Profile of Mary Walsh of Trentham by Josepha Smith and Frances Devlin-Glass
Some context: Mary Walsh (née Morgan) emigrated from Co Roscommon to Australia as a young nurse in her twenties. Several readers of Tinteán suggested we should look into her story, and now in her early 90s, she was willing to answer our questions about her life in Victoria as a wife, mother nurse and farmer. She married into a Irish musical family and that tradition persists too in Mary’s nine children. As an experienced nurse, she is widely respected and loved in Trentham, a quietly spoken matriarch of her community.
Mary Catherine Morgan (born on the first Friday of November 1933) was the eldest of what would become a family of three children, born to farming parents in a rural community near the village of Brideswell, south, Co. Roscommon. The area is known for its Pattern festival, a feast honouring the matron saint of Ireland and namesake of the area Saint Brighid, a tradition that persists today on the last weekend in July. Mary remembers the festival fondly for the excitement of dressing up and enjoying a moment of style and convivial times shared in the community. Fashion, an early and enduring passion of Mary’s, was not something she raided from her mother’s wardrobe. Rather it may have been gifted from relations in America and then embellished to make her own.
Historic accounts paint a bleak picture of the time though. Rural Ireland was in decline owing to resettlements out of the West, a free state finding its feet and the global backdrop of the Great Depression. None of these stresses feature in Mary’s telling of herself. She remembers fondly her mother baking soda bread, her own cow milking responsibilities, and the care of chickens, never feeling the want of anything. The many simple, familiar rituals in the thatch home where Mary happily spent her early years with younger siblings Delia and Joseph, nestled in a community of family, friends and relatives.
Perhaps this is what contributes to her regal persona as she sits fireside, 90+ years young with white stylishly cut hair, long soft beige knitted dress adorned with silk flower embellishment – style persists too. In her own astute and expansive story, she never complains, not even about the six week-long journey by sea that brought her to her adopted home in Australia. On the contrary she even claims to have enjoyed it (once past the Bay of Biscay – she’s only human). Night shifts in nursing, no problem. Ten children never cost her a thought. It is as much her outlook, and dignified demeanour that gild her as any lofty bestowed title – of which there are many – Mum, Grandma, Nurse, Friend. Not so much appointed as embodied, an Irish Queen. Mary keeps meticulous record of guests to her home, friends she encounters, new and old. This is her fortune/treasure/wealth. The hospitality she learned at the hearth, for which the West of Ireland is famous is something made into somewhat of an artform in recreation and elixir in her profession. The seeds she planted in an industrious youth and tireless working life – until the age of 80 are coming home as harvest.
When asked about pastimes or games of youth, she shares that hers was a family that was very good at visiting neighbours and friends. Hospitality was and is central to the family and community. The decline of this in modern life is something Mary is holding ground against. And she is beloved for it. Newcomers to the district she settled in in Australia are greeted with a bag of Tom’s excellent spuds. In any given sitting you can rely on an array of genial interruption from the youth of grandchildren home from boarding school or university, to friends who have travelled across the world to enjoy Mary’s very sincere and refreshing hospitality so very far from Brideswell – but in kilometres only.
Inspired by sisters Maureen and Chris O’Malley who were both doctors and lived a few fields away, Mary’s primary ambition in life was to be a doctor too. Something still new at the time for Catholic women in Ireland, but not impossible, as she remembers it. As life would have it, education at the local primary school was not ideal preparation for the academics required. Mary recalls the teacher showed much more interest in a beau who would pass the schoolhouse than in imparting any wisdom to the children in front of her. This disappointed the eager scholar. Not content with local options for secondary school, Mary secured permission and a place for herself at the Sisters of Mercy secondary school in Athlone, seven miles away. Something her siblings did not follow her in. Though it was hard for Mary’s mother to part with her, Mary was determined. She returned home at weekends which was especially important after Mary’s father died when she was only 16 years old. He had been a man keenly interested in the world too. In wartime, Mary remembers holding a candle for him so he could read the newspaper at night. Though the house had electricity, it would not be used at night for fear that planes flying overhead would be able to identify and bomb an occupied dwelling. When he died in 1949 it was a catastrophic loss to her mother who managed well despite feeling bereft.
Secondary school proved to be a better education for Mary. Indeed, she learned how to present herself in uniform with near army precision. The nuns were incredibly strict about it. This would hold her in good stead for her next step. When Irish nursing training was bureaucratic and complicated and the pathway to England was well worn, at the age of 20 Mary set off for Manchester to undertake training as a general nurse. From there she was recommended to undertake midwifery training in Winchester, the cathedral city and the burial place of Jane Austen. If she were to have a ‘favourite child’ among her many nursing roles, Winchester would have short odds. As a more upmarket city than Manchester, and relishing her new charge Mary cycled the city with coat (unlike Call the Midwife). Style again.
Nursing
At a young age, Mary had evinced an interest in becoming a doctor or a nurse and she paid especial attention to women medicos she encountered. Two local Irish women, sisters Maureen & Chris O’Malley, who became doctors helped shape her ambitions. She would later, also met and admired Catherine Hamlin, a pioneering Australian gynaecologist/obstetrician who worked for 60 years in war-torn Ethiopia, performing surgery on women with obstetric fistulas, founding midwifery clinics as well as an organisation to train local women in midwifery. These were perhaps the first or second generation of university-educated women medics and they inspired Mary to a life of service as a nurse.
Despite her family’s attempts to keep her in Ireland, she left aged about 22, or even younger (19 or 20) for general nursing training in Manchester, and then midwifery in Winchester for a year. She loved nursing in England, and especially her time in Winchester and still has the signature blue scarf with the hole in it from this service. She vividly recalls it getting caught in the wheel of her bicycle. She loved the architecture of Winchester, especially the Cathedral and enjoyed going to evensong. She worked as a palliative nurse and as the district nurse able to be called out at any time of day or night for emergencies and to deliver babies at home. She travelled home often on holidays, sailing via Holyhead for about 2 weeks every 6 months. Her father died early when she was 14 (16 by grave calculation), and her mother did not travel. His death catastrophic for mother, ‘what will I do?’
Leaving Ireland
Home on holidays, Kathleen Finnerty, a nurse in Accident and Emergency in England, sowed the first seed of emigrating beyond Europe. There was not much work in Ireland, and Mary knew that Irish-trained nurses were in high demand. She’d been thinking of leaving England when she saw in a nursing journal an ad for a job at the hospital in Kyneton that appealed to her: the wording was enticing. The emigration agent at Australia House was also very upbeat: ‘You’ll love Australia’, without so much as knowing her name or anything about her, but they were right.
Living in UK in Hampshire at the time and, ‘blessed with the blindness’ of youth, she imagined then she would be back in a few years. She doesn’t think of embarking for Australia and leaving her family as bravery, but perhaps it was, because the only other person she knew it in Australia was a nurse she met on the journey to Australia who immediately departed for Cargellico, in central NSW on Western plains, 600 kilometres away.
After going home to say goodbye, she left from Southampton on the Italian liner, Fairstar, for Australia by way of the Suez and Colombo, landing in Melbourne. Mary denies she possessed the courage one would expect given the bold directions she chose for herself. She maintains she always felt guided to do what she did. She turns to God at night. Somehow she had the good sense not to look too far ahead and the commendable faith not to worry. The hardest part, greatest challenge, in leaving her mother and siblings who were in no small way devastated by her departure. They accustomed to her absence but longed for her – she kept up letter writing to her Mother and siblings, and sent home remittances. Aerogrammes were the order of the day and Mary took no small pleasure in her calligraphy. Style again. Asked about the most challenging time of her life, Mary talked of the wrench of leaving her Irish family. She would not be free to return until the late 1970s, and thereafter only infrequently saw them again.
Mary’s life in Australia will be continued in the December issue of Tinteán. Watch this space.
Josepha Smith and Frances Devlin-Glass
Jo is Irish-born and lives in the Trentham district. Frances Devlin-Glass is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective.
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