When Stephen Curry – star of Australian films including The Cup and The Castle, and now nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Logie for TV series Bay of Fires – sat down to have a chat with his 83-year-old mum, Helen, at the beginning of filming his revelation-stacked episode of Who Do You Think You Are (WDYTYA), one question was on the tips of both their tongues:
Was there a bigamist lurking like a scandalous skeleton in their family closet?
“Both of us were sitting there hoping that there was, vicariously thrilled through some dodgy great-great-great uncle,” Curry chuckles.
Multiple outrages follow. “I honestly don’t mean to minimise this at all, but it was morbidly enjoyable to find out all this skullduggery that went on in my family,” he adds. “I wouldn’t say I wear it as a badge of pride, and I’m probably responsible for various older members of my family being mortified, but I do wear it as a badge of pride that we now know.”
Curry’s father, Neville, recently passed, underlining that, like many Australians, Curry knew very little about his family history beyond scant bits and pieces of his grandparents’ lives. “Losing dad reminded me about the importance of legacy, and he left such a great one,” he says. “It makes you question your own mortality, and the mortality of my mum as well. She’s going really strong, but it gives you that extra impetus to find out what you can.”
His WDYTYA adventure follows Curry from the idyllic Macedon Ranges home he shares with his wife Naadein Crowe and their two beautiful boys back to Melbourne, where he grew up, and out to Gold Rush towns including Chewton. “For my kids and their kids to have a document like this, a historical map, when they’re old enough to appreciate that, it’s going to be an incredible gift.”
Stephen Curry with historian Dr Liz Rushen, at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. Credit: Ryan McCurdy
Uncovering heroes and villains along the way, Curry’s history stretches back to a mansion in Dublin, though riches in the bank do not guarantee a wealth of spirit. “They say money doesn’t buy happiness, and it probably doesn’t buy you a sense of honour, either,” Curry notes of one particularly awful ancestor. “If it wasn’t for some heinous mismanagement, I could have been raised a silver spooner and wouldn’t have had to work a day in my life. I could have been a terrible person myself and gotten away with it.”
As an actor, Curry plays bad guys in a controlled environment. “They’re a lot more fun because the rules are very different for them, just like they are for billionaires,” he says. “You don’t want to think about what my what my five-times great grandfather from Dublin was actually worth, in today’s money. Thank god people in the subsequent generations managed to fritter it away.”
Curry’s family also includes Bronze Age-uncovering archaeologists in England, and a valiant whistleblower who suffered for his convictions. The uncovering also fills Curry in on Melbourne’s notorious Yarra Bend Asylum, long-since demolished and its foundations buried. He felt the weight of every step. “I never expected to go on that kind of an adventure, like it’s happening in real-time,” he says. “When you’re learning about your six-times great grandfather, who went through this incredible struggle even to get to this country, it’s both a wealth of experience and also fraught.”
A breathtaking scene in front of an unmarked grave brought Curry to the edge of tears. “It comes back to legacy,” he says. “When the memory of a life’s struggle is erased, that’s something that a lot of my family are going to want to rectify. And that’s part of the gift of this show, through the incredible research team at SBS, to find all of this information. To go back so many generations through which the documentation is pretty sketchy and find such a rich history, within my family, of very good and some bloody bad people.”
Stephen Curry in Melbourne during filming for 'Who Do You Think You Are'. Credit: Ryan McCurdy
Australia’s story contains multitudes of both. “There’s so much history in this country, and so much of it is this disgraceful history that needs to be remembered if we’re to move forward,” Curry says. “But also there’s a rich history of toil, of hard work and dedication to what would have been an incredibly difficult experience in the Gold Rush days. Having to confront the living conditions back then, not the least of which is the lack of sanitation and the fear of lawlessness. It really was the Wild West back then, and there was so much danger in raising a family.”
The child mortality rate during the Gold Rush was as high as 40 per cent. “It’s not that some people didn’t live to ripe old ages,” Curry says. “It was that so many children perished before their time. Even trying to get a child to live past the age of five was a mission.”
Confronted with tragic tales, Curry felt held by the many historians who took the time to sit down with him and trace his family’s story. “They understand the importance of this, to be able to allow generations and the struggle that they went through to live on. I’ll never forget their kindness.”
Inspired to delve deeper, Curry’s journey doesn’t end here. “I get my little obsessions, you see.” But what if there are more rogues lurking in the annals? “Hopefully we’ve got more of the good side of the family rather than the bad, but it always skips a generation, they say, so who knows mate?”
As for future generations, Curry is sanguine. “I would like to go on the record to say that I take no responsibility for the actions of my great-great-great grandsons or daughters. They’re going to be their own people.”
The brand-new series of Who Do You Think You Are? is currently airing 7.30pm Tuesdays on SBS and SBS On Demand. See earlier episodes in this series, including Stephen Curry's episode, along with past series, .
Stream free On Demand
Who Do You Think You Are? Australia
