Story for performance #217
webcast from Sydney at 08:06PM, 23 Jan 06

look at history
Source: Abraham Rabinovich, ‘Iran ambitions a recipe ‘for its own destruction’’, The Australian online, 23/01/06.
Writer/s: Boris Kelly

Oscar Wilde once described fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible and, as a fellow Irishman, I confess to sharing his disdain for the English as a people. Despite having spawned Shakespeare, Monty Python, rugby and the Rolling Stones the English have a lot to answer for. In 1846, at the height of the Great Famine, my ancestors left Ireland under duress to travel to Australia. They were indentured farm labourers from the estate of a certain Lord Monteagle who was variously Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of Colonial Affairs in the British government. The famine was at least in part an English construction, the result of English landowners exporting crops grown in Ireland rather than allowing the produce to be used to feed the people who laboured to grow them. The potato blight sparked the famine because spuds were the people’s dietary staple but there was food enough available if the British had wished to release it from the stores.

By all accounts Lord Monteagle was a benevolent landlord who, having stolen Irish land in the tradition of Cromwell, had come to sympathise with his slaves, faced as they were with a daily diet of boiled thistle. At the urging of his good wife, Monteagle provided assisted passage to Australia for many of the labourers and domestic staff on the estate and, as history would have it, twelve of my ancestors set sail from Cork on the Scarborough bound for Sydney. All twelve arrived in Sydney harbour some months later but on the day of their arrival the youngest of the party, an infant barely one year old, passed away. For reasons not entirely clear the bedraggled cluster of hapless, Catholic individuals that were my genealogical foundation drifted west to the hot, dry western plains around the area now known as Boorowa. The men were all accomplished horsemen who ultimately found their skills in demand as stockmen, jockeys and trainers, for the Irish were historically great lovers of the horse and, in particular, the horse race.

St Patrick had climbed the misty peaks of the mountain in the north west of Ireland that now bears his name, Croagh Patrick, and it was from there that legend tells he expelled all the snakes from Ireland. I have little doubt that having spent their first summer in the central west of New South Wales my family must have thought the bastard had sent all those snakes to Australia. The sheer force of heat and dust, flies and venomous creatures must have confirmed to them that they themselves had been benevolently shipped straight to hell.

As families do, mine ebbed and flowed and gradually drifted across the surrounding area until one hundred years later my father met my mother at the Cowra Show. She was wearing a white dress and he was riding horses in the local races. They were scarcely more than kids but, as was the custom at the time, they married young, my mother was twenty-one, and twelve months later, my father being a good Catholic and my mother a Protestant virgin, produced their first child, my good self. My mother had come from a hybrid of Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics but her mother, although thoroughly lapsed as a Presbyterian, was sufficiently bigoted to go to extreme lengths to ensure that I was not baptised into the Papal flock. The amusing part of it was that my paternal grandmother, herself a staunch Roman Catholic from the north of Italy, was equally determined to have the local priest anoint me, so much so that even prior to my departure in swaddling from the local hospital she had tried to have the priest secretly do the deed only to be thwarted by her ever-vigilant opponent. For her part, my mother’s mother had responded to the priest’s show of diplomacy in coming to visit her at home to talk reason to her, by turning the garden hose on him and expelling him and his robes from the perimeter of her property.

The Presbos won the rights to my soul in the end through sheer force of wit and stoic determination but I remain a Catholic in the cultural sense if nothing else. Which may explain why I felt so at ease when my first wife and I were married in the Greek Orthodox church in a ceremony redolent of incense and sung liturgy. Her father had come from Greece to Australia as a boy of thirteen and had been hastily dispatched to, unbelievably, Cowra where he had worked, predictably, in the local cafe where he had unknowingly served my grandmothers and most likely many members of my family without the slightest inkling that years later I would meet his daughter in Sydney and he would try unsuccessfully to talk her out of marrying an ‘Australian’. Oddly enough, my second wife had a connection to Cowra too. She was Italian to the bone and had a great-uncle who had been captured during the war and spent time in the Cowra prison camp where he ultimately passed away and may have been issued the last rites by the very same priest my Nan hosed from the garden.

To leave off where I began, with the English, there are two achievements of which they can be proud, the first of which is cricket if only for the sheer passion surrounding the Ashes series and the joy and despair it brings to followers of the game in Australia and England. The second is the one exception to Wilde’s description of the Poms as unspeakable and foxes as inedible and that is my third, current and possibly final wife. But who knows what history may bring to the unwary.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Boris Kelly.