The Good Boy (26 page)

The
Lightning
did not leave Liverpool until 14 May under the command of Captain Forbes who had done so well in the
Marco Polo
. Her departure was recorded in the diary kept by one of her passengers.

Sunday 14th May 1854
. With a tug on each side and one ahead the clipper
Lightning
slipped down the Mersey from Liverpool at noon, to the boom of guns from the
Marco Polo
and shore batteries and to the strains of the ship's band playing ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer', many joining them in chorus, flags flying, many full hearts leaving their native land forever – away we go. Divine service in our saloon and ditto after tea – too much ranting and praying. We cannot get fresh air for the crowds who at tend. We get our meals in great discomfort and without order – everyone for himself and many are rough and rude. Several sails were set without wind to fill them. One tug returned to Liverpool on Sunday and the sec ond on Monday with a large mail from the passengers, but the third remained until the ship was off Cork on Tuesday. With every sail set we present a fine appear ance even with only a light wind.

9th June.
Following on several trifling squalls during the day, a much stronger one at 10.30 p.m. carried away the jib topsail and by 11 p.m. white thick clouds were rising to a fresh cool breeze. The ship was almost covered in sail and as the breeze became stronger she gradually set herself to it, at the same time going quicker and quicker. Men were stationed at the halyards and I went below to keep dry. The ship was nearly on her side when the Captain came on deck; … what a roaring of wind, thundering of flapping sails, dashing of spray, shrieking of orders there were before we were snug again. The ship trembles very much when she dashes against a wave. T… thinks we ought to petition the Captain to keep us under less sail, for he sees very little difference between frightening a man out of his wits and killing him outright.

Friday 7th July 1854.
We are somewhere off the Mozambique Channel and had a tempestuous night, going at a fearful rate at times. Main topmast halyard gave way making a terrific noise until the sail was stowed. Lee scuppers a long way under – sea high – many a heavy dash over into the main deck. An extra lurch and 20 men leaning against the weather side went flying down to leeward, some on their feet and some on their sterns. 9 p.m. the ship seems to be going faster than ever – absolutely flying from under one. 10 p.m. the blocks, 18 inches above the lee rail, are frequently under water. The deck is on an angle of 45 or 50 degrees and you only get along hand over hand, by the belaying-pins on the windward side. The second mate, whose watch it is, says ‘Now this is what I call carrying on!'
⁵⁰

My maternal great-grandmother, Fanny Hockey, was born in South Australia in 1844 to a young couple who had arrived there in 1839, just three years after the establishment of the colony. They had come from the picturesque village of Montacute in Somerset, England, on the sailing ship
Asia
and in Adelaide they opened up a small grocery or general provisions store, initially in a tent. After fifteen difficult years in the fledgling colony, they decided to move on and to join the gold rush to the neighbouring colony of Victoria. They piled their possessions onto a cart, harnessed up their one horse and, with their six young children in tow, set off walking the 700 or so kilometres to the diggings. My greatgrandmother, the second of five daughters, was aged ten at the time; her baby brother, the family's first son, died along the way. The family eventually reached the goldfields at Maryborough, and that is where Fanny grew up and met and married, at the age of seventeen, my great-grandfather, James Sullivan.

Fanny spent the rest of her life in Maryborough while two of her sisters moved to nearby Dunolly and Tarnagulla, having married the sons of the proprietors of hotels in each town. The Railway Hotel, then run by the Nicholls family, is still in business in Dunolly. The rather grand-sounding ‘Victoria Hotel and Theatre' in Tarnagulla, run in the 1860s by the Bool family, also from Montacute, is also still standing but is now delicensed and has become the Tarnagulla Public Hall. The village of Moliagul, where in 1869 two lucky fossickers unearthed, just five centimetres below the surface of the soil, the ‘Welcome Stranger' nugget – a staggering 71 kilo lump of pure gold and the largest nugget ever found in the world – is only a few kilometres away. Like many of the other gold rush ‘hot spots' around Maryborough, Moliagul is now little more than a name on the map, but would have been familiar territory to my great-grandparents when the nugget was found.

Great-Grandfather James Sullivan had come to the goldfields from County Carlow in Ireland, arriving in Melbourne in 1855 in the sailing ship
Blanche Moore
. He did some fossicking at first, but soon opted for a position as a warder at the first prison built in the area, on the outskirts of Maryborough. This would have been less than a year after the Eureka Stockade uprising in Ballarat and at a time when (as almost always) security, particularly for nervous members of the Establishment, was a growth industry. For an Irishman to ‘take the king's shilling', i.e. to work for the English Crown, was a little surprising and remains a little disconcerting for the writer, a strongly republican descendant, but the little we know of him suggests that James was a very practical, level-headed fellow and such genes are also useful in life. It does not seem to have taken him long to realise that a public servant, no matter how lowly, had a more certain income than any digger. It also seems that he managed to do some fairly successful prospecting, or speculating, in his spare time, and after about ten years as a prison warder he resigned and became a full-time ‘investor', buying and selling shares in local goldmines. When he married Fanny he was referred to on the Marriage Certificate as a ‘constable', and when some twenty years later on their children started to marry, he was referred to, on their marriage certificates and under the heading ‘Occupation of Father', as ‘Gentleman'. How very British it was for an increase in fortune to turn a constable and part-time fossicker/ speculator into a ‘gentleman'! I never met him, of course, as he died when my mother was only eleven years old. She remembered him as a tall, bewhiskered, well-dressed man with a head of silvery hair and a blackthorn walking stick … which he shook at her on finding her swinging on his garden gate. ‘Get down from there, you young Terryalt,'
⁵¹
she recalled him saying. An autocratic and patriarchal figure to her, he was nonetheless clearly loved by his large family, his youngest daughter referring to him always as ‘Dearest Da'. He died in 1911, with Fanny by his side. ‘Cover me up, Fanny, I'm cold,' are reported to have been his last words … the last directive of very many to his dutiful wife.

To marry James, Fanny had somewhat distanced herself from her family in that she converted to Catholicism and became a devout parishioner of the Catholic church in Maryborough. To the end of her days, she never missed Sunday Mass, in her last years having a permanent booking on Sunday mornings with a local (horse-drawn) cab company to take her to Mass and to bring her home. She was something of a traditionalist and had not welcomed such new-fangled things as motor cars or, for that matter, hats (she always wore a bonnet), gas stoves, hot water systems or even armchairs, always sitting on a straight-backed chair if away from home and her favourite rocking chair. ‘I've never accustomed myself to lolling about,' she said to my mother, who tried to steer her towards something more comfortable than a kitchen chair. Only with great difficulty was Grandma Fanny persuaded in her last years to accept the connection of electricity to the matrimonial home in which she lived till the end of her days. A typical weatherboard miner's cottage with a galvanised iron roof, the house had grown along with the family. Initially of two rooms, it soon acquired two more, then another when a new kitchen was attached at the back, then a return verandah at the front and side, and then a new room at the end of the side verandah, always referred to as ‘the big room' where the boys slept. The children included five girls (one of whom died in childhood) and seven boys; as a child I often wondered how the two parents and twelve children had ever fitted into such a small place. Of course, by the time space had to be found for the younger children, the older ones had already left the nest and gone out into the wide world … all except the eldest daughter, Daisy. She had announced her intention of entering the convent but was told by her father to wait at home, helping her mother, until the youngest child, her brother Ray, had grown up. Daisy did as she was told and waited, entering the Brigidine convent in Echuca, that order's first house in Victoria, in 1908, toiling faithfully in the Lord's vineyard until her death in 1957.

The second-youngest child was Bert, my Great-Uncle Bert whom I remember very well as unforgettable and a little aweinspiring: he had no arm in the right sleeve of his jacket! He had served in the Australian mounted cavalry in the World War I, had been decorated for bravery at Gallipoli and had lost his arm in Egypt. As a six-year-old, I wondered how on earth one could lose an arm, and I then and there classified Egyptians as a strange race, somehow involved in stealing, or else in failing to find, my uncle's arm. Great-Uncle Bert was a school teacher and indeed, when I first met him, a Headmaster. As I had just started school, I found him a little intimidating. He had a deep and beautiful speaking voice, one of the Sullivan family traits, contrasting strangely with the almost rasping voice of his wife, Auntie Alice. Alice was incredibly ‘jolly' and was given to shrieks of laughter and to poking one's ribs, and was at times almost dangerous to be near. She called her husband by the abbreviation ‘Sul' rather than ‘Bert', not ‘taking the mickey out of him' but nonetheless keeping his feet on the ground. Even as a child, and later on as a teenager, I was aware of them as a truly happy, loving and indeed inspiring couple, as two people so close to each other in their old age that they each seemed to know what the other was thinking and feeling and was going to say next.

After James died, Fanny, accompanied by her youngest daughter, Mill, usually spent the six weeks of the summer school holidays with my mother's family at their home in Hamilton. The trip from Maryborough to Hamilton was made by steam train and took all day, first to Avoca and then to Ararat where they would change trains. Then, after having lunch in the Railway Refreshment Rooms at the Ararat station, they took the train from Ararat to Hamilton on the Portland line. Grandma Fanny's arrival in Hamilton was always one of the highlights of the Christmas holidays. One grandson, my uncle Frank (himself a bit of a wag), said that Grandma Fanny had an extraordinarily keen sense of humour and was always playing tricks on the children, cracking jokes, telling new stories, and producing toffees and other surprises from the pockets of her voluminous clothes. My aunt Nell, the
fashionista
of the family, said (surely with some exaggeration) that each year ‘we were all agog' to see Grandma's new bonnet, the purchase of which (apparently timed to coincide with the trip to Hamilton) became more and more difficult as hats came in and bonnets went out of fashion. My mother, more focused on the practicalities of housekeeping than was her younger sister, remembered (with gratitude and even some embarrassment) the giant mending basket which awaited Grandma's nimble fingers, needle and thread. This basket would have been gradually filled during the year by all manner of clothes needing taking in or letting out or patching or repairing, socks needing darning and cuffs needing turning (and in a family of seven children there was much call for such repairs and renovations).

Grandma Fanny's arrival would soon be followed up by a house visit from Dean Shanahan, the formidable Irish parish priest who apparently held most of his parishioners in some thrall but who was as meek as a lamb in paying his respects to ‘old Mrs Sullivan' each Christmas. My mother was inclined to think that the Dean's visit was really timed to catch her father at a moment when, to impress Grandma, he might be tempted to proffer the Dean a more than usually handsome cheque as a Christmas donation to the church. My grandfather was one of the few Catholic businessmen in Hamilton, a very Protestant town in those days, and he and the Dean, who thought, or pretended to think, that a successful shopkeeper would be as wealthy as the members of the great squatter families of the Western District, had many a skirmish on the subject. On one occasion the Dean was seen to hand back grandfather's cheque, saying, ‘Double it, Millane,' and my grandfather had quietly replied that he would be quite happy to cancel the cheque if it was not acceptable as it was.

My great-great-grandfather Seamus Millane and his wife Brigid had come from Ireland to the gold rushes in the Colony of Victoria in 1857 on the sailing ship
Mangerton
. They were already in their fifties, farmers from near Ennis in County Clare. Rather surprisingly they brought with them, also as ‘Unassisted Passengers', their five grown sons, including the seventeen-year-old Peter, who subsequently became my great-grandfather. The family made its way on foot from the port of Geelong to Ballarat and on to the diggings near Castlemaine. The extent to which they tried their luck digging for gold we do not know, but within a few years they had opted to mine the miners and had opened a general store in the main street of Castlemaine. Nearby was a butcher's shop run by a family from Athenry in County Galway and in 1866, young son Peter married one of the girls from Athenry, Honorah Elizabeth Fyans.

A hundred years later my efforts to locate descendants of the Fyans family in Athenry in Ireland proved unsuccessful, but I did learn that ‘Fyans' seems to have been the Irish rather phonetic way of pronouncing the Norman-French name ‘Fiennes'. Fiennes is a tiny village near Calais on the Channel coast of France. Jean de Fiennes was one of the six ‘Bourgeois de Calais' represented in the great statuary group by Auguste Rodin and created in homage to the resistance by Calais to the invading English in 1347. The local
seigneur
, Eustache de Fiennes, had accompanied Duke William of Normandy in his conquest of England in the eleventh century and some of the Fiennes descendants who had then settled in England
⁵²
had, in the fourteenth century, crossed to Ireland and seized land near Dublin. The spelling/pronun-ciation of the French ‘Fiennes' subsequently appears in Ireland as Fyans, Foynes, Fines, and so on. One of the Fyans had been Mayor of Dublin in the fifteenth century, as had another Fyans in the sixteenth century. Finnstown House Hotel now stands on the site of Fyans Castle in County Louth just outside Dublin. The Fyans family must have ‘conformed' to English rule under the Tudors, just as the Fiennes family in England must have changed from Catholic to Protestant in the same period, in order to keep their property and status. So now I see that my genes link me to eleventh century France and to the fortune-seekers who helped Duke William in the conquest of Saxon England and also, through their near descendants, to those Anglo-Norman go-getters who helped the Plantagenets in their invasion of Ireland. The Fiennes/Fyans family was an influential one in the Dublin area for the following four centuries, turning its coat from Catholic to Protestant in the sixteenth century when continuing prosperity depended upon doing so … and in the eighteenth century permitting members willing to turn back to Catholicism, to intermarry with the ‘native' Irish and to move beyond The Pale
⁵³
and into the nationalist west of Ireland. Captain Foster Fyans, first Commandant of the penal settlement at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) and first Police Magistrate in Geelong, who figured prominently in the development of Geelong and of the Western District of Victoria, came from County Louth, always within The Pale, and the more conformist side of the family. However, by the time he joined the British army in 1811, there were Fyans living in County Galway in the west of Ireland, and it is from those Catholic Fyans, whom I was unsuccessful in tracing, that Honorah Elizabeth descended. Is this evidence of a ‘pragmatic' gene, of a well-developed instinct of survival? Is it evidence of a ‘realism' gene, one that helps distinguish between the important realities of life and the less important myths of religion? At this early stage in the development of the science of genetics it would be premature to make such a claim, but such speculation would seem to be reasonable.