Bloodlines
Chapter 13: William and Mary Jane
William and Mary Jane O’Grady at home in Gore Hill, Sydney c 1930s.
This Depression-era photo of William O’Grady and his wife Mary Jane was taken in the backyard of their home in Sydney’s Gore Hill.
William is the fifth child of Johanna and John O’Grady. He was born on 1 October 1867 and spent his early years in Kelso and Bathurst while his father continued to work on the railway line to Orange. Later, William moved with his parents and siblings to Gore Hill, where his father established a brick-carting business.
William met Mary Jane Wright when he was in his early 20s. He was another tall and lean O’Grady with a glint in his eye; she was a beautiful 17-year-old English girl with lovely white teeth and a peaches and cream complexion who had emigrated to Australia with her mother and stepfather when she was a child, settling first in Queensland then moving to Sydney in the 1890s.
Theirs might have been a match made in heaven, except for the fact that William was Catholic and Mary Jane was Protestant, so there was no dancing together at Catholic Youth events, no tennis days, no chaperoned excursions to the beach or anywhere else because such things never happened between the Catholics and the Protestants. They fought each other, tooth and nail, but they never fraternised. Never.
On Sunday mornings I watch them go to church, the Protestants, and I feel sorry for them, especially the girls, who are so lovely, they have such beautiful white teeth. I feel sorry for the beautiful Protestant girls, they’re doomed. That’s what the priests tell us. Outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. Outside the Catholic Church there is nothing but doom. After Mass on Sunday I go with my friend Billy Campbell to watch them play croquet on the lovely lawn beside their church. Croquet is a Protestant game. They hit the ball with the mallet, pock and pock again, and laugh. I wonder how they can laugh or don’t they even know they’re doomed? I feel sorry for them and I say, Billy, what’s the use of playing croquet when you’re doomed? He says, Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed? [1]
Of course plenty of things happened between Protestants and Catholics, not just the European wars of the 16th, 17th and 18th century, the Great Famine, and the never-ending Irish wars of independence. Occasionally, the young ones fell for each other, defying four centuries’ worth of hatred, as was the case for Mary Jane Wright and William O’Grady. On 24 June 1899 they had their first child, born in a small worker’s cottage in Union Street, in the innner-Sydney suburb of Newtown. They called him William.
Given that John O’Grady had a reputation for being very strict, he probably hit the roof when William and Mary Jane broke the news. The priests would be none to happy, either, given the Church’s view on pre-marital sex and inter-faith relationships.
Mary Jane and William also had to ignore the law, which regarded baby William as filius nullius, the ‘son of nobody’. The idea of filius nullius was similar to terra nullius, a nonsense notion that no-one lived in Australia before the English arrived. Both of these things are legal fictions. Nevertheless, they held sway: filius nullius remained law in the UK until the passage of the Legitimacy Act in 1959 and it wasn’t until the High Court’s Mabo judgement in 1992 that terra nullis was finally consigned to Australia’s legal history.
The circumstances of young William’s birth were never discussed around the dinner table as I was growing up. The first I heard of it was when our father William John (known first as Kelly, then Kel) mentioned it a few years before he died. He said Mary Jane and William couldn’t marry because opposition to their union was too powerful. Nevertheless, they did marry eventually, and Dad liked to envisage young William as the pageboy at the wedding of Mary Jane Wright and William O’Grady. The young fellow would have been four years old then, a perfect age for pageboy duties; he would have been proud no doubt to be given the opportunity, watched over by Mary Mother of God and the saints preserved in stained glass and Jesus on the cross.
Recent family discussions have mentioned a ‘secret baptism’ that occurred before the wedding. It’s unclear if this refers to Mary Jane, or to young William. Perhaps it refers to both. In any event, Mary Jane converted to Catholicism and married William at St Mary’s Catholic Church in North Sydney on 18 June 1904.
The idea of young William walking down the aisle ahead of Mary Jane and William at St Mary’s makes a lovely picture in the mind’s eye but it seems to be wishful thinking: the Irish priests who dominated the Catholic church were not known to flexibly interpret the rules. The first priest at North Sydney was an Irishman called Father Peter Powell. If his congregation was too small, he would boom across the church: ‘John Kelly, go out and give the bell another toll!’. If Father Powell had any message of any kind to deliver, he would deliver it from the pulpit, in no uncertain terms. [2]
It’s certainly possible that the priest who celebrated William and Mary Jane’s marriage, Father Joseph Brennan, had less hellfire in him than his predecessors. And if young William and his parents were baptised, then the wedding could have unfolded at St Mary’s as Dad imagined it. But I think it’s more likely that Kel wished to straighten things out. He would have liked William and Mary Jane’s wedding to be fully blessed and their son to be fully acknowledged by the church because the young William in question, the one who may or may not have been pageboy, went on to become Dad’s father.