Above the Starry Frame Read online

  Helen Townsend is a well-known writer of quality commercial fiction including Love Tangle, Turning Point and Curably Romantic, as well as the bestselling non-fiction title, Baby Boomers Childhood Book. Above the Starry Frame explores her family heritage, and in writing the book she did a considerable amount of research in Ballarat, where she spent time as a child on family holidays. She now lives in Sydney with her family.

  ABOVE

  the STARRY

  FRAME

  HELEN TOWNSEND

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  First published 2007 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Helen Townsend 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Townsend, Helen, 1947– .

  Above the starry frame

  ISBN 9781405038034 (pbk).

  1. Irwin, William. 2. Irish – Australia – Biography. 3. Immigrants – Australia – Biography. 4. Gold mines and mining – Victoria – Ballarat. 5. Ballarat (Vic.) – History – 1851–1901. I. Title.

  994.031092

  Typeset in Fairfield Light 12/16 pt by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2008 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Above the Starry Frame

  Helen Townsend

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-837-7

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  CONTENTS

  The Knockaleery Letters

  PART 1 DAYS OF THE RUSH, 1849–55

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  PART 2 DREAMS AND DESPAIR, 1861–68

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  PART 3 THE GOLDEN CITY, 1878–93

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  Fact and Fiction

  Acknowledgments

  THE KNOCKALEERY LETTERS

  When migrants arrive in a new country, they bring language, religion and all manner of cultural baggage – those vital, living parts of what they have come from. Migration is a messy, uncertain business, a leap in the dark, a difficult and courageous process of uprooting and resettling. Since 1788, it has been a major part of Australia’s story.

  Throughout history, people have gone to other lands as colonisers, convicts, invaders, adventurers and refugees. They go to better their lives, to escape hunger or civil strife, for glory or spoils. They go in hope. They go in fear and despair.

  They leave behind families, connections, history and tradition. They leave behind people they love, communities to which they are attached.

  Those left behind live with their absence.

  It was a collection of family letters that inspired me to write about this experience. These letters were written to my great-grandfather William Irwin in Australia by his family in Knockaleery, Ireland, between 1849 and 1893. They are hard to read. The ink has faded; the paper is yellowed. Some parts of the letters are missing. There are archaic words, inventive spellings. But powerfully and poetically, they evoke the pain of migration, as well as the hopes that attend it.

  These letters bear witness to the struggle to maintain an enduring sense of family that would transcend the separation. Reading them, I felt connected by these fragile pieces of paper to that simple, yet extraordinary farming family in Ireland.

  I was so moved and inspired by the letters that I delved into the other side of the story. I wanted to discover what happened to that Irish farm boy who migrated, alone, to Australia. I found a story replete with loss and pain, as well as happiness and success. That story reflects the migrant experience of being cut free, with new opportunities, new challenges, new disappointments. It also reflects the loss of family, place and tradition, and the powerful desire to rebuild that.

  That story, of those who went and of those who were left behind, is the story I tell here.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was the body of the O’Reilly girl, whose name was Mary, that Eliza remembered. The body had been sitting outside the sod hut, but had fallen to one side, which was how Eliza knew she was dead, because a live person wouldn’t have sat that way. Her poor coat, much poorer than Eliza’s, which was poor enough, was unbuttoned, not protecting her from the cold. Her mouth was open, showing her teeth, some black, and her tongue hanging out.

  They never spoke of finding the body, but it was in Eliza’s mind as they trudged past the spot, and she wondered if it was in William’s mind too. Back then, two years ago in the terrible year of 1847, they had run all the way home so fast they were breathless. As they came into the farmyard, William had stopped. ‘There’s no help to be had, Lizey, the poor girl was dead. I’ll tell Father.’

  After that the body had become the business of Father, who told Mr Tenner. Then it was the business of Mr Tenner, who was the landlord’s agent. Mr Tenner had the body buried, along with the bodies of the mother and a baby which were found inside the sod hut. And Father had told Eliza that the poor family weren’t tenants, but renters, from somewhere west, having no father, and Catholics also, not like their own family, which was Protestant. They’d hardly ever seen them, on account of most often taking the track across the Tattykeel paddock rather than the road. Father said that their potatoes must have failed, as their own had failed that year. All that made it feel a more distant matter than the body of Mary O’Reilly with her tongue hanging out, sitting outside the sod hut, had felt.

  They never spoke of it again. For it was close, so close, that Eliza thought that they should have known. And maybe they had known, she thought, but they had no food themselves to spare, nor money to give, for they were themselves in debt to McCrea from sending their oldest brother, James, to America, and even more with the rent which they hadn’t been able to pay. But even with James gone, and the
next brother down, Joseph, who was married to Eleanor and living nearby at Tattykeel, there were still six of them to feed at Knockaleery Farm, in addition to Mother and Father.

  In those years of the famine, there were few potatoes that didn’t come black and rotten from the ground and it seemed as if all would perish in Ireland, as had happened in the famines and plagues in the Bible. It felt at times that the world would end, that God was angry, that the soil and the sunshine and the rain might cease to provide the food from which they got their daily bread. The minister said ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ every week, which made Ann Jane so angry she did not want to go to church. Eliza was shocked by Ann Jane saying such a thing, but Father said that even though you had to go to church you were entitled to your own conscience. The hunger had made them argue and fight that winter and their faces were pinched and spare-looking.

  Eliza had been frightened in those hard, lean years, but she knew her family had been lucky that they had all lived, not starving or having died from fever. Even so, they often had an ache in their bellies from hunger, or from eating boiled-up nettles. It was then that Eliza’s eyes had gone weak.

  Now, it seemed that the blight had stopped rotting every crop of potatoes, but the famine had changed things and it was understood there was not enough food or land. Some of the younger ones had to go to other lands: there was no choice. And those who went away remembered the poverty of Ireland. They remembered life was hard there, and that their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and cousins had to be helped. In their family, James had gone to America, which was a most bountiful place, and there was talk of William following, or maybe Robert, or Ann Jane and Mary together. It was a matter of borrowing more from McCrea, or hoping James might send money back.

  This autumn afternoon, Eliza and William had gone to the Canders’, taking with them the gift of a piglet. They started the trudge back home up the steep hill and Eliza felt the wind through her coat, which made her look forward to the warmth of the house and the hot barley stew.

  ‘Come on, I’ll carry you,’ William said.

  ‘I’m too big now to have you carry me,’ said Eliza. She was the youngest of the family, and William was the next youngest, so they were often together.

  ‘I’m bigger still – bigger than Father standing back to back,’ said William. He was tall, but still laughed like a boy and had a way about him that made you want to agree with most of what he said. He always had things to suggest, like rounding up the cows in summer with the two of them barking like dogs, or running in great arcs down the hill. He knew where to find duck nests in the bog and how to float grass boats through its tricky channels. When Eliza had been going to school, he’d helped her with the numbers and told her the tricks of mathematics.

  Eliza’s legs ached, but she felt she was too old to be carried, being fourteen, or thereabouts.

  ‘Frederick Cander carries his granny,’ said William. ‘And Granny Cander’s very large and lumpy.’ He turned his back and, as she jumped on, he caught her legs, staggered to get his balance, then set off up the hill, going from side to side to make the less of it, tossing her lightly on each turn of the road so she shrieked with laughter.

  ‘Don’t drop me on my head,’ she gasped. He’d done that long ago, and ever since it had been a joke between them.

  ‘Your head’s so hard it wouldn’t hurt you, Eliza Irwin. Hard head, hard head,’ he chanted as he puffed to the top of the rise. William was always making something out of nothing. His spirits soared high and he lifted others with him.

  He turned and they looked back at the setting sun low in the dark sky. He let her legs go so her weight dropped off him, but she kept her arms around him as they stared at the line of the light along the horizon. They stood, silent, watching the sun slip, knowing they should go so as not to be caught in the dark. A touch of rain came in the wind, but still they watched. Eliza thought she would never forget this moment – standing with brother William, at the top of Tattykeel Hill, watching the sun set, when she had just recently become a woman. She wondered if William would remember it too.

  They ran down the hill towards their house at Knockaleery Farm, trying to avoid the ruts and puddles in the road in the near darkness, their eyes on the window of the house where the lamp shone dimly. They could feel more rain in the wind, colder by the minute. At the bottom of the hill, where a small stream ran across the road, they found the stepping stones. William forgot the puddle after the last stone, and Eliza laughed as she heard the splash of his boot, and remembered herself to jump.

  ‘Nearly all here,’ said Mother as they came inside to the warmth. Mother was by the fire, moving the pot of corn meal onto the ashes. ‘Ann Jane’s fetching the lamb in, but Robert’s at Tattykeel for tonight, at brother Joseph and Eleanor’s house.’

  Eliza looked at the darkness of the stairs going up to the bedroom. It always was so strange to her that the bedroom was light in the morning with everything to be seen, but in the darkness, the stairs seemed to lead to a different place. The things seen in the morning were displaced by sounds and smells that didn’t quite match, so it felt like taking to her bed in one place and waking in another altogether. Downstairs there wasn’t that difference. The brightness of the fire lit Mother’s face. The armchair, solidly stuffed and bulky, seemed like a person about to walk itself into the full warmth of the fire. The table was lit by rush candles, so Eliza could see the family’s faces around it, although behind them everything bled into shadow again.

  Eliza gave out the bowls and spoons. Father was sitting at the table, and Mary, the oldest sister, was there too, and John, silent as he mostly was. John was not quite right – something in the head, Father said – although he was a good worker. He had gone to school and could write a little, but he wasn’t that way much inclined, Mother said.

  William helped Mother lift the great pot of barley stew off the fire, as Ann Jane came in with the lamb and settled it by the hearth. As William sat down, he tugged on Ann Jane’s plait and tickled Mary’s neck. Ann Jane pinched him back and Eliza tickled his neck. It always went that way, flicking and jostling, slapping and laughing, seeing how far it could go before Father snapped or Mother hushed. Then there was quiet for the saying of grace. And then they were intent on the business of eating. At this time of year, there was enough to eat – always the same barley stew, but enough.

  ‘Still hungry?’ Mother asked as they finished.

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused, knowing there was no more. ‘Still hungry!’

  Mother threw up her hands in mock horror. ‘I give them breakfast and midday and then they’re still hungry for tea. And again in the morning. Oh Father, it’s the feeding of them that never stops.’ It made them laugh, so sometimes if she just whispered ‘Still hungry?’ it might set them off. But Eliza thought of how they’d never said it in the time of the famine; it was too close a question then.

  Father laid his hands flat on the table, a signal that something was to be announced. Eliza saw a flash of irritation cross William’s face. William loved and followed Father, but he was a man himself now, and was often impatient with Father, especially his slow and measured way of saying things.

  ‘Mr Tenner and Reverend Stewart came to see me today.’ After the plates had been cleared off the table, Father spoke. ‘We talked of emigration. An agent is here about, looking to fill a ship to go to New South Wales. There’s places for young men and women that are suitable.’

  ‘And what was it Mr Tenner had to say?’ asked Mother. This was a prompt for Father, part of the slowness of the game. Father always talked to Mother over the milking in the late afternoon, so she would know at least something of what he was going to say.

  ‘Firstly, he asked about Robert going for the interview with this agent, Robert being the older. I told him Robert was not ready to emigrate,’ Father said. Eliza put her hand on Mother’s.

  Mother did not ask about this. It pained her the way Father thought of Robert, always finding
fault with him. Eliza knew Robert was difficult. He and Father clashed, and Robert fell into trouble over work and many other things.

  ‘I said also that William was more advanced in his schooling than Robert,’ Father said, ‘having gone to night school. And that he had an ability in mathematics to add four columns in his head, as well as a fine hand.’ Father paused in deference to these abilities of William’s.

  ‘And Mr Tenner said that in view of that, I might consider sending William to the colony of New South Wales, where there could be positions in the government service, it being a colony of our Queen. Reverend Stewart felt it was a good chance also.’

  Eliza could see William wanted Father to speak more quickly. Father always spoke so proudly of William’s schooling.

  ‘I don’t mind New South Wales at all,’ said William, ‘but when you spoke of emigration before, I thought it was of America. I’ve seen this New South Wales in Mr McNickle’s atlas. I heard of some persons going there.’ He stopped. Eliza thought he was caught between excitement and hesitation, knowing that most of the Irish went to America or Canaday. They knew almost nothing of this other place. She could not imagine why Father might think of such a place, although William had long been keen to emigrate, to cross the sea to new places like so many did now. ‘Might I not go to James?’ asked William.

  William’s question was out of place, but he was not rebuked as Robert would have been.

  ‘This is assisted emigration so the cost is less. It is assisted by the government.’ Father paused to give substance to this assistance. ‘Two pound would be the cost to us, plus some to outfit William. The passage to America would cost more. And seeing as Mr Tenner is favourable to this, he would fix it to borrow what we need from McCrea . . .’ He sighed. ‘In addition to what we already owe him. The disadvantage is that it is halfway round the world – for those who know their geography.’ He cast a rueful glance around his children, challenging them to confess their ignorance or attest to their knowledge, but they remained silent.