from another website:

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IN THE TIME OF THE FIRST FLEET THERE WAS A PENALTY OF DEATH FOR SODOMY WITH MAN OR BEAST. http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/jul9.html ....

1. 6 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

   This is an interesting website and I’m going to look into it. I was intrigued when this site came up on Google, it appeared to have a reference to my site, but reading on, I cannot find any reference.

   It is definitely akin to mine though, relating to down-to-earth stories of the old Oz in the tradition of Poor Man’s Orange and Harp of the South.

   The row houses in the illustration could be Ruth Park’s Surry Hills. I was influenced by her when I read her books in the fifties. They were seriallized in, I think, the S.M.H. I could not afford to buy the book, as I was getting only seven pounds a week as a junior copy-writer at Proud’s the Jewellers in Pitt St Sydney. I remember Theo Wood was advertising manager. I could stand the city life in an advertising office for less than two years though and I took the train up to Cairns and worked cane-cutting and in sugar mills and then made my way working on trochus-shell luggers up as far as Thursday Island…a bit farther actually, as the “Lucy” (owned by the South Sea Pearling Company) made it once past Wapa reef right to Saibai Island, within sight of New Guinea’s mangroves.

   My life of adventures started. I became like the bloke working in an office but yearning for the bush, in one of Henry Lawson’s poems. (I can’t recall which one.) More recently I was interested in the style of writing in “‘Tis and Angela’s Ashes, as I had wandered through the back streets of Limerick in the seventies, before Frank McCourt’s books were written probably, and felt a strange connection. I recall one old Irishman who looked a lot like my grandfather, Dick O’Keefe, asked me “Have you been over in America for a while and come back home?”

   “Yes” I answered (though it had been five generations.)

   You can leave my email address public if you want. I have plenty of time to reply to anyone. I even get a kick out of deleting spam, most of which seems to deal with Viagra and “member enhancement” (not that these are of any interest to me at seventy five years of age.) Thanks, ‘Ric Williams. “Williams Family First Fleeters Confirmation.” http://freewebs.com/daone89/index.htm

2. on 15 Jan 2007 at 5:08 pm7 ninglun

   ‘Ric, could you put that site address in a return comment? I would like to look at it too. Or, on second thoughts, were you referring to this site??? You had earlier been to the Whitfield family history pages; is it the first time you have seen the rest? Did my new template fool you into thinking you hadn’t seen it before? My row of houses is nearby, and is very much Ruth Park territory, being in Riley Street just up from Devonshire Street, around the corner from where Kate Leigh used to live, and where the brothels used to be. Further up some famous ones still are.

   Email addresses in comments are for my eyes only; they never get published. WordPress doesn’t allow it — or at least I don’t think they do. Most people would be pleased with that.

3. on 15 Jan 2007 at 7:32 pm8 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

   Yes Ninglun….I think it was this site but with a line or two of my comment. I thought it was another site, sorry.

   Funny how stuff is rearranged by Google or whatever. I came across “about us” on Google which was one of my stories, but it had no links to any other or my main page. I have a problem putting more stories and paintings on as I am dependent on my young son, who is so busy with his affairs, being seventeen and he will only comply to add to the site after many urgings.

   I am duplicating the website on blog. com (or is it blogs.com ?)and it is supposed to be easier to manage so I might be able to do it myself. The website has not come up in google yet, maybe another week or two.

   Those row houses have not changed much. I remember looking down the back lane at the brothels and the line of customers and wondered why did they want to do that. I guess I was about 17 myself then.

   A year or two later I picked up this redhaired Hungarian woman in a Kings Cross coffee-shop, where we were drinking cafe royals and we were so eager we just reached a nearby lane, before we were at each other. I remember us slipping down onto the ground and the fray in my second best suit and my skinned knees.

   Such are the forces of youth that make us do silly things. Keep in touch.

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5. on 15 Jan 2007 at 7:40 pm9 ninglun

   You should see inside those particular houses today! Someone I know owns one of the ones in that picture. It is quite luxurious, and you probably wouldn’t get much change from $800,000+ for it! In fact you might need more.

6. on 16 Jan 2007 at 8:25 pm10 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

   I used to go to the Tatler theatre and see foreign films, though I could only read the sub-titles. The Tatler was on the south side of the park (Hyde Park?) and after the show I would walk down into Darlinghurst, past the Crown Street Women’s Hospital and on into Surry Hills. My dad told me there used to be a razor-gang push there rivalling the Rocks and they sometimes fought. That was the era of bell-bottom trousers in the early twenties.

   My brother met a girl at a dance and walked her home to a row house in Surry Hills. He asked her for a kiss and she replied. “You aint from around here, well. The blokes from Surry Hills don’t ask. They just take!” My brah took the hint and said it was worth it. I presume there was more than kissing.

   He said she took his handkerchief when she went inside “Because it’s got you on it.”

   They were a rough lot around there in those days and I was one time attacked near Redfern Station bridge because I had a “boong” girl with me and they wanted a piece of her. Somehow the one punch I got in and Tonia’s screams saved us. I went looking for them a couple of nights later with a ballpeen hammer in my pocket but luckily never saw them again.

   There used to be a Chinese fish and chip shop between Central and Redfern station on the East side. Just a small, hole-in-the wall place. I ordered some meat and cabbage pastries that the old Chinese woman deep fried in pig-fat. They were the first Chinese food I had ever eaten and they were delicious at sixpence each.

   For some years I operated a stall at Paddy’s market on Saturday and did pretty well. I sold jewellery, some of my own designs cast in mock silver and bronze and some Indian imported stuff. I made a few quid, selling the business eventually and going over to Europe and Morocco. An advantage selling this jewellery was I got to fit rings, bracelets etc on pretty young women and maybe it was the intimacy of touching, but anyway I did rather well in the amorous field too. Too well probably, because I began to think of girls as a replaceable commodity.

   This attitude is the likely cause of me sitting at home alone in my old age, while my three sons I hardly ever see, are off doing the same things I used to do.

7. on 16 Jan 2007 at 8:42 pm11 ninglun

   Great stories, Ric! Keep them coming. Surry Hills today seems tame by comparison.

8. on 17 Jan 2007 at 6:00 pm12 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

   Until the age of printing, then radio, then T.V., next vcrs the dvds then computers, cellphones, Ipods and what else is coming down the chute, it was customary for the older members of the family and even the tribe, to sit around the fire at night and entertain, instruct and amaze the younger members with myths, tribal stories and family anecdotes.

   This historical wisdom instructed the group how to behave towards each other and gave a sense of belonging and continuity and a meaning of life to all. That was when there WERE families, long ago.

   Nowadays, media, commercial and bureaucratic have taken over. These institutions (including schools, admirable in many ways) distort the feeling of family. In fact it seems they out to destroy all generational cohesion and replace peace of what some might call the soul with an ever-present sense of insufficiency. It is not too surprising people have become isolated, egotistic, erratic, disjointed and that many face the future with futility. The young seem to seek instant gratification, the kind they are programmed to want. Newer, “better” by comparison, makes older “worse” and obsolete.

   This idea has been extended even to older people, especially when their desire to purchase more has been sated and they are not so important in this frenetic consumer non-society. Older people are pushed onto the side-lines and their voices of collective wisdom are muted by head-phones and Ipods blasting electronic rap beats into bursting juvenile brains.

   So that leaves old me, strumming and humming on the front porch watching the world zoom by. The world of zoomers is oblivious to my archaic “uncool” rythms and irelevant stories.They dissipate acoustic vapour trails of boom-box ear-splitting “music?” all the way to the next “now” sensation.

   Am I just getting old and ornery? Is is time yet to go inside with all the other well-preserved living corpses for the yellow pill and the little blue one and the pink on that keeps cantankerous old buggers like me quiet? What are we all sitting here waiting for anyway?

   Well at least my name is not in the daily paper obits yet. I looked today.

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10. on 17 Jan 2007 at 6:25 pm13 ninglun

    Nor mine. Yet here we both are using the Internet!

11. on 18 Jan 2007 at 2:48 am14 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    I have not learned how to use the spell-checker so does it matter if my spelling is off? Now I can’t think whether there are two “r” in irrelevant and it is probably irrelevant in any case. Until the mid eighteenth century, spelling was not systemized and absolute and individuality leaned towards expression and meaning, though pedants and grammarians might tear their hair and tut-tut away in tacit disapproval.

    Back to topic and then I will desist for awhile in this column.

    Discussing religion can lead nowhere but confusion. It is like a Hottentot and a New Yorker discussing the Koran in Yiddish. Religion is not for discussion. It is told and must be believed without evidence “and you better believe it sonny, or you aint a-goin’ to heaven, boy!” If you question anything you are soon ostracised and if you continue to be obstinate, you go past being a redeemable sinner to a disciple of the devil.

    Religion is no longer religio, religionis of the Romans, a code of ethics and behaviour. It has been opted by most organisations bent on self-aggrandizement and the pressing need to grow bigger, collect loot, and indoctrinate everyone forever at the expense of other similar organisations selling similar faiths (without thought.) So you see, (you better believe this, because I am right of course and there is no need to discuss this undeniable Truth I am revealing to you) discussing religion is an oxy-moron, the meaning of which term may be the idiocy of climbing a high mountain, gasping for oxygen and losing a few million brain cells, you never use, anyway.

12. on 18 Jan 2007 at 10:10 am15 ninglun

    Fortunately I go to a church where questioning is welcome. I propose to return to the issues in this post later on.

13. on 18 Jan 2007 at 3:10 pm16 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    At your church Ninglun you might ask “Who made God? What happened before ‘in the beginning’?” Why did Jesus deny his mother? How old was the “virgin” Mary? (13) What did Joseph do lying alongside the “virgin” Mary? (JUst snore himself to sleep? Looks like he must have been a saint.) Why did he continue to tend to Mary when the child was by the Angel Gabriel? How come Jesus’ lineage goes right back to Abraham? Is the world older than 5000 years? How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?

    Some of these questions I asked ar age 16 while I was at St John’s and I soon found I did not need to march down to the Cathedral in Armidale on Sunday morning with the rest of the sheep and listen to the minister bleating platitudes and misconceptions. Instead I sat on the Post Office steps read the Sunday paper and ate pie, peas and potato from Souris’s cafe.If I were to get up during a church service and ask one point of clarification I would be liable to summary conviction under the Australian Penal Code……Free enquiry into religion? Bah humbug. A sham…just bloody brainwashing of young minds.

    Why waste time “discussing” points of religion? Might as well discuss how many fairies were dancing at the fairy ring under the oak tree at the bottom of the garden….or how many horns on Rudolph the red-nosed Reindeer. It helped me to have an atheist mother and an atheist grandmother and a father who did not give a damn.

    Do you feel obliged to delete this blog in the name of “free” speech and good taste? Go ahead. I’ve already copied it and it will be on my website next week. God be with you. In sh’Allah!

14. on 18 Jan 2007 at 4:01 pm17 ninglun

    You’d be surprised how many of your points I agree with, Ric. As I said, I’ll come back to it later on. Meanwhile, have a look at Bishop Richard Holloway, whose approach I have some agreement with.

    No, I didn’t feel moved to delete your comment, which is not offensive as far as I am concerned. I did fix some typos though.

15. on 18 Jan 2007 at 7:27 pm18 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    ninglun… You remind me of Ted Noffs at the Wayside Chapel years ago. Wonder what happened to him? Died I suppose. I was in love with his niece Margaret, a lovely-looking girl who was unresponsive on the rug on my studio floor at the Haymarket. How I pined afterwards for that girl.

16. on 18 Jan 2007 at 7:51 pm19 ninglun

    Not surprising, Cedric, as South Sydney Uniting Church is not unlike the Wayside Chapel — still there as you’ll see, and one of our congregation does volunteer work there often. “In March 1987, the Reverend Ted Noffs had a major stroke and, sadly, was never to return to work (he died in the early 1990s and his family set up the Ted Noffs Foundation a few years later in his memory). Others continued his work and vision at the Wayside.”

    Our church works mainly around Waterloo and Redfern.

17. on 18 Jan 2007 at 11:57 pm20 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    Things are getting too close to home as my cousin’s husband Professor Ross will no doubt be reading this stuff eventually. Actually Ruth just sent me an email correcting some of my omitted family information, so I had better stay off religion.

    Thanks ninglun. I was fond of Ted Noffs. He gave me lots of opportunity to sound off during the discussions on Sunday nights.I recall I directed most of my rancour at the Pommie Bastard, Webster, who had a sharp wit for repartee. Another of my contemporaries was Bill Dwyer, who unfortunately followed the L.S.D. trail. I remet him in London years later at Hyde park naturally. Somehow the Daily Telegraph had me pegged as leader of the “League for Spiritual Discovery” and I played along for the lark. I think there was a spread about me in the Sunday Telegraph.

    About that time I orchestrated the pot of red paint on the soldiers coming back from Vietnam with my girlfriend Nadine Jensen, helped by Bill Dwyer and the anarchists. They put Nadine in Callan Park (for the sole reason to silence her) and pumped her full of tranquillizers. Bill Dwyer was arrested soon afterwards. They were looking for “the Canadian” but were never able to find him. That incident was in the papers all around the world.

    I will stop the correspondence now and thanks for the outlet. The Guardian Unlimited cut me out of their blogs a few months ago and now i just blog occasionally on Topix.net. Goodbye.

    Cedric

18. on 19 Jan 2007 at 12:29 am21 ninglun

    Wow, quite a few stories there, Cedric! Webster! Haven’t heard that name in years, but I do recall him as one of Sydney’s characters. Cedric has made an error in the links to his blog in this thread, but you will find his site under “Aussie Interest” on the right. Feel free to return, Cedric, if something catches your eye. You bring back a wild Sydney I was only on the fringes of, but certainly heard much about.

19. on 20 Jan 2007 at 4:34 am22 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    The purpose in targetting the troops returning from Vietnam was:

    To counter the propaganda publicity of the parade through the streets of Sydney. This parade, a symbolic “victory” march (when it was actually a continuing defeat( but with hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian casualties by “our” side) was instigated by authorities to bolster up waning support for Australia’a participation at that time.

    A pretty young girl pouring red paint (symbol for innocent blood and readily understood) on the “Victorious Heroes” turned this martial pomp into a worldwide message that troops were not heroes and the war in Vietnam was criminal. The action was successful and Ninglun, you must have been one of the small minority who thought and still think that this demonstration against the war was misdirected.

    *****************************

    I notice that it is very difficult to find reference to my small budding web-page from your expanding collection. I do not know if that is by accident or design, in this case, but in the past I have never found Christian websites or organisations to be energetic in supplying links to secular, non-christian ones. Although “free thought” is often lauded, it is “Christian free thought” which means, in essence, modified thought (to use a polite term.)

    Thank you, anyway, Cedric Williams.

20. on 20 Jan 2007 at 8:29 am23 ninglun

    No quarrel then or now about the stupidity of the Vietnam War, Cedric. My point was that attacking the soldiers so directly tended to elicit sympathy for them rather than revulsion against the war. That’s what I felt at the time from Cronulla or Wollongong or wherever I was, and it was the way most of the people around me felt about it, even those who were active in the Moratorium. But I was more conservative in the 60s and early 70s.

    I won’t argue about it too much now…

    Your page is under “Aussie Interest” and has been there for quite a while as Williams Family: First Fleeters, and Ric W’s family stories, right under the Nick Possum Home Page. Have you ever looked at that? I think you’d love it. Very Sydney irreverent, a bit like the old Oz or the Nation Review.

    My feeling about this being a Christian website is similar to my feeling about it being a gay website: yes, but… If you went through the links on the right you’d find atheists and sceptics there too. I worry about what we have traditionally called free thought sometimes, not that I’m against it, as it can become a fundamentalism of its own kind. Truly free thought may lead to a variety of outcomes. My Chinese partner’s free thought in the context of growing up gay in Mainland China was an interesting phenomenon to follow. He has an amazing capacity, well honed back when he was young, to resist being told what to think. In time he found an explanation of the way things work in the teaching of the Dalai Lama, which he experienced first hand — not that he accepts the full metaphysics of Tibetan Buddhism. He approves of my reconnection with the Uniting Church but would never go there himself. It strikes me that he is more concerned with the effects of belief on behaviour rather than with the content of the belief, and I must say I sympathise with that. We westerners can be too bloody intellectual.

21. on 20 Jan 2007 at 11:26 am24 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    Sorry Ninglun. I was as always hasty in my judgements. Just as I have been continuously judgemental about homosexuality. I have been known to express my views in a grim, jocular manner as: “I believe there is a place for gays in society BUT IT AINT NEAR ME! Intellectually, I have no objection to private performances of those now known erroneously as “gays” (are they gay, though?). I could say some of my best friends have been gay, but that would be a lie. I could say that my favourie movie star was Rock Hudson, but that would also be a lie.

    Actually I advocate complete license and freedoms for “gays” within limits. These limits would be within certain gated areas of a city or town with a pass system for access by departures, determined by medical checks before they are allowed to mingle with other citizens. So you see, I am basically tolerant of them. I would be extremely sad if it were necessary to disinherit any of my three sons if found “gay”. I would certainly miss further conversation throughout my lifetime with such a son. I feel sure that I would permit fleeting contact on important family occasions such as death or at Christmas, (after the Christmas dinner, of course.) Yes one must be tolerant these days (unfortunately). Cedric

22. on 20 Jan 2007 at 11:55 am25 ninglun

    There’s a matching joke along the lines of “I might be gay, but at least I am not morose…” Not a great admirer of Rock Hudson’s work either. But I guess if you were ever to end up in hospital, you wouldn’t ask questions about the sexuality of those working to save your life. There is a pretty good chance, greater than the average population in my experience, that you would encounter several gay people in that environment. One of my gay friends is serving in the Australian military as I speak.

    What did you think about Don Dunstan, SA Premier in the 70s? I had a wonderful conversation with him in the Albury Hotel one night.

    I really hope you wouldn’t disinherit your sons. What a person really is is a much more significant issue than race (we neither of us have a problem with that), gender (nor that) or sexuality (??problem??).

    I’ll stop preaching. Guess all I can suggest is a quiet read of some of my links over there.

    Yeah, my family got used to it, including my brother (straight as they come) who is around your age.

23. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:00 pm26 CEDRIC WILLIAMS

    To each his own end.

24. on 21 Jan 2007 at 6:58 pm27 ninglun

    Cedric later submitted a not-for-publication comment outlining some of the issues he has with gay sexuality, most of them biological or hygienic rather than moral. It was an honest if graphic comment, and properly not for publication. However, I don’t object to dialogue on the subject. Many of the points he raised would indeed apply also to heterosexual intercourse of various kinds.

    My answer is that the assumption that certain things must be done in certain ways is not necessarily valid. Some of us have brains as well as genitals.

    My advice is as before, to quietly read some of the sites I have placed on the right under “gay life and issues”. Having been in the interesting position of having to educate my own mother on the subject, resulting in her “accepting but not understanding”, I can only hope reflection could produce similar results in others.

    This is not the context for detail on the subject. With so much out there in internet and book form, with almost any reputable and non-homophobic medical practitioner able to advise on the subject, and many groups devoted to gay health and safe sex, there isn’t really much excuse for gay men being irresponsible (though too many are) or for others to labour under misconceptions on the matter.

    Here in Sydney the basics are even taught in school, and so they should be. See my GLBT resources. The original context of that page was as a resource for the welfare department at SBHS, which is not to say SBHS endorses it, though I did keep within Department of Education guidelines on the subject, I believe.

    None of the above is meant to put you down, Cedric, or is meant to patronise any one. I know your viewpoint was genuine. I also know how hard it is to get your head round it all. After all, I didn’t get my own head around it until I was close on 40 years old!

    Finally, sexuality is not merely about sexual activity, and it is not in itself a matter of choice. Most gays and lesbians will tell you it is a matter of discovery. Lifestyle, on the other hand, does involve choices.