The Good Boy (2 page)

Although that and, later on, a year of Psychology were the only science units I ever completed at university, the basics of scientific method and an interest in genetics must have been absorbed and have lain there in my subconscious … waiting to be of use when one day I would get around to wondering whether Mendel's peas, and the birds and the bees, had anything to teach me. The day came rather late in life while working with cousin Tom and garnering from him snippets of information about long-dead forbears known personally to him but whom I had never met. I suddenly remembered Mendel and saw myself and the other family members of my generation as peas, so to speak, tucked into sample trays and carefully labelled with colour-coded symbols in such a way as to make it clear to a future scientist or even to a future family researcher, just where our antecedents lay, which of their qualities we possessed, which ones had strengthened, which ones had weakened … and which new/additional characteristics seemed to have been acquired.

My antecedents were, of course, not peas but the family forebears that Tom and I had identified and so in an effort to understand where I had come from, what had made me what I am … the Story of Moi, shall we say … I began looking more closely at individuals identified in our family history. Not surprisingly, I found nobody who had made quite the same sort of fist of life as I had, but I did find many interesting bits of information. I found that since they had settled in the Australian colonies in the 1850s my family had included lots of ‘ordinary' people as well as quite a few of the less ordinary; their occupations had included actor, airman, artist, banker, builder, butcher, clerk, dentist, doctor, electrician, farmer, football star, hotelier, inventor, judge, lawyer, nun, nurse, painter, plumber, poet, priest, railwayman, sailor, shopkeeper, soldier, surveyor, teacher, veterinarian, and so on. There had been couples with large families and couples with no children, there had been traditional church marriages, registry office marriages and couples living together without any sort of marriage; there had been straights and there had been gays. There had been at least one murderer and one poor chap who had committed suicide, actually managing to cut his own throat with an old-fashioned ‘cut-throat' razor. What sorts of behavioural patterns could one identify in such a large group? Could any behavioural characteristics be identified as appearing in successive generations? Could the results of intermarriage be seen anywhere in the transmission and modification of characteristics?

This is not an attempt to pass the buck or to blame earlier family members for my actions and lack of action. Our decisions are our own decisions; I was simply curious to see whether inherited traits could be discerned. Scrutinising my forebears and, most of all, myself proved to be quite fascinating … and what I found might prove of interest and even of use to others.

As a young teacher not long out of training college I had perhaps been a little over-enthusiastic one day in explaining to my Form Two History/Geography class that as Australians we were really ‘white Asians' and not Europeans. Next day, a rather quiet boy who often gave the impression of dozing through classes and of absorbing little of the wisdom being imparted by his teachers, came respectfully to me during recess and said: ‘Sir, my father said that we are not White Asians, Sir,' and, clearly puzzled as to which authority to believe, then went off to join his mates at play in the schoolyard.

It probably was both premature and provocative to have made that remark to a class of thirteen-year-old boys in a Catholic school in a middle-class Melbourne suburb in the 1960s. Most of the boys would have been of Irish, Anglo-Scots or Italian descent with a dash of Balt, Dutch and Yugoslav from post-war immigration thrown in (the term ‘Yugoslavia' was used in those days to cover Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, all migrant-source countries). It was only to be expected that parents, or grandparents, from Europe might not have begun to see that Australia was geographically much closer to Asia than it was to Europe and was therefore likely to develop cultural and eventually even blood ties with its near neighbours. The departure of the Dutch from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1949 and of the British from Singapore and Malaya by 1965 saw many Dutch and British colonials migrate to Australia. The fall of South Vietnam to Communist North Vietnam in 1975 saw not only the end of French Indochina but the beginnings of what came to be a quite significant migration to Australia of Asian peoples. The White Australia Policy introduced at Federation in 1901 was finally gone and the Australian government announced its aim of making the country ‘multicultural', of happily blending together the original Aboriginal society, the Anglo-Celtic society dating from 1788, the post-World War II European migrants and the Southeast Asians of the 1970s.

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 Melbourne, 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.