My Aussie Roots

I attended the Remembrance Day ceremony in Cairns today. On the Esplanade, the memorial in front of the Returned Services League (RSL Club for those abroad reading this post). It was an emotional service for me because I only recently discovered what my Australian grandfather did during World War II.

In fact, my family other than my Sydneysider mother and longtime Cairns resident, her NSW mother who relocated to FNQ, and a few cousins who also went North to Central QLD, actually knew what my Grandad looked like. Officer Stanley Marsh, pictured above, turned out to resemble the legendary Australian movie star, Errol Flynn from Hobart! I regret to say, my ancestor emulated the notorious Tasmanian Hollywood hero's "toxic masculinity" by all accounts; "wicked" even, as per the definitions of unacceptable male behaviour described by this hyperlinked Vanity Fair feature on the Aussie legend.

In the months before my mother's passing out at Kewarra Beach north of Cairns, I began a frenzied search for information about her Dad who clearly had been traumatised and suffered from PTSD postwar. Just so I could say something about him at her funeral. And out of longheld curiosity about this grandparent.

I contacted the archivist at the Canberra War Memorial and began a virtual journey into this ancestor's military life. However the photo above of my grandparents's wartime wedding only surfaced through a relative around 12 months later when I was back in Europe. It's the reason I'm motivated to write this post to digitise and make permanent such a slender artefact from our Australian family tree.

It's the only photo I have of this man who was not only a pilot during WWII against the Japanese, he was a mechanic and armourer trained to recover crashed war planes. I may have pieced the fragmented archival info together inaccurately, but it seems that Stan was a courageous salvager of planes. He had been sent to the UK to learn to fly Spitfires and other types of aircraft. Then under great secrecy, he was deployed into the jungles of South East Asia.

That's all I know at this point in time. Now that I have returned to my tropical hometown permanently after having spent half my life in Germany, the UK, Switzerland, France and most recently Sicily, I hope to have more time and leisure to continue my genealogical research. This type of unearthing of family history has led to more surprises and secrets.

My other grandfather, a German officer trained for Alpine mountaineering in a historic Royal regiment, turns out to be Jewish! He and my half Jewish, Bavarian grandmother - who emigrated to Cairns after WWII - were both working for the German Resistance. This is a story for the next post as that archival information only surfaced through my detective work last Australian winter when I was avoiding the summer on the Mediterranean...

I'll post that next month just so my followers, fans and new "voters" can get to know me personally and my personal background. I guess the moral of this story is that things are not always as they seem and the truth deserves your dedicated attention - sometimes even investigation - in order to be properly understood...

Yours in service,

Tania Peitzker

Credits - the featured image is courtesy of the National Library of Australia and the ANU archive https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/flynn-errol-leslie-6364  Copyright notice: Errol Leslie Flynn (1909-1959), by unknown photographer, 1940s National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an13384126.