Unreserved Sale. To be sold by public auction, Forecastle Deck on 20th Nov 1867. A few second-hand Paper Collars The property of a gentleman who has no shirt
This newspaper "notice" - mocking, defiant, humorous - was written by a Fenian prisoner on board the Hougoumont, the last convict ship to sail from England to Australia. It is not a poem as such, yet its very spirit is poetic, and there was no doubt in my mind that it would have to be included in our book The Turning Wave. That was last July when I was immersed in the 19th century and in Sydney's winter.
My own journey into the rich world of Irish-Australian poetry and song had begun 10 years earlier when I met Colleen Burke in Sydney. We began to discuss the links between our two countries and the wealth of poetry and song expressing the depth and complexity of this contact. Standard histories of the Irish in Australia had generally refused to acknowledge poetry as either a source of information and witness or as something of cultural value.
Our endless hours in libraries yielded material that shines out of darkness, illuminating past and present and creating a book of lives, history and politics as well as poetry.
One of the most remarkable of these lives is that of "Frank the Poet" - Francis MacNamara, an Irish convict whose poetry documents the horrors of the penal system and whose subversive wit cuts through cant and authority. MacNamara was convicted in Kilkenny in 1832 on a charge of larceny and, after making a mockery of the judge and the court, received a seven-year sentence of transportation for his performance. He served more than double this for his various acts of rebellion.
His greatest act of revenge was his long poem, 'A Convict's Tour to Hell', which invokes the spirit of Swift ("Nor can the foremost of the sons of men/ Escape my ribald and licentious pen") and the tradition of the aisling to describe the brutality of convict life and the blackly comic fantasy of just revenge in the afterlife:
'Have you one here called Captain Murray?'
'Yes, Murray is within this place.'
'Would you,' said Satan, 'see his face?'
'May God forbid that I should view him
For on the Phoenix Hulk I knew him' . . .
Cook who discovered New South Wales
And he that first invented gaols
Are both tied to a fiery stake
Which stands in yonder boiling lake.
The original manuscript of this and a number of other MacNamara poems are now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, 32 pages sewn between a crude protective cover made of pages torn from an old Sydney Morning Herald. MacNamara got his certificate of freedom in 1849, but little is known of his life afterwards; it's believed he worked on the goldfields of Mudgee in New South Wales, and he was known in the pubs of Melbourne in the late 1860s.
MacNamara had served time in Tasmania with Ned Kelly's father, John "Red" Kelly. They were both at the infamous convict settlement of Port Arthur in what was then Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s. MacNamara composed at least one piece about the most famous of the convict bushrangers of New South Wales, "Bold" Jack Donoghue, whose deeds undoubtedly influenced Ned Kelly. A striking testimony to the power of the ballad is the fact that Governor Darling prohibited singing songs about Donoghue in public houses "on pain of loss of licence".
The story of Ned Kelly and his family has been told time and again, but it finds its arterial pulse in Kelly's own magnificent 'Jerilderie Letter', the manuscript on which Peter Carey based his recent novel True History of the Kelly Gang. Kelly dictated the text to Joe Byrne and handed it to a bank clerk at Jerilderie in New South Wales in February 1879 during a raid on the town. The letter creates a startling prose-poem of political and social protest: " . . . I have been wronged and my mother and four or five men lagged innocent and is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also who has no alternative only to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splay footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as officers of Justice or Victorian police . . ."
While Kelly's father, Frank the Poet, and hundreds of others were suffering in the convict camps in the 1840s, other Irish people were establishing free lives in the new colony and bearing poetic witness to events in Ireland and in their new home. Many fine poems on the Famine were published in Australian newspapers at the time and have not been reprinted until now. Several were published anonymously under pseudonyms or initials.One of the first white people to testify in poetry to the mass murder of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia was a remarkable Irish woman: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, from Newry, Co Down. She arrived in Australia with her husband and six or seven children in 1838. Eliza is acknowledged as the first poet to attempt transliterations of Aboriginal song. She wrote about the massacres of Aboriginal people, notably the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, when at least 28 people were killed by a group of ex-convict station hands, some of them Irish.
We explored the linked histories of Irish and Aboriginal people and one of the most significant voices here is that of Dublin-born poet Roland Robinson, who spent many years living with Aboriginal people and often wrote poetry based on oral tradition, such as 'Captain Cook' (related by Percy Mumbulla):
The big ship came and
anchored
out at Snapper Island.
He put down a boat
an' rowed up the river
into Bateman's Bay.
He landed on the shore of the river,
the other side from where the
church is now.
When he landed he gave the Kurris clothes,
an' those big sea-biscuits.
Terrible hard biscuits they was.
Poets of Aboriginal and Irish heritage include the late Kevin Gilbert, John Muk Muk Burke and Jennifer Avriel Martiniello, who describes her granddaughter learning Irish dancing and recalls that her grandmother's totem was a bird.
Loss, love, exile, joy, humour, epics, epigrams, prose poems, lyric poems, ballads: all are here. Poems in Irish include work by Louis de Paor, Eil∅n N∅ Bheaglaoich and the 19th-century ballad Na Connerys. Two of my favourites were written by Ulster poets: Victor Daley from Armagh and John Laurence Rentoul from Derry. Daley's mock epic, The Glorious Twelfth at Jindabye, recounts a pitched battle between Orange and Green supporters after an Orange march in New South Wales in 1898:
But, in spite of all, the day might have ended up in peace,
Without broken heads or instruments, or work for the police,
If it hadn't been for Doolan's educated cockatoo
That had been for months in training for the
Orangemen's shivoo.
On the roof of Doolan's pub it perched and talked in
language vile,
And 'To h-ll with old King Billy!' screeched in most
insulting style.
J. Laurence Rentoul was a Presbyterian minister and professor of Latin and Greek at Melbourne University. His poem, 'Sam Perry', is a tribute to an old friend from Garvagh, "a man of extraordinary ability and endowed with a sparkling wit":
We forgot the click of the marbles' ring,
And the flick and spin of the whirring top,
To laugh at the quips your wit would fling
At the oaf, and the factor, and the fop:
At the landlord, grinding the face of the poor
In the mill of his ruthless high rack-rent,
Or driving him forth from his fathers' door
When he voted true, or hisstrength was spent
Rentoul, Dunlop, Daley, John McGarvie, Marie Pitt, Frank the Poet, John Boyle O'Reilly: some of the roll-call from almost two centuries of poetic testimony to the bonds between Ireland and Australia, bonds forged by what might almost be termed an accident of colonisation. Another name to be remembered is that of the Dublin convict artist T. Richard Browne, whose naive and glorious watercolours capture the sense of awe in the face of a new world. They saw and testified to beauty in the face of adversity, singing the landscape as people have done for millions of years.
These songlines are part of a legacy carried to Australia on the tide of history. A little of it has now come home again.
The Turning Wave, Poems and Songs of Irish Australia, compiled and edited by Vincent Woods and Colleen Z. Burke, published by Kardoorair Press, Armidale, New South Wales (£12.50 pb, £20 hb), available through bookshops.