The Past is Not Always Proud of Itself

Lost Voices, Untold Stories

I did not set out to write a family history. I had no neatly ribboned bundles of letters, nor old albums filled with sepia-toned portraits of Anthonys or Mazlins in their Sunday best. It was not a long-harboured plan. Some of it, I think, has to do with age. There comes a time when the horizon narrows and what lies behind begins to matter more. Or at least there is more of it. The passing of my mother, Victoria Dell Mazlin, later Anthony and Poulton, at the age of 94, and the unexpected gift of an Ancestry subscription were the immediate catalysts. But I do not want to make this sound too neat or trite. While I have always been drawn to history, this project does not aim to be an academic reconstruction of the past. The motivation is harder to define. I began with a simple desire: to understand my mother better and to make sense of the fragments of experience she shared with me, and a wish to know the people whose lives shaped the ground I now stand on and the country I live in.

Writing my family history, much of which unfolded in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has not only involved collecting names and dates of births, marriages, and deaths, but also exploring the connection between memory and history. These stories are not heroic or grand. But they are mine, and they are part of this country. Writing about them has meant encountering lives shaped by poverty, crime, punishment, migration, and deaths that too often came too early. And there are times when I am proud of them, proud not in the celebratory sense of triumph, but in the recognition of what they endured. In the second half of the 19th Century, Robert Anthony and Mary Jane Gibson buried two children under the age of two, in the cemetery where they would later lie themselves. They endured that grief and went on. Thomas Mazlin, the illegitimate child of two convicts and orphaned at 16, went on to become an orchardist and modest landowner in Sydney, raising close to twenty children with his two wives, Catherine Cook and Anne Wing.¹ But pride in their endurance and the strength of other family members sits alongside harder truths.

The past is not always proud of itself.

I return to this thought often. For some, the past holds achievement, recognition, or continuity. For me, it also holds damage. My maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Hannah Brown, was transported to New South Wales in 1814.² Four years later, my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Maslin, was also sent to the colony. Two poor young souls in England who stole scraps of cloth, she, a scarf; he, cotton from a bleaching field. She was sentenced to death, later commuted to transportation to New South Wales. He received a seven-year sentence in the colony. They met, though they never married. Their one child survived.

As I trace my lineage, I find Anthonys and Maslins who were part of the colonial administration. One served as a prison turnkey, while the other was an early Queensland policeman. One joined the Native Police, a colonial force of Aboriginal troopers commanded by white officers that was tasked to “disperse” Aboriginal people during the Frontier Wars.³

What has helped me to face these histories is the work of others. David Marr’s “Killing for Country” offered not only a reckoning with the violence that shaped Australia, but a model of how one might write with conscience.⁴ His work reminded me that shame and honesty can coexist. Kate Grenville's “Unsettled” explores her own family’s role in colonisation with similar honesty, confronting shameful legacies without defensiveness and showing how personal history can illuminate national truths. ⁵ Richard Flanagan’s “Question 7” had a different kind of impact. ⁶ He showed how memoir and history could blur, how the past might be approached sideways, even obliquely. His literary experimentation permitted me not to slavishly follow the conventions of family history writing. I am trying to do something else: to search for the lives behind the names and dates, and ask what they tell us about my family and all Australians.

This is not a confessional exercise. I do not seek catharsis or that overused term “closure”. But I do want to understand. Writing these stories has helped me reflect on my mother’s experiences and on the historical and social forces that shaped her life. The image you see above is of my mother as a small girl on the steps of her childhood home in Herberton. ⁷ That single image with her collection of bits and bobs in her little suitcase contains a world.

Along the way, I reflect on broader historical themes: 19th-century convict transportation and punishment; the dispossession of Aboriginal people and its lasting effects; the influence of religion on family and community life; the value placed on education and the barriers to accessing it; and, finally, how the major wars of the 20th century shaped Australian families, including my own.

This project is not an attempt to reclaim pride. Nor is it an exercise in condemnation. It is, simply, an attempt to understand, to bring into view the people and patterns that shaped a life, and to do so with humility and without heavy-handed or glib judgements. I do not expect a resolution. But I do expect that something is gained by the effort: a sharper sense of where I come from, and a more profound curiosity about where others do too.

This is where I have started. Others will have their own beginnings shaped by what was spoken, what was withheld, and what was never recorded. What aspects of your family’s history do you take pride in? And how do we reckon with those parts that are harder to face? Do we name them, interpret them, or remember them, or are some things better left unsaid?

Endnotes

1. Historical records indicate various spellings of the surname, including Maslin, Maslen, Marslin, Mazlen, and Mazlin. In this work, “Maslin” is used for the convict ancestor (born c.1790s), and “Mazlin” for his son Thomas Mazlin (1830–1894) and later descendants, reflecting the spelling adopted in the later 19th century. He lived on Sydney’s North Shore, where he worked as a timber getter and later an orchardist. His family acquired modest landholdings. Four of his children later moved to North Queensland, becoming involved in timber getting and agriculture.

2. Between 1788 and 1868, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia, primarily to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Transportation was a standard punishment for a wide range of crimes, including petty theft. For a more comprehensive account of female convict transportation, see A Marathon of Misery on my blog.

3. The Native Police was a colonial paramilitary force that operated across several Australian colonies, most prominently in Queensland. It consisted of Aboriginal troopers led by European officers and played a key role in violent frontier policing. The contested term “Frontier Wars” refers to the protracted conflicts between Aboriginal Australians and settlers from 1788 into the early 20th century. These were violent, often locally driven clashes over land and sovereignty that are increasingly recognised as central to Australia’s colonial history.

4. David Marr, Killing for Country (Black Inc., 2023) – Marr traces the violent history of his forebears during the colonisation of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, blending investigative journalism with personal reckoning.

5. Kate Grenville, Unsettled (Text Publishing, 2024) – Grenville explores the role of her ancestor in the colonisation of New South Wales and reflects on the ethical responsibilities of family history writing.

6. Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Knopf, 2023) – A literary memoir that experiments with form to link personal memory, global events, and philosophical questions about history and imagination.

7. Herberton is a tin-mining town established in the 1880s on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland. It later became a centre for agricultural and pastoral activity. Several members of the Mazlin family, descended from Thomas Mazlin, were among the early settlers in Herberton, Atherton, and Evelyn, contributing to the development of farming and timber industries in the region.