Home Truth Read online

  For Sebastian

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Song of Exile Rosaleen Love

  The New Jerusalem Gabrielle Lord

  The Brilliant City Inside the Soul Cassandra Pybus

  Homes Sweet Homes Peter Goldsworthy

  Distance Looks Our Way Marion Halligan

  No Poet’s Song Matthew Condon

  Home Triptych Andrea Goldsmith

  Who Trespass Against Us Michael McGirr

  Start With the Tulip Carmel Bird

  This Plush Embrace Ian Britain

  SOURCES

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘He was alone, three million light-years from home.’ So concludes the first chapter of the novel of the film E.T. Packed between ‘alone’ and ‘home’, those three million light-years express the vast and tender emotions carried by the concept of home, the place of origin, the place of belonging, of comfort, of relationship: the haven. Home is the place each human being (and each extra-terrestrial) seeks with the heart. In 1982 Steven Spielberg gave the world the imperative ‘E.T. phone home’. This unlikely little clump of words went straight to the core of the matter. Connection with home is the genesis of hope.

  In this collection of essays ten writers have taken ten personal approaches to the meaning of ‘home’. All the essayists are established Australian writers, writers who have had a great deal of time and experience on which to reflect. They sometimes locate their home in the country of origin, in the town, in the house, but almost all move into some examination of relationships with others, and also into the nature of the self. ‘Home’, it seems, is bound up with identity. Exploration of identity frequently takes the writers into recollections of their early selves, and ‘home’ sometimes lies very close to the places and relationships of childhood. Contemplation of home leads back to the mother and forward to the grave, such a trajectory bringing writers inevitably again to an examination of the self.

  Australia is a continent to which Europeans came in the eighteenth century partly for the purpose of establishing European culture, in an attempt to convert a land they experienced as foreign and hostile into a land they could ultimately consider to be home. The terrible violence and tragedy of this exercise whereby powerful invaders overtook the homeland of the indigenous peoples will forever mark this country. And the invaders carried with them their own tragic underclass, people who were forced into exile from their homelands. The idea of home is horribly scored and burned into the story of this country.

  In 1997 a government report on the lives of thousands of Indigenous Australians who had been taken from their families was published. It was called Bringing Them Home. This is a most striking example of the powerful use of the word ‘home’, a word which is used so frequently in speech and writing without necessarily very much reflection. All the emotion of the stories contained in the report is packed into the word. Home. The report contained personal accounts by Indigenous people of their childhood experience of being removed from their families and homes and relocated. I edited and published a collection of these stories in 1998: The Stolen Children—Their Stories.

  That is all a long time ago now, and it may seem odd to say so, but as a result of seeing the word ‘home’ in the title of the report, I have been contemplating the word ever since, wondering what it means to people, how writers might explore it and describe it. This present collection is the result of my contemplation. The writers here are all people of principally European heritage, all originating from migrations at various times up to the middle of last century. A collection of ten essays implies a small selection, and I have confined this selection particularly to writers who work with images. I believe it is images that can give writers the power to carry their understanding of the word ‘home’ into the hearts and minds of readers. The word itself is an abstraction, and requires the solidity of imagery in order to come to life.

  In February 2009 bushfires in rural Victoria killed 173 people. Pictures of burned-out houses are the graphic symbols of those lost lives. These houses were homes; they were repositories of possessions, hopes and dreams. They were the fragile havens, the places of supposed safety and nurture, the locations where the people placed their identities. The word ‘homeless’ has a terrible, terrible ring. When you are homeless, where is your identity?

  Since long before 1788 Australia has been a place of migrations, from the arrivals of pre-history, to the people who came here in search of a new home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to those who still today make their way here in the hope of a better life, a hope that is sometimes frustrated and dashed. Home; they are all looking for their home. The place they once called their own has in many cases become a place of danger and fear rendering it no longer truly ‘home’.

  The essays in this collection address in various ways the question of what ‘home’ might mean. It is my hope and expectation that readers will take the essays as inspiration for further contemplation on the meaning of the term.

  I am sometimes visited by the memory of a dusty pink rose that bloomed in my garden some years ago. In the hollow centre of the rose lived a bright green praying mantis that seemed very much at home. In the end, the rose lost its petals and died. I always wonder where the insect went. And a most moving and potent use of the word ‘home’ can be seen on the World War One memorial in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. The reference is to the horses that were, at the conclusion of the war, shot by the soldiers who loved them. Rather than see these faithful animals fall into the unloving hands of local traders, the men destroyed them. On the memorial is the statement: ‘They did not come home.’

  Song of Exile Rosaleen Love

  Be it ever so humble

  There’s no place like home.

  A charm from the sky

  Seems to hallow us there.

  Which seek thro’ the world

  Is ne’er met with elsewhere

  An exile from home,

  Splendour dazzles in vain

  O give me my lowly

  Thatched cottage again.

  John Howard Payne, ‘Home Sweet Home’

  ‘Home Sweet Home’ was one of the most popular songs of the nineteenth century. Soon after its first performance in 1823, in the opera Clari, the song was sung in drawingrooms and streets, in arrangements from piano and brass band to the hurdy-gurdy. It was more than sentimental nineteenth-century schmaltz extolling the virtues of domestic life. For those displaced and dispossessed by the political and economic turmoil of the nineteenth century, the song spoke directly to their memories of a ‘home sweet home’ irretrievably located in lost times and places. The song was well-enough known to be a musical joke. When in 1859 Jean Francois Gravelet, known as the Great Blondin, walked a tightrope across the Niagara River near the Falls, he was greeted as he reached the Canadian side by a brass band playing ‘Home Sweet Home’. The song slipped easily into the encore repertoire, often as a last song in a farewell concert, with Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland keeping up the tradition. Adelina Patti added a few extra high notes to further please her audience. A technically brilliant remastering allows us to admire Nellie Melba’s pure voice on a recording made in 1905, and now easily accessible on YouTube. Wherever and whenever audiences heard ‘Home Sweet Home’, it stirred memories of home and homeland and created a half-pleasurable, half-painful emotional reaction in audiences well-primed to shed their tears.

  Home remembered from afar is part of my own family history. In 1913 my Irish grandparents, Alice Rebecca and Robert King, left Connemara for Australia, together with five members of their family. Religious intolerance
in the vicious form of ostracism and boycott forced them to leave. For Alice and Robert, ‘home’ had many meanings: the home they remembered, with its beauty, and its troubles; the new home they found in a welcoming Australia; and the ultimate home that, in faith, they believed awaited them at life’s end.

  Whereas the Irish-born generation in Australia looked back on Ireland as a lost homeland, for the Australian-born grandchildren Ireland is more a romantic place of song, legends and stories. In our family, sentimental Irish songs are popular. Some of us have Irish names. Claddagh rings are exchanged. We go back on tourist visits. Two of us inherited our grandparents’ version of ‘Home Sweet Home’ in the form of reproductions of paintings by the Irish artist Paul Henry. Henry, who lived in Connemara from 1900 to 1919, was one of the first Irish Impressionists. He shows the hard life of the times for what it was: the lowly thatched cottages, the sods of peat turf stacked against walls, the rutted dirt roads that wind to distant blue hills. Hardship was there, but also beauty. Henry’s skies glow. His water shimmers. ‘A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there’ is brilliantly captured in light reflected from sky and lough. At the turn of the twentieth century, the west of Ireland came to be seen as a pure land, a place where the ancient language, culture and spirit lived on uncorrupted, and Henry caught this moment in time. My grandparents could subscribe to the image, while fleeing the reality.

  As an emigrant family there is one thing we had to which we could return. The house built by my great-grandfather Michael King sometime in the 1860s still stands in Cleggan, County Galway. As an ancestral house, Seaview House was far from humble: a large two-storey stone farmhouse with a slate roof and a view over Cleggan Bay. It presided over the largest farm in the area. The house and farm remained in King family hands for some one hundred years until 1967, when it was inherited by a step-relation, then sold to become a riding school. Cleggan is now a holiday destination for tourists. My grandparents would have been astounded at its transformation.

  The one photograph we have from the late nineteenth century shows an imposing white house with a jaunting cart parked outside. On Sundays, two horses were harnessed to the cart to take the family a few miles to church. At one end of the house, a door opened into a separate shop and post office, for the family also ran the first post office in Cleggan. Once, my King greatgrandparents were clearly prosperous and settled. Yet one by one their children left Connemara until only one son remained on the family farm. The story, as members of the Australian-born generation unravelled it, turned out to be far more curious than our parents ever knew.

  The story of my grandparents’ emigration starts with the terrible events of the 1840s, the period of the great Famine, a period well before they were born, but which shaped their lives. (In histories of Ireland, the word ‘Famine’ is given respect with a capital letter, as is ‘Workhouse’.) Between 1845 and 1848 the potato crop failed for four successive years, and it was the poor in the west of Ireland who suffered the most. Between the two census years of 1841 and 1851, the population of Connemara fell by ten thousand, about one third, as peasants were evicted from their land and most faced starvation. In 1847, 87 per cent of the inhabitants were dependant on soup rations distributed by the Relief Commissioners.

  It was to Connemara in the 1850s that my great-great-grandfather Thomas King (c.1812–1885) moved with his family. He was a scripture reader employed by the Protestant Irish Church Missions. On my grandmother’s side of the family, my great-grandfather William Manning (1828–1903) was native to the area and lived there through the Famine years. By the early 1850s he converted to Protestantism, swayed by the harsh doctrine that the Famine was the judgment of God upon the Catholics for holding to their old religion. God had judged the poor, but the Irish Church Missions, with funding from England, would help them learn the error of their ways.

  The Irish Church Missions were established from England to convert the Catholics of Ireland to Protestantism. Though they brought food to the starving and education to the children, their main aim was to save their souls. Both Thomas King and William Manning were mission agents and scripture readers, employed to teach ‘the true knowledge of scripture’ in homes and schools. By 1856 they were two of eleven mission agents at Sellerna, where Thomas King remained until his death in 1885, while William Manning moved on to other places within the region. They must have known each other. In 1901 William Manning’s youngest daughter, Alice Rebecca, would marry Robert William King, a grandson of Thomas King. Alice and Robert were my grandparents. Both sides of my Irish family were evangelical Protestants in a Catholic area, a recipe for the trouble that would come their way.

  William Manning was a native Irish speaker, able to interpret the Bible in the language of his people. We still have his Irish Bible in our family, though none of his descendants can read it. Inside, pinned to a green grosgrain ribbon, there is a small pressed flower of the May, or hawthorn, perhaps as remembrance of William’s granddaughter Mabel (May), who died in 1897 at the age of twelve. Certainly the Bible provided a memento of home for his daughters Alice and Sarah, the mother of May, for they brought it to Australia when they emigrated in 1913.

  The mission agents’ philanthropy came with heavy conditions. The writer Tim Robinson describes the Irish Church missions as ‘that second blight that visited Connemara’. It wasn’t enough the people had to endure the Famine. They had to cope with a zealous group of missionaries, including my ancestors, who told them the Famine was their own fault. According to the Protestant tract, The Banner of the Truth (1852), Catholics were not Christians because they put their faith in the ‘false atonement and false mediators’ of Pope and priests. Today, I find it distressing to read these virulent sectarian diatribes, with their elaborate, mean-spirited claims that Catholics were damned to hell.

  At the time of the Famine, for those looking for explanations for the horrors they endured, the tirades must have seemed credible. In the battle for the souls of the benighted, anything goes. Miriam Moffitt, the historian of the Irish Church Missions, writes that the methods used by Protestants in their missions, and Catholics in response, were ‘dubious, underhand, hypocritical and harsh: but it must be remembered that this battle was fought for the purest of motives—that all should enter the kingdom of heaven’.

  For the Protestants, heaven was a place where you wouldn’t meet a Catholic, and in the Catholic heaven of those times you would certainly never meet a Protestant. Disputatious members of each faith endured a life of misery in this world, and were prepared to make life miserable for others, for their own good. They certainly weren’t aiming for an afterlife that embraced difference. The term ‘conversion’ is of that era, replaced in the twenty-first century by the less coercive notion of ‘inter-faith dialogue’. In nineteenth-century Ireland, there was less dialogue, more inter-faith hostility. There is a family story that Annie Greer, a Manning granddaughter, was trusted with minding a Protestant neighbour’s newborn baby. She ran away with him through the night to a safe place, so the Catholic priest could not baptise him. That must have been round 1900 or so.

  It was a harsh life in Connemara then, and a harsh set of beliefs. For over fifty years, William Manning devotedly served the Irish Church Missions, both as teacher and scripture reader. He retired in 1892, already having been described in 1880 as ‘aged and infirm’ and unable to go out in bad weather. I imagine the life his wife, my greatgrandmother Mary Jane Manning, must have led, raising ten children and moving with her husband to his seven postings in the west Connemara area. (Thomas King served twenty-nine years, mostly in the one place, Sellerna.)

  Most likely there is no Manning house still standing to which the family can return. The mission cottages would have been humble enough, though some are described as ‘slated houses’ rather than, presumably, the older thatched cottages or cabins. Today in Connemara there are few physical traces of the schools and churches built by the missions. Many buildings were burned or demolished during the Civil War of 1922–2
3. In 1926 the disused mission church at Sellerna, where both William Manning and Thomas King had been stationed, was demolished. The stones were removed and dispersed by local people intent on destroying all trace of mission activities. The mission schools brought reading and writing, and teaching in the English language to areas where there were no schools, but the children faced examination in Scripture, and were taught arguments and verse to refute the ‘Romanism’ of their parents. No wonder the scripture readers were often pelted with stones, or beaten up when they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Irish Church Mission activity was all but over by the end of the nineteenth century. The older agents like William and Thomas died, and their children either migrated, or converted. My ancestors were part of a religious movement that was a spent force by 1900. My grandparents left Ireland because the proselytising missions of their ancestors had failed.

  I mentioned there is a King family house, Seaview House, that still stands at Cleggan, built by my great-grandfather Michael King in the 1860s. This is the house to which three of my King cousins have returned. In 1965 one of us met Theresa King, the widow of my great-uncle Hal King. Theresa was then ninety-two years old, and sprightly enough to show off the farm, but apologised for no longer being able to climb over the stile. Theresa pointed to three small holes in a drystone wall, which my uncle Wallace and my father Oliver had carved with their pen-knives around 1911. In a letter written in 1932, Hal recalled: ‘Each time I cross into the garden, I see the stone, and I think of you all, and I very often lay a potato or two in these little holes that I find loosely lying in the furrow.’ In 2002 another cousin returned and went riding on local paths on a horse from the Seaview stables. He found Hal’s grave in a cemetery on nearby Omey Island. Hal, the one King who remained in Connemara, had died a Catholic. In 2007 another cousin, Fiona, went back, and found out more. She met Theresa’s great-nephew John, who had inherited then sold the house. One by one the three cousins going ‘home’ learned a little more of the family story, but it was Fiona who learned the terrible family secret.