both sides of the family that, until your father got his disgrace ban, has saved us from being total no-hopers.â
What she was referring to was the harmonica, or mouth organ as we all called it. It seems, going way back in time, weâve always been a musical family. John McKenzie, my convict great-grandfather on my dadâs side, played the fiddle, though my grandpa, Cliff McKenzie, took up the mouth organ when it first came out from Germany and was known as the aura . As a young bloke of eighteen in Burnie, where John McKenzie had settled after gaining his ticket of leave, Cliff quit fishing to join the 1860 gold rush on the mainland.
He soon discovered that he didnât much care for digging and, after staking several useless claims, he found he was marginally more successful with a pack of cards than sluicing for ore. While playing poker with an American prospector, he won a harmonicon known as the Prairie Queen, an instrument far superior to the aura . It was all the encouragement he needed to quit and become a bush musician.
This new career inevitably led Cliff McKenzie into country pubs, picnic races, bush celebrations, weddings and wakes, enabling him to continue the family tradition on two fronts: as an expert in making music and a proclivity for getting drunk, and to this he added an addiction to gambling. He eventually grew tired of the itinerant lifestyle and when, in 1888 he heard that Queen Island was to be opened for land settlement he came to the island at the age of forty-six where he received a grant and took up farming. He married a girl from Burnie, a cousin twenty-five years his junior. My grandmother, Maud Jasmine, gave him six children and died giving birth to Alf.
Of course my grandfather, despite his career as a bush musician where he should have picked up a thing or two about rural living, knew nothing about tilling the land or keeping livestock. He soon got into debt with the bank, which eventually foreclosed on him. With the change he got after the bank had sold his farm, Cliff McKenzie bought a small house near the harbour and resumed life as a fisherman, one of the first on the island.
He never bothered to marry again but, with his background and the social graces he had acquired as an entertainer, the mouth organ wasnât the only instrument he employed to charm the island ladies. In the process he succeeded in scattering his seed widely and generously. Two generations along, a good few kids at school possessed our red hair and pale freckled skin and, moreover, had a distinctly McKenzie look about them.
On my mumâs side, also an original island-settler family as well as convict stock from Hobart, there appeared to be a string of Irish tenors going way back to County Clare, and a great-grandmother, Mary Kelly, nee Flannaghan, who legend has it, played the Irish harp like an angel but was sent to Tasmania as a convict for keeping a bawdy house. She is said to have earned her ticket of leave early by being regularly requested by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the governor, to be allowed to leave the Womenâs Prison to play the harp at her Friday-evening soirees at Government House in Hobart. So it was not unexpected that the Kelly and McKenzie combination made us a pretty musical bunch.
By island standards we were a small family, just four kids, with me the eldest, then Sue, followed by my twin brothers, Steve and Cory. Most of the fishermen bred like bunny rabbits with eight or nine kids just about the norm. Birth control, even among the Protestants, was unthinkable. Boys from the age of fourteen usually left school to work on the boats and the girls cleaned fish, mended nets and made craypots, the more kids the better being the prevailing philosophy.
âThank Gawd for the mumps!â my mum would say after weâd visited one or another of our multitudinous relations or another fishermanâs family. At the age of twenty-five Alf had contracted mumps, which,
What she was referring to was the harmonica, or mouth organ as we all called it. It seems, going way back in time, weâve always been a musical family. John McKenzie, my convict great-grandfather on my dadâs side, played the fiddle, though my grandpa, Cliff McKenzie, took up the mouth organ when it first came out from Germany and was known as the aura . As a young bloke of eighteen in Burnie, where John McKenzie had settled after gaining his ticket of leave, Cliff quit fishing to join the 1860 gold rush on the mainland.
He soon discovered that he didnât much care for digging and, after staking several useless claims, he found he was marginally more successful with a pack of cards than sluicing for ore. While playing poker with an American prospector, he won a harmonicon known as the Prairie Queen, an instrument far superior to the aura . It was all the encouragement he needed to quit and become a bush musician.
This new career inevitably led Cliff McKenzie into country pubs, picnic races, bush celebrations, weddings and wakes, enabling him to continue the family tradition on two fronts: as an expert in making music and a proclivity for getting drunk, and to this he added an addiction to gambling. He eventually grew tired of the itinerant lifestyle and when, in 1888 he heard that Queen Island was to be opened for land settlement he came to the island at the age of forty-six where he received a grant and took up farming. He married a girl from Burnie, a cousin twenty-five years his junior. My grandmother, Maud Jasmine, gave him six children and died giving birth to Alf.
Of course my grandfather, despite his career as a bush musician where he should have picked up a thing or two about rural living, knew nothing about tilling the land or keeping livestock. He soon got into debt with the bank, which eventually foreclosed on him. With the change he got after the bank had sold his farm, Cliff McKenzie bought a small house near the harbour and resumed life as a fisherman, one of the first on the island.
He never bothered to marry again but, with his background and the social graces he had acquired as an entertainer, the mouth organ wasnât the only instrument he employed to charm the island ladies. In the process he succeeded in scattering his seed widely and generously. Two generations along, a good few kids at school possessed our red hair and pale freckled skin and, moreover, had a distinctly McKenzie look about them.
On my mumâs side, also an original island-settler family as well as convict stock from Hobart, there appeared to be a string of Irish tenors going way back to County Clare, and a great-grandmother, Mary Kelly, nee Flannaghan, who legend has it, played the Irish harp like an angel but was sent to Tasmania as a convict for keeping a bawdy house. She is said to have earned her ticket of leave early by being regularly requested by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the governor, to be allowed to leave the Womenâs Prison to play the harp at her Friday-evening soirees at Government House in Hobart. So it was not unexpected that the Kelly and McKenzie combination made us a pretty musical bunch.
By island standards we were a small family, just four kids, with me the eldest, then Sue, followed by my twin brothers, Steve and Cory. Most of the fishermen bred like bunny rabbits with eight or nine kids just about the norm. Birth control, even among the Protestants, was unthinkable. Boys from the age of fourteen usually left school to work on the boats and the girls cleaned fish, mended nets and made craypots, the more kids the better being the prevailing philosophy.
âThank Gawd for the mumps!â my mum would say after weâd visited one or another of our multitudinous relations or another fishermanâs family. At the age of twenty-five Alf had contracted mumps, which,
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