convict in the family tree. The majority of Deegan and McGrath’s great- and great-great-grandchildren are law-abiding and employed. Two are professional comedians. One is a magistrate.

  It’s fashionable now to assert that genealogy reveals much more about the genealogist than about his or her ancestors. No doubt there is a kind of Rorschach process involved, whereby the crowd of names and facts that one is able to pull together from whatever records remain looks as if it had a certain shape. Some people in my family tree stand out to me because what I learn about their lives feels as if it has relevance to my own—I found out about Julia and all her children when my children were a similar age. But this isn’t therapy; it’s the history of human lives. Michel Deegan was real, a man who loved and suffered, and the events of his dark and extraordinary life shaped him far more than my discovery of them has shaped me. I am, of course, curious about his legacy to all his descendants, myself included—not just the poverty and the crime but the secret he guarded as well. His secrets, and those of the other inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, shaped its culture for a long time, but what did the actual experience of concealment feel like within families?

  If Michael Deegan and Ann McGrath’s children were not aware that their parents had been convicts, it would be consistent with what the historians say—most people simply didn’t speak of it. My father was raised in part by his grandmother, Michael Deegan’s youngest daughter, and he remembers her as a particularly refined and ladylike woman. She trained as a teacher and then raised five children. She was also a twin, and her sister became a nun. Did she know?

  I contacted some of my father’s cousins, who were as surprised to hear the convict story as he had been. But they agreed that the convict’s daughter was renowned for her class and elegance. Did her parents teach her to be that way? Did she learn to be like that to distinguish herself from her parents? Was she a naturally graceful woman who was also lucky enough to grow up in a country where there was plenty of food and education for most people?

  I was a little nervous to tell my father about Michael Deegan, but the changing times had changed him too. He was completely surprised. He had never heard the slightest whisper of the truth, but he had no trouble accepting it. He was sad for Deegan and McGrath, and he was full of compassion for their situation. He didn’t think that anyone in his parents’ generation knew about our convict.

  I found out where Deegan and McGrath were buried, and one day my parents and I drove to the small country cemetery outside of Castlemaine. On a quiet road at the base of a steep green hill, they shared a grave with their son, his wife, their youngest daughter, and, as the gravestone said, “others.” Their stone was the smallest marker in the graveyard, but a beautiful tree leaned over where they lay, shielding it from the elements.

  It used to be that people could expect their illicit pasts would die with them, but the personal computer and Internet revolution have changed all that. Digging up records was once laborious, specific, physical work, but now it often just involves opening one’s laptop. The easy availability of all records means it will be harder and harder to invent your own past. For good and bad, the new historical transparency brings new responsibilities with it too.

  Chapter 6

  Information

  The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, no encroaching hunger, not the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the *organization* and *accessibility* of human knowledge. We own an enormous “encyclopedia”—which isn’t even arranged alphabetically. Our “file cards” are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

  Call it the Crisis of the Librarian.

  We need a new “specialist” who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.

  But we are not likely to get either one in a hurry and we have a powerful lot of grief before us in the meantime.

  —Robert Heinlein, “Where To?” (1950)

  There is an extraordinary group based in the United States that sends its representatives all over the world to gather information about the life histories of human populations. They make deals with states and churches to view the records of their citizens, both living and dead. Once inside the libraries and the vaults and the back rooms of the world’s archives, they set up their cameras and painstakingly photograph every birth certificate, marriage contract, and death certificate they can find. The images are sent back to their headquarters and stored in a vault that was hollowed out of a granite mountain in the Utah Rockies by their forebears, whose names are also stored there. In their theology family is sacrosanct, and scholarship and genealogy are essentially holy activities.

  In October 2012 I drove through a steep-sided pass to see if I could find the Granite Mountain Records Vault. The scrubby plants by the road were mustard yellow and rust, but the autumn breeze that blew through the car window still had a touch of warmth. On the south side of the pass, the rock’s geological layers pointed eighty degrees up at the sky. A few miles in, a rattlesnake lay coiled in the middle of the road. Thanks to old photographs and current Google satellite images, I found what I was looking for and got out to gaze up at the concrete arches that lead into the vault, built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as the LDS) in the 1950s.

  In the 1970s journalist Alex Shoumatoff described the vault’s six 200-foot-long chambers and three 350-foot-long corridors; its air-filtering, ion-detection, and smoke-detection systems; its meter for tracking movement in the earth’s crust; and the spring-loaded blast locks that will seal it in the event of a nuclear explosion, the natural temperature and humidity levels of the chambers preserving the film and paper records that remain. At the time of his visit the most striking wonder of the vault was the number of drawers that filled its chambers and the massive number of analog documents they held. Since then, access has been restricted, and the media and the public have been shut out. Still, the vault is one of the informational wonders of the world, and I was determined to see it, if only from the outside. According to the Mormons, millions of personal records are stored behind a fourteen-ton steel door, which stands three hundred feet inside the mountain.

  A week earlier in Colorado I drove into the same mountain range hundreds of miles east and placed my hand in the imprint left by a three-toed dinosaur one hundred million years ago. On Dinosaur Ridge, where the stegosaurus, allosaurus, and apatosaurus were discovered, clearly defined rows of footprints stomp up the rock wall, a busy ju
mble of moving feet from the shoreline of an ancient sea. The entirety of human history may be more ephemeral than one of those steps, but in the meantime the architects of the vault are leveraging the mountain against that possibility. Their goal is to preserve not just human history but all the individuals in it—at least, those whose existence has been noted on paper. The LDS is not the only American institution caching data in the mountains, either: Rumor has it that a U.S. government facility and various private facilities are dug in along the same road. Still, the Mormons think as hard as, probably harder than, anyone else in the world about what it means to keep facts alive, or at least to keep them accessible to the living, and the phenomenon they have built out of granite, microfilm, machines, and software is as mind-bogglingly ambitious for our century as the flying buttresses and gargoyles of Notre Dame were in the twelfth century.

  Even as a large branch of American genealogy sheared off at the turn of the twentieth century into a mad eugenic scheme to reshape the human race, the Mormons got on with their mission to gather and share records. Around that time Mormons whose ancestors had come from Europe could find out about their forebears only by traveling back to their home countries and transcribing whatever information they could find. As a way to assist its members, the church began to send representatives to locate collections of records, copy them all, and bring them back to Utah. In the 1920s the church began recording the genealogical information it had gathered on index cards, and in 1938 it started to make copies on microfilm. Eventually the microfilm was circulated to thousands of Mormon libraries throughout the world. By the 1950s the church elders faced an ever-growing pile of film, and in the wake of the great destruction of records in Germany in World War II, they started to dig into the mountain to store it safely for posterity.