All at Tinteán and all of Val’s friends and a wide circle of associates were delighted with this formal recognition of Val’s achievements. Val’s interests and community work are spread across a vast field. The official citation which accompanied the award’s announcement indicated that it was ‘for service to education as an academic and historical researcher and to the community.’ Such a summary of Val’s contribution to our community barely touches the true story. He has been an inexhaustible and encouraging advisor, carer and mentor to so many, particularly to the disadvantaged.

As a Catholic priest in the Melbourne Archdiocese during the 1960s and 1970s, Val was involved in the publication of Priest Forum leading to the formation of the National Council of Priests. He has been an office-bearer of the Australian Vietnam Society, involved with post-war reconstruction and the collection of historical records. He wrote a definitive and exhaustive study of Melbourne Catholics and Vietnam, Disturbing the War (Spectrum) published in 1993 and which formed his doctoral dissertation.

He is a Senior Fellow , School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne.

He was a board member of the Celtic Club in Melbourne for 5 years and was the winner of that club’s Dr Michael Sullivan Award in 2006. He has been involved with the Irish Language Association and is an ardent student of that language.

Val Noone was the founder, editor and publisher of Táin, the precursor of Tinteán. Taín established itself as a serious and scholarly journal in the forty-five issues and seven years of successful publishing over which Val presided.

We offer Val our sincere congratulations on this milestone achievement and honour.

We also offer him our apologies for this belated tribute – he will no doubt understand our proffered excuse – a glitch in the system!

The Tinteán Editorial Committee

The reason for my interest was that many years ago I danced myself in Newcastle upon Tyne and was keen to see how Irish Dancing had changed since those days (the 50s!). Having never attended a National championship, I was overawed by it. The championship was spread over six days and there were over 1000 participants, aged from seven years old to adults, from every State and Territory in Australia. Musicians and adjudicators came from Canada, England, Ireland, and the USA. I was fortunate to meet a couple from Soth Australia whose son was a competitor and who were able to advise a novice about the rules and set up of the championships. The solo dancing that I watched was the older competitors from Senior Boys and Girls (16 years) through to Senior Men and Ladies. The competition at this level was truly fascinating and of a very high standard.

The changes I noticed were the more difficult steps in the solo dances, the colourful costumes with beautiful embroidery and the wigs (a change from ‘rags’ in the hair the night before a competition!),and the competitors wear different costumes for their solo dances and team dances.

The figure dances I saw were beautifully choreographed. The story of the dance was read first and then interpreted through dance. Marks were given for teamwork and presentation. The many different school teams’ costumes were striking, making the whole experience most enjoyable. Altogether the standard of solo dancing with the more intricate steps and the superb presentation of the team dancing were much more involved than I remember from my dancing days. The whole event was a credit to both teachers and dancers in Australia. Well done.

After the competition, I interviewed the dancer whose parents I had met at the competition. I was interested in finding out the background of one of these young dancers whom I had observed in the competition. James McEvoy competed in the Junior Men (17 years). He is a dancer with the Scoil Rince Ní Murchu in SA and in his competition he came 2nd to Brent Pace-Rabusin from the Rabusin School in Victoria. James has danced since he was four and has won his State championship at least nine times. James enjoys his dancing and the many friends he makes from travelling around Australia meeting other competitors. He combines his love of dancing with many other interests such as singing and playing the flute, the Irish whistle, and the piano. He also completed a very successful year twelve.

The competitors who qualify from the Nationals are eligible to attend the World Championships which this year will take place in Glasgow from 29 March to 6 April. We wish all those able to attend the best of luck. Interested readers can find out all the results from the National competitions by logging onto the AIDA website and then to Australian Championships results.

Brenda Lindeman

The catalyst for Hood’s disclosure was the publication in Melbourne’s Catholic paper The Advocate (April 19, 1902) of a Raftery poem set in Ballylee, ‘Mary Hynes’. The poem appeared both in the original Gaelic and in an English translation by Dr Nicholas O’Donnell, Australia’s foremost Gaelic scholar. In the opening stanza the poet meets Mary Hynes one Sunday morning:

Going to Mass by the heavenly mercy,

The day was rainy, the wind was wild;

I met a lady beside Kiltartan

And fell in love with the lovely child;

My conversation was smooth and easy,

And graciously she answered me,

“Raftery dear, ’tis yourself that’s welcome,

So step beside me to Ballylee.”

(Frank O’Connor’s translation has been used here.)

Raftery falls in love with her; the poem is a paean of praise to the girl’s beauty which the blind poet cannot see. In the next issue of The Advocate Martin Hood published his letter of reminiscence:

Ballylee

Sir, I was much interested in the Irish song, “Ballylee”, printed in the “Advocate” of last week; not more because of its clever translation by an Australian native (Dr. O’Donnell) than that the author was personally known to me in my early years, and that I was born and brought up within a few miles of Ballylee. I remember Raftery paying one of his itinerary visits to my father’s house – I think about 1834 – when he remained a few days. He had with him as a guide a boy of about 14. He was of course blind from his early childhood and learned to play on the violin. He was in the habit of paying periodical visits to the houses of the gentry and well-to-do farmers. He was welcome everywhere he called, and, I may say, his poetry was more appreciated than his music. He had other favourite ladies besides Mary Hynes. His song “Bridget Vasey” was more popular and more generally sung in my native place than “Mary Hynes”. He composed a remarkable dirge on the “Cholera Morbus”, a scourge that committed fearful ravages in 1832, and this was one of his best known productions.

Raftery had great command of the Irish language and a good general knowledge of history. He had frequent altercations with kindred poets – one in particular named John Burke. Their recriminations were frequently recited at the firesides on long wintry nights. As indicated in “Ballylee”, Raftery was by no means indifferent to an abundant cellar.

Ballylee is in the parish of Kiltartan – a parish that takes in the northern portion of the town of Gort – a town well known to His Grace Archbishop Carr. If the departed spirit of poor Raftery could take any interest in mundane matters, he would view with satisfaction the feelings excited by Dr O’Donnell in the recitation of his eulogy of “Mary Hynes” at the other side of the globe, and which was in Raftery’s day a recreation ground for the kangaroo and the emu. – Yours, etc. MARTIN HOOD

Melbourne’s Archbishop as the time, Thomas Carr, was born in Galway and was Bishop of Galway when appointed to the Melbourne See in 1885. Raftery wrote poems berating rival poets – his poem on Shawn a Burke (John Burke) imagines Burke being hunted through the countryside as punishment for his poetic transgressions.

Raftery’s poems were not committed to print during his lifetime. Oral versions were later collected and published in 1903 as Songs Ascribed to Raftery by Dr Douglas Hyde, a leader of the Gaelic Revival movement. Hyde says of Mary Hynes: ‘She was the handsomest maiden, they say, who was born for a hundred years in the West of Ireland.’ An old fiddler remembered her: ‘Mary Hynes was the finest thing that was ever shaped. There usedn’t to be a hurling match in the country that she wouldn’t be at, and a white dress on her always.’ Another man said: ‘If she went to a hurling match or a gathering the people used to be running on top of other to lay their eyes on her.’

Raftery’s most famous poem was occasioned by someone asking who the blind fiddler was:

I am Raftery the poet,

Full of hope and love,

With sightless eyes

And undistracted calm.

Going west on my journey

By the light of my heart,

Weak and tired

To the end of my road.

Look at me now!

My face to the wall,

Playing music

To empty pockets.

Ballylee is near the town of Gort. The Gort-Kiltartan-Ballylee area in south Galway has many associations with W.B.Yeats, who bought an old tower at Ballylee in 1917, as he tells us in his poem ‘To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

In Yeats’ poem ‘The Tower’ the blind poet is Raftery. As Yeats recalls, Mary Hynes herself and Raftery’s poem celebrating her had not been forgotten in the neighbourhood:

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the colour of her face,

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if she walked there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight.

Martin Hood in Australia was one of those who remembered the Raftery poem set in his home town of Ballylee.

Hood was a stalwart of Melbourne’s Irish Catholic community for over fifty years. He was a founder and six times President of the St Patrick’s Society which staged the annual St Patrick’s Day procession and fete from 1857 onwards. Though a teetotaller he worked in a wine and spirit store, and later as manager of a brewery. Hood was a prominent member of many organisations – the Melbourne Athenaeum, the Benevolent Asylum, the Mutual Society, and the Irish National League which campaigned for Home Rule for Ireland. He died in 1909 at the age of 86.

Dr Nicholas O’Donnell, who was President of the local Gaelic League and also a leader in the agitation for Home Rule, published a column in Gaelic in The Advocate during the first decade of the 20th century. He had persuaded the management of the paper to import type with a Gaelic font. Each week he published a text in Gaelic with his own translation into English. In the issue of May 21, 1904, O’Donnell disclosed he had been able to buy a number of handwritten manuscripts in Gaelic, which included a text of Brian Merryman’s long poem ‘The Midnight Court’, and a 250-page version of the most important ancient Irish epic, the ‘Táin Bó Cuailgne’.

It is remarkable to think that a century ago Melbourne harboured ancient Gaelic manuscripts and a man who knew Raftery the Poet.

Patrick Morgan
Val Noone has recently published an article on Nicholas O’Donnell’s Gaelic Column in the papers of the 16th Australasian Irish Studies Conference.

As a practising literary critic, I jumped at the opportunity of reading about an Irish-Australian elder in the field. Three female colossi bestrode literature in the 1970s, and I am privileged to have been taught by two of them – Judith Wright (who taught Australian poetry to honours students at the University of Queensland in 1968) and Dorothy Green (my postgrad supervisor). I have met Veronica Brady often in the course of my career, have often been reviewed by her, and am proud to think of her as a fellow-traveller in Australian Studies, but of the holy trinity of redoubtable female Australianists of this era, she is the least well known to me, so it was a pleasure to find out a lot more about the pilgrim journey of this great Australian. I’ve admired her for a long time – for her feistiness, fearlessness, feminism, passionate advocacy of Aborigines and other marginalised people, and for her energy.

Kath Jordan’s biography confirms her place in the genealogy. She has a lot in common with Wright and Green, and it is no accident that she re-entered their orbits later in life giving the inaugural Dorothy Green address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Ballarat in 1992, and writing an authorised biography of Judith Wright. Separated by half a generation, all three of these women are/were tiny, nuggetty persons physically, with not a whiff of old-lady-ness about them, and very prepared to use their tongues and gimlet eyes in defense of their beliefs. Each of them cultivated mild eccentricity both as a defence against the bourgeois expectations of women of their respective times, and for the freedoms eccentricity confers on such outré souls. Each of them was a passionate educator, and charismatic (even Judith Wright after deafness made her vocation as a teacher difficult), but with an edge of dogmatism and abrasiveness. All three were radicals, with strong views about the corrupting influence of money, and left-leaning to the extent that at least two of them earned the dismissive and derogatory moniker, ‘commie’. Each of them was driven by social justice agendas which literature was made to serve, and this in times that long predated the academy’s easy acceptance of aestheticism as a norm, and each suffered for this choice. It is easier for the academy to support them in a post-modern and post-colonial theory-driven context. They were pioneers for women in the academy, and suffered the disdain of their male contemporaries, as this book makes clear.

Veronica Brady was born into a strongly Irish clan, Bradys from Cavan (in the 1860s), farmers originally, and later railwaymen, but not as strapped as many famine migrants, with the family’s wealth augmented by marriage into the Molloy and Collins families, who had a much stronger entrepreneurial streak. Second-generation Irish-Australian is an affiliation Veronica was pleased to acknowledge throughout her career. The family had middle-class money and good connections in a period when most Irish were working class, and girls in the family were educated by the Loretos. After taking a degree in History and Literature at the University of Melbourne, Veronica became a Loreto nun. She honed her skills as a teacher in secondary schools, and later, because the Loreto rule followed the Jesuit one, got the opportunity to teach at tertiary level, first at Christ College in Melbourne, and later as a tutor at University of Western Australia. There she established the first serious course in Australian Literature at UWA. She also fitted in postgraduate studies in Chicago and Toronto, making a major contribution to Patrick White studies in her PhD. Her research had always strongly focused on the sacred, and on heterodox forms of religious experience, and White was a passionate master for the young Veronica Brady, with his anti-bourgeois satire, mysticism, hyper-nationalism, his troubling of gender fixities, and his yearning for European sophistication and aestheticism. There are many traces of Patrick in the trajectory of the young academic. She was at the younger end of the generation which made Australian literary studies respectable. It was hard to dislodge the cultural cringe and instal Australian literary studies as a central part of the curriculum, and Veronica and her ilk deserve much credit for this. However much Patrick may have fallen into desuetude in recent years, he was a strategic piece of armoury in what could be bloody battles (the case of Sam Goldberg at Sydney University is part of this story). Kath Jordan reminded me of the pleasures of consuming the latest new work by Patrick White in long, days-and-nights reading sessions, and as soon as the books came on the shelves in bookshops, or if the cost was prohibitive, in libraries.

Whether Veronica Brady’s social conscience came from her father, the scriptures, or life experience, does not much matter, but from her early days she was a fearless unionist (hence the appellation ‘commie nun’). She got many opportunities to put her beliefs into practice at the university, and later when she took on a highly visible role as an ABC commissioner in the 1980s. The question of whether she was a good appointment (she unwisely let it be known she did not watch TV) is too lightly skated over by the biographer, but certainly in this short-lived role the staff appreciated her characteristic efforts to get to know them. This kind of genuine interest from the board was exceptional. As in her teaching, she had a passionate commitment to the educative and cultural roles of the ABC and stoutly resisted commercialisation. She had the temerity to suggest that if money were to be saved, it should be done in sports coverage.

The book details, in a rather fractured and fracturing way it has to be said, the myriad of causes with which this dynamo of a woman has been and is associated. She proudly teaches Aboriginal literature and culture (in properly post-colonial consultative and collaborative ways with elders), but also concerns herself with living conditions, land rights and native title, and deaths in custody. She preaches and enacts reconciliation as a speaker and writer, and deals with racism in head-on ways with students. She reports finding that difficult in Western Australia, and she often despairs of the ‘Perthlings’ whose outlook it has been her life’s work to change. Other causes include East Timor, campaigns against nuclear proliferation, the ordination of women, Amnesty International. The list is long and one senses that she feels obliged to say ‘yes’ if the cause is good, even if it might be wiser to say ‘no’ because of the ways in which she is stretched. I am sure the organisations that can claim her as a figurehead or as a spokeswoman are grateful for her energy, even if she is hard to pin down.

Kath Jordan’s book gives a good sense of her as a clannish family woman, of the simplicity of her living arrangements, and also of the chaotic whirlwind she seems to generate. It’s a story of warmth, and compassion and giving. However, I do have reservations about this book and believe it does not serve its subject well. I think Veronica should have said no to a close (and admittedly good-hearted) friend writing a biography. It is gushy and overwritten, sentimental (witness the title, which is intended affectionately but does disservice to a firebrand of a woman who is neither angelic, nor truly a larrikin). There is too much unsubstantiated enthusiasm, too many hurrahs (‘very’ is a key word). I longed for the counter-evidence to be examined and for the writer to engage critically with the data she has amassed. The segués are often baffling and trivialising (from ironingboards to aborigines on p.125), and too chronology-driven. There’s not a lot of argument to act as spine for the book, nor a deep immersion in the intellectual world Brady inhabits.

Jordan’s book gives a lot of background, but if it ever goes to a second edition, there’s much more that could be done with the material. I’d appreciate some analysis of how it is that a woman with her ‘crypto-heretical’ (she has called herself an ‘unbelieving believer’) views of church teaching (on abortion, gay rights, ordination of women) is able to skate under the Episcopal radar when her male colleagues (like Peter Kennedy in Brisbane) are being threatened with excommunication? Does her order offer protection? Are women better buffered than male religious? Are her education and her ability as a debater forms of armour? Is it her high-profile public intellectual status that protects her? Or her independent means? Or her femaleness? Clearly, she makes waves within her order, but maybe it is her personal charisma, or forthright challenging manner, which protects her? We get glimpses of her struggles with church, but also of her compliance with its demands at less strategic moments. She is a woman who has strong personal loyalties, and somehow seems to be able to accommodate the demands of her order. Jordan’s puzzlement is too easily defused by Veronica’s too glib ‘explanation’: ‘that’s the deal.’

Perhaps my misgivings about this book suggest that we need a frank and thoughtful autobiography. This is a woman with a sense of humour and she undoubtedly has a huge capacity for modesty, so I’d really like to see her muster that fierce, even lacerating honesty to explain the enigma that is Veronica Brady. In doing so, I am sure she would justify my locating her in that superb genealogy of sisters-in-literature: Wright-Green-Brady. Between them, they helped forge a nexus between social justice, environmental awareness and the literary arts.

Frances Devlin-Glass in ‘retirement’ continues to profess Australian (and Irish) Literature as an editor of the Journal for the Study of Australian Literature and as the founding director of Bloomsday in Melbourne.

This book took me quite by surprise: its easy style and its visionary overview of Ireland’s rich natural endowments in ancient times held me spellbound. This translation makes what is purported to be a very complex manuscript very easy to navigate: the Latin manuscript is printed on the left hand page, with the English translation on the right hand page.

Until now, the Latin writings of the Irish have remained neglected and untranslated. In the Foreword, Keith Sidwell, Professor of Latin and Greek at UCC, comments

Between 1500 and 1750, when Latin was the medium of European intellectual discourse, more than 300 Irish writers produced more than 1000 printed works, and probably as many, if not more again, like Zoilomastix, never reached print (thought this may not have stopped them circulating and having their own influence).

In the Introduction, Denis C. O’Sullivan surveys the historic period with specific focus on the O’Sullivan clan’s political struggles –driven from their lands from the 1200s, and finally, after the battle of Kinsale in 1602, when Philip was an impressionable 12 year old, many members of the O’Sullivan Beare clan were exiled to Spain. Don Philip became an important historian in his time, best known for his Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae (Lisbon 1621), usually referred to as the Compendium, and also known as ‘O’Sullivan’s Catholic History’.

In 1625, Don Philip wrote Zoilomastix in an effort to refute Giraldus Cambrensis’ derogatory report on Ireland, Topographia Hiberniae (1188) (available as an e-text on the internet). This translation of Zoilomastix, Book One, takes us on a highly colloquial and entertaining journey into the Irish environment, region-by-region, a survey of landscapes, birds and bees, beasts and man –offering a whole new slant on life in pre-modern Ireland.

From the first English/Norman incursions in the late thirteenth century, which continued until the Tudor invasion in the late sixteenth century, the Irish were slandered and slaughtered for political gain. A critical analysis of the ‘fraudulent’ Norman incursion into Ireland can be found in Maurice Sheehey’s When The Normans Came to Ireland (Mercier, 1998). Not as well known is the fact that at the same time many significant writers described Ireland as a paradise. This is confirmed in a recent in-depth geographic study of Ireland, undertaken by Ulf Erlingsson, a celebrated Swedish scientist with a unique background in marine geology and disasters (coincidentally, also from the University of Uppsala), who claims that Plato based his geographic description of Atlantis on Ireland: Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective –Mapping the Fairy Land (Lindorm Publishing 2004).

In The Natural History of Ireland, Don Philip O’Sullivan opens with the question: ‘What are the things that were said by Giraldus that need to be refuted here?’ He compares Giraldus Cambrensis’ disparaging criticisms with his praise: ‘Giraldus is refuted by his very own words with which he praises Ireland in a wonderful way.’

Don Philip supports his argument with a broad spectrum of commentaries on Ireland. For example, on the comforts of early Irish life-style, he quotes Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618), from De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (Antwerp 1584), (which, by the way, has recently been translated by John Barry, lecturer in Classics at UCC). Stanihurst was a keen pupil of Giraldus Cambrensis, but even he refutes Giraldus’ judgments:

‘He alludes, not aptly, to the verse of the prophet, in Psalm 62: ‘In a land deserted without road and unwatered.’ Truly it appears clearly, even from the testimony of Gyraldus himself, that Ireland was not deserted. In Chapter One he wrote as follows ‘I could, like others, have chosen for your sublime highness small gifts of gold, falcons, and hawks, with which the island abounds’ (Chapter 6). He tells us that the plains are covered abundantly with crops (Chapter 7). He attests that a great amount of wine is imported into Ireland. He declares everywhere in his history that a great multitude of Irish men were under arms. With these and with other errors, which Stanihurst has compiled more comprehensively, it is satisfactorily established that Giraldus was ‘neither constant in truth nor consistent in lying.’

Don Philip quotes Stanihurst again:

This land is the most temperate of all lands. The exhausting heat of the tropic of Cancer does not drive one to the shade. The cold of the tropic of Capricorn does not invite one urgently to the fireplaces. Here, you will see the snows rarely and then lasting a limited period of time. … Grassy pastures grow green in winter time, as in the summer. Thus they are not accustomed to cut hay for fodder and never prepare stables for the beasts. With the pleasantness and the mildness of the air, almost all seasons are moderately warm. … The island is in little need of the services of doctors. You find very few ill people apart from those who are about to die. Between continuous health and final death, there is scarcely any mean. In the same way, no one of the natives born here who has not left the land and the healthy air, ever suffers from any of the three kinds of fever…’

Don Philip O’Sullivan knew the heart of the Irish peoples’ deep respect for nature–they were artists, naturally, in the truest sense of the word, –hence ‘Saints and Scholars’.

Today, we are struggling to maintain a healthy relationship with nature and it is never easy to articulate our deeper insights. Irish songs and poetry often succeed. My song ‘Rapture’ (For Love’s Caress CD 1998) comes to mind as an intuitive response to Don Philip’s vision of his homeland:

Womb of time– bearing down
Impelling light– seeking life
Spirit flower– living river
Melodies merging– praising glory.
Breathless rapture– pressing, primal thought
Weaving the link of fire and air
Hearing– knowing– tracing an ancient call
Dancing on living sacred ground.

The Normans introduced power struggles over separation of Church and State to Ireland, thus exposing the Irish to previously unheard of levels of cruelty and chaos, resulting in the separation of heaven and nature.

The book finishes with biographical notes on Authors Cited, giving further glimpses into the mind of the times, especially in relation to Ireland’s connections with Europe. Dr. Denis C. O’Sullivan’s translation is a landmark contribution to all aspects of Irish scholarship, natural, cultural, and political.

Mairéid Sullivan

Mairéid Sullivan (maireid.com) is an internationally acclaimed singer and songwriter.

Of all the ethnic origins of non-indigenous Australians, the Irish element is the most difficult to quantify. Yet, in the 2006 Australian census, over 1.8 million people still identified themselves as having Irish ancestry. This was the third most prevalent source quoted for ancestry, behind ‘English’ and ‘Australian’. However, most experts concede that a large number of those respondents who stated their origin as ‘Australian’, as for those claiming other ethnicity, would include people of Irish ancestry. So, the real figure for Australians of Irish origin is very much higher than has been stated in this census and largely unrecorded. The Australian Embassy in Dublin puts the figure for Australians of Irish ancestry as 30% and it is said that for most of Australia’s history, Irish Catholics have been the country’s largest minority. Indeed, it is difficult to find many Australians who lived here before the Second World War who did not have some Irish ancestry.

Our first non-indigenous settlers included some 40,000 convicts of whom a large number were Irish. Many of these were political prisoners from the rebellions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries or those whose ‘crimes’ were committed in response to the oppression, economic or otherwise, of their foreign landlords. After 1831, many Irish arrived as part of the assisted immigration scheme to take up menial occupations in this new land and over 4,000 young female orphans arrived during the Great Famine. Irish immigration persisted for the next 100 years. Only in the 1960s, did immigration from the south of Ireland drop significantly.

It is not only due to the lack of specificity in census recording that the real impact of Irish ancestry has not been revealed. Regrettably, our Irish origins have often been hidden in the sanitised version of Australian history that many of us were taught as children. It was full of the exploits of famous historical figures from our colonial past, described as British. A number of these were actually Irish but, like the rest of us at the time, under the umbrella of British passports. Many Irish Protestants had achieved positions in the law and politics but their origins were hidden under the British label while their Catholic countrymen did not enjoy the same opportunities. The era of sectarian bigotry which existed in this country from British settlement to less than fifty years ago made it ‘unfashionable’ to admit to Irish ancestry, thought to be synonymous with the deadly sins of Catholicism and Fenianism. Job advertisements of the first half of the last century often featured the statement ‘Catholics need not apply’. The bigotry and ignorance of the times is not dissimilar to the attitudes of many modern Australians to our Islamic immigrants. Perhaps, we should be playing a leadership role in combating this more recent racism.

Sectarianism ensured that there were barriers to the pursuit of many occupations for Catholics, who comprised the majority of Irish Australians. Such a barrier existed on the conservative side of politics right up to the period following the Second World War. For example, in the Government of the post-war period, Prime Minister Menzies often referred openly to his Army Minister as a ‘token Catholic’ and Catholics were virtually unrepresented in the conservative parties at the time. Despite this barrier, seven of our 26 Prime Ministers have Irish origins, including the incumbent. A measure of the disappearance of this sectarianism in politics today is reflected in the fact that the last three leaders of the Liberal Party have been born to, or converted to, Catholicism. Irish Australians have served in the positions of Governor General, State Governor, Premier and as heads of public service departments. They feature as giants of commerce, prominent sporting, intellectual and cultural figures, and leaders in all walks of life.

Although this bigotry is almost completely gone, there are still important matters to address, such as the preservation and promotion of our sense of identity. Our pride in our Irish origins is important in the recognition of the contribution of the Irish to Australian culture. One has only to look at our early music, poetry and slang to see these origins. The natural sense of fair play, questioning of authority based on aristocracy and privilege, and our sense of humour are no doubt due to our early Irish settlers as much as anybody. However, it has been most unfortunate that demographers have aggregated Irish Australians with those of British origin. Many of us grew up with the descriptor of ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a term which was both inaccurate and an insult to our Irish ancestry. Later, possibly with good intentions, the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ was introduced and applied to Australians of both Irish and British backgrounds but this is equally misleading and insulting. This use of the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ has been much criticised, although sadly it is still in common usage. Patrick O’Farrell has described it as ‘a grossly misleading, patronising and false convenience’ while Siobhan McHugh says it is a distortion of our past which fails to recognise the struggle of Irish Australians against oppression and demonisation. Surely, it’s time to give this description a permanent burial.

One of the reasons for a resurgence of interest in our Irish ancestry has been the growth of family history investigations. As a result, many have discovered their Irish roots, reflecting the significant contribution made by these immigrants to our new Australian society. Tinteán, the publication of the Australian Irish Heritage Network, plays a leading role in the recognition of our Irish heritage and culture. We have a loyal and growing number of subscribers which includes past and present government ministers, authors, musicians, academics and poets, not to mention a sprinkling of bishops and clerics, both Catholic and Protestant – all proud of their Irish origins. Our readership is not restricted merely to our subscribers. Issues of Tinteán are retained by public libraries and universities both here and overseas and the usage of these copies is evidenced by enquiries and new subscriptions. It is our mission to continue to provide a focus for the promotion and preservation of our heritage.

Robert J F Butler

To open, Peter Kiernan welcomed all and paid tribute to the First Peoples for their stewardship of this land and in a spirit of reconciliation and in solidarity. In directing attention to the sacrifices made by the seventeen hundred orphan girls carried across the seas in six sailing ships to Melbourne and with all those who hunger, he quoted from the plaque: ‘God never planned this work’.

A piece written by Pauline Rule ‘From Famine to Melbourne’ was then read by Robert Butler. This was first published in the original booklet prepared for the unveiling of the Rock in 1998 by the Irish Ambassador. A reading from shipboard diaries quoted in Don Charlwood’s The Long Farewell then followed. The diaries were written by passengers in sailing ships of those times, with dramatic descriptions of the horrendous and frightening seas of the Roaring Forties.

Mary Kenneally, a well-known actor and enthusiast of things Irish gave a beautiful reading of a poem by her third cousin Brendan Kennelly, ‘My Dark Fathers’ a chilling account of a Great Famine husband and wife united in death. Mary chooses to read this every year because it explains the horror, the shame and the grief-stricken silence that fell on Ireland for generations after.

Our minstrels then did us proud and we heard traditional instruments as our ancestors would have heard them, acoustic and with deliberation. Leo Kelly, piper, explained the integral place a Bard had in a community’s rhythm of life and he traced the history of the Union or Uillean pipes (as they have been known since the 1930s). He played several pieces, a slow air, ‘The Cause of my Pain’ and other laments. The haunting sounds of his pipes held us spellbound and passers-by stopped and listened intently. More music followed with fiddler duettists Sean Kenan and Phil Cleary (no, not wearing a footy jumper) playing an air, ‘For Ireland I’d not tell her Name’, a hornpipe ‘The Boys of Blue Hill’ and a reel ‘Drowsey Maggie’.

A highlight of the afternoon was the contribution of two orphan girls’ connections, Debra Vaughan and Anne Ramage. Debra is a great-great-granddaughter of Sarah O’Malley who landed at the spot where we stood, from the Pemberton in May 1849. She spoke with love of her relatives and family and the contributions they have made to Australian society. She spoke of the dispossession of the Indigenous people echoing the Irish supplanted by Vikings, Normans English and and Scots. Waves of people before us have learnt to bend and integrate and then love the people who next come to change again their splendid isolation. Anne has family connections with two Lady Kennaway girls, Bridget and Mary Costello from Galway and she boasted proudly of her pride and interest in that history.

To close, Kathleen Kiernan played, very expertly, a slip jig ‘The Butterfly’, on the tin whistle. Heavy rain resumed and we all retreated for hot coffee and French crepes. It was truly a memorable day, that second-last Sunday in November.

Leo Kelly, Debra Vaughan and Peter Kiernan

Ni féidir é a bhogadh,
an braon fola a doirteadh
ó thaobh mo mháthar ionam,
a d’fhág starrfhiacail chlaon
im charball uachtair
bollán tochais i ngort
mo mharana, oghamchloch
a bhodhraíonn m’aigne
lena haibítir bhallbh.

Cuirim ordóg ramhar
fé fhiacail an fheasa
is labhrann an gallán
as íochtar comhfheasa amach:
Cúl le cine, cúl le cine
mar is dual cine ded shórt,
focail chomh crua
le gráinne gainimhe
fé chaipín súile
atá iata chomh dlúth le sliogán oisre.

Nuair a osclaíonn scian an tsolais
a bhéal ar maidin,
tá fiacail ar sceabha i ndrad mo mhic,
gléas chomh hard le niamh an phéarla
ar a gháire neamhbhoirfe gan teimheal.

Heredity

There’s no denying
the blood that goes through me
from my mother’s side,
leaving one snarled tooth
in the roof of my moth,
an itching post in the field
of my thoughts, an ogham stone
that shouts me down
with its unintelligible alphabet.

I put my swollen thumb
under the tooth of knowledge,
and the stone speaks up
from the underworld of my thoughts:
You were always a black sheep
Like all belonging to you,
Hard words like grains of sand
in the corner of an eyelid
shut tight as an oyster.

When a blade of light prises it open,
there’s a tooth askew
in my son’s mouth.
It shines like a pearl
in his perfectly crooked smile.

Louis de Paor was born in Cork and lived in Australia 1987- 96, where his first bi-lingual collection, Aimsir Bhreichneach / Freckled Weather was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award. In 2000 he won the Lawrence O’Shaunessy Award and in 2003 the Orireachtas prize for the best collection of poems in Irish.

The Suitcase

This is the Kilburn High Road
running up towards Cricklewood
away from England’s Edgeware Road
where the homeless Irish come
carrying their father’s battered suitcase,
though their father may have never left home.
They used to buy them at the summer fairs
for that day when their time would come,
or get them off a friend who died,
his lifelong journey finally done.
That’s how my father stayed in his fields.
His suitcase travelled to him
from an Irish woman with a soft Kerry voice,
whose children’s eyes were Irish blue
and accents East End Cockney.
She had married three times in England
and returned sadly widowed again.
The locals said “she deserved what she got
the saintless, unGodly woman.”
Yet they listened discreetly to the stories she told

of how one husband left in a blitz of booze,
Another in a blitz of bombs,
the last one dying on a beach outside Calais
his toes barely touching French soil.
She used to giggle at the thought,
said it reminded her of once
when he danced on Brighton beach
in nothing but his cotton drawers.
When she died the priest brought round her suitcase.
My father left it by the door.
In our kitchen someone was always leaving home.

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin, studied literature at Essex University & Trinity College and is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts. Of six acclaimed collections Arc published the most recent, The Well in the Rain: New & Selected Poems in 2006. He gained a Varuna Fellowship in 2003, The Robert Horne Award in 2007 and the National Poetry Prize. In 2008 Brooding Heron Press, Washington, published Days Like These. His new collection ‘Folk’ and a book of poems for children ‘An Elephant Called Rex’ are eagerly awaited.

The Poor Commissioners

In 1849 a group of 150 famine victims were denied sustenance at the poorhouse in Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, until they had registered with the so-called “Poor Commissioners”, based 14 miles away at Delphi House. In the depths of winter they walked there through the valley by Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain, only to find that the commissioners were having dinner and would not see them. Dozens froze to death in the snow. A stone monument on the place today reads: TO COMMEMORATE THE HUNGRY POOR WHO WALKED HERE IN 1849, AND WALK THE THIRD WORLD TODAY.

And what were they thinking, finally, as they sank down,
hope extinguished,
or was it a relief to stop thinking
only reeling, drifting in and out in the whirling sleet
glimpsing your father there, huddled, vanishing
so that the snow at last
a misjudged enemy
invited you down to rest,
muffling each voice
and a faint half-dreamed comfort
in closing your eyes on your knees in the shadow of the Croagh
named for the saint who fasted,
like Our Saviour,
only both from choice.

Beyond bitter curses, then, or did they die raging,
snot and tears freezing on their faces?
Who was chosen to muster
a semblance of dignity
to approach the house,
and how to return
to break the news to the others
and with what words?
And the men in the house, never dreaming
That this would be the moment seized by fate
To expose them
This, which was commonplace, no doubt;
They were Commissioners, only that, righteous with due process,
stamps and nibs put away for the day, and now
dealing with a nuisance, irritable,
pushing the last of the bread
around their plate.

Would they have behaved better
If they knew they were to be judged
Jump to stoke the fire,
Order a tureen of soup made,
Swing open those doors,
be exemplary?
History catches us like this,
buttons undone and disguises off
aggrieved with burdensome paperwork
maintaining order in some godforsaken outpost
and, frankly, the poor always with us

as so these hundred and fifty,
unnamed,
condemned to white oblivion
by a flat refusal,
one stone, no, suffices for them all.

It is the past we find containable
folded along old certainties
like a map or a card
a stone to mark distance,
reduced to well-worn lines,
observed through a square glass pane:
the Hungry Poor, outside the gates at Delphi House
the villains and the victims
the snow soaked with amnesia,
frozen here and rendered into monochrome
by this driving rain

but they are with us
trudging with the last of their energy,
thousands of miles now, from poorhouses and famine fields
chilled and exiled,
holding pitchforks or children or unsigned paperwork,
forged, faded identifications,
the wrong currencies,
they are with us and we will not see them
as they come through the valley
spurred by a mirage of lit windows
and laughable hopes of some borrowed hearth,
they are with us, and we are done with them
we ill not meet their eye.

Tomorrow we will draw a red line in the ledger
pious and put-upon, holding this burden like a full plate
against our memory of the cold.

This is Delphi of the silenced, unrecognisable stone
Delphi where witness is a frozen and thawed and refrozen thin
Delphi, where the oracle speaks, and we do not listen.

Cate Kennedy has published two poetry collections, Signs of Other Fires (2001, Five Islands Press) and Joyflight (2004, Interactive Publications), a travel memoir Sing, and Don’t Cry (Transit Lounge, 2005) recalling time in Mexico with Australian Volunteers International, a short story collection Dark Roots (Scribe 2006) and a novel The World Beneath (Scribe, 2009). She lives on a farm in north east Victoria with her family.

Jim and Loretta Lane, key campaigners for Crossley whose associations with the church goes back generations

If you pray to St Brigid, she will lead you a merry dance before granting the miracle. The saint was true to her reputation, according to Teresa O’Brien, who led the campaign to return St Brigid’s church and hall to the community. Until the eleventh hour, Friday 31 July, the church at Crossley (near Koroit in the Western District) was to be sold by the parish, sight-unseen, to wedding planners from Melbourne. The Warrnambool Standard reported that Realtors, L J Hooker even offered the property to the Rebels Bikie Gang; who, although pleased to be considered, declined the offer. Late on Sunday 2 August, after a frantic week of fund-raising, and a long series of strategic interventions, by Sr Adele Howard (Shane Howard’s sister,) who talked to the parish priest, Fr Van de Camp, negotiations were completed in favour of the community.

Losing the church was a devastating prospect to the Crossley parishioners. Why did a broken down, decommissioned church and an ancient hall mean so much? As we talked to the locals, several things became obvious. The Church on the Hill symbolised the faith, hope, money and toil of their potato-farming, dairying forebears, who raised the original £6000 to build the church and donate it to the parish. Back when a good wage was £2 a week, and families were large, this was an astonishing sacrifice on the part of hundreds of the community’s ancestors. Their descendants’ sense of place was still strong. Tales were told of a 95 year old woman who had desperately wanted to be buried from the church but could not, and of a still-born child buried elsewhere with a clod of clay from Tower Hill in a locally sourced white coffin. Such small comforts matter to the grieving. It mattered because the people construed the link to the soil as sacred.

Nostalgia and fond memories of good times in the Hall, the mecca for dances and sessions in Crossley

The return of those educated elsewhere to join their ‘Elders’ (the term they used) in the battle to keep the community asset was also striking. In other communities, educated children forget their past in the bright city lights, but not the Teresa O’Briens or the Regina Lanes of this story. The Church and Hall constituted a social investment for them, so that walking away would have betrayed history and their community.

The sense of having invested much not only in monetary terms, but more in social terms was strong. ‘I Had a Ball in the Crossley Hall’ stickers proliferated in the district. The people who fought for it, wanted a keeping place for their memories and those of their ancestors. Aboriginal people, like Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, who stood beside them in the fight, see the church as marking an important sacred site. Standing magnificently astride the western slopes of Tower Hill, it commands views to Killarney Beach. Lit up at night, it would be a beacon for miles, especially from the sea, where many of their ancestors landed in the decades after the Great Famine.

Other visions for the church is for it to become the first diaspora Gaeltacht, a focus for Irish language and culture in the most concentrated settlement of Irish in Australia. Even if that dream is utopian, St Brigid’s is likely to become an important centre for events such as the Lake School of Irish Music.

The sense of community in Crossley is striking and multi-generational. ‘Elders’ had instilled in their families that community members take turns in giving and receiving; indeed, this mutual reciprocity is the nature of community. If you sweep the church and arrange the floral decorations for weddings, then the time will come when others will do it for yours. This is more than an investment which bears interest; it defines the community as a sacred entity in its own right, in which giving and receiving are the currency of exchange.

Those parishioners who could see the logic of selling the church to fund the more viable churches in Koroit (only 8 km distant from Crossley) were angry that the Friends of St Brigid’s made offers for the property at less than the estimated commercial value. One priest notoriously denounced them from the pulpit as ‘Fenians’, a term that in retrospect they might wear with pride, but at the time hurt deeply and still rankles. The priest before the current incumbent was shocked that his community questioned his decisions and Koroit parishioners on the finance committee were unhappy with the resistance to the sale when so much needed to be done closer to home. Other parishioners derided the ‘Friends’ as those who no longer went to church or engaged in plan-giving, as if these things defined what Christianity meant. In fact, many were and are still church-goers. It became a struggle between different kinds of communities: one orthodox, exclusive and excluding (‘you’re not practising, not plan-giving, not obedient to your priests’) and another more tolerant of difference, who are educated and questioning.

The campaign reignited community spirit. ‘Elders’ learned what they thought they never could – how to use email and work mobile phones. Older skills still proved as useful in later life as the nuns and brothers always said that they would. The ability to write a neat hand proved to have enduring value as one campaigner sent handwritten letters to television stations, the Archbishop and even the Pope. His handwritten protest caught the attention of the 7.30 Report on ABC television. It was something producers had not seen in years. Talents were put to use: Shane Howard’s song, The Church on the Hill, was so often sung that the typed words were no longer necessary to the impromptu choir of people of all ages who sang it with passion at the Friday night celebration. A fund-raising concert was convened in Melbourne. $100,000 was gathered within a week from sources well beyond Moyne shire. Many were small donors; some large; and some from overseas. Confidence is high that the remaining $100,000 will be raised. One contributor from Dingle noted that Irish parishes will look to Crossley to find versions of community which have been lost in Ireland, as wealth undermined the buttresses of community and modernity brings increasing anomie and alienation.

St Brigid, the patron of this enterprise, loves her brinkmanship. So many timely interventions, over several years of campaigning, only just averted disaster, but achieved the miracle of persuading a community-minded priest to accept a bid a little lower than the one offered by the stranger and to give the Friends of St Brigid a year to find the remaining $100,000. A community is rejoicing but they still need help and support to achieve their aim of full ownership.

Felicity Allen and Frances Devlin-Glass

Hackett oil portrait by James Quinn, Courtesy Jesuit Publications and National Library of Australia

The Riddle of Father Hackett: A Life in Ireland and Australia
Brenda Niall
The National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2009
ISBN: 9780642276858 (pbk.); RRP $39.95

Like his close friend Archbishop Mannix, the Jesuit priest Fr William Hackett came to Australia in his late forties after a significant church career in Ireland, and spent the rest of his life here. Sometime between his ordination and Easter 1916 he moved to the republican position, opposing all British involvement in his country. He knew personally many of the people who determined events in Ireland at the time, among them Padraig Pearse, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and Erskine Childers. During the war of independence from Britain he supported the insurrectionists, acting as a sort of courier ferrying messages, information and supplies around Ireland, often at considerable danger to himself. After the signing of the Treaty, he sided with de Valera and those who opposed it. Michael Collins wrote to Hackett on the evening before Collins was assassinated in Cork in 1922. Things were getting too hot for him in Ireland, and soon afterwards the Jesuit order moved him to Australia.

His life here was also influential, though not as exciting and dangerous. He soon became close to Dr Mannix, both anti-Treaty Irishmen, traditionalist but political priests, and men of high intelligence and wit. They relaxed in each other’s company in a friendship of thirty years. He was Mannix’s closest friend in Australia. Fr Hackett founded the Catholic Central Library in Melbourne, mentored the influential Campion Society, served an unhappy term as Rector of Xavier College, and was chaplain to both Catholic Action and the controversial Industrial Movement of Bob Santamaria. He moved in elevated non-religious circles, being a friend of Prime Ministers Scullin, Lyons and Menzies, the Governor of Victoria, Lord Somers, and other grandees. He died after being hit by a car in Kew, a few months before the great Labor Split of 1954.

The above is an outline of the known events of his life, but beneath the surface there are conundrums. Brenda Niall, one of Australia’s best-known biographers, has successfully explored the many disputed interpretations of events in his life. She has utilised to the full Hackett’s papers preserved in the Jesuit archives, but even with this material there are huge gaps in the record where the author has inevitably to speculate about events. For example, though Mannix and Hackett met regularly for three decades, there is almost nothing recorded of their conversations. The Irish events in Fr Hackett’s life have equally great lacunae. But the author has managed to weave the disparate material together into a convincing portrait. This book, best read in a couple of sittings, tells an engrossing story.The title refers to The Riddle of the Sands, the best known book of Hackett’s executed friend Erskine Childers. There are riddles in Hackett’s life. How did a non-political young priest get so involved in politics? Why did he take up the rebel cause after 1916, and the anti-Treaty cause in 1922, in such a direct and dangerous way? How much did his Jesuit superiors know of, and approve of, his involvements? Did he ask to leave Ireland or did the Jesuits make the decision to move him, willingly or unwillingly? How close was he to the Movement? The author teases out plausible answers to these questions, with the evidence disclosed in such a way that the reader can come to different conclusions.Hackett called himself Mannix’s court jester, but he is more accurately described as a confidante, one who can share innermost thoughts with a friend in a serious way. Both can, as equals in private, think out loud in each other’s company with their guards down. The ageing Mannix comes across in Niall’s portrait as remote, superior and demanding. Hackett did express to his sister his boredom on long summer holidays with Mannix at Portsea, but this is not the full story – he obviously found Mannix’s company enjoyable.

Though Hackett was chaplain to the Movement, Niall claims he was sympathetic to the viewpoint of the Catholic Worker group, who opposed Santamaria. Hackett attended a day-long meeting on Movement problems at Belloc House in 1953. Niall quotes him ruling that Movement activity was a political not religious commitment, but his main contribution to that meeting was as follows:

The opposition is not merely confined to a few people. It is to a large extent organised. Ramifications pretty great and pretty malignant – all sorts of statements uttered utterly untrue.

All facts should be put before the Bishops. I should think it would be the wisest thing to do. We are in a strong position at the moment. Though the fight has gone a good way it is far from finished. I think that they [the Bishops] could be quite prepared to restore the Mandate and give us a new Mandate as you suggest.

He may have retained his personal friendships with the Catholic Worker people, but this statement shows he was a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the Movement’s activities, which should not surprise us, as in Ireland he had had no qualms about being involved as a priest in undercover missions of a much more dangerous and unconstitutional nature. After risking his life carrying and dodging bullets in a war zone, local cloak-and-dagger Movement activities wouldn’t have knocked a feather off him.

Brenda Niall perceptively says of Hackett: ‘Knowing two Australian prime ministers might be an accident; three looks like a habit’. Hackett comes across in this biography as a recognisable personality type – a person who is not a natural leader, but close to powerful figures in public life, as their tic-tac man, counsellor, confidante and courier, a personality naturally drawn to the world of background activity. Such people enjoy playing an important role unknown to the public. They are usually motivated more by personal loyalty to those they admire than by strong ideological drives. They are the opposite of extremists, being interested in arranging compromises and deals between contending parties. Hackett had admirable qualities – a great gift for personal friendship, courage and insight. He puts me in mind of Alec Guinness, huddled inconspicuously in an overcoat, playing the role of a poker-faced agent in Ealing Studios films of the 1950s. Niall reveals that during the Anglo-Irish war Hackett once found himself in a rebel house in which ammunition was hidden. With the house about to be raided, Hackett calmly put the bullets in his pockets and walked out. The police waved him on because he was a priest, a great cover for a courier.

This is a brilliant biography, where the subject comes to life for those who did not experience the pleasure of his company.

Patrick Morgan