Ghost In The Machine
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2014
- Messages
- 2,521
- Location
- Yorkshire
Wasn't til we lived in Colorado, I ever really had a sense of the sheer massiveness of some places outside Europe. Here, every thing is built on, overlooked - no woods that stretch for entire counties, etc. I think that genre of 'backpacker murder' films and TV has, of course, plenty to do with a recent serial killer but also, speaks to this fear deep inside us all, of being alone in an unknown vastness. And all those 17thC, 18thC and 19thC US 'captive' narratives - this fear of what christian Europeans would have seen as 'the uncivilized' and 'wilderness' runs deep, I think (translated in some cultures in the 20thC into alien abduction stories, I suspect...) Space, the final frontier. Etc.
Mungoman, my son's fiancee comes from the Potteries! They still export their very lovely women as she's now living here in Yorkshire!
Skinny, yes, them merinos were something we can't farm very well here. My Aus relatives were a Lincolnshire farmer's son who went out on the Third Fleet as a marine then married a convict and stayed and an 1840s' grt grt uncle whose story I stumbled on in the 19thC newspapers, when researching summat else. He was an 'incendiarist' and got the death sentence but it was xmas so the sentence got commuted to transportation. I think he was eventually released and stayed in Tasmania, which is where my other (unrelated) earlier relative had also gone. On my dad's side there is another Aus connection - he had a very posh ancestor who went bankrupt around 1830, and took himself to Aus to build a new life. Interestingly, I found this man mentioned in the newspapers a few years earlier, as the victim of a notorious robber. The robber had been transported to Aus. He ended up staying there and my man's son married the convict's daughter! Always intrigues me to think of these Yorkshire people, probably never been beyond York in their lives, suddenly at the other side of the world...
Mungoman, my son's fiancee comes from the Potteries! They still export their very lovely women as she's now living here in Yorkshire!
Skinny, yes, them merinos were something we can't farm very well here. My Aus relatives were a Lincolnshire farmer's son who went out on the Third Fleet as a marine then married a convict and stayed and an 1840s' grt grt uncle whose story I stumbled on in the 19thC newspapers, when researching summat else. He was an 'incendiarist' and got the death sentence but it was xmas so the sentence got commuted to transportation. I think he was eventually released and stayed in Tasmania, which is where my other (unrelated) earlier relative had also gone. On my dad's side there is another Aus connection - he had a very posh ancestor who went bankrupt around 1830, and took himself to Aus to build a new life. Interestingly, I found this man mentioned in the newspapers a few years earlier, as the victim of a notorious robber. The robber had been transported to Aus. He ended up staying there and my man's son married the convict's daughter! Always intrigues me to think of these Yorkshire people, probably never been beyond York in their lives, suddenly at the other side of the world...