This story began as a series of blog posts. They are copied below and form Bloodlines, Part 1.
“Blood has a song … and the chorus of ancestors is one of the hardest of superstitions to forsake.” — Christos Tsiolkas, 71/2.
Chapter 1. Hartley, New South Wales
Once there was a hard-working couple who lived in a tent in a campground near Hartley, New South Wales, in the shadow of the escarpment that defines the western edge of the Great Dividing Range. This escarpment holds the late afternoon light beautifully, as if it were a precious child, but it offers no protection from the sou’westers that buffet those who live nearby and the place feels restless and unforgiving as a result.
Johanna Grady’s first child, William, was born in that tent near the escarpment, in March 1867. Five months later, on a bleak mid-winter day in August 1867, Johanna and her husband John Grady buried their first-born in Hartley Cemetery and the boy’s remains lie there still, not far from my own son’s childhood home.
I was unaware of how close Will is to my son until I read Maureen Clarke’s history of the O’Gradys.[1]
Maureen’s work includes a copy of Will’s death certificate, which states: “William, the first child of John and Johanna, was born at Middle River near Hartley, NSW, and died of diarrhoea on 14th August 1867 at the age of 5 months. He was buried at Hartley, NSW.” Now that I know this, I want to make something of it: partly to make amends for not reading Maureen’s work sooner but more truthfully in the hope this story might repair a broken relationship.
We drove through the Blue Mountains and out to Hartley Cemetery in April 2022. We being my partner Malcolm, myself, and a young Kelpie adopted from a farm worker in Bathurst who could no longer keep her or her five siblings. Her name is Hope. We went to Hartley to find Will’s grave. I expected we’d find him resting there along with the many white settlers and their children who lived and died in the area during the 1800s.
We left Hope at the entrance and took our time wandering among the headstones, some of which are so weathered you can no longer read their inscriptions. Irish immigrants occupy most of the cemetery: shepherds, farmers and labourers by the name of O’Connor, Kelly, Murphy, O’Sullivan. All of them are buried with their feet facing east, ready for the second coming, although they may be buttressing the escarpment, making sure the Great Dividing Range continues to keep the city and its suburbs at bay. ‘We worked hard’, I could hear them say, ‘this land is ours.’
Of course the Gundungurra people who lived in the area before these settlers arrived would have a few things to say about that, despite their stories being ignored or deliberately erased. One of the graves at Hartley Cemetery belongs to a young policeman killed in the line of duty. ‘The living ought to know where their dead are buried,’ I imagine him saying, a caution not to be taken lightly.
There was no sign of William O’Grady. Perhaps his parents were too poor to afford a headstone. They were itinerant workers, after all. Two bob Paddies, they called them, paid just two shillings a day to help build the railway line from Sydney to Bathurst. It would have been back-breaking work, clearing a 200km corridor through the Blue Mountains in very tough conditions. Like hundreds of other immigrants, John and Johanna earned a little and lost a lot while working on the railway. They did everything they could to keep themselves and their son alive but the water they drank was contaminated and it took young Will away.
If John and Johanna Grady did spend their savings on a headstone, it’s possible the one they bought for Will is now completely worn away, all details erased by wind and rain and the inevitable passage of time. It’s also possible that Will’s headstone is one of those that have toppled over. We noticed several of the settlers’ headstones at Hartley now lie face-down, covering the grave of whoever is buried below, their owner’s story literally taken to the grave. Will might be under one of those.
A few days after we visited Hartley, one other possibility came to mind: Will probably wasn’t baptised before he died because the Middle River campsite where Johanna and John lived would not have had a resident priest. A man of the cloth might have travelled from Sydney every six months or so, saying mass, hearing confessions and conducting marriages and baptisms if required, but there’s a good chance William missed out on baptism because the short amount of time he spent on this mortal coil, just five months, may have occurred between pastoral visits.
If this is true, then Will O’Grady’s soul would have gone to limbo and his little dead body would be interred in a quiet corner of the cemetery in a grave marked not with a headstone but perhaps a few sprigs of early wattle. That’s basically what happened to unbaptised infants at the time, in that culture.
I read recently that two of Ireland’s most beautiful artefacts – the Tara Brooch and the Ardagh Chalice – both dating from the AD700s, were rediscovered by accident after being lost for centuries. The brooch was discovered on a beach in County Meath, north of Dublin, in 1850, while the chalice, bedecked with gold, silver, copper and bronze, was found by two boys, Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan, digging in a County Limerick potato field in 1868.
I’m glad to know this because it helps me to think differently about Will and other young family members who have died or are otherwise lost to us, my own son included. Each and every one of them is more precious than the Tara Brooch or the Ardagh Chalice, and more beautiful than a sandstone escarpment at sunset. These are our children, conceived with love, gone but never forgotten, some of them waiting perhaps to be rediscovered, their stories re-told.
[1] The Grady’s and O’Grady’s of Ireland and Australia, 1800’s and 1900’s. Maureen Clarke, 1992. Self-published.
Chapter 2. Will’s father, John
Liverpool Dock, showing Strand Street and Custom House in the 19th century. From Cities of the World, published c.1893.
Will’s father, John Grady, was 19 and thin as a rail when he left home in County Limerick in mid-winter 1859 to join a throng of young men and women waiting at Liverpool docks in England for permission to board the Dirigo. They were farmhands and labourers, housemaids and cooks; a few were married, fewer still had young ones in tow and they clambered aboard the leaky ship as soon as they were allowed, single men forward, married couples amidships, single girls aft, unaware that the souls of those who died on the voyage before this one lurked below, thickening the foetid air with complaints about the ship’s purser. He’s crooked, they claimed.
John set sail on 20 December 1859 but he was barely a few miles along the Mersey River when a storm hit hard and broke the ship’s mast; there was nothing to do but drop anchor and wait for a replacement to come from Liverpool.
Rather than stay onboard, the Dirigo’s Captain Brown decided to spend Christmas elsewhere. He didn’t abandon ship exactly, although the captain certainly enjoyed a fulsome time onshore because when he returned, raisin-eyed, after noon on Boxing Day, the tide was too far gone to set sail as planned. The Dirigo finally weighed anchor again after seven nights on the Mersey River. By the time the ship reached the Irish Sea there could be no turning back: home was far behind and the place young John Grady pinned his hopes to, Sydney, was at the other end of the world.
John’s parents, William and Honora Grady kept their children alive during the 1840s famine in Ireland by renting a cow. It was all they could afford but it helped them survive while more than a million people around them starved to death.
Eventually, William and Honora had to say goodbye to three of their children forever because Ireland had not enough food and few opportunities to keep the young ones at home. More than one million men and women left Ireland between 1850 and 1860. Many of them came to Australia as assisted immigrants, sponsored by friends and relatives and supported by colonial governments wanting cheap labour. John Grady was the first in his family to go, then his brother Patrick, and finally, Norah, who was 19 when she followed her brothers to Sydney. Goodbye for now, they would have said, downplaying the loss. In Gaelic: Slán go fóiil.
A fellow passenger on The Dirigo with John Grady kept a diary [1] during their voyage to Sydney. The following excerpts tell something of the experience:
Tuesday 31 Jan 1860: Caught a shark, part of which made a good dinner. Weather hot so that almost impossible to sleep below so took hammock on deck.
Saturday 11 Feb: Sighted a barque to windward, sailors employed holy stoning the deck. Passengers were able to get their boxes up from below & returned.
Monday 27 Feb: Caught an albatross measuring 7 feet from tip to tip. The captain tied a piece of ribbon round its neck with the ship’s name and date & let it go.
Thursday 1 March: Another squall came and ship rolled heavily. The bowsprit was broken and foretopmast split & during the repair one hand in the top gallant rigging was knocked off & he fell lifeless to the deck. On the following day his corpse was sewn up in a hammock, placed on a wooden grating with the English covers over it, placed on the ship’s rail & after the burial service was read by the ship’s doctor his body was committed to the deep.
Friday 16 March: Noon, spoke to a barque named Venishon bound for Sydney and out from London 71 days as against our 79 from Liverpool. Our Captain asked to be reported a little disabled should they get to harbour first. Stranger offered assistance but politely refuse. Fog at midnight.
Monday 19 March: A whale passed close alongside about 25 foot long & half that wide, looked like a large upturned boat.
Tuesday 20 March: One of the hands was thrown over the wheel, in a squall, breaking some ribs. At 10am the mainsail split from head to foot. At noon the Irish single men caused a disturbance. They broke into the storeroom and attacked the purser & his mate with pieces of wood. The captain, doctor and mate went down & threatened them with firearms without avail. All hands were then called below & with the help of a few belaying pins soon stopped the riot. One of the ringleaders was taken aft & clapped in irons.
Friday 30 March: Gale blowing at 4am. A sudden squall blew the sails to shreds. Heavy seas & water amidships, floating buckets, mess tines, boots & shoes. Some passengers were bruised and knocked against the tables & most of the clothes were wet or missing.
Tuesday 3 April: Steady breezes, all sails set. Speed 9 mph. Doctor organises passengers to clean ship between decks, cleaning mess tables & seats with sand and holystone. Passengers refuse to eat the salt beef. Get pork instead.
Friday 6 April: Good Friday. Catholics engaged most of the day in religious devotion eating only a biscuit.
Friday 13 April: Entered Sydney Harbour at 5pm and passed along the most beautiful scenery imaginable, the passage being half a mile wide, the land of both sides dotted with large houses & planted shrubberies & pine trees. We dropped anchor at 6.30pm, having been at sea 108 days. At 7pm, single girls go ashore to the depot.
[1] Diary of a Voyage on The Dirigo: Liverpool UK to Rocky Creek NSW. Original publication: 1859 – 1860. Author unknown. Transcribed in 1979 by Leo D Greer. Republished by the Newcastle Family History Society Inc. Accessed on 10 April 2022.
Chapter 3. William the first
Buckets of milk and cream: a dairyman’s earnings.
The hand-drawn chart I keep on the desk that was once my father’s helps keep track of the Johns, Williams, Patricks, Johannas, Hanoras and Timothys in our family tree.
This is no easy task, given some of the Williams are known as Bill or, in my father’s case, Kel; some of the Patricks are known as Paddies; and some of the Johns are known as Jack. The shift in surname from Grady to O’Grady happened in the late 1800s, after John Grady married Johanna, and I wonder if this reflects a renewed confidence in being Irish, or a nostalgia for the Ireland that John left behind (both are possible, despite the persistence of William, a thoroughly English first name, in every generation we know of).
The use of the prefixes O and Mac in Irish surnames (meaning ‘son of’) diminished as England tightened its rule over Ireland from the early 1500s onwards. The Earl of Tyrone, also known as Sean O’Neill, gave the British crown so much concern that Elizabeth 1 banned the name O’Neil, on punishment of death and forfeiture of property, and by the 1600s the prefixes O and Mac were widely dropped because it became extremely difficult to find work in if you had an Irish sounding name.[1]
Maureen Clarke has identified William Grady (Billy) as our first known ancestor.
Billy was born in County Limerick around 1815 and married Honora Scanlon in the village of Oola when he and Honora were in their early 20s. Billy listed his occupation as a dairyman, which means he paid money to a farmer/landlord to lease some cows for a year. During the lease, the dairyman and his family could live in the farmer’s house and the dairyman was entitled to whatever milk the cows produced.
A dairyman’s life would have been precarious, with so many variables out of the dairyman’s control, and in January 1847, nine years after their wedding, Billy and Honora’s circumstances changed for the worse.
The Great Famine struck hard, although Billy was one of the lucky ones. He found work at a horse stud called Ellards, about three miles from Oola. He and Honora and their five children – Patrick, John, Timothy, Hanora (Norah) and Margaret – moved into a small rented cottage near Ellards and Billy worked the night shift, guarding a potato field for six or seven shillings a week. This wouldn’t have been easy, I imagine, because Billy would have been friends with people whose kids were starving to death. What was he supposed to do when a neighbour came to Ellards to nick a spud? You’d turn a blind eye, I imagine, at risk of losing your job and seeing your own kids starve. No wonder three of Billy and Honora’s kids had to leave Ireland for good. There wasn’t much choice.
[1] A dozen things you might not know about Irish names. Neil Burdess, The Irish Times. 25 October 2016
Chapter 4. Johanna Devereux
Johanna Devereux disembarked from the Montmorency soon after it arrived in Sydney Harbour on 29 November 1864. Being a single woman, she would have been among the first of Montmorency’s passengers to set foot on Sydney’s foreshore, as was the case with the single women on the Dirigo when it arrived four years earlier.
Johanna moved into a terrace house in Riley Lane, Surry Hills, where her uncle Tim Devereux lived with his wife Margaret and their three remaining children. Tim was born in Limerick in the early 1800s. He left Ireland forever, in 1857, but not before he and Margaret buried six of their young children: three boys and three girls, taken by the Great Famine, rest their souls. He was a farm labourer who found work in Sydney as a bootmaker, and he and Margaret lived the rest of their lives in Surry Hills, in between the gold rush years of the 1850s and the Depression of the 1890s.
Although thick with fellow Irish immigrants, and on its way to becoming a slum, Surry Hills was a world away from Limerick, where everything was wet, not for a week or a month at a time, but as Frank McCourt memorably put it, from the Feast of Circumcision [otherwise known as New Year’s Day] to New Year’s Eve:
Out in the Atlantic Ocean, great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick.
The rain dampened the city from the Feast of Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges.
From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woollen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments to be inhaled with cigarettes and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of spilled stout and whiskey and tinged with the odour of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many a man puked up his week’s wages.
The rain drove us into the church – our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain. [1]
Johanna’s grandparents, Timothy and Bridget Devereux, were born in Ireland in the late 1700s. Their surname sounded unusual for an Irish family until I twigged to the fact that the Norman invasion of England reached Ireland as well. For some reason, the brief amount of time we spent at school studying the Normans focussed on the Bayeux Tapestry and the Battle of Hastings, in England, in 1066. Surprisingly, Ireland didn’t get a look-in, at least not at a Catholic school in North Sydney in the 1970s.
‘Devereux’, it turns out, is an Anglicised version of ‘D'Evreux’, meaning ‘from Évreux’ (a town in Normandy, France). The D’Evreux family were closely aligned with William the Conqueror and the Norman occupation of Ireland and England. Initially, the Normans maintained a distinct culture and ethnicity. Yet, with time, they came to be subsumed into Irish culture to the point where they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves". Names such as Roche, Devereux, D'Arcy are common in Wexford County, in the south of Ireland, where the Normans first settled. Names beginning with the prefix ‘Fitz’, such as Fitzgerald, also indicate Norman ancestry. Fitz is from the Norman for ‘son’. [2]
Johanna Devereux was born in Russeltown, County Tipperary, 140kms from the coast of County Wexford where the Normans began their invasion of Ireland. She and John Grady must have known each other before they left for Australia: the two of them were just a year apart in age and they were neighbours. John lived in Oola, in County Limerick, and Johanna was a stone’s throw away in neighbouring County Tipperary. But the Irish have a saying: for every mile of road there are two miles of ditches, and Johanna’s parents, William and Ellen Devereux, were wealthy enough to lease two farms as well as a house and an office, and they probably hoped their daughter would meet and marry a man with prospects. For all his verve, John Grady had none. Not in Ireland, anyway.
Before Johanna landed in Sydney, John took a steamship north to Newcastle and found work as a labourer on Ash Island, in the Hunter River. It was fertile and richly-forested island “granted” to Alexander Walker Scott in 1829. Scott belonged to a family of influential colonists: his father was a physician and botanist in Bombay, and it was from him that Scott inherited his passion for natural history. John’s employer built a home on Ash Island for himself and his wife and daughters and developed a reputation as a generous host, interested in the arts, natural history, science and agriculture.
Ludwig Leichhardt visited Ash Island in 1842. “It is a remarkably fine place,” the explorer recalled, “not only to enjoy the beauty of nature, a broad shining river, a luxuriant vegetation, a tasteful comfortable cottage with a plantation of orange trees, but to collect a great number of plants which I had never seen before. It’s a romantic place, which I like well enough to think that – perhaps – I’d be content to live and die there.”[1]
In 1864, Alexander Scott and his daughters Helena and Harriet published a beautifully illustrated study of butterflies and moths. Their book, called Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations, was a landmark publication in its time.
John Grady was involved in this milieu, an observer and indirect participant who laboured on his employer’s dream. He worked on Ash Island between 1861 and 1865, so he was there while the Scott family researched Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations and he would have watched his employer’s accomplished daughters chasing butterflies. He may even have caught Nellie or Hattie’s eye and caused a heart to flutter.
But after a wave of bank failures, drought, and a collapse in wool prices, Australia’s colonies were hit by an economic depression. Alexander had to sell Ash Island in 1866, the same year that his wife Harriet died. He retreated to Sydney, bankrupt and bereft. John Grady left Ash Island as these troubles came to a head, returning to Sydney to marry Johanna Devereux on 10 April 1866.
Ash Island circa 1858-1861, from the front cover of the Australian Lepidoptera published 1890 by The Australian Museum.
[1] Frank McCourt. Angela’s Ashes. Harper Collins 1996. pp 11-12.
[2] Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 May 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans#Ireland
[3] Ludwig Leichardt’s descriptions of Ash Island during his visit to Newcastle in 1842 from his letters published in The letters of F.W. Ludwig Leichhardt collected and newly translated [from the German, French and Italian] by M. Aurousseau (London: Published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press, 1968). Sourced 13 April 2022 via the website Hunter Living Histories: https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2014/09/27/ash-island/
Chapter 5. Years later
One hundred and fifty years later, my father William John O’Grady (Kel) started to write down what he knew about his ancestors, including John and Johanna. He was especially pleased that John married ‘the girl he had left behind’, as he put it. He enjoyed the synchronicity embedded in John and Johanna’s marriage because Kel felt his own experiences mirrored theirs.
My father had left Sydney when he was a young man, travelling north in search of work and adventure. Kel made it as far as Brisbane and was enjoying himself, free from parental observation, when he got word that the girl he had left behind, Doreen Doherty, was being courted by another young man with prospects.
Kel O’Grady and Doreen Doherty grew up in the same neighbourhood and were close in age. They had seen each other at dances the Catholic Youth Organisation organised in the hall behind St Michael’s. Kel had the Irish glint in his eye, Doreen had a radiance about her, and the question was: would this descendant of John and Johanna Grady return to Sydney and pop the question to the woman he loved? He did. And Doreen Eleanor Doherty said yes. They married in Sydney on 2 August 1952.
Now imagine Johanna Devereux, who was 26-years-old at the time, and John Grady, who was 25, standing side-by-side at the altar of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, just shy of a century before Kel and Doreen tied the knot. Johanna married John in the autumn of 1866, with John’s brother Patrick and his sister Norah watching from the pews, all of them wearing their finest threads. Johanna and John swore to love and to cherish, to have and to hold, for richer or for poorer, ‘til death do they part. They had no material wealth, no home of their own; they didn’t have much of anything except youth and optimism, and that was enough.
Up next: a bit of queer history…
Chapter 6. Hope sits beside me
Hope sits beside me as I write this. She nudges me every so often, hoping I’ll turn away from the screen and give her my attention. I do sometimes, but only briefly. I explain that I’m in a hurry to get this down. I tell her I’d like to write about what happened with my son. How I’d like to place him in this story, tune him into this chorus of ancestors because, as E.M. Forster noted, unless we remember we cannot understand.
There’s a lot to remember and a lot to understand.
I first met my son’s mother Hanna* at a rooftop party overlooking Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. It was December 1995 and we were drinking frozen margheritas. Hanna was with her partner Madeline*. I was with Malcolm, and we were celebrating the end of year with staff and friends of the Sydney Star Observer, the newspaper I reported for. I was earning $25 an hour less tax. I know this because a pay slip fell out of that year’s diary when I went back to double-check these dates and details.
From the rooftop we could see squadrons of fruit bats fly over the old Darlinghurst Police Station. They travelled the same route every day, leaving the Botanic Gardens at sunset to feast on the fig trees in Sydney’s east. The bat colony expanded over time and eventually something had to be done about this because the Botanic Gardens were being stripped of their foliage and the uninvited guests were pissing over the bench seats.
We were unaware of these problems on the night of the Star party, we simply watched and marvelled at this natural display. We were aware of our own good fortune, though: Mardi Gras was fabulous, the gay and lesbian newspaper we worked for was going from strength to strength, and Sister Sledge still packed the dance floor with “We are Family”. Best of all, new drugs were coming onstream to slow HIV’s ghastly progression. We published fewer obituaries in the Star that year than ever before.
*Hanna and Maddie are pseudonyms.
Chapter 7. Easy friendship
An easy friendship grew during the decade that followed. We enjoyed each other’s approach to life: Hanna and Maddie’s was slightly irreverent, as was ours, in an Oxford Street way (part and parcel of writing for a queer community newspaper). We had a common bond, too, discovered that night at the Star party: we planned to quit the Sydney scene eventually, and by chance the ‘somewhere else’ we had in mind happened to be within each others’ orbit.
Hanna and Maddie owned acreage in a valley where the night sky no longer reflected Sydney’s lights, not far from where Malcolm and myself owned a small weatherboard cottage in the mountains. The plan was to move there when we could: they’d have farm animals and a vegetable garden, we had a wood-burning stove, space for some chooks, and I imagined we’d get stuck into the dream of writing, painting, planting.
Along the line, in the year before Hanna turned 40, Hanna asked if I’d help her start a family. I liked the idea but worried about how this would pan out. It took a while to commit to being a donor dad, and by the time I said yes, Hanna had found someone else.
Chapter 8. A Home at the End of the World
Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his book The Hours. I mention this by way of introducing an earlier book Cunningham wrote, called A Home at the End of the World. It’s a romantic novel about the entangled lives of three friends: Jonathan, a gay man living in New York in the early 1980s; his friend and flatmate Clare, who hopes against all odds to have a baby with Jonathan; and Bobby, an old school friend of Jonathan’s.
It’s the old school friend, Bobby, who ends up fathering a child with Clare. The three adults decide to buy a house in rural Woodstock, well away from the city’s bright lights. Jonathan and Bobby open a café there while Clare raises their daughter.
Wikipedia summarises the story this way:
“The trio form their own family, questioning traditional definitions of family and love, while dealing with the complications of their polyamourous relationship.”
I know, I know. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Polyamourous relationships rarely end well and Woodstock, the festival that took place in a couple of muddy paddocks, was a complete fiasco.
Nevertheless, A Home at the End of the World works beautifully as a story because it asks us to consider what we want from life, and what steps we are willing to take to create the version of home and family that we dream of. The characters in A Home at the End of the World may be naive but it’s their yearning that makes them so human. Their version of family was not well mapped but they went in search of it anyway.
Many things came to mind when Hanna asked if I would help her have a child (none of the polyamorous stuff, you’ll be relieved to know, but certainly the dream of creating our own families, our own homes, in a peaceful place).
I knew if I did donate, it could not be anonymously. I also knew a few men who had donated sperm to lesbian friends and they spoke well of their experiences. I told Hanna I’d want to know the child, and have the child know me as his or her father. Hanna and Maddie said they preferred it that way. They liked the way I engaged with my own extended family and wanted their child to have this connection too.
These discussions paved the way for what happened after Hanna’s first pregnancy failed. When she recovered from this loss, Hanna wanted to try again and asked if I was still willing to help. I said yes.
Hanna explained they wouldn’t need money for child support because she could get social security payments as a single parent. For that reason, she said, it would be best if my name didn’t appear on the birth certificate. However, we agreed I would be known as Dad and Hanna would be Mum. Maddie was going to be known as Maddie, and Malcolm was going to be Malcolm. It was all pretty straightforward.
“What you make of being a Dad is up to you,” Hanna said. And I thought if I could be half as good as my own dad at this fathering thing, I’d make a pretty good father myself.
A few years later, I looked up from a task in the garden and watched as Malcolm and my son walked together, hand-in-hand, down the driveway towards our version of Ash Island, our home at the end of the world. The two of them were deep in conversation. I smiled, relieved to know it would all be OK.
Chapter 9. The first seven years
The first seven years with our son worked out pretty well, minor glitches notwithstanding, although I did not see the stumbling stones until too late. We fell hard and fast, Hanna, Maddie and myself, tumbling with our son into a sinkhole where adult voices claimed: ‘he’s not your dad, he’s just a donor’, ‘he’s a dud’, ‘he wants to take you away’, and: ‘we will conquer him’.
On 19 June 2019, when the High Court handed down its judgment in Masson v Parsons, I was in the Family Court to maintain my own relationship with my son after all else had failed. Robert Masson and I do not know each other, and the timing of our actions was coincidental, but our claims were remarkably similar. [1]
In a landmark decision, the High Court recognised Robert Masson as a father and a sperm donor. Essentially, the High Court ruled that being a donor did not diminish Robert’s role as a father.
In our family matter, the District and Family courts determined, twice, that the relationship between my son and myself was significant and should be supported. Orders were made accordingly.
These and other judgements have helped donor dads and their children. The decisions recognise the relationships between children and their donors as significant and meaningful, and worth supporting by Order if necessary. The law also recognises the legal standing of same-sex parents and the relationships between them and their children. Unlike times past.
If you would like to know more, visit www.donordads.com.au
[1] What makes a father?': the sperm donor who asked the courts to answer this question tells his story. Greg Callaghan, Good Weekend, 28 July 2019.
Chapter 10. Are you OK?
Hope tells me to walk around the sinkhole rather than fall into it again. And after years of struggle I’ve learnt to listen to her advice.
However, I don’t know if our son is trapped there still, with Hanna and Maddie. This is what keeps me awake at night and the one thing I wish for is that our son, a young man soon, has an open mind and a kind heart. Everything else flows from that.
So I return, in a manner of speaking, scouting the perimeter of that sinkhole, searching for signs. I write to our son for Easter, his Birthday, Christmas and other occasions: ‘I’m thinking of you, I love you, are you OK?’
Ten things to remember
Your mode of conception matters not. You were conceived with love
Pasta. We loved pasta. Lunch at ours was usually pasta
Grandpa Kel. He probably should be first or second on the list, but I’m not ranking these in order. You would have enjoyed knowing Grandma Doreen as well. She died two months before your birth but I told her you were on the way and she loved hearing that.
Luna Park
Seeing dinosaurs at the Australian Museum and sharks at the Aquarium
Your first bike
Pizza at Pompeii, in Bondi Beach, then gelato afterwards looking over the Pacific Ocean
Monkeys in the cupboard. It was a game we made-up and played endlessly. It made us laugh
Pretending the cubby house at Memorial Park was our shop. This was your idea. You enjoyed saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to the imaginary items I requested, and if something was out of stock, I’d make follow-up requests that were increasingly outlandish. This put the smile in your eyes
Bateman’s Bay. We flew to Canberra and caught the bus from there. It was one of our last weekends together before the troubles. You and Annie and I shared a cabin next door to Grandpa Kel. Cousins and aunties and uncles were there too, for a family reunion: a symphony of O’Gradys, Wheelahans, McCleans, McNabs, Riordans, Fords, Urbaniaks, Parkers and Horns. We found time to walk along the beach together, the two of us: you left an impression of angel wings in the sand.
God bless you, son. And Will, who rests nearby. He too would have left an impression of angel wings.
Easter 2022.
The story continues in Bloodlines, Part 2
Chapter 11: Famine’s children
Johanna Devereux and John Grady were five and four years old respectively when the potato blight first appeared in Ireland. The disease caused a partial failure of the potato crop on which so many Irish people depended. The blight returned the following year, in 1846, with much more severe effects, pushing Ireland into an extended nightmare of hunger and disease.
During the Great Famine, between 1845 and 1851, about one million people died of starvation or hunger-related disease, and a further one million people emigrated. It was, as Irish ambassador Daniel Mulhall and many others have written, an unparalleled food crisis in the western world, decimating the Irish population and causing long-term economic and political effects. [1]
The Great Famine is one of many tragedies to beset Ireland. For a small country, not much bigger than Tasmania, it’s had more than its fair share of troubles: invasion and occupation, suppression and murder, civil war, severe poverty and over-crowding, famine, intolerance and displacement. Many emigrants carried Ireland’s troubles with them – how could you not? - and it’s clear that multiple generations of Irish families in Australia have relived the trauma of Ireland’s history. In different ways, in different contexts, to be sure. But it’s part of our DNA. You can see this written into the faces of our forebears, especially that of our great grandfather William.
William was Johanna and John’s fifth child, named after his younger brother who died in Hartley. William followed his father into brick-carting, and the two of them were peas in a pod, I reckon: long and lean in the body, angular faces, hair cropped short, lips held tight against the brick dust. They wouldn’t have looked out of place among the monoliths on Easter Island, those ancient stone carvings thought to represent the ancestors’ spirits.
William had siblings on either side, in this world and the next, and when you hear a roll-call of Johanna and John’s children [2], together with information about the length of time they spent here and their cause of death, you get a sense of Irish history writ small:
William Grady. Born 1867. Died 1867, aged 5 months. Cause of death: dysentery
John Grady. Born 1868. Died 1877, aged 9. Cause of death: gangrene
Margaret Grady. Born 1870. Died 1929, aged 59. Cause of death: heart failure
Patrick Grady. Born 1872. Died 1942, aged 70. Cause of death: undocumented
William Grady. Born 1874. Died 1904, aged 90. Cause of death: heart failure
Mary Ellen Grady. Born 1877 (twin). Died 1973, aged 95. Cause of death: undocumented
Timothy Grady. Born 1877 (twin). Died 1878, aged 4 months. Cause of death: dysentery
John Grady. Born 1879 (twin). Died 1963, aged 84. Cause of death: undocumented
Timothy Grady. Born 1879 (twin). Died 1924, aged 44. Cause of death: tuberculosis
Johanna Grady (Cissy). Born 1882. Died 1946, aged 64. Cause of death: cancer
Honora Grady. Born 1885. Died 1886, aged 13 months. Cause of death: marasmus
In the late 1800s, after the railway line to Bathurst railway was completed, John and Johanna returned to Sydney.
John established a brick carting business at the Gore Hill brickyards, using money he and Johanna saved from the railway job to lease or buy several horses and drays. The North Shore train line was being built at the time, and this encouraged substantial urban development and increased demand for materials. John’s timing was good. It was hard and dusty work, though, and the business was a considerable investment for John and Johanna to make.
We can get a sense of how it is to work with horses and drays for a living by asking someone who did it.
Allan Gillham is a good example. He owned a horse and dray for 22 years in Sydney, working for WC Penfold, ferrying goods from the city stores to customers around town. Rising costs - including $32,000 to maintain three Clydesdales – eventually forced Gillham to close his business, and when he did, he told the Sydney Morning Herald: “This isn't really a job - it's a part of your life. You've got to be with your horses seven days a week. You've got to feed them, look after them. They're just like little babies. I will be losing the biggest part of my life.” [3]
John cared for his horses seven days a week, feeding and grooming them, not only protecting his investment but perhaps seeing them as an extension of family. He relied on them, and vice versa, which goes some way to explaining the following:
“Older members of the family know little about John and Johanna. John is said to have never completely recovered from the drowning of his horses when the punt on which they were travelling to Manly sunk whilst crossing Pittwater, some years before the erection of the Spit Bridge.” [4]
The hand-operated punt John O’Grady boarded with his horse and dray to cross Middle Harbour. Image courtesy of Mosman Council Digital Library, no: DSC2001 .
The accident happened in September 1888.
John left home early to take a load of bricks from Gore Hill to Manly. He stopped at a sandspit near Chinaman’s Beach, on the Mosman side of Middle Harbour, to board the punt that would take him and his horses and dray across to Clontarf.
“There is a long, often quite sad history from the crossing of Middle Harbour. The earliest evidence I found talks about a man named Barnard Kearns who in 1830 started rowing passengers from Shell Cove to Clontarf.
“In the 1850s a man named Peter Ellery was rowing passengers across the Spit. He also started a punt service to ferry both cattle and men, with the charge being less if horses swam across themselves to which at least one account indicates the horses quite enjoyed the swim.
“Unfortunately Mr Ellery’s punt regularly broke down leading the Government to replace the service with their own in 1870. While larger it was also unreliable as well as unsafe. In September 1888 the punt capsized throwing five men, eight horses and drays carrying bricks into the water. Sadly all of the horses drowned.” [5]
John was one of those five men thrown into the harbour, together with his horses attached to loaded drays.
A terrible sight, it would have been, to see these precious animals mercilessly pulled under. Life-threatening for John and his fellow brick-carters, too. They would not have known how to swim but if they were to survive they needed to get themselves clear of eight thrashing horses and hang on to a capsized punt until help came. Either that or dog-paddle to shore.
[1] Ireland's Great Famine may be a footnote in 19th century European history, but it is fundamental to an understanding of Ireland's story, writes Daniel Mulhall in ‘Ireland’s Great Famine and its after-effects’, 3 December 2018. Retrieved 8 May 2022. https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/about-us/ambassador/ambassadors-blog/black47irelandsgreatfamineanditsafter-effects/
“While there were many striking developments in Ireland throughout the 19th century - Robert Emmet's Rising of 1803, the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Repeal movement of the 1840s, the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, the emergence of the Fenians in the 1860s, the land war of the 1880s and the rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell between 1880 and 1891 - nothing came close to the Famine in terms of the scale of its short-term and long-term effects. Its immediate impact was devastating. It was the last incidence of mass hunger in the western world.
“The Famine’s immediate impact in terms of mortality and population loss is clear. The Famine's longer-term economic and political effects require some interpretation. The most consequential of these was mass emigration from Ireland: 6 million people left between 1841 and 1900. This figure exceeded the total population of Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century. Dispute about the causes of the Famine has had a long afterlife. From the word go, Irish nationalists laid the blame squarely at the feet of the British Government and saw it as an invincible argument in favour of self-government. Historians tend to be more understanding of the undoubted inadequacies of the Famine relief effort on account of the unprecedented scale of the tragedy that beset Ireland.
“Whatever view is taken about responsibility for the Famine, the fact that it had such catastrophic effects engendered a profound sense of grievance that became a death knell for the Union between Britain and Ireland. It is true that the Union survived for seven decades after the Famine, but that was because Britain was the strongest State in the world at the time and was not for turning on the Union no matter how much discontent there was in Ireland. It took the effects of a world war and a dramatically changed international environment to give Ireland an opportunity to win its independence.”
[2] Maureen Clarke notes: “Sometime after his marriage to Johanna, John began using the surname O’Grady. All of his children’s births have been registered as Grady but the deaths have been registered as both Grady and O’Grady.”
[3] End of the Dray. Sydney Morning Herald. 29 October 2005. Retrieved 4 May 2022: https://www.smh.com.au/national/end-of-the-dray-20051029-gdmc6r.html
[4] Maureen Clarke, op cit.
[5] The Spit Punt, Life Before the Spit Bridge. History of Sydney 4 May 2016. Retrieved 4 May 2022: http://www.historyofsydney.com.au/the-spit-punt/