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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: History; Category: Recollections; Published: 14 April 2011; Hits: 113352

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When I was working, at age 15, I bought a .22 rifle. Almost everybody owned a rifle in those days; only a .22 calibre but it could still kill you.

One day mum said to me, “Rossi there’s a cat under the house that’s going to have kittens, can you get rid of it”. Of course that was right up my alley. I thought the loud bang would only be heard by the neighbours so I only used a .22 short, not the full power of a .22 long. Then I had to entice the cat to come out so I put a saucer of milk on the ground and said “here, puss puss puss” and out came the cat to within about six inches of the muzzle of the rifle.

I pulled the trigger… There weren’t any comments from the neighbours so I thought if I did it once I could do it again. Every night there were dozens of cats; spitting, meowing and caterwauling everywhere. You could go out the back door and shine a torch and you would see 15 to 20 cats sitting on the back fence.

I would lean the rifle up against the side of the doorway, shine the torch along the top of the sights of the rifle right between the eyes of a cat and squeeze the trigger. I very rarely missed. Within the next couple of weeks I killed and buried quite a lot.

One of the neighbours in the next street was missing her prize Manx Persian cat; it didn’t take her long to find out what had happened to it. Just about everybody knew what was going on, so she summonsed me. There was a big write-up right on the front page of the Daily Telegraph – the headlines:

Cat Killer bought to Book.
The reign of the Merrylands cat killer ended this week when Mrs Melinda Black summonsed Ross Smith, a 15 year old youth for shooting her prize Manx Persian cat.

The lad confessed to the crime.

I have a very good long term memory but I probably couldn’t tell you what happened yesterday. A big sergeant of police came around to see me. Feeling a bit sorry for me he advised me to go around and apologise to the old lady which I did; and she withdrew the summons.

So it was when I was a boy.

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Travel

Ireland

In October 2018 we travelled to Ireland. Later we would go on to England (the south coast and London) before travelling overland (and underwater) by rail to Belgium and then on to Berlin to visit our grandchildren there.

The island of Ireland is not very big, about a quarter as large again as Tasmania, with a population not much bigger than Sydney (4.75 million in the Republic of Ireland with another 1.85 million in Northern Ireland). So it's mainly rural and not very densely populated.

It was unusually warm for October in Europe, including Germany, and Ireland is a very pleasant part of the world, not unlike Tasmania, and in many ways familiar, due to a shared language and culture.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The McKie Family

Introduction

This is the story of the McKie family down a path through the gardens of the past that led to where I'm standing. Other paths converged and merged as the McKies met and wed and bred. Where possible I've glimpsed backwards up those paths as far as records would allow.

The setting is Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England and my path winds through a time when the gardens there flowered with exotic blooms and their seeds and nectar changed the entire world. This was the blossoming of the late industrial and early scientific revolution and it flowered most brilliantly in Newcastle.

I've been to trace a couple of lines of ancestry back six generations to around the turn of the 19th century. Six generations ago, around the turn of the century, lived sixty-four individuals who each contributed a little less 1.6% of their genome to me, half of them on my mother's side and half on my father's. Yet I can't name half a dozen of them. But I do know one was called McKie. So, this is about his descendants; and the path they took; and some things a few of them contributed to Newcastle's fortunes; and who they met on the way.

In six generations, unless there is duplication due to copulating cousins, we all have 126 ancestors. Over half of mine remain obscure to me but I know the majority had one thing in common, they lived in or around Newcastle upon Tyne. Thus, they contributed to the prosperity, fertility and skill of that blossoming town during the century and a half when the garden there was at its most fecund. So, it's also a tale of one city.

My mother's family is the subject of a separate article on this website.

Opinions and Philosophy

The Carbon Tax

2 July 2012

I’ve been following the debate on the Carbon Tax on this site since it began (try putting 'carbon' into the search box).

Now the tax is in place and soon its impact on our economy will become apparent.

There are two technical aims:

1. to reduce the energy intensiveness of Australian businesses and households;
2. to encourage the introduction of technology that is less carbon intensive.

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