Between 1842 and 1895, seventeen direct ancestors of my father, John Aloysius Gibson (1927-1983), came to the Richmond River as convicts or free settlers, or were born on the Richmond as the children of these newcomers, and all but one stayed. Their graves are scattered through the cemeteries of towns up and down the river. Many of them traveled the globe before reaching the river valley that would be their resting place. My father was born, lived and died in Kyogle, a small country town on the Upper Richmond River.
How and why does a family become entangled with a place? How did my paternal ancestors think about the place that they made into a home? What was the significance of that understanding of place for the original owners of the land, the Bundjalung?
My father’s ancestors imagined both a promised land and a land full of promise. In this account of their struggle to realise those promises, there are stories of longing, poetry, prayer, estrangement, and unrequited love. There are stories of sawing, milking, dressmaking, mechanical invention, success and failure.
With the cloth of promise and the shards of reality, my father’s ancestors made a home and identity on the Richmond.
Imagining a Promised Land— Gibson Ancestors’ Ideas of Place on the Richmond River 1842–1925 documents five generations of Scottish, English and Irish convicts and free settlers/invaders.
Read Imagining a Promised Land
Writing Things 