Ashamed to Admit

Season 3 finale: Secret Scandalous Family Histories

• The Jewish Independent • Season 3

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For this Season 3 finale, their very last episode as co-hosts, Tami and Dash balance the over/undersharing scale by delving into Dash’s secret and scandalous family history. They discover that there’s more than one way to define a “Jewish Family.” 

Ashamed to Admit will continue as a podcast AND a vodcast in 2026 with a new co-host joining Tami in the studio.

Follow TJI on Instagram for more intel. 

Read the full article: https://thejewishindependent.com.au/jewish-ancestry-barnett-family

You won’t regret subscribing to The Jewish Independent's bi-weekly newsletter: jewishindependent.com.au

Tami and Dash on Instagram: tami_sussman_bits and dashiel_and_pascoe

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SPEAKER_00:

Are you interested in issues affecting Jews in Australia, the Middle East, and the world at large, but struggling to keep up with all the stories your algorithms serving you? If you answered yes, then you've come to the right place.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm Dash Lawrence from the Jewish Independent, and in this episode, our season three finale, and my last as co-host of this podcast, your third cousin, Tammy Swissman and I are going to cut through some seriously chewy and dewy topics.

SPEAKER_00:

With a healthy dose of Jewish shame.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to this episode of A Shame to Admit. You heard right, this is my final episode as co-host of this esteemed program.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'm JCOM reporter Tammy Sussman here with some breaking news. Dash, I have just been informed by a reliable source, someone with close links to the Jewish Independent Family, that Tammy and Dash are in fact consciously uncoupling as co-hosts. The split has not come as a result of any broyus between the colleagues as some listeners had feared, others had hoped. Did anyone reach out to you, Dash, asking, what happened? Did anything happen?

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't have as many inquiries as you seem to have had.

SPEAKER_00:

Everybody loves a drama. They love a bit of a scandal, a scandal. Even you, Dash, you couldn't wait to tell me that one of my ancestors had gotten into a a bit of petty crime back in season one. Yeah. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_01:

That was fun. Yes, yes. I did enjoy that.

SPEAKER_00:

That was after I shared that my maternal great-great-grandparents came to Australia from Odessa in the very early 1900s. I told you they settled in Broken Hill. And then what did you do?

SPEAKER_01:

I discovered that this ancestor not only stole a few hearts, but also a bicycle or two.

SPEAKER_00:

I love how you say you discovered, like you went out of your way to dig around in the archives.

SPEAKER_01:

I love a good archive hunt. It was all I could actually really find was this record of theft and charges laid against. Was this Edward Lakovsky from memory?

SPEAKER_00:

It was. It was old Eddie.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Handsome Edward Lakovsky, your uh, as you called him, your hot ancestor. Everyone's got one. I was elated to share with you that you descended not only from pickle royalty, but also from petty thievery.

SPEAKER_00:

So you can imagine the sheer thrill, the sheer delight that I experienced when I read your recent piece for the Jewish Independent. Which opens with the following line. You know what, Dash, I'd love for you to read it. Let's have it in your voice.

SPEAKER_01:

My maternal grandfather, Lawrence Michael Barnett, spent the 1950s as a committed Communist Party member who also happened to be secretly filing reports to ASIO about his comrades. I've recently discovered that wasn't his only secret.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. Now, for our international listeners, ASIO is Australia's Secret Service.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. It's Australia's Internal Security and Intelligence Organization. So Australian CIA. Well, CIA is the external security agency for the United States.

SPEAKER_00:

FBI.

SPEAKER_01:

For our British listeners. And if you're in Israel, it would be the equivalent of Shinbet.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

It's the Internal Intelligence Agency. Yeah. My grandfather was filing reports to them, was an informant to them for Informant, spy, snitch. Yeah. Yep. For much of the 1950s and 60s.

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. And you've recently discovered that wasn't his only secret. He had a few little secrets up his sleeve, didn't he?

SPEAKER_01:

He did, and we'll get there. But first, we should probably let our listeners know that Ashamed to Admit will be continuing in 2026 in a new format and with a new co-host.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's right. Dear listeners, it will continue as a podcast. So you can listen to us while you're washing your dishes, during your commute. But those of you who are more visual people, you will be pleased to know that Ashamed to Admit will be continuing in 2026 as a vodcast as well. So you can see full episodes on your screen.

SPEAKER_01:

Love it. So I am so excited, Tammy, about this. Really looking forward to this new co-host who I can't tell you about, dear listeners, just yet. I know that you're desperate to know, but you're just gonna have to be patient and follow TJI on Instagram because we'll be revealing who that person is in instalments this summer.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. We're gonna make it a game. But we can assure you that you'll love her. Him. Them. I'm mixing up the pronouns because I don't want to give anything away. Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

On with our season three finale.

SPEAKER_00:

Dash, I think you need to have a bit more enthusiasm when you say that.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. It's time to open up the box of family secrets, Tammy.

SPEAKER_00:

On with our season three finale. Dash, let's get back into your family secret. Or secrets. Plural. So before the little musical interlude, we were talking about your maternal grandfather, Lawrence, who we've now discovered was a spy, informant, snitch. And you thought that little bit of information was the most scandalous thing about him. Until your uncle Steven did something a lot of people are doing these days, which became the start of this story that you wrote for TJI and the story we're covering today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, Tommy, my uncle Stephen, who is a very keen genealogist, ordered an online DNA kit. The kit came into the mail, and you spit into a test tube effectively and put the lid on, put it back in the mail, send it back to the company. And then a few weeks later, the results appeared and he was stunned.

SPEAKER_00:

And what did he discover?

SPEAKER_01:

So he had always assumed that his DNA would show that he was almost entirely Anglo-Saxon. So when he saw that quite a decent chunk of his ancestry was Ashkenazi Jewish, 29% he did not expect this.

SPEAKER_00:

Twenty-nine percent Ashkenazi Jewish. When he shared this with you, what went through your mind?

SPEAKER_01:

So many things. I I I I think immediately it did solve a mystery or a big question we had in our family about who Jesse Sheba Barnett was.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And it clearly showed us that this mysterious woman, so my maternal great-grandmother, Stephen's maternal grandm grandmother, was Jewish. And that there was a whole part of this family story that we didn't know anything about. At that stage, I was finishing off my PhD, which, as you know, Tammy, and as our listeners know, has essentially a history looking at the Australian Jewish community and its relationship and identification with the State of Israel and with Zionism. So there I was finishing off this PhD. You're laughing because it's very niche, Tammy, but also incredibly fortuitous in some ways. Because here I am finishing off that PhD.

SPEAKER_00:

With no idea that you had any kind of Jewish links at all.

SPEAKER_01:

No idea.

SPEAKER_00:

No idea.

SPEAKER_01:

Jesse Sheba Barnett. I think we had maybe one or two photos of her. Uh, very, very, very old photos. And there were certain features that just looked quite different to the other parts of the family. So I had some sense that my maternal great-grandmother may not have been Anglo-Saxon, but I absolutely did not know that she was she was Jewish.

SPEAKER_00:

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about her? So I'm going to assume that you didn't know much about her until that test. Is that what led you to then go and search about where she was born and how she ended up in Australia?

SPEAKER_01:

So once we discovered that she clearly was the Jewish part of the family, Uncle Stephen and I both went on a bit of a research odyssey. And over the course of many years, because it it didn't just happen overnight, we started to piece together her family story. Jessie was the eldest child of four children born in Poland in the last decade of the 19th century. This family of four made their way from Poland sometime around the late 1890s. We don't know the reasons for their migration to London, but they were, like many, poor. So interestingly, she went to uh what was a very large Jewish uh school in London at the time. Uh, so was educated to a certain level, but like many children, and particularly girls of that generation, her education ended probably sometime in her mid-teens. And then she registered and worked with the Red Cross during World War One. During World War One, she was working with the Red Cross. She encountered a visiting Australian major, a um very charismatic, very handsome but quite complex man named Mervyn Herbert. This Murvyn Herbert uh was decorated for his service. He led a battalion at Gallipoli, uh, where he was injured, survived, but had to retreat back to the UK. And that is where it seems he met young woman, Jewish emerge, young Jewish girl working for the Red Cross, and it seems that some sort of liaison developed. Because eventually, 1919, Mervyn Herbert returns back to Australia, and Jesse Sheba Barnett follows soon after.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. I love the way you use the term liaison.

SPEAKER_01:

I use that term, Tammy, because he was married with two children. Uh he had a wife, he had two children back in Adelaide, and he wasn't in a position for this to be. He he wasn't in a position to make it official. Make it official, totally. To use the language of the kids these days, it was complicated. The relationship status was complicated.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. The kids these days don't use that. I mean, they say situationship.

SPEAKER_01:

Situationship, totally. It was it was absolutely a situation ship, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, for him, but for her, she was like low-key obsessed with him.

SPEAKER_01:

Quite possibly.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. So how did she get back to Australia? Did he sponsor her to come or did she just go full stalker mode?

SPEAKER_01:

So, yeah, look, it's incredible to think about. He returns back to Australia. Like many World War I veterans, he was granted a subsidy from the government to establish his own property. He chose a block of land along the banks of the River Murray in regional South Australia, near a little township called Marook. He established a grapefarm uh farm with a view to producing wine, and he established a distillery, and he uh had his wife and two kids there, um, move the family there, and lo and behold, by 1920 or 1921, Jesse Sheba Barnett and a newly born baby boy, Lawrence Michael Barnett, end up settling near this property, maybe even on the property.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Question. Did Mervyn Herbert's proper wife know about Jesse?

SPEAKER_01:

We don't know the answer to that question, right? But they then spend the next 13 or 14 years, give or take, near each other, living in close proximity to each other.

SPEAKER_00:

It was my understanding from reading your articles that they lived together. Like I was getting big polyamorous vibes. Was that my projection?

SPEAKER_01:

Truple vibes?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I I thought they were thruppling. Is that just the way I read your article? Like, was that wishful thinking?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, I think it probably was wishful thinking. That would have been extremely scandalous at the time. But look, there was something very unconventional happening there. So in 1933, like more than a decade since Mervyn Herbert has established his farm, and Jesse Sheba Barnett is living there or near there. There's an article written about the success of this property.

SPEAKER_00:

An article from the Murray Pioneer of June 1933 records.

SPEAKER_01:

The hostess is Miss Jesse Barnett. Not Ms. Not Mrs. Because she's not married. Miss Jesse Barnett, strangers to the river. So the term strangers to the river, I think, alludes to guests or people who choose to go and stay at Ilangi, the property, can be assured of a hearty welcome at this progressive home.

SPEAKER_00:

That's what I read into it because you also wrote this Jewish woman, a Polish immigrant via Le East London, worked as a hostess in this area alongside her Australian lover and his legitimate family. That's what I gathered meant that they were like in cahoots or they knew about it. And then you write, remarkably, this arrangement, likely scandalous and therefore hidden from public view, continued until 1936. And yes, the Murray Pioneer have used the term progressive home. So this is what I'm thinking with no disrespect to you. In fact, I have now gained respect for you. Straighty 180, Dashell Lawrence, executive director, wears a lot of navy blue, blazers. Your great-great-grandmother was in a very complicated relationship. She was in a complicated relationship, and I reckon that Mervyn Herbert's wife loved having Jessie around. They were like sister wives. They got a little bit over Mervyn Herbert, because I reckon that he was probably like stuping a few women in town. Some point they saw each other and you know they got vulnerable with each other, opened up. I reckon they maybe even made out a little bit. Like I'm not Okay, Tammy. You really too far? Alright, just get back to the story.

SPEAKER_01:

This is my great-grandmother we're talking about here. You know, let her let her rest in peace.

SPEAKER_00:

This is not well, that's my version of resting in peace.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. You want you wanted to turn this into some sort of sexy Jewish lesbian drama.

SPEAKER_00:

Lesbian, sorry, I did. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Okay, let's get back to the story. All right, so at some point, for reasons unknown, Jessie left that property with your grandfather Lawrence. She boarded a ship in Adelaide, and that was her permanent return to London.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, so on the shipping records, they record that they are making a permanent return to the UK. Lawrence, I think, would have been 14 at this stage. So he's a teenager. They presumably were going to make a life in London. I imagine it would have been in some ways a relief to return back to a city you know well, and not to be seen as potentially the subject of some sort of scandal. Not that long after they disembarked from that ship in London. She died of tuberculosis.

SPEAKER_00:

She was only 49.

SPEAKER_01:

She may even have been younger, in fact. We don't we we don't have a birth record for her. Um 49 is the age that's listed on the death certificate, but it's possible that she was even younger. And yeah, my grandfather stranded. No mother alive, no father, because it's not clear that Mervyn was ever accepted publicly as his father. So he was put into an orphanage soon after.

SPEAKER_00:

And then he was repatriated to Australia. He returned to South Australia to the property where Mervyn Herbert was. And so that's essentially how you ended up in Adelaide. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. A consequence of him eventually being returned back to his father. And then raised, I should say, raised as Mervyn Herbert's son, never with his surname, but in that context of sort of, you know, rural South Australia in the 1940s and 50s.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell In the meantime, Jessie lay in an unmarked grave in Edmonton Jewish Cemetery.

SPEAKER_01:

Which was the resting place of her mother. It was and still is an Orthodox cemetery. It was and still is, although there's not many plots left, the place that Orthodox Jewish people in London would be uh would be buried in at some significant cost, I sh I should add.

SPEAKER_00:

So after you discover this, is it you and your Uncle Stephen, or is it like So essentially we had discovered that, you know, she had died in 1936.

SPEAKER_01:

She was buried somewhere in London. At some point, Uncle Stephen and I tweaked that we could maybe try and find out where she was buried. Not easy to do, but with some assistance, we were able to get a hold of her burial records. Unfortunately, in the UK and in London in particular, there is an organization called the Kehila's Federation, and they have a burial society. They maintain Jewish cemeteries around London and they keep very, very good records. And so we were able to access their records, find out where she was buried. She was buried in Edmonton Cemetery. So Stephen reached out to a kind of group of other Jewish genealogists and people trying to discover more about their Jewish family. And on this particular forum, he came across a gentleman called Stan Kaye. Stan, uh proudly Jewish guy, raised in North London, classic uh North Londoner, very humble fellow. He was a naval officer. And in his retirement, he had sort of taken on this quite extraordinary mission, a mitzvah probably is a better way to put it, of helping families and individuals like us discover their graves and where they kind of needed it, provide some, you know, some maintenance or some assistance. If you had a a grave in a in a Jewish cemetery, Stan is your guy. He will Stan's your man. Stan is your man. He will crisscross across London as he does most days of the week and takes photos of these and sends them back. So he went there. We gave him, we said, Stan, you know, she's in Intermittent Cemetery. This is the section of the cemetery where she is. This is the road, this is the plot. Can you go and take a photo? So off Stan went, took his photo, and lo and behold, there is nothing there. It's an unmarked grave, which I've since learned from Stan was obviously an indication that while there was enough money to get her buried, there wasn't enough money to get a gravestone added at the time. And, you know, he indicated this is, you know, this is a real shame. This is something that Jews, as I'm sure you know, Tammy, have a relationship with death and with bereavement that is quite different to certainly to, you know, Anglo-Non-Jews. There is a really strong feeling that you should be buried and that that burial should have a gravestone. And really, under no circumstances should you, you know, not follow the kind of conventional pathway. Well, Jessie was buried, but she didn't have a gravestone.

SPEAKER_00:

So when you learnt that information, what did you decide to do?

SPEAKER_01:

I didn't really think too much about that until a few years ago. By this stage, I have my own family, and um, as listeners to the podcast know, they're they're Jewish. And, you know, I'm starting to think much more about questions of legacy. Yeah. And and as a father, as a um someone with my own children, I think her not just her death, but the way that my grandfather was left with really no opportunity to grieve or process or remember his mother, it really struck me. And and I would also say the thought of her, this extraordinarily brave decision to move to Australia in very unconventional circumstances. And then again, her decision to then move back to the UK with her son. She just seemed like such a brave and loving person. Obviously, I'm projecting these things onto her. But I I do have a strong sense of her, even though we never knew her and we have very little record of her. And it just it just did not feel right that that grave remained unmarked. So, as you know, Tammy, I went to London in April of this year, and I knew I was going to London about 12 months prior. This is to run the London Marathon.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, to throw that in, yep.

SPEAKER_01:

I did, yeah. Not a great time that day, but that's okay. It was um it was a victory in other ways that trip, because ahead of that visit I arranged for a I mean, a gravestone is probably almost too big of a word to use. It's a very modest little stone, um to headstone to be to be made up and an inscription to be made up. And I ordered for that to be placed just in time for my visit in April. And uh yeah, Stan Stan the man picks me up from the the nearest train station at Edmonton, and he and I spent the morning together talking not just about my story, my family's story, but all of the stories that he has, the extraordinary reunifications he's been able to uh facilitate, and you know, the the chapters that he's been able to help rewrite for families.

SPEAKER_00:

That's so lovely. What a mensch.

SPEAKER_01:

What a mensch. He gave me the time to be by the gravestone, but also to point out certain things about what was likely to have been the process that took place when she would have been brought to the cemetery. And we also went to Jesse's mother's headstone as well and saw that. So yeah, he sort of shared all of this with me and did it in a very generous and and kind and gentle manner, as is Stan's way. He's a mensch.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh. And you're a mensch for having organized all of this. I think that's really, really special. And you did something very important that day. And I hope you've acknowledged that. Obviously, I can't speak for Jesse, but I imagine that she would be very appreciative of what you did.

SPEAKER_01:

I did have a few moments of thinking, like, I know that this is important to me, and I'm I'm glad that this is happening. Even if no one in my family ever gets a chance to visit that gravestone, even if her spirit can't see that this has been affixed and that she has been remembered in this way, it still feels like the right thing to do. It still feels like the thing that needed to happen.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, we've been doing this podcast together for 18 months now. Yeah. And throughout this this time together, people have always gotten confused when they learn that you're not Jewish, because it comes up quite a bit in in the podcast. You remind our listeners that you're not Jewish. Your partner's Jewish, your kids are Jewish.

SPEAKER_01:

Now we've gone and made it even more confusing again by telling people I kind of am Jewish.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, but you write in your piece, and it's really a beautiful piece. I encourage all our listeners to read it because I was really moved by it. You write as someone who has spent nearly two decades researching and writing about Australia's Jewish community. And now, as someone with a Jewish partner raising two Jewish children, I'm often asked, Are you Jewish? So again, over the past 18 months, I've been trying to get you in the hot seat, trying to convince you to be the person that I interview, and you keep saying, No, no, no, no, no, it's not about me. Now I finally have you in the hot seat. So am I allowed to ask you how do you answer that question now when people say are you Jewish?

SPEAKER_01:

My answer's still the same. That is that I'm not Jewish. I wasn't born Jewish, I wasn't raised Jewish, and yes, we have a Jewish household, and I have a connection with this community in Australia and with Jewish life that is unique. But I think the question is it's it is a very interesting one because here I am with a Jewish story. My family story is is also Jewish. Does that make me Jewish? I I don't know. I don't know that it does. Religiously, I have you know absolutely no leg to stand on when it comes to being Jewish. There are certain practices that I now share, and you know, I'm a member of a congregation and all of those things.

SPEAKER_00:

You like to kovech.

SPEAKER_01:

I love to kovech. I I did before I knew this anyway, and I still do. I love to nosh as. You know, the Jewish story is is a part of me now. There may have been a part a part of me in the past that was perhaps inhibited in sharing that. Maybe part of the inhibition was around the sort of fragmentation. Because in some ways, the impulse, or at least the impulse I always felt, and maybe others can can agree with this, is an impulse to have a coherent, clear story. But I think having a very fixed and narrow definition is a little bit limiting. So I think uh that's a very long answer to your question, Tammy.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, it is much longer than I expected. I thought you were gonna say, yeah, I'm 12.3%.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So no, it is more complex, obviously. Dash, thank you so much for sharing that story. It's a very common experience when you meet someone who's Jewish and you say, Oh, where's your ancestor? You know, oh, where are you? Polish, Hungarian, and then it's very common for that person to launch into a full family history. And quite often I just want to interrupt them and say, I don't need the full family history, I just need to know the region. So this is like I'm genuine when I say this to you. I was genuinely curious, interested, and touched by the story. And I thought it was quite appropriate for our final episode together. I think our listeners have been very curious about you. You're an undersharer, I'm obviously an oversharer, so I thought it was time to, you know, kind of balance that equilibrium. So as we bring our season three finale to a close and our final episode together, I'm having this beautiful moment and he checks his phone. That's late.

SPEAKER_01:

Which is funny because I don't know whether the microphone picked this up, but an alarm on my phone started to go off, and it was like piano music, just as as the sentiment is is crescending is rising piano music? Yes, it was. Yes. So I was like, hang on, where did this come from? Has Tammy just pressed play on a tiny violin? Well, thank you, Tammy, for this conversation and for um bearing with me as we go on this ancestral journey. I I couldn't have done it with anyone else, not just this conversation, but also the podcast. And uh yeah, I'm gonna miss miss our weekly chats and interviews and our WhatsApp messages, which of course we can still continue, but they're they're not quite as much fun when we've got a show to plan and and it's true and talk about it.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean don't you worry, I'm still gonna send you unhinged voice memos. So Love it. Yeah, you've got that to look for, please.

SPEAKER_01:

Please do and go well with your new um partner in crime, your new co-host.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_01:

And yeah, looking forward to seeing what you guys cook up in the new year.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Dash. I think it's time for us to do our final outro. You've been listening to Asham to Admit with me, Tammy Sussman, and my former co-host, executive director of the Jewish Independent, Dr. Dashiel Lawrence.

SPEAKER_01:

This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King with Theme Music by Donovan Shanks.

SPEAKER_00:

If you like the podcast, forward it on or leave a positive review so that other people can find us.

SPEAKER_01:

As always, thanks for your support and look out for Asham to admit in its new format with Tammy's new co-host in twenty twenty six.

SPEAKER_00:

Until then, take care of the money.