Genevieve Von Black Music

Imagine you’re a 21 year woman in 1857 and you decide to travel alone on a barque to a country you know only a little about, to work there for the rest of your life… Ghosts Are Speaking is an instrumental improvised track referencing the uncertainties riven throughout such an act….

I haven’t been able to find out precisely why a young 21 year old woman named Grace Christophers decided to be shipped from her home in Cornwall to Lisdillon, Tasmania to be a house maid. Grace is one of my direct ancestors. On arrival, on the Prompt, she was documented as medium height, stout, and with dark complexion, hair and eyes. Half of that is me. The captain’s written something else about her – “comfortable manner”? I can’t decipher his writing. See the attached picture – can you? But if that was what he was describing, that’s me too. And her manner could explain how she hit it off with a young fellow traveller on that ship bound for the same place, William Couch. They were married almost two years later in the parish of Swansea, Tasmania (where Lisdillon is located).