a respected identity

When I detailed my Danish Great, Great Grandfather's obituary in an earlier post, I told you that he was referred to as an 'old and respected identity'. It took me a long time to trace Jens Peter Jensen's history before he arrived in Australia (and there are still gaping holes) but I do know that his Mother was probably not a respected identity.

I am fascinated by the story of Jens Peter's Mother, Jensine Christiane Jensdatter. Jens Peter listed her as 'Christiane' on his records in Australia, so perhaps that is how she was known. She had at least 5 children and, from what I can glean, all by different fathers. As I traced her story through the Danish church records, it felt as though I was witnessing some 19th Century soap opera. I know that being a single mother could not have been easy, so I was thrilled when I discovered her marriage to Jeppe Holm Jonasen in 1848, saddened when both her daughter and Jeppe's daughter from his previous marriage died in 1852, and devastated when her and Jeppe's son died two years later. Jeppe died not long after, and I have lost track of Jensine Christiane from that point on. Unlike other branches of my family where illegitimate births do not have father's names attached, the Danish records have the 'alleged' father recorded. This is a remarkable thing and marvelously useful.

An understanding of Jen Peter's family history goes some way toward explaining why he chose to come to Queensland. Of his 8 children, 6 were daughters. Here 5 of those women are pictured on the beach. The second from the right is my Great Grandmother Caroline, or Grandma Riemer, as she was known in my family.

Image reference: Jensen sisters Edna, Camilla, Helen, Carrie and Elsie, enjoying a day at the beach. Image no. 46859r. Qld Library Collection

the tree as it stands

I spoke to a group of students at the Queensland College of Art this last Monday. They are preparing for a project looking at bodies and a few artists were asked in to discuss their approach to the body. Ray Cook, that marvellously mischievous Brisbane photographer, was talking about the secret gay stories of famous historical bodies apparently. I was sad to have missed that. There is always something fabulous about the reinterpretation of history from another viewpoint. I took a single pine finial for my show and tell, and a range of images from my practice of the past 16 years. When I thought about my work in preparation for this talk I became aware of how important the ‘missing’ body has always been to me; the bodies that become invisible, either through repression, regulation or the simple act of forgetting.

Previously I have drawn attention to no-bodies via empty spaces, cavities and the traced impressions of past presence but with this project my father and I are giving each missing body its own firm, physical proxy. I have to wonder what the implications of that will be for my future work…

Here is an image of the partially completed work as we set it up in the studio last weekend. It really does become more and more unwieldy as it grows, just like a real family. My father has taken to carrying most of the pieces around in a neat black shoulder bag. It all seems very ‘have art, will travel’ and entirely appropriate given that this is a migration story about cultural transport. There were discussions about Queensland, and a more generally Australian habit of forgetting, on Monday. It was so stimulating to hear other people’s perspectives on the project and their own stories about ‘slipping’ cultural identities. I hope that it is understood that I am not making some special claim for a Scandinavian history of Queensland in this work. I am simply curious to know why some migrant identities are ‘marked’ and remain highly visible, while others evaporate. I will always be suspicious of forgotten data. If my ancestors were chosen as suitable migrants to Australia because it was presumed their own heritage and difference would disappear, it becomes my job to rattle that presumption, no matter how long ago it was made.

up the hill, over the city

This is the Gamle Aker Kirke, the church where my great, great grandparents were married. It is a severe building positioned on a hill above central Oslo, with a beautiful cemetery attached. The late spring evening I visited here with my parents it was almost silent. There was no sense of being in a city at all. There were purple flowers in the trees around the church and occasional birdsong. The church was built here in the eleventh century and it is Oslo’s oldest surviving building. It was originally a basilica in the Roman style. Frederick Martinsen (later known as Pedersen) and Anne Lovisa Iversdatter married here on 28 April 1871, only 10 days after Anne Lovisa registered as emigrating from the parish of Aremark and a mere 18 days before leaving Hamburg for Australia on the Lammershagen. She was 6 years older than him. When you assemble the genealogical data on individuals there are always fascinating gaps and mysteries. This is the addictive element of the research. Standing on the top of the Telthusbakken hill on a beautiful, fine and mild evening, I try to imagine them coming to the church to marry. He was a cork cutter and I assume she had been a farm servant girl. But I cannot know how they met, how they decided to marry and emigrate together or how they decided upon Queensland as their destination. What struck me most about the church grounds was how richly green everything was. This whole part of the world seems to have an astounding wealth of water. What a shock it must have been for them. Anne Lovisa had expressed her intention to leave Aremark for Amerika, but instead she would end up in Aramac.

the erratic nature of research

The difficulty for me about keeping this blog is the erratic nature of research. Previously, I have allowed projects to develop before presenting a single work derived from the chaos of my findings at the end. This creates the impression of a coherent, linear research and development process where artworks emerge fully formed and complete. From an art career perspective this is preferable because it conforms to all sorts of beliefs about the artist's vision - and it hides errors, imperfect tangents and the like. From my perspective as a researcher, this is a nonsense camouflage and actually does insult to the very thing I love about these projects: the complications, the false turns and dead ends.

So here it all is, laid out for scrutiny and comment. It is frightening and thrilling to be contravening all the lessons I was taught about protecting your brand as an artist. Perhaps it signifies my final farewell to the illusion that one day I will 'straighten up and fly right', produce stand alone artworks that can sit proudly in a gallery with a price tag! Instead I'm enjoying Bill Brown's discussion of 'Thingness' in his article on Virginia Woolf's short story, "Solid Objects", published in 1920. There is a proposition that the misuse of an object can allow us to experience it in its specificity or can allow us to appreciate its individual features anew. This is a happy echo of the misuse of wooden finials I have been working on with my father. [Brown, B. (1999) The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism), Modernism/Modernity 6.2, pp.1-28]

material culture

When I was about to begin high school my Grandfather Pedersen had a number of wooden pencil boxes made for his grandchildren. Those boxes were made from the most distinctive local timber: Silky Oak. Sanded and polished, silky oak has a beautiful, shimmering, honey toned surface. At the time I treated the box as harshly as I could. It was so anachronistic; I wanted it to look ‘genuinely old’ as quickly as possible. The inside of my pencil box is covered in teenage graffiti: the names of bands, mostly, and the message, “please let me pass maths 1984”. My Grandfather died the following year.

There are no existing objects to connect me directly to my Norwegian ancestors, no piece of clothing, no old bible or other documents, not even a photograph to know them by. I have these items for other branches of my family tree. This wooden pencil box, so incredibly old-fashioned when it was given, has come to ‘stand in’ for the material culture that is lost to me. Something about the procedure of my Grandfather distributing these boxes suggested the echo of a tradition.

I am an artist first and foremost and I work with ‘stuff’. It has become part of this project to imagine what that stuff might be in this context. My Father loves to work with wood. His father built the family home out of timber in the basic Queensland post-war style but my Father prefers something more ornate: the turned and decorative wood effects so often found in Scandinavian architecture. The Vikings worked with a lathe powered by the spring of a young sapling bent and tethered to a pedal. My Father’s lathe is a home-modified affair that is probably a major carbon culprit, but this love of timbercraft could be vital link with a my lost material culture.

first impressions

When the 'Shakespeare' arrived in Maryborough, with Jens Peter Jensen on board, it was reported that the passengers were all 'Germans'. Looking through the passenger list, it's clear to see that a majority of those aboard were from Denmark, with significant numbers from Germany and Switzerland and a smaller number from Sweden. I read somewhere that on days when ships from Hamburg arrived, it was difficult to hear a word of English spoken in town as farmers from the surrounding area came in to meet up with their countrymen and potentially hire someone for a job of work.

On August 10, 1871 the Mayborough Chronicle described the passengers this way: "The immigrants per Shakspere prove to be as fine and well-conditioned a lot of people as evere arrived here [...] Their healthy, sturdy, clean, and comfortable appearance speaks for itself, and from what we hear many of them possess the additional recommendation of adding in some degree to the available capital of the colony. We are told that quite a considerable amount has been deposited by these new chums during the day at our local banks. These are the right people to send out to Queensland, and we are glad to hear that there is a prospect of more of the same sort from where they came."

It's hard not to hear Australia's contemporary immigration priorities echoed in those sentiments: healthy, clean and comfortably off. Many of those on board this ship were agricultural workers, destined to be part of the farming district stretching out from Maryborough. They were described (perhaps not as ironically as I would hope) as 'more acceptable "material"' in the Brisbane Courier of 9 August.

Image reference: Adelaide Street, Maryborough, 1880 - Image Number: qmar00063 State Library of Qld collection

the genealogy

My connection to Denmark and Norway begins with the three great, great grandparents who migrated to Queensland in the 19th Century.

They were:

Jens Peter Jensen, born 14 January 1845 in Snertinge, Særslev Parish, Skippinge Herred, Holbæk Amt, Denmark. Jens appears to have been the fourth illegitimate child of Jensine Christiane Jensdatter, who claimed Jens’ father was Jens Hansen. Jens Peter Jensen arrived in Maryborough on the ‘Shakespeare’, a boat that sailed from Hamburg early 1871 and arrived in Hervey Bay in June. There were cases of small pox on board the ship and consequently, passengers were quarantined until August. Jens married a young German woman in 1882, Marie Louise Auguste Sempf, and they had eight children: Herbert Peter, Eunice Marie, Caroline, Elsie, Helene Sophie, Victor Charles, Camilla and Edna Alexandra Dagmar.

Jens Peter died in 1928 in St Mary’s Private Hospital and in his obituary, printed in the Maryborough Chronicle, he is described as “an old and respected identity of the Maryborough district.” His obituary went on to state that “the late Mr Jensen was a civil engineer in the employ of the Queensland Government for a number of years, but he was forced to relinquish that work for health reasons. He later followed other vocations and retired about five years ago to Pialba.”

He was buried in the Maryborough Cemetery, while his wife, who died five years previously, was buried at Appletree Creek, near Childers.

Frederick Pedersen was born in Oslo (then Kristiania) 14 January 1850 and baptised Frederick Martinsen at the Oslo Domkirken on 1 April of that year. Following the Norwegian custom, his last name was a patronymic, derived from his father’s name, Martinius. At some point, Frederick assumed his father’s last name, Pedersen, and chose to use that as his family name from then on. His Mother was Maren Kirstine Jörgensdatter.

Anne Lovise Iversdatter, whose maiden name came to be recorded in Australia as Iversen, Everson and a range of other things, was born 7 February 1844 in the Aremark parish of Østfold in Eastern Norway. Her parents were Iver Iversen and Mari Larsdatter and she was one of at least 8 children. Her family were living at the Lervig farm. On 18 April 1871 she registered her intention to emigrate in the Aremark parish register, stating her intended destination as ‘Amerika’.

Frederick and Anne Lovise married at the Gamle Aker church on 28 April 1871 and left for Australia on board the ‘Lammershagen’, which sailed into Keppel Bay in Central Queensland in September 1871. Frederick and Anne Lovise then travelled to Aramac in the Central West, before Frederick got a job with the Railways. They had six children together: Mary Ann, Emily, Christian Frederick, Louisa, Maren Elizabeth and Edward Martin. Frederick retired in Emerald in 1912 and Anne Lovise died there in 1918. She was buried in Emerald. Frederick went on to live with one of his sons in Rockhampton until his death in 1937. He was buried in the North Rockhampton Cemetery.

the project so far...

I grew up believing that, unlike Sydney and Melbourne, Queensland was an ethnically homogenous and resolutely 'Anglo' place. I believed this even though I understood that my own surname was not an English one, and that many of my friends bore the names of non-English ancestors. There are things about Queensland that make it unlike anywhere else in Australia: its population patterns, its political past, and its strange history - a history of forgetting.

It was estimated in 1939 that around 10 000 Scandinavians emigrated to Australia in the 19th century as a consequence of the Queensland Free Immigration program and concerted efforts to encourage Northern European immigrants to the state (Lyng 1939).

S2Q / GOOD BLOOD is the title of an ongoing investigation of the background and consequences of this migration, with particular reference to my own family heritage.

Northern European migrants (from Scandinavia but also Germany) arrived mostly through the port of Maryborough in the Wide Bay region of Queensland, having left Europe through Hamburg. The exploitation of these migrants by unscrupulous agents was of particular interest to their home nations, who often set up emigration registers to ensure the validity of migration offers.

It is understood that one of the main motivations for encouraging Scandinavian migration to Australia was as a corrective to ‘excessively’ Catholic and urban population patterns. Swedes, Finns, Norwegians and Danes were actively recruited for the cultivation of farms and rural centres. It is my opinion that this pattern of rural migration had significant long-term effects on the nature of Queensland’s subsequent development.

This project is a process of data logging and visual interpretation, where manifestations and effects are mapped, utilising material from the migration databases of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Queensland and Australian archives and the personal collections of descendents of Scandinavian migrants.

I'm seeking to visually represent the diverse, and often problematic, cultural heritage of the state of Queensland for both a local and wider audience.

Reference
Lyng, J. (1939). The Scandinavians in Australia, New Zealand and the Western Pacific. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.