Over the past nearly 200 years many of us have listened to the stories of our Scottish roots and as they have been told and retold we’ve added to the good parts and diminished the hard parts so that most of us have a belief of much that is wrong or just didn’t happen.
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We want to believe that our ancestors were poor gentry, robbed of their birthright, or victims of ruthless landlords or marauding reivers or soldiers.
In many cases we are not that far from the truth.
However, many of our forebears were the poorest of the poor.
That their traditions and much of their culture survived speaks of dogged determination and, in today’s Aussie parlance, ‘guts.’ There are a number of photographs in the museum of their houses of the beginnings.
Look at them and weep for your ancestors and then admire the drive that got you to where you are today!
Looking at the posed portraits and photographs on local museum walls, or the ‘going to church’ dresses, or the ‘having the parson to Sunday lunch’ table settings on display, it’s easy to forget the everyday table ware and the everyday clothes that were worn most of the time: the articles which were the norm before they made a go of it in their new life in their early days on the Manning.
Examples of many of the everyday articles may be seen in the Wingham Museum.
Many of the Scottish settlers were from the lowlands along the borders with England or from the islands off the west coast of Scotland.
A significant number were Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland.
They were descendants of the Scots who had been part of the Protestant plantation into Ireland following the ousting of the Stuart kings.
The Ulster Scots were all landless, and together with their mainland cousins their shining goal was to own their own land.
With shared speech, shared religious traditions and a shared agricultural background, our Scottish forbears were almost a separate community within the community.
