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  Since then, the mix has been increased by the addition of many refugees from the Middle East, from Afghanistan and from Africa, producing a multicultural melting pot rivalled only by that of Brazil, which is now seen as an emerging global superpower, thanks to its vast natural resources and to its multiracial gene pool. Australia, once seen as a big and almost empty land inhabited by small numbers of Stone Age people, is now, thanks to its mineral resources and rapidly developing multicultural society, moving in the same direction.

  Although established in Australia since the 1850s, my own family’s roots are all in Europe, mostly in Ireland, with a small input from nineteenth-century England and from mediaeval France. Many cultures, including those of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, recognize and respect the influence upon individuals of the very soil on which they live and grow. While I feel a strong bond with the vast sunburned land of Australia I also feel a mysterious attraction to the lands that produced my forebears; in setting out to explore the influences these forebears have had on me it was inevitable that I should also look at the countries and backgrounds from which they had come.

  My father’s family had come from Ireland, from the border country between County Limerick and County Tipperary, while my mother’s family had come from nearby County Clare. Both places are attractive parts of the Emerald Isle, with gently rolling green hills often crowned by a ruined castle or monastery providing a romantic backdrop to the well-kept and prosperous-looking farms in the valleys. All this land had, of course, been seized by the invading English in the seventeenth and earlier centuries, and their descendants in the nineteenth century usually lived in the ‘big house’ of each village or locality. The dispossessed native Irish, including my forebears, who were not permitted to reside within five miles of a town, lived up in the hills in mud and thatch cottages, and came down to work as farm labourers on what had once been their own land.

  I visited the tiny stone chapel built in 1830 where my paternal great-great-grandparents Thomas and Ellena Mulcahy had been married in 1831, just a few years after the British government had reluctantly agreed to allow the Irish to practise their religion and to build Catholic churches. It was a pathetic little structure, on a scale comparable to the outbuildings of Linfield House, the nearby mansion built in 1790 by the local English landlord family. It was easy to imagine the feelings of anger and injustice that the Irish must have had as the difference between the lifestyles of the conquered and the conquerors developed, reaching a peak in the 1840s and ‘50s when famine struck.

  This fertile area then continued to send large quantities of farm produce to England to feed the rapidly industrialising cities there, even when the Irish farm labourers, obliged to live largely on potatoes grown in small plots around their cottages, saw their potato crops wiped out by blight. They had little or no money with which to buy other food, as their labouring ‘wages’ were usually a book entry cancelled out by the ‘rent’ they were obliged to pay for their mud cabin and plot of land. As a result, their families were reduced to eating stolen cattle fodder or even grass from the roadside, to begging for a place in the workhouses reluctantly set up by the English, to dying in the fields … or to emigrating. During those terrible years, Ireland’s population was reduced by half, one quarter emigrating and one quarter starving to death. I found it easy, therefore, to understand why my greatgrandparents had decided to leave forever that beautiful but sad country.

  My mother’s family, perhaps because they lived in County Clare, a more remote part of the island, seem to have managed a little better. My great-great-grandfather Seamus Millane was born there in 1798, ‘The Year of the French’, the year of the last great uprising by the Irish against English rule when over 30 000 died in battle or were subsequently captured and executed.5 The bulk of the fighting took place far enough away for Clare to have remained relatively undisturbed, and Seamus would have been one of the few Irish male children born that year to have grown to maturity, married, produced a family and to have died peacefully in his bed … albeit by then on the other side of the world, in Australia. A gradual relaxation of the laws by the British government in the 1830s saw the Irish allowed to buy land and the Millanes had been able to buy a few acres, high up on the rocky hillside, and to build a small stone cottage. When they decided to leave, in 1857, they had been able to sell their patch of land and to travel to Australia as fare-paying passengers with a little capital rather than as penniless ‘assisted passengers’ like the majority of Irish emigrants.

  All of my forebears travelled out to the Australian colonies on sailing ships, one family being on board the crack clipper ship Mermaid which in 1854 sailed eleven days ahead of her even more famous rival the Lightning. On this her maiden voyage the Mermaid took only 74 days for the non-stop trip around the Cape of Good Hope to Melbourne, the Lightning, subsequently establishing herself as the fastest sailing ship ever on the Australian run and perhaps in the world, taking 78 days. I came across an account written by a passenger who travelled on this voyage of the Lightning and, because the experience would have been very similar on whichever of the ships the families travelled on, my heart fills with pride at the bravery of those seafarers every time I read it.6

  Ships mostly took three months or more for the quite perilous voyage, hundreds of vessels and thousands of passengers being wrecked and lost en route to Australia. Some ships (such as the Tayleur, wrecked off the Irish coast with the loss of 346 lives) foundered within days of commencing the voyage, while nearly 200 others were lost along the rugged Victorian coast as they approached the safety of their destination, Melbourne. So these families were in a sense ‘boat people’ and, like the boat people heading to Australia in the twenty-first century, must have been highly motivated and courageous, risking their lives at sea and travelling across the world to an unknown land and to an uncertain welcome. The dreams of such venturers, both in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries must, it seems to me, have been dreams of a better future for their children rather than of good times for themselves, a bright and happy future that would make the risks and dangers of the voyage and of pioneering in the colonies worthwhile. These boat people brought, as their twentyfirst century successors do, the genes of spirited survivors, of strong-willed, resourceful nation builders.

  I have never found any written records explaining why my Irish forebears chose to come to one of the English colonies in Australia and have always been puzzled that they opted to go from one colony (Ireland) where they were oppressed to another colony in Australia run by the same sort of WASP capitalists as were running the United Kingdom in the 1850s. Perhaps it was the lure of the gold rushes of the 1850s or perhaps it was the idea of a big, open, empty country far, far away? Perhaps it was fear of the ‘coffin ships’ on the much shorter trip to the already independent USA, the main escape route from nineteenth-century Ireland? But if it is unclear why they chose the new Colony of Victoria, it is quite clear what my father’s family hoped to do … to acquire land and to farm it. I do now feel rather uncomfortable with the realisation that this ambition in reality meant occupying the land of the Aboriginal people in Australia, just as the English had occupied the land of the Irish in Ireland. In purchasing land or in accepting land grants from the Crown they were in fact ‘receiving stolen goods’ … except in those rare instances where land rights had been purchased from or negotiated with the Aboriginal owners (as Batman and Fawkner had done in the settlement of Melbourne).

  My great-grandfather, James Mulcahy, arrived in 1857 on the ship Melbourne. He found immediate employment as a farm labourer and worked and saved until he was able to buy land. He married Brigid Wade, a girl also from Tipperary, a year after arriving, and in 1867 they took up a ‘selection’ on the banks of the Goulburn River north of Melbourne. Two of the local squatters, Henry Furze and Hugh Glass, objected to the plans to ‘select’ parts of their vast runs, but after an exchange of rather heated correspondence with the squatters and with the Lands and Survey Board in Melb
ourne, in which James firmly stood his ground, the Board dismissed the squatters’ objections. I sometimes wonder whether objections from the Aboriginal owners of all those lands would have been successful if submitted to the Board! Not only had they no means of knowing how to object, but from what I can piece together of my family’s experience, the Aborigines at first did not realise that they should have objected. The family stories were that the local Aboriginals were quiet, friendly people, happy enough to share the plentiful food, water and shelter with the newcomers and to continue their nomadic existence and seasonal wanderings across the broad Goulburn Valley. Like the Irish in Ireland before the arrival of the English, the Aboriginal people had no concept of individuals claiming to own exclusive rights to land, which for millennia had been the inheritance of the whole clan or tribe; they seemed not to realise, until it was too late, that the fences and buildings being quickly put up by the squatters and selectors were steadily, relentlessly, pushing them off their traditional hunting grounds and into oblivion.

  James and Brigid had a large family, the fifth son, Daniel, marrying in 1893 Elizabeth Kenny, like him born in the colony to settlers from Ireland. They produced three children, two girls and then a son, James, who became my father. Three months after his son’s birth, Daniel died as the result of a harvesting accident, leaving his 25-year-old widow with three children, a promising farm and a mortgage. When she had been just ten years old, Elizabeth had seen her own mother die and her father remarry in the following year. Elizabeth soon found herself in the role of nanny/nursemaid to her young stepbrothers and stepsisters, and in later life confided that Daniel’s proposal of marriage had been readily accepted, as she had felt that she might as well be washing the nappies of her own babies as those of her stepmother. Although hers does not seem to have been a romantic marriage, Elizabeth became a sad and even bitter woman on her husband’s death. Cousins who grew up with my father said, ‘Everyone was frightened of Auntie Lizzie’. I remember my grandmother as a tall, thin woman always dressed in black, of few words and never smiling; as a child I could never understand why our house seemed to be more serious and less gay when she was visiting.

  On her husband’s death, my grandmother leased and then sold the farm and moved in to Tatura, the nearby country town, to raise her children. When my father was fifteen she again decided on a move; the elder daughter, May, joined the Sisters of Mercy in the newly established local convent and my grandmother sold the Tatura house, moving with the younger daughter and son to Ballarat so that Dad could attend St Patrick’s College as a day boy and complete secondary school. My father enjoyed his years at St Pat’s and always spoke of the Brothers, who had taught him there, with great respect and affection. On completing his studies he joined the Victorian Public Service and once again my grandmother sold her house in the interest of her son’s career, this time moving the little family to Melbourne and purchasing a house in an inner suburb so that it would be convenient for Dad to travel to his work in the city. Five years later he enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, with my grandmother continuing to provide financial support through the study years ahead.

  After graduation, my father worked for a short time as a locum in suburban practices and then set up his own practice in Oakleigh, an outer working-class suburb. My grandmother sold her house and the proceeds were used to purchase a larger place on the city edge where the little family lived, my father running his surgery in the front rooms and my grandmother and aunt keeping house. My grandmother must have been very happy as her little family settled in to the new house, a brass plate at the front door announcing the rooms of ‘Dr J. E. Mulcahy’. Alas for her, within a few short years, my father met and married my mother and my grandmother’s dreams had come crashing down. My grandmother and aunt moved to a new house in nearby Caulfield, but even the birth of three grandchildren did not reconcile her to the marriage or to her daughter-in-law. She rarely spoke to us children and almost never to my mother. From childhood my sister, brother and I were always aware of her aloofness and seeming disapproval. Once my father had died, at the age of 55, my grandmother sought no further contact with us. As her daughter Margaret had predeceased my father, a nephew stepped in to the breach and helped my grandmother to move to a retirement home where four years later, having lost all interest in life, she died. I visited her the day before death came and for once she smiled and faintly spoke my name.

  Two: Beginnings

  I began life not under a cabbage but at home, in my parents’ bed, where I was born. But before that happened my parents had to meet. My mother, Athen Millane, was a nurse and trained midwife and, along with a friend who had completed similar training in the same large Melbourne hospital, she had in 1927 opened ‘Mildon’, a small private hospital in a nice old house in the comfortably middle-class Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. It was more a convalescent home than a hospital, there being no operating room or serious surgical equipment, and the biggest medical events of any week would have been the births of the many local children who were safely delivered in its midwifery unit. The new mothers would subsequently spend a few days in the care of the small staff of trained nurses, the local GPs calling in each day to check on the recovery of their ‘middy’ cases and on the state of health of other patients booked in for overnight or for longer stays.7 These other patients would include people who had undergone surgery or treatment in one of the big fully-equipped metropolitan hospitals and who had been discharged after a few days to convalesce in a small private hospital, thereby making room for the admittance of more serious cases.

  My father, Jim Mulcahy, was a young GP new to the area, and at Easter time of 1930 he accompanied a slightly older colleague to Mildon to meet the owner/managers, Sister Millane and Sister Donovan, and to decide whether he might in future refer cases to them. Fortunately my mother rather than her nursing colleague was on duty when my father was introduced. The meeting became a case of love at first sight and within a few months wedding plans were afoot.

  My mother sold her share of Mildon to her business partner and set off for her parents’ home in Hamilton, 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, to prepare for the wedding, set to take place on the day after Boxing Day. December 27 had been selected as the wedding date so as not to greatly inconvenience guests travelling from distant places such as Melbourne and having to absent themselves from work for several days.

  Four of my mother’s five brothers, my uncles Bill, Frank, Ray and Leo, were all working in Melbourne and they all travelled to Hamilton together for the wedding in Leo’s newly acquired Essex. The car had not been ‘run in’ and so had to travel at low speed. The fuel for the engine was fed by gravity rather than by a petrol pump, so climbing even modest gradients was something of a problem, with the petrol not keen on flowing uphill from the tank at the rear of the car to the engine in front. My uncles hit on the solution of reversing the car up the hills, with one of them walking in front and another walking behind to explain the situation to any other travellers on the road.

  Having left Melbourne early in the morning of Christmas Day they had not arrived by sunset, and as darkness fell my grandfather set off walking down the Melbourne road swinging a hurricane lantern to guide ‘the boys’ home. He met them at the foot of the hill at the edge of town and was puzzled to see them and their new-fangled motor car facing towards Melbourne rather than towards Hamilton. He was not impressed by Leo’s contraption that had obliged his boys to travel so slowly, and often backwards, all the way from Melbourne!

  The wedding went off without any other hitch and after the ceremony and reception my parents drove to Melbourne and sailed on the Nairana for a honeymoon in Tasmania. My mother was terribly seasick and so my father gave some thought to staying and setting up practice in Tasmania. But as he had already bought a house and started up his own practice in Melbourne, where his mother and sister lived and kept house for him, such a dramatic change of plans was not really practicable
. So my mother returned, as she had gone over, on the Nairana, and was still seasick even after the ship had crossed Bass Strait, steamed up Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River and had tied up at its berth at North Wharf behind what is now Southern Cross Station.

  My father’s decision to marry had come as quite a shock to his mother who apparently had believed that he would remain at home with her as the comfort of her old age. When he announced his intention of bringing his new wife home, my father persuaded his mother that she should move out and a house about to be built in a nearby suburb was selected for purchase. Building work progressed very slowly, however, and my grandmother and aunt were not able to move into their new home until nearly six months after my parents’ wedding. As a result, the new daughter-in-law had to share house and husband with her mother-in-law. My grandmother seemed to always regard my mother as an interloper rather than as a daughter, and the six months spent together were very difficult. It was not until a little over two years after the wedding that the first child, my sister, was born and 21 months later, at the height of the Great Depression, I put in an appearance, the first son.

  My mother once told me that I had barely stopped crying for the first six months of my life, and that a nurse friend had taken one look at me, had shaken her head sadly, and had declared, ‘You’ll never rear him.’ I can’t remember why I cried so much and indeed, unlike many others, I have no precise memories at all of early childhood, just those of a warm and loving existence with my parents and older sister. I would like to think that, if I was a total pain for my family for the first six months of my life, I made up for it by being a source of uninterrupted joy thereafter but, alas, that did not prove to be the case.