Above the Starry Frame

by Helen Townsend

  The character of Father, old Joseph Irwin, robust and certain, loving and direct, also comes through strongly in the letters, as does the somewhat carping brother Joseph, ready to take umbrage and offence. As the recipient of the letters, it is clear that William was a much-loved child, and high hopes were held out for him.

  William, although a dutiful correspondent initially, in later years left his wives to write to the family and wrote less himself, although the family at Knockaleery were clearly grateful for his financial generosity. Talking to contemporary migrants, this seems a common experience. The gap widens, lives diverge. Small things seem large on paper. Mistakes and misunderstandings occur easily, especially where there is a great disparity of wealth. The natural intimacy fades, although love may remain. It gets harder and harder to write.

  I found Eliza’s letters beseeching William to write incredibly painful to read. I struggled to make sense of it: that he sent only newspapers, that he never told her of the deaths of Johnny and Willy. My rationale was that he simply could not write after the death of his two eldest sons. But it still feels incredibly sad.

  When I was in Ireland with my sister, we searched for Eliza’s grave in the old Kildress graveyard in the grounds of the ruined Kildress church. We both nursed an irrational impulse to let her know that William had kept her letters, and that we had read them and heard her. But we could find no Irwin graves at all.

  We found the house at Tattykeel Farm, or the ruins of it, in which a grandson of William’s older brother Joseph, named Robert Irwin, had lived until his death early in the 1960s. He had been visited by an Australian grandson of William Irwin, John Irwin, in 1957, and had told him that he had been visited by Aunt Eliza when he was a child. The stone house was very poor and primitive. We talked to the people who owned the land and had known old Robert – the last Irwin in the district. In many ways, that life did not change greatly between the 1850s and the 1950s, although the change since then has been considerable. It felt quite overwhelming to walk through this countryside, with the hedgerows and stone walls, where the cattle are still brought inside to winter.

  In Ireland I did a lot of research on farming methods, how people lived, what they wore and ate, and the Potato Famine. The Irish have a great sense of their history, and there were many details that enabled me to create scenes and events and a sense of the family hierarchy. I think it would have been quite natural for Eliza’s parents to keep her home and unmarried in order to care for them in their old age, although what she felt about this is entirely my own invention.

  The famine was a devastating event in Irish history, and was directly responsible for the emigration of so much of the population of Ireland, a diaspora which continued through into the twentieth century. Now it is much discussed, with famine museums and memorials and an enormous body of literature. But after the famine itself, very little was written about it until well into the next century. The event, although shaping history, fuelling the anger of the Irish against the English, was too painful, too complex, too sad, to speak of directly. And although it was not as severe in County Tyrone as in some other parts of the country, it was the precipitating event in this story.

  Eliza, like both her parents, was very religious. Religion did not arise from any personal decision, but was woven into every aspect of life. Eliza seemed to have both the temperament of a believer and the need for faith in her life. She clearly became more religious as she aged. I imagined that in that shrinking community, still poor, but more secure due to the money sent back from her emigrant siblings, she would look back on the rich, full life of her childhood and the events of the famine, and religion would have provided her with acceptance and understanding of her life. In one letter she mentions attending a tent mission, although not in Belfast. American evangelists did visit Belfast at this time and held missions, so it is not inconceivable that she would have attended one there.

  There is a coyness around the question of Robert’s Catholicism in the letters, except for brother Joseph’s horrible anti-Catholicism. Robert married a Catholic in Ballarat and was buried a Catholic. He stopped writing to his family in Ireland, and it seems that William remained diplomatically quiet on the question of Robert’s religion. William joined the Presbyterians in Ballarat, and there was plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment in that religion which he would have had to negotiate. The way I have written about this is entirely fictional, but William certainly did not desert Robert, and Robert’s daughter Mary Jane and her family continued to be connected to the Irwins in the next generation. I liked this about William, for it was a time when people were often cast out of families for marrying outside their religion.

  I puzzled a lot about the question of who William was. I had the letters to him, in which he is a much-loved, cherished son and brother. I had the basic facts of his life, his emigration, working at The King’s School, going to the goldfields, moving into the hotel business, and then his wives, his children, his will, his death, his obituaries. My grandfather Harold, the youngest of his children, was twelve when his father died. He didn’t talk to his own children about his father. The story of William being able to add four columns of figures in his head was enshrined in family history, as was the fact that he bought a phaeton for Julia and constantly borrowed it to ride around town himself. It was part of family legend that his pub was a meeting place for the leaders during the time of Eureka. These things were about the sum total of family memory.

  So I wondered what it would be like for an eighteen-year-old boy to cross the world, going to a distant colony, knowing only one other person on the ship. I wondered what it would be like to be an assistant master at The King’s School. In that area, there was some productive factual research. I wondered how a twenty-four year-old man, just a few years later, could be running a substantial pub and theatre in Ballarat. And I wondered what it would be like to be caught up in all those ideas that were swirling round on the goldfields. From that speculation, it became clear that William was lucky, he was enterprising, and he was intelligent, quite apart from adding four columns in his head. From the advertisements he placed in newspapers for the Star Concert Hall, it was clear he liked Irish comicalities and low-comedy effusions. It took a bit of work finding out what they might have comprised – I had a lot of fun doing research on the goldfields entertainment.

  The Star Hotel was a meeting place for the Ballarat Reform League. William and his partner, William McCrae, were both members of it and both described themselves as ‘democrats’. Captain Charles Ross, the designer of the Eureka flag, died at the Star.

  Researching Eureka, I was struck by many things. It was an event of great complexity, but it is clear that the goldfields created a temper of democracy, based on contemporary British, European and American ideas, and also on the independence that the life of gold digging gave the men at Ballarat and elsewhere. Bendigo was probably a greater hotbed of radicalism, but a series of events brought things to a head in Ballarat. I tried to imagine William, with his rural Irish background, coming into contact with these ideas. I found that although Protestant Ireland was largely conservative and hierarchical, there was nevertheless a sense of the rights of man, and the rights of conscience amongst many of the Protestants, particularly the Presbyterians, in Ireland.

  We know William was a friend of Humffray in later years, so it seems possible they were friends at the time of Eureka, and also possible that it was the admirable John Basson Humffray who gave William at least part of his political education.

  Predictably, William’s obituaries had only good to say, emphasising his capacity for faithful friendship and his commercial talents. Other than that I had to invent his character. I had already invented the tragic Michael O’Connell, and the robust and solid Danny Phelan. I was pleased to be able to slot Danny in as the barman at the John O’Groats and the Provincial. I’d become fond of him, especially when he got up and danced a jig on the opening night of the Star Concert Hall, light on his feet despite his fourteen
-stone weight.

  Life on the goldfields may have been wild at times, but considering the combination of large numbers of young men far from home, abundant supplies of alcohol, few women and sudden wealth, it was surprisingly law-abiding. Religion, right from the beginning, was important. Churches, especially non-conformist and Catholic, were some of the earliest institutions to establish themselves on the fields. The Sabbath was observed as a day of rest and church services were packed.

  There does not seem to have been the great division between Catholic and Protestant that was otherwise so characteristic of the Australian colonies. The term ‘digger’ seemed to bring men together, often in national groups, but generally not at odds with each other. The exception was the Chinese, who were always outsiders and generally ostracised, although evidently a few of them did marry Scottish women.

  There was differentiation between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, but this did not result in bitterness and separation as it did later. It was quite possible for William and his partner, McCrae, to make the Star an Irish house without worrying about the religious allegiance of their customers. The advertisements in the Ballarat Star make clear it was very Irish.

  Obviously, William had a good dose of the Protestant ethic, as well as enjoying a drink and low-comedy effusions. That he was a moral force man at Eureka, committed but moderate, is mentioned in one of his obituaries, and he did ride to Geelong to inform Alicia Dunne of Peter Lalor’s condition, as he had also swum ashore at Geelong with the horse on the way to Ballarat.

  So he began to take shape – enterprising and sociable, not one of your dour Presbyterians. I imagined him shy with women, entranced by Bridget. And with Bridget, he would feel his life in that place coming together, that he belonged in the town after the extraordinary events of the Eureka Stockade.

  After Eureka, I immersed myself in the growing city of Ballarat. I had the outlines of William’s life – the fire at the Star, the move to the Provincial, his marriage to Bridget Byrne, his membership of the Masonic Lodge, of St Andrews Kirk and the Licensed Victuallers.

  An obituary letter from William Bramwell Withers, the early historian of Ballarat, mentioned his own friendship with William and also William’s friendship with Humffray, to whom he stuck through Humffray’s ‘dark days’, which could only refer to his disgrace in 1862. This gave me the platform to create the story of how William stuck to Humffray. Like William, I don’t want to believe Humffray was corrupt, although the evidence against him, which is only circumstantial, is nevertheless powerful. Perhaps, as Bridget said, ‘he did not have the wit to make it pay’.

  The colonies as a whole were divided on the question of religion, the fundamental division being between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics were not regarded as merely Catholic, but Irish Catholic. And despite the town’s democratic beginnings, this division was nowhere greater than in Ballarat. The Orange Order was very strong in numbers and intemperate in its rhetoric, so it was perfectly acceptable in politics to brand your opponents as Irish, popish, ignorant, superstitious or pretty much any insult that came to mind. In the face of this, the Irish Catholics closed rank. With their strong ecclesiastical leadership, they established their own education system, importing priests and nuns from Ireland to keep the faith alive, fostering a close clannishness and solidarity. Given his brother Robert’s Catholicism, William would have had to negotiate the Protestant–Catholic divide constantly.

  ‘Irish’ in Australia has become a shorthand term for Irish Catholic. It is easy to forget the important role the Protestant Irish played in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were a large and influential immigrant group, many prominent in the law and in business. Henry Cuthbert, who was William’s solicitor, is a prime example: a superb lawyer, influential in Ballarat through his civic activities, an active Freemason and a member of the Legislative Council. He was not in the Orange Order but had a cousin who was. It is quite conceivable Cuthbert would have helped William who, although from more humble beginnings, clearly had a keen sense of the Protestant ethic and a desire to move forward in the world. The interesting thing about the Protestant Irish is that while there were strong bonds between them in terms of religion, their membership of civic organisations and politics, they did not survive as an identifiable group, perhaps because of their very success. Now it is all too easy to forget they existed.

  The royal visit to Ballarat, and the shooting of Prince Albert by a Ballarat man, just had to be part of William’s story. I have no evidence of his actual feelings on the matter, but it seems to me that he was a man caught between many conflicting streams – the question of Irish loyalty, his own loyalty to the men of the days of the rush, his Catholic brother, his undoubted acquaintance with men who belonged to the Orange Order and the growing division between Catholic and Protestant.

  However, I didn’t want to re-invent William as a political activist, to make him someone who he clearly was not. I thought up Danny Phelan’s pig named Victoria, and with it came the story of William as an ordinary man, making a small stand against sectarian injustice. I felt strongly about this story, because those particular sectarian prejudices remained an important part of Australian history and society until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The Chinese, of course, were victims of an even greater prejudice, a prejudice I could only hint at in the context of this story.

  Religious and racial prejudice is not something we have left behind. Politicians today are still invoking panic about foreign plots by migrants, and there is still a sense of fear about difference in culture, religion and loyalty. Judgments about who belongs and who doesn’t, which are not far removed from the rhetoric which surrounded the supposed Irish Fenians in the Australian colonies at that time, still abound. Henry Parkes started a witch hunt with considerable hubris. It was clever politics, but he never uncovered any Fenian plotters. Indeed, it seems that, compared with the Irish in America, the Australians of Irish background may well have been vocal at times, but in practical terms were generally half-hearted about the Irish cause.

  When Bridget died, she was given a short obituary as William’s wife, which also mentioned that she nursed the wounded at Eureka. That was all I knew, but she too began to emerge from these events. As Ballarat society became settled and respectable, I wondered how a woman who had enjoyed the freedom of the days of the rush might deal with the restrictions of feminine propriety. Bridget took shape in my imagination, a great delight to me, so when I wrote of her death I was almost too sad to finish it. Pity there’s no grief counselling for writers of fiction.

  Jane was more straightforward, given the enthusiastic recommendations that preceded her from Knockaleery, and also because she was not such a central character. Likewise Robert, whom I could imagine arriving from Ireland, dreaming of his freedom, but also William dreaming of a Robert who didn’t exist. So the tension came into play between the two of them, Robert never being the success William was, inconveniently becoming a Catholic, but always a large figure, who became very real in my mind. He did live out at Italian Gully and later had a woodyard in Ballarat. The liver disease of which he died suggests a powerful thirst. But for the rest, big, tall, dark Robert with his wide smile came to me as a sibling one would love and find incredibly annoying at the same time. Yet for William, who came from that big, close, loving family, to have this one sibling who represented that world, would have been vitally important.

  As a child I spent considerable time in Ballarat with my grandparents, Nell and Harold Irwin. We had picnics in the gardens, went to the statue house, watched the rowing and sailing on the lake, went to bridge parties and ‘down the street’, and I watched my grandfather don his exotic Masonic robes to go the lodge. My grandparents seemed to know everyone and everyone seemed to know them. My grandfather took me to local concerns in which he had an interest – the woollen mills, a foundry, the pottery. I understood, as my grandfather picked up bits of quartz, shook his head over mullock he
aps, took us into deserted mines, talked seriously with other old men about yields and nuggets and gutters of gold, that gold was a deeply serious matter. My grandparents’ cat was named Nugget, and I lived in hope that somewhere in all the quartz and clay up Black Hill I might find a real nugget. My view of Ballarat was a highly romantic view that would not have been possible had I actually lived there.

  In researching this book, I found Ballarat to be a less congruous place, rougher, more nuanced. It certainly had the grandeur and pretensions of a rich Victorian city, but also encompassed a hierarchy and social mores that could be harsh and destructive. But I was glad I started with that romantic attachment, for that view took in something of the vision of those who built it. The civic pride and hubris were embraced by many of its citizens who did not share in the vision, or in the spoils of gold. So there was something of that dreamlike quality, especially in William Irwin’s lifetime, when the promise of gold still had some reality, although in a much more prosaic and industrial way than in the days of the rush.

  William’s third wife, Julia, is one character about whom there was more family information. There are photos of her, more sense of her, although her early life before migration remains something of a mystery. She was concerned with respectability, culture, education and social position. Part of this probably came from her own background, but maybe also from her situation as a widow without means. Respectability was her one protection. Men in colonial society could reinvent themselves. As social mores became tighter, that process became harder and harder for women. Her marriage to William was indeed a fortunate thing for them both.