geoffrey speldewinde

Story

Geoffrey Speldewinde is the 9th, and last, generation in a line of Dutch Burghers. He was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1953. He arrived in Australia in September 1954 with his parents Charles and Christine, having learnt to walk on the rocking ship (his mother reports he looked like a drunken sailor). But there is a history to his arrival….

Sri Lanka, in ages past called Ceylon, Serendib, Taprobane and Zeilan, is a land mainly of Sinhalese (Buddhists) and Tamils (Hindus) which became an important sea-port as the European seafarers and traders made their links with Asia. In 1505 a Portuguese Admiral and his fleet landed and established Galle, in SW Sri Lanka.

The 17th Century, globally the century of the Dutch, saw the Dutch roaming the world seeking trade. The spices, especially cinnamon, of Sri Lanka were irresistible to them. The Dutch, Geoffrey’s ancestors, drove off the Portuguese by the mid 18th Century. In the century before these Dutch in turn lost their dominance to the British, they had developed significant public works such as canals and dams and roads, Forts, Roman Dutch Law, the Dutch Reformed Church and us! Unlike their Portuguese predecessors, intermarriage with local people was actively discouraged within the Dutch community.

That brings us to the British who had conquered large parts of India and then moved on Ceylon. They were a superior force and the small Dutch forces were in no way able to offer real resistance. Colombo and Jaffna fell in 1796 and at the Peace of Amiens in 1802 it was agreed that Ceylon would become a British possession.

The British were a very good Colonial Power. Certainly, they made money out of Ceylon, but they also put in place a legacy of roads, railways, and government at all levels, and a well-educated professionally-trained people not counting the establishment of tea, rubber and coconut plantations.

The Dutch who decided to ‘stay on\’ became very important to the British in this era; they spoke English and were able to make the transition from their trading-based community to fill the many positions in the professional, legal and administrative system under British colonial rule.

The Burghers reached 46000 persons by the mid 20th century, some 0.6% of the total population living on an island the size of Tasmania. Living in mainly urban areas they were a community favoured by the British by being closest in Western values, speaking English at home, worshipping God in the ‘western\’ manner, and were experienced in an administrative system set up by themselves. ‘They became the instruments of western progress as Ceylon inched towards economic and political independence’1. They lived ‘happy and care-free, knew how to relax, how to socialise, how to enjoy living and to accept life\’s ups-and-downs’.

Interestingly, the Dutch-descended and Portuguese-descended communities tended to be discrete entities by virtue of their different denominations (Protestant vs. Catholic) and different languages (English vs. Portuguese) and the fact that the Portuguese tended to intermarry with the original inhabitants whereas the Dutch Burghers usually only married other Dutch Burgers. By now we are almost all distant cousins! This distinction was facilitated by the Victorian mores of the 19th Century with its strict rules on class, ethnicity, colour and religion.

The Speldewindes, from the Flemish region, trace their Ceylonese ancestry back to Christiaan, a book-keeper, who married in Jaffna after arriving around 1700. The lineage is readily traceable through the repository of the Dutch Reformed Church, without which emigration to Australia with its White Australia Policy in 1954 would not have been possible. Alice de Boer, a great grand-aunty, was the first female medical graduate of Ceylon in 1898.

On the distaff side, following the genealogical convention of tracing the male line, Anthony van Dort left Gravenburg arriving in Colombo in 1767. He was a drummer and soldier in the New East India Company.

But moving on; alas the good life of jobs, excellent education, and a sense of importance came to an end for the Dutch Burghers in 1948 when Ceylon was granted independence and self-government. The ‘writing was on the wall\’ and more clearly so when in 1956 Sinhalese was declared the national language, Buddhism the national religion, and the flavour of life was no longer Eurocentric.

Hello 1954 Australia with the White Australia Policy! Can we come in please?! In October 1954 we arrived in Tasmania on the SS Himalaya.

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