A Six Century Family: Walk through time from the English village of Chardstock to the great Australian outback

A Six Century Family is a historical novel presenting an insightful alternative history by Australian Anthropologist Dr Sandra Penny-Dimri. The narrative energy is derived through a focus on the Penny family whose lineage has been traced back to the year 1500. Rather than a history of wealthy elites, political power brokers or royals; A Six Century Family is positioned from the subaltern perspective as it illuminates the lives of the rural peasant, the exploited and the capacity of the underdog to fight back.

A Six Century Family is a unique literary journey that is divided into three sections. The first section commences in the South English village of Chardstock where the recorded lineage began. Documentary research provides details of the life and times of rural men and women of this era; the impact of extreme winters freezing rivers that saw fun fairs and horse races on the River Thames but a lack of drinking water in the country, of the greed of London’s grain merchants leading to country wide famine, the extraordinary power of the Lord of the Manor and the socio-values that infiltrated from London to impact upon the lives of the villagers. This early history leads into the second section involving the years covering a pivotal period in the lineage with the sentence and arrival of the first Penny family member into the colony. A time in which the wretched powerlessness of England’s population excess was being charged with minor offences and herded by a disdainful administration onto stinking, vermin infested prison hulks. Families were torn apart as children, young women and men were convicted and sent for the ‘term of his/her natural life’ to Australia. There they were beaten, lashed with the cat-o-nine tales till blood filled their boots, and harshly treated as slaves. This underclass of British society formed an unpaid labour force, with the goodies sent back to the wealthy English families. The third section moves onto biographies of the modern age with Robert Penny being given his freedom. However, it was a limited freedom to start a second family and to own a farm in New South Wales. If he had attempted to return to his wife and children in England he would have immediately ended his days on the gallows. Yet, hypocritically, when the two World Wars arrived his descendants were called to return and die in the trenches, filthy mud of Flanders and cliffs of Turkey for England. Not to save the life of the average British brother but rather, once again, to serve the political and trade interests of the wealthy British families. With the skill of a master storyteller, the 20th Century Bob Penny portrays the isolation and the joys of a childhood in the outback in a story he wrote about his dog, the joys and sorrows as told in his poems and in his ‘oral history’ stories told to his daughter. A Six Century Family ends with a number of quoted personal reflections on their lives by Penny family descendants, which add a fascinating comparative depth to this epic.