Call it the luck of the Irish that my ancestors didn't face a Christmas Island welcome
The Age
Saturday August 15, 2009
THE wild, beautiful and windswept County Donegal, in the remote north-west of Ireland, is a long way from the wild, beautiful and windswept south-west corner of Victoria, Australia, but it never seemed so to our family.Every Christmas, Easter, birthday or any other excuse for a party meant squads of us would gather at our grandparents' homestead on a country hilltop for feasting, arguing, cavorting and, most of all, music. Just about everyone played the piano or could hold a singing note, and as our grandmother and her daughters carved roasts and hams and turkeys, and the blokes poured beers €” that was the way of things those days €” the songs would float out across the paddocks.Long after we kids had exhausted ourselves tumbling around the garden full of big old trees and mysterious pathways and had piled into beds in rooms that seemed as big as dormitories, the old songs would lull us to sleep. Irish songs, almost all of them, though my mother's family had been Australian for generations.Our ancestors had come across the oceans from the tiny village of Rathmullan, Donegal, chased out by famine and merciless landlords 160 years ago. Sick at heart at the knowledge they would never see their green land again, but required to make the choice between starving and placing their hope in a place that may as well have been as distant and alien as Mars, the old people buried their past and got along with building a future.But the burying was never complete. On those nights in our grandparents' home, the songs and stories of loss and love and longing came from the stone huts and the old pubs in the crooked streets of Ireland.It is the way of the diaspora €” families take their stories and music across the world with them and lodge them in their new histories. It is the story of Australia, a nation of diasporas €” a place built by the people of some 200 nationalities. In time, they become Australian, but they hold a piece of the past in their souls and bring it out on special occasions.The most appealing suburban clubs these days are those with clear ethnic or national connections, and who among us, whatever our familial history, can resist a street festival fired by the food, dancing, music and drink of any number of the world's cultures?But as yet another boat full of the dispossessed and desperate sailed towards Christmas Island this week, a new round of hand-wringing and cursing of people-smugglers was all but guaranteed.It has long been thus. When the first displaced people of war-wrecked Europe arrived at the Melbourne docks in 1947, wharfies were reluctant to offload them.They were different, they were going to take good Australian jobs, most of them didn't speak English and they probably ate unmentionable concoctions. The union movement and quite a slice of the population (itself already a mixing pot of post-war immigrant backgrounds) was equally unimpressed when Vietnamese began turning up in leaky boats in the early 1970s.And all those years ago, when the Irish fled famine and eviction, the Catholics and the Protestants were as uneasy about living together as Greeks and Turks a generation ago or Christians and Muslims today. In my own family, there were brothers and sisters who hardly spoke another civil word to each other when a Protestant married a Catholic. Who today could imagine such absurdity?Ah, but the latest arrivals on Christmas Island €” most of whom will undoubtedly turn up in a street near you one day €” are unauthorised and transported by people-smugglers, whom Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called the vilest form of human life. A different proposition altogether.Really?Over the past few weeks, with the southern hemisphere winter sending us scurrying to our fireplaces, your correspondent took himself off to Ireland to dig into his family's past, take photos of the graves of his ancestors in a churchyard on a Donegal hillside (there are none of us left above ground in the village) and travel the entire coastline of that ancient island.It turned out often to be a re-run of those childhood gatherings in western Victoria. Every evening in a pub somewhere a band of musicians wandered in and set to the business of playing and singing the sort of music that was as familiar as the wind across our Australian paddocks.Travelling alone, I was never without company €” an Irish pub is a miracle of community, with whole families using it as eating place, gossiping centre, storytelling and music hall, as well as a handy spot for a pint. In Dingle, on a south-west peninsula beautiful enough to make a man sob, there is a pub that serves as hardware store and bicycle shop during the day and, as evening settles, the proprietor simply walks to the other side of the room and opens the bar.The locals at such places could not bear to witness a traveller standing alone, and your correspondent regularly found himself drawn into the merriment.But in a riverside town in County Wexford a sailing ship is moored, and it is a sobering experience to climb aboard. It is precisely the sort of vessel that brought the Irish to Australia, a famine ship.Were the captains and crew of such craft €” on which the wretched steerage passengers were forced to huddle in conditions so cramped and unsanitary that up to half of them died on many voyages €” much different to today's people-smugglers, Kevin Rudd's most vile form of human life?Or were they simply market-driven purveyors of the desperate to new lives that created new histories for families and the nation of Australia €” the dispossessed who carried with them nothing but hope and songs and stories that would live on and on?Tony Wright is national affairs editor.
© 2009 The Age