The Menzies of Maitland St

Janes legacy tells the true stories about fifty members of a our family spanning five generations and 175 years.

 

Bathurst NSW is in the grip of drought and recession at the end of the convict era. A soldier’s violence puts a little girl into the Female Orphan School in Parramatta. With bushranging at its peak she is ‘apprenticed’ as a maid to the Commandant of the Mounted Police at Bathurst.

 

Not surprisingly, her children turn to the sea for their living. They take livestock to New Zealand, coal to America and grain and nitrates to Europe.

 

When Australia is threatened with invasion, twenty five cousins volunteer to serve overseas in World War II. Happily all of them return safely though scarred. Three were Prisoners of War, others saw action at Tobruk, El Alamein, Singapore, Darwin, Lae, Finschhafen, Morotai, Tarakan, Labuan, on the Thai-Burma Railway, Japan, in the South Pacific and over the skies of Europe and India.

 

Today their children enjoy the prosperity of modern Australia. Perhaps they, more than most, have an understanding of what it means to be an Australian.

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John Brew, growing up in Sydney in the 1940's frequently met numbers of his fathers cousins and he gained the impression that the wider family must have been close.

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The result of 20 years of research, this book, complete with photos and hand-drawn charts and maps, unravels the mysteries behind this close knit family, stories of sadness, of bravery and of the commonplace whose motivations and values have influenced him and his children and his cousins and their children.