Stace and Hall family histories

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: History; Category: Recollections; Published: 04 April 2014; Hits: 240506

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The following family history relates to my daughter Emily and her mother Brenda. It was compiled by my niece Sara Stace, Emily’s first cousin, from family records that were principally collected by Corinne Stace, their Grandmother, but with many contributions from family members. I have posted it here to ensure that all this work is not lost in some bottom draw. This has been vindicated by a large number of interested readers worldwide.

The copyright for this article, including images, resides with Sara Stace.

Thus in respect of this article only, the copyright statement on this website should be read substituting the words 'Sarah Stace' for the words 'website owner'.

Sara made the original document as a PDF and due to the conversion process some formatting differs from the original. Further, some of the originally posted content has been withdrawn, modified or corrected following requests and comments by family members.

Richard

Stace and Hall family histories

a summary

Stace Lucas Bannister Fawkner Peed Hall Venables Mears Cutbush Nairn Pontifex

Compiled by Sara Stace, 2013

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Travel

Denmark

In the seventies I spent some time travelling around Denmark visiting geographically diverse relatives but in a couple of days there was no time to repeat that, so this was to be a quick trip to two places that I remembered as standing out in 1970's: Copenhagen and Roskilde.

An increasing number of Danes are my progressively distant cousins by virtue of my great aunt marrying a Dane, thus contributing my mother's grandparent's DNA to the extended family in Denmark. As a result, these Danes are my children's cousins too.

Denmark is a relatively small but wealthy country in which people share a common language and thus similar values, like an enthusiasm for subsidising wind power and shunning nuclear energy, except as an import from Germany, Sweden and France.

They also like all things cultural and historical and to judge by the museums and cultural activities many take pride in the Danish Vikings who were amongst those who contributed to my aforementioned DNA, way back. My Danish great uncle liked to listen to Geordies on the buses in Newcastle speaking Tyneside, as he discovered many words in common with Danish thanks to those Danes who had settled in the Tyne valley.

Nevertheless, compared to Australia or the US or even many other European countries, Denmark is remarkably monocultural. A social scientist I listened to last year made the point that the sense of community, that a single language and culture confers, creates a sense of extended family. This allows the Scandinavian countries to maintain very generous social welfare, supported by some of the highest tax rates in the world, yet to be sufficiently productive and hence consumptive per capita, to maintain among the highest material standards of living in the world.

Fiction, Recollections & News

Egyptian Mummies

Next to Dinosaurs mummies are the museum objects most fascinating to children of all ages.

At the British Museum in London crowds squeeze between show cases to see them. At the Egyptian Museum in Cairo they are, or were when we visited in October 2010 just prior to the Arab Spring, by far the most popular exhibits (follow this link to see my travel notes). Almost every large natural history museum in the world has one or two mummies; or at the very least a sarcophagus in which one was once entombed.

In the 19th century there was something of a 'mummy rush' in Egypt. Wealthy young European men on their Grand Tour, ostensibly discovering the roots of Western Civilisation, became fascinated by all things 'Oriental'. They would pay an Egyptian fortune for a mummy or sarcophagus. The mummy trade quickly became a lucrative commercial opportunity for enterprising Egyptian grave-robbers.

Opinions and Philosophy

A Dismal Science

Thomas Carlyle coined this epithet in 1839 while criticising Malthus, who warned of what subsequently happened, exploding population.

According to Carlyle his economic theories: "are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next" and in 1894 he described economics as: 'quite abject and distressing... dismal science... led by the sacred cause of Black Emancipation.' The label has stuck ever since.

This 'dismal' reputation has not been helped by repeated economic recessions and a Great Depression, together with continuously erroneous forecasts and contradictory solutions fuelled by opposing theories.

This article reviews some of those competing paradigms and their effect on the economic progress of Australia.

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