Word: upfolded
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...Maureen Upfold was a child when she piped up with the classic existential query, "Dad, why are we here?" Behind the question was not a spiritual crisis but puzzlement over why so many pale-skinned people like herself dwelled in a country once solely occupied by Aborigines. "I think our ancestors were convicts," her father, Thorvald, told her. "Let's find out." So began an investigation that led Upfold first to some basic Australian history and then to the story of her great-great grandmother, Anne Dunne, an Irishwoman convicted of stealing linen and sentenced to seven years...
...Gazing now at a 150-year-old ambrotype photograph of her convict forebear, Upfold sounds proud and protective. She will not brook any suggestion that Anne Dunne was other than a brave soul who endured a myriad of hardships while at the female factory in the settlement of Parramatta, now a commercial center in western Sydney. Dunne eventually married a lifer named James Tompkins and experienced, Upfold speculates, times of joy in a land where she chose to live out her post-convict years. "In life, you've got to go forward," Upfold says...
...convicts' stories: "Is it a sense of impotence of our effect, of our power to act in the world in a meaningful way? Are these women's stories a life affirmation to counteract the existential abyss that can sometimes fill our horizons in our time?" For Maureen Upfold, the message is simpler: Know who you are and where you came from, and don't waste a second being ashamed of what you find...
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