I met a guy recently who went to a posh school in England, went “up” to Oxford and got a double first and got a job in the sort of broking house in London that was once seen as the epitome of upper class high life, but is now being portrayed as the root of all the world’s troubles. He told me that when he lived in London, he would entertain clients in the sort of restaurants were the portions were tiny and the bills massive. At 9pm he would make his excuses and pretend that he had an art opening to get to. But actually he was sneaking off to his secret pleasure: Dog racing at Walthamstow greyhound track. “Chav horse racing” he calls it. He had to don an old anorak and roughen up the edges of his polished accent just to fit it.
Well I feel that way about Rugby, except in reverse. Rugby Union is a posh sport, despite what people in Limerick will tell you. As a general rule of thumb (and this applies as much in New Zealand and Australia as it does in Ireland), Rugby is played in schools that charge fees while Football, of varying codes, is played in schools that don’t. My school was firmly in the non fee paying camp. The only way most people in my school could have afforded to pay for education was if they robbed a bank, a trade many of them later went into.
So I played Gaelic Football and Hurling at school. During break time we would play 30 a-side games of soccer in the yard with a tennis ball and duffle coats for goals. Rugby only intruded on our lives a couple of times a year when the state television service would broadcast the games in that years five nation’s championship. We watched because we were so starved of live sport that we’d watch anything (I spent many happy hours watching wrestling for example). We didn’t really pass much notice as the rules seemed convoluted and Ireland were crap.
I did play three games when I was ten after the local Rugby club decided to go all liberal and invite the poor schools into the local inter schools competition. We played our first game against one of the other poor schools. After a whistle dominated affair that contained two hundred penalties and one successful pass, we beat each other into a 0-0 draw. We lost the next match 4-0, after our full-back thought tripping their winger would be easier than tackling him and we conceded a penalty try. The unfairness of that decision still pains me as we assumed the ref would make them kick at the posts and the previous two hours proved that no one from our schools could kick one of those funny shaped balls more than two feet in the air.
In our final match, we played the local Grammar school and they spanked us 57-0. My career thus ended. Played three, lost two, drew one. For 0, against 61. That was in the 1970’s and only Manchester United had a worse sporting record back then.
Afterwards, I was happy to leave Rugby to people with money and odd shaped balls. My roots were solidly working class and I had enough real sport to keep me happy. In the 90’s however, I decided to class up and started hanging out with people who knew how to pronounce ‘th’ and who got out of the bath when they wanted to go for a pee. Not being one to start at the bottom, my first match was the World Cup Final at Twickenham in 1991. My ex girlfriend managed to score eleven tickets for the game (she probably slept with somebody for them, but the less said about that the better) and we distributed as many as we could to Australian friends. We didn’t know many Aussies then and I was damned if I was going to give any to English people. So if you watch an old video of that game, you might notice seven empty seats in the West Stand.
To my great annoyance I was hooked. I started sneaking into club games and even took part in a sevens competition, where in tribute to my school history, my team yet again failed to trouble the scorer. With the passion of a convert, I threw myself into the rules and studied the differences in style between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. All to no avail unfortunately, as it became clear to me that only a tiny proportion of the people who watch Rugby actually understand it.
They certainly don’t understand it here in Melbourne, but then again they don’t watch it either. This place is a desert for Australian Rugby Union, never mind the European Six Nations stuff that I favour. So we diehards are forced to fork out for Setanta Sports and subscription TV. That’s bad enough but the games tend to start at 4.30am as well. As somebody who struggles to get up for work during the week, this has provided a real challenge during this campaign. However, success provides its own stimulus and Ireland’s performances this year made it increasingly easy for me to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings.
That was capped off this morning when Ronan O’Gara finally broke a sixty one year old hoodoo and Ireland won the Grand Slam. In the great tradition of sport, we almost threw it away in the end when Wales kicked a penalty that would have won them the game. Thankfully the kick fell short and I leaped from my early morning sofa to punch the air and do a self conscious jig of delight. In the process I stood on the remote control and turned the TV off. Thus I missed the final few seconds of Ireland’s historic season.
Outside, the sun was rising above St Kilda and I walked down to the pier to watch the City wake up. Nobody seemed to notice that an historic sporting event had happened on the other side of the world. But that was fine with me. Rugby is my guilty secret and that’s the way I want to keep it.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Henry Holt is Swimming with the Sharks
Harold Holt is out there somewhere with Elvis, Shergar, Lord Lucan and Reggie Perrin. Having a beer no doubt, while laughing at the poor deluded world. Although as he would now be 99, Harold is unlikely to be a heavy drinker.
His clothes were found on the beach at Portsea in Victoria in 1967. And Harold wasn’t in them. He was last seen wading into the surf and heading for Tasmania. This would be a strange enough course of events in normal circumstances. But as Harold was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, his disappearance is even stranger. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the swinging sixties. Australia was a different place back then, uncertain about where it fitted into the new world order. The old connections of Empire were fading as war in Asia made the Aussies look towards their back yard.
Holt was the first leader here to reach out to the Chinese. So much so, that some people began to think that he was an agent of Chairman Mao. This led to many conspiracy theories such as Chinese submarines taking him away, or the CIA doing what the CIA does best.
But as Sigmund Freud (or was it Grouch Marx?) said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And the sad truth is that Harold probably just drowned and was gobbled up by the multitude of murderous aquatic life that patrols the seas around Australia.
You can imagine my surprise therefore when I stopped outside the “Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool”. The guy drowned, so they called a swimming pool after him. It is as incongruous as the “JFK Memorial Rifle Range”.
Henry Bolte is another interesting character. He was Victoria’s longest serving premier, having held that post from 1955 to 1972. By all accounts, Henry liked a drink or two, despite being the man who introduced breathalyser tests in this part of the world. Long after he had retired to his sheep farm in Ballaret, he was driving home one night when he smashed into his neighbour’s car. Henry was pretty badly injured and woke up later in hospital to find that the nasty doctors had taken a blood sample which they were planning to pass on to the Police.
Somehow (and I’m conscious here of the risk of libel, even if the man has been dead for nearly twenty years) Henry’s blood sample was switched with one from a non drinking unknown party and came back clean. He was found to be pregnant however! Actually I made that last part up, but something did tickle the suspicions of the local constabulary and before long, Victoria’s most famous citizen was up in front of the judiciary to explain why he had tampered with samples. He ran a sort of Bart Simpson defence, along the lines of “It wasn’t me, even though I’m the only one who could benefit from the crime.”
Needless to say Henry got off, which I’m sure is totally unconnected to the fact that he would have appointed all the judges in the case while serving as Premier. But his reputation in the eyes of the locals was forever stained. He is the most famous drink driver among Australia’s political elite, which is saying something when you look at the likes of Bob Hawke. So how is he commemorated? They called a bridge after him! What better way to remember a drunk than to name a piece of roadway in his honour.
This leads me to think that Australians have a dark sense of humour when it comes to remembering their politicians. They certainly don’t hold them in high regard, encouraged no doubt by the behaviour of politicians towards each other. Question time in the Australian parliament is like feeding time at the zoo, except the animals there don’t call each other ‘drongos’ and slag off each other’s wives.
So it comes as no surprise that when they die, the country tries to find the most inappropriate object to remember them by. But I think it also points to the difficulty Australians have with naming places. In Europe, names developed organically from the places ancient herdsmen forded rivers or the shade of a particular glen on the day Stone Age man first walked there. That’s why in Ireland we have places that literally translate as “The Valley of the yellow furze in the moonlight of a bright October night”. In Australia, the white man arrived to find that the locals had named everywhere already. Showing the same care and attention for the traditions of the indigenous population that they showed them in normal life, they promptly discounted all these names and set about calling every nook and cranny after their beloved homestead back in blighty.
But Australia is such a vast country that they soon ran out of “Little Ramsbottoms” and “Surrey Hills”. So they took to being literal. So that’s why you end up with the Blue Mountains (which look green to me but don’t say that to an Aussie), Mount Beauty, The Snowy Mountains and the Big River. The early inland explorers were clearly not men of imagination either. You can imagine Burke and Wills coming over a mountain and seeing a vast desert in front of them.
“What will we call it, Robert?” said Wills.
“Well it’s in the middle of the country, so why don’t we call it ‘The Central Desert’”
And so they went on, naming things after dead white men or the first thing that came into their heads. It’s a big country so many of the original indigenous names have survived. Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) comes to mind as do many tongue twisters that I can’t even pronounce never mind type. But if something new is built and they can’t find an inappropriate dead politician to name it after, the locals seem to struggle. Last year, they opened the newest bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. They ran a public competition to come up with a name and the winner, from thousands of entrants was “The Yarra Bridge”.
Henry and Harold, wherever they are, would be proud of that lack of imagination.
His clothes were found on the beach at Portsea in Victoria in 1967. And Harold wasn’t in them. He was last seen wading into the surf and heading for Tasmania. This would be a strange enough course of events in normal circumstances. But as Harold was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, his disappearance is even stranger. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the swinging sixties. Australia was a different place back then, uncertain about where it fitted into the new world order. The old connections of Empire were fading as war in Asia made the Aussies look towards their back yard.
Holt was the first leader here to reach out to the Chinese. So much so, that some people began to think that he was an agent of Chairman Mao. This led to many conspiracy theories such as Chinese submarines taking him away, or the CIA doing what the CIA does best.
But as Sigmund Freud (or was it Grouch Marx?) said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And the sad truth is that Harold probably just drowned and was gobbled up by the multitude of murderous aquatic life that patrols the seas around Australia.
You can imagine my surprise therefore when I stopped outside the “Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool”. The guy drowned, so they called a swimming pool after him. It is as incongruous as the “JFK Memorial Rifle Range”.
Henry Bolte is another interesting character. He was Victoria’s longest serving premier, having held that post from 1955 to 1972. By all accounts, Henry liked a drink or two, despite being the man who introduced breathalyser tests in this part of the world. Long after he had retired to his sheep farm in Ballaret, he was driving home one night when he smashed into his neighbour’s car. Henry was pretty badly injured and woke up later in hospital to find that the nasty doctors had taken a blood sample which they were planning to pass on to the Police.
Somehow (and I’m conscious here of the risk of libel, even if the man has been dead for nearly twenty years) Henry’s blood sample was switched with one from a non drinking unknown party and came back clean. He was found to be pregnant however! Actually I made that last part up, but something did tickle the suspicions of the local constabulary and before long, Victoria’s most famous citizen was up in front of the judiciary to explain why he had tampered with samples. He ran a sort of Bart Simpson defence, along the lines of “It wasn’t me, even though I’m the only one who could benefit from the crime.”
Needless to say Henry got off, which I’m sure is totally unconnected to the fact that he would have appointed all the judges in the case while serving as Premier. But his reputation in the eyes of the locals was forever stained. He is the most famous drink driver among Australia’s political elite, which is saying something when you look at the likes of Bob Hawke. So how is he commemorated? They called a bridge after him! What better way to remember a drunk than to name a piece of roadway in his honour.
This leads me to think that Australians have a dark sense of humour when it comes to remembering their politicians. They certainly don’t hold them in high regard, encouraged no doubt by the behaviour of politicians towards each other. Question time in the Australian parliament is like feeding time at the zoo, except the animals there don’t call each other ‘drongos’ and slag off each other’s wives.
So it comes as no surprise that when they die, the country tries to find the most inappropriate object to remember them by. But I think it also points to the difficulty Australians have with naming places. In Europe, names developed organically from the places ancient herdsmen forded rivers or the shade of a particular glen on the day Stone Age man first walked there. That’s why in Ireland we have places that literally translate as “The Valley of the yellow furze in the moonlight of a bright October night”. In Australia, the white man arrived to find that the locals had named everywhere already. Showing the same care and attention for the traditions of the indigenous population that they showed them in normal life, they promptly discounted all these names and set about calling every nook and cranny after their beloved homestead back in blighty.
But Australia is such a vast country that they soon ran out of “Little Ramsbottoms” and “Surrey Hills”. So they took to being literal. So that’s why you end up with the Blue Mountains (which look green to me but don’t say that to an Aussie), Mount Beauty, The Snowy Mountains and the Big River. The early inland explorers were clearly not men of imagination either. You can imagine Burke and Wills coming over a mountain and seeing a vast desert in front of them.
“What will we call it, Robert?” said Wills.
“Well it’s in the middle of the country, so why don’t we call it ‘The Central Desert’”
And so they went on, naming things after dead white men or the first thing that came into their heads. It’s a big country so many of the original indigenous names have survived. Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) comes to mind as do many tongue twisters that I can’t even pronounce never mind type. But if something new is built and they can’t find an inappropriate dead politician to name it after, the locals seem to struggle. Last year, they opened the newest bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. They ran a public competition to come up with a name and the winner, from thousands of entrants was “The Yarra Bridge”.
Henry and Harold, wherever they are, would be proud of that lack of imagination.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Home thoughts from abroad
I was good at Economics when I was at school. You had to be when your mother gave you a pound a week pocket money and strawberry milkshakes (which at one stage eclipsed women in the pantheon of my affections) cost 70p while my home town football team charged me 50p every fortnight for admission to their games.
Follow that regime for a year and you’ll become an expert in deficits, budgeting and the cruel realities of supply and demand.
I was so good at Economics in fact, that my teacher, Mr Dunne, was astonished when I tried to drop the subject before my final exams. The school principal had designed a timetable entirely focused on providing the teachers with as much time as possible in the staff room. As a result, I was faced with the sort of choice that no sixteen year old should have to take. One that shapes the rest of your life. I had to choose between History and Economics. Choose the former and I would have a lifetime of reading interesting books and engaging in exciting dinner table conversation. Choose the latter and I would spend years searching for a personality, but would have a greater understanding of the crisis the world now finds itself in.
In the end my decision was easy. Mr Dunne pleaded with me to stay in his class, but made it clear that he was doing so for his own needs. I went to a mixed school. Not in the religious or gender sense, we were strictly an all boy’s Catholic institution, staffed by musty brothers with barely suppressed urges. Our school was mixed in that 50% of the pupils were idiots and they thought the other 70% were smart kids. Without being too big-headed, I fell into the smart kid category while Mr Dunne had been cursed with a high percentage of the simply bewildered. He needed me to get his numbers up. In economic terms, our class was in long term recession and I was a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Thankfully, I had a spark of romance in me at that age and wasn’t going to allow myself to become a commodity. I spent the next twelve happy months in the bosom of my history buddies. I ended up with a much worse result in History than I would have achieved in Economics but it’s a small price to pay for principle.
Now in 2009, I wonder which subject would serve me better. My homeland is in a mess of Dante proportions and finds itself in the unenviable position of being the worse performer in a school for dunces. The whole world is suffering but there is a temptation to focus on the most extreme case so that everyone else can feel better in comparison. It’s a game we Irish have been playing for centuries, when no matter how bad things got, we could always say, “well at least we’re not English”.
The rest of the world is now saying, “Well at least we’re not Irish”.
As a student of History, I could see that the current crash was entirely predicable. The past is filled with tales of bursting bubbles and queens who insist the rabble at the gate should eat cake. Every period of excess and greed has been followed with sackcloth and ashes, as though the Gods conspire to bring a little ying and yang.
A better understanding of Economics would, I suspect, bring me to the same conclusion. We live in a finite world but yet we fool ourselves that some things like growth and prosperity can be eternal. And when anyone tries to tell us otherwise, we shun them and call them doom seekers.
There were people in the dog days of Ireland’s boom years who warned of the impending crash. But the Irish were too busy buying apartments in Bulgaria or test driving the latest BMW to notice. As a nation, we adopted the pose of the three monkeys who wanted to see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. Now those monkeys are being mocked by the rest of the world.
In the past week I’ve watched a feature on Australian TV about Ireland’s economic woes and read a report on how the Germans are shocked that we blew all the money they gave us to build motorways on beer and fast women. The world is watching Ireland at the moment like a bitter old nun taking pleasure in the news that the kids who smoked behind the bike shed have now got lung cancer. There were many who resented our prosperity, who saw us as brash new kids on the block that acted like lottery millionaires from a council estate. They are lining up now to put the boot in, even though their own economies are in a similar mess.
I escaped of course before the whole thing went belly up and now feel like those passengers who got on the Titanic at Southampton and then got off at it’s last stop before New York (Cobh on Ireland’s South coast) because they felt a bit sea sick. I left Ireland for Australia for many reasons, but chief among them was a feeling that the country was heading for an ice-berg. While I occasionally feel smug that my predictions have come true, it really is no fun to watch your country implode in the way Ireland is now. I used to surf Irish websites to check on football scores and to enjoy the eclectic pleasures of the Irish Times letters page. But lately, it has become impossible to log-on without being bombarded with stories of redundancies and foreclosures.
I’ve decided to leave those stories to the overseas journalists who are now dancing on Irish graves. I’ll keep checking out the History ones. They are my first love after all and somehow the past is a much more pleasant place to be at the moment than the present.
Follow that regime for a year and you’ll become an expert in deficits, budgeting and the cruel realities of supply and demand.
I was so good at Economics in fact, that my teacher, Mr Dunne, was astonished when I tried to drop the subject before my final exams. The school principal had designed a timetable entirely focused on providing the teachers with as much time as possible in the staff room. As a result, I was faced with the sort of choice that no sixteen year old should have to take. One that shapes the rest of your life. I had to choose between History and Economics. Choose the former and I would have a lifetime of reading interesting books and engaging in exciting dinner table conversation. Choose the latter and I would spend years searching for a personality, but would have a greater understanding of the crisis the world now finds itself in.
In the end my decision was easy. Mr Dunne pleaded with me to stay in his class, but made it clear that he was doing so for his own needs. I went to a mixed school. Not in the religious or gender sense, we were strictly an all boy’s Catholic institution, staffed by musty brothers with barely suppressed urges. Our school was mixed in that 50% of the pupils were idiots and they thought the other 70% were smart kids. Without being too big-headed, I fell into the smart kid category while Mr Dunne had been cursed with a high percentage of the simply bewildered. He needed me to get his numbers up. In economic terms, our class was in long term recession and I was a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Thankfully, I had a spark of romance in me at that age and wasn’t going to allow myself to become a commodity. I spent the next twelve happy months in the bosom of my history buddies. I ended up with a much worse result in History than I would have achieved in Economics but it’s a small price to pay for principle.
Now in 2009, I wonder which subject would serve me better. My homeland is in a mess of Dante proportions and finds itself in the unenviable position of being the worse performer in a school for dunces. The whole world is suffering but there is a temptation to focus on the most extreme case so that everyone else can feel better in comparison. It’s a game we Irish have been playing for centuries, when no matter how bad things got, we could always say, “well at least we’re not English”.
The rest of the world is now saying, “Well at least we’re not Irish”.
As a student of History, I could see that the current crash was entirely predicable. The past is filled with tales of bursting bubbles and queens who insist the rabble at the gate should eat cake. Every period of excess and greed has been followed with sackcloth and ashes, as though the Gods conspire to bring a little ying and yang.
A better understanding of Economics would, I suspect, bring me to the same conclusion. We live in a finite world but yet we fool ourselves that some things like growth and prosperity can be eternal. And when anyone tries to tell us otherwise, we shun them and call them doom seekers.
There were people in the dog days of Ireland’s boom years who warned of the impending crash. But the Irish were too busy buying apartments in Bulgaria or test driving the latest BMW to notice. As a nation, we adopted the pose of the three monkeys who wanted to see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. Now those monkeys are being mocked by the rest of the world.
In the past week I’ve watched a feature on Australian TV about Ireland’s economic woes and read a report on how the Germans are shocked that we blew all the money they gave us to build motorways on beer and fast women. The world is watching Ireland at the moment like a bitter old nun taking pleasure in the news that the kids who smoked behind the bike shed have now got lung cancer. There were many who resented our prosperity, who saw us as brash new kids on the block that acted like lottery millionaires from a council estate. They are lining up now to put the boot in, even though their own economies are in a similar mess.
I escaped of course before the whole thing went belly up and now feel like those passengers who got on the Titanic at Southampton and then got off at it’s last stop before New York (Cobh on Ireland’s South coast) because they felt a bit sea sick. I left Ireland for Australia for many reasons, but chief among them was a feeling that the country was heading for an ice-berg. While I occasionally feel smug that my predictions have come true, it really is no fun to watch your country implode in the way Ireland is now. I used to surf Irish websites to check on football scores and to enjoy the eclectic pleasures of the Irish Times letters page. But lately, it has become impossible to log-on without being bombarded with stories of redundancies and foreclosures.
I’ve decided to leave those stories to the overseas journalists who are now dancing on Irish graves. I’ll keep checking out the History ones. They are my first love after all and somehow the past is a much more pleasant place to be at the moment than the present.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Fear is a Darkroom where negatives are developed
I think I've found a cure for anxiety. Try and gather a number of things to worry about and pretty soon you'll find that you are so confused you won't be able to concentrate on anything. You'll turn from an anxious person into a mumbling idiot which may not sound like an improvement but at least gets you a nice padded cell and you'll be given lots of colored balloons to play with.
I'm about ten minutes away from the balloons at the moment. The world just seems to have become an overwhelming place and it's hard to stay calm. The news is filled with economic horror stories that could be penned by Edgar Allen Poe. My homeland seems to be suffering this more than anyone else (although Iceland and Latvia might disagree) and lurches every day towards some unstoppable Armageddon. My employer is technically bankrupt and only stays alive because the American Government can't face the appalling vista of letting it die. And all the while, the skies around Melbourne are filled with the choking dust of a hundred bush-fires, which like some rough beast is slouching ever closer towards the City.
And which of these impending disasters is worrying me most? None of them in fact, I've spent all day wondering if Arsenal will qualify for next years Champion's League and if the Lasagne I cooked at the weekend will taste as good after three days in the fridge.
We live in times that will either kill us or leave us with great stories to tell our grandkids. I used to feel cheated that our generation was the most boring since Adam and Eve. My grandfathers fought in Ireland’s war of independence and were midwives to the birth of our nation. My father was a young teenager during World War II and despite living in the relative safety of a neutral country, he has many tales of errant German bombs falling on the nearby village and dry black bread for dinner.
Our generation knew little about real drama. Of course there have been wars, famine and natural disasters on our watch, but these were always in far flung places and we could ignore them as quickly as we could turn off a television. That has all changed now of course and we have a story which will scare and astonish future generations.
When I come to tell my grandchildren about Black 09, I’ll start with economics. That was the time when the 400 year old orthodoxy of Capitalism finally collapsed. In hindsight it seems so obvious that it would falter, seeing as how it was built on a seismic fault line. We split the world into consumers and producers. The consumers paid the producers for goods and then borrowed money back from the producers in order to buy more goods.
I call this older brother economics. When I was 10 years old, I had a fascination with train sets. My Mother’s cruel solution to this longing was to buy a train set for my older brother, who at 12 years old had no interest in such things as he was developing a keener affection for narcotics and pornography. He realised however, that he could extract my measly weekly pocket money for the offer of one hour’s train time. I hungrily agreed but found myself an hour later unsated in my desire to be Thomas the Tank Engine. My only solution was to borrow from my brother against the security of next week’s pocket money.
My brother fed my voracious appetite by adding new carriages and bridges and pretty soon I owed him so much that I would still be paying him back when I was 45. He realised that I was a bad debt and decided to give me a good beating in lieu of missed payments. The fact that he used Engine number one for this purpose was painful for me on a number of levels.
That’s what childhood is for, a chance to live out and learn from the failures that adults make, in the security of a kid’s game. Unfortunately, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher do not seem to have had older brothers.
While the world partied through the recent consumer driven boom, the Irish were up in one of the back bedrooms getting high on LCD while being sick over the guest’s coats. We Irish just can’t do anything at normal levels. Offer us a free bar at a wedding and the happy couple will be paying the bill off for 20 years. Start an Internet campaign to vote for the 20th Century’s most important person and the Irish will conspire to ensure that an obscure 3rd Division football player wins the poll.
So it is with economic booms. We couldn’t just do a normal one. We had to go out and get rip-roaring drunk and while the rest of the world now has a hangover, we Irish are in the emergency ward on an intravenous drip.
But if the world and my homeland wasn’t enough to worry about this week, I’m also faced with the dilemma of working for a company that is teetering on the edge of extinction. We’ve had more bail-outs than a lifeboat from the Titanic and the analogy of sinking ships is not out of place. We receive daily emails from the CEO in the States telling us not to panic. When you consider that he was the one that got us into this mess in the first place, it’s hard to trust his judgment. With the amount of debt the company is burdened with, it’s clear that he didn’t have an older brother either.
When faced with so many worries, we can either turn to the drink or learn that we should only concern ourselves with the things we can control. Everything else will happen anyway. As the writer Leo Buscaglia said “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy”.
I'm about ten minutes away from the balloons at the moment. The world just seems to have become an overwhelming place and it's hard to stay calm. The news is filled with economic horror stories that could be penned by Edgar Allen Poe. My homeland seems to be suffering this more than anyone else (although Iceland and Latvia might disagree) and lurches every day towards some unstoppable Armageddon. My employer is technically bankrupt and only stays alive because the American Government can't face the appalling vista of letting it die. And all the while, the skies around Melbourne are filled with the choking dust of a hundred bush-fires, which like some rough beast is slouching ever closer towards the City.
And which of these impending disasters is worrying me most? None of them in fact, I've spent all day wondering if Arsenal will qualify for next years Champion's League and if the Lasagne I cooked at the weekend will taste as good after three days in the fridge.
We live in times that will either kill us or leave us with great stories to tell our grandkids. I used to feel cheated that our generation was the most boring since Adam and Eve. My grandfathers fought in Ireland’s war of independence and were midwives to the birth of our nation. My father was a young teenager during World War II and despite living in the relative safety of a neutral country, he has many tales of errant German bombs falling on the nearby village and dry black bread for dinner.
Our generation knew little about real drama. Of course there have been wars, famine and natural disasters on our watch, but these were always in far flung places and we could ignore them as quickly as we could turn off a television. That has all changed now of course and we have a story which will scare and astonish future generations.
When I come to tell my grandchildren about Black 09, I’ll start with economics. That was the time when the 400 year old orthodoxy of Capitalism finally collapsed. In hindsight it seems so obvious that it would falter, seeing as how it was built on a seismic fault line. We split the world into consumers and producers. The consumers paid the producers for goods and then borrowed money back from the producers in order to buy more goods.
I call this older brother economics. When I was 10 years old, I had a fascination with train sets. My Mother’s cruel solution to this longing was to buy a train set for my older brother, who at 12 years old had no interest in such things as he was developing a keener affection for narcotics and pornography. He realised however, that he could extract my measly weekly pocket money for the offer of one hour’s train time. I hungrily agreed but found myself an hour later unsated in my desire to be Thomas the Tank Engine. My only solution was to borrow from my brother against the security of next week’s pocket money.
My brother fed my voracious appetite by adding new carriages and bridges and pretty soon I owed him so much that I would still be paying him back when I was 45. He realised that I was a bad debt and decided to give me a good beating in lieu of missed payments. The fact that he used Engine number one for this purpose was painful for me on a number of levels.
That’s what childhood is for, a chance to live out and learn from the failures that adults make, in the security of a kid’s game. Unfortunately, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher do not seem to have had older brothers.
While the world partied through the recent consumer driven boom, the Irish were up in one of the back bedrooms getting high on LCD while being sick over the guest’s coats. We Irish just can’t do anything at normal levels. Offer us a free bar at a wedding and the happy couple will be paying the bill off for 20 years. Start an Internet campaign to vote for the 20th Century’s most important person and the Irish will conspire to ensure that an obscure 3rd Division football player wins the poll.
So it is with economic booms. We couldn’t just do a normal one. We had to go out and get rip-roaring drunk and while the rest of the world now has a hangover, we Irish are in the emergency ward on an intravenous drip.
But if the world and my homeland wasn’t enough to worry about this week, I’m also faced with the dilemma of working for a company that is teetering on the edge of extinction. We’ve had more bail-outs than a lifeboat from the Titanic and the analogy of sinking ships is not out of place. We receive daily emails from the CEO in the States telling us not to panic. When you consider that he was the one that got us into this mess in the first place, it’s hard to trust his judgment. With the amount of debt the company is burdened with, it’s clear that he didn’t have an older brother either.
When faced with so many worries, we can either turn to the drink or learn that we should only concern ourselves with the things we can control. Everything else will happen anyway. As the writer Leo Buscaglia said “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy”.
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Fire and Dust
Epic is an overused word in this part of the world. Baz Luhrman wrote and directed “Australia”, a weepy big budget movie that could easily double as a Qantas advertisement. Baz uses the word ‘Epic” when flogging his film in reference mainly to the country after which the movie is called. He talks about its vast deserts, towering mountains and raging rivers (when not in drought). But you can’t help feeling that Baz is overusing the word in an attempt to have his own movie thought of in that vein.
However, “Epic” is the only word that can describe Australia this week. Queensland has just gone through three cyclones in a fortnight resulting in torrents of water, while down in South Australia, they baked through a week of 40c plus days with not a drop of water to be seen.
Here in Victoria, we’ve had our own record weather to deal with. God teased us with a week of hot days and steamy nights towards the end of January. The mercury stayed above 40 for four days in a row that drove the citizens of Melbourne to light headedness and caused thousands of them to sit in the murky waters of Port Phillip Bay at midnight in a desperate attempt to stay cool.
Melbourne houses are not built to manage hot weather, because seemingly these high temperatures are a relatively modern development. It is as though we are seeing global warming through a magnifying glass in this part of the world. So it was with some trepidation that the City braced itself for Saturday February 7th. The meteorologists warned that records would be broken. None of us realised how awfully accurate that statement would become.
On the day itself, temperatures reached a new official record for Melbourne of 46.6c, although in parts of the City it reached 49c. It’s hard to describe how hot that feels. I walked 100 meters from my air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned cinema and it was like a trek through Dante’s Inferno. The first thing you notice is a tingling on your lips as the moisture sizzles and evaporates. You don’t sweat because your body somehow recognises how futile that would be. You simply bake in an oppressive heat and scamper for whatever cover you can find.
We were lucky in that we found a movie that was both enjoyable and lengthy and were able to escape the heat of the afternoon in a pleasantly chilled cinema. The cool change had been forecast for late afternoon. This is a weather feature that seems unique to Victoria. The hot winds that swirl down from the Central Deserts bring scorching weather to South East Australia. They are met by cooler winds coming from Antarctica and eventually these cool winds push through. When this happens temperatures can fall by twenty degrees in twenty minutes. On one occasion I was chased up Bourke Street by a cool change on my way back from lunch and a very pleasant experience it was too.
Melbournians look forward to the cool change in the way six year olds look forward to Christmas. On hot days, the expected time of arrival of the change is the main subject of conversation at work, particularly at this time of year when there is no AFL football to talk about.
As we left the cinema on February 7th, the smiles on the faces of people in the foyer told us that the cool change had arrived. On this occasion, the temperature had only dropped by 10 degrees to a still extreme 36c, but to us it felt like we’d been dipped in ice cream and we lingered on our stroll back to the car.
So the City survived its hottest day since records began and we settled in on that Saturday evening to prepare the stories we would tell our workmates about how we got through the big heat. In country Victoria however, a tragedy was emerging that would make our stories of discomfort simply ridiculous.
Nature gives us the beauty that this world possesses and also the bounty to enjoy it. Many Australians choose to live in the bush, or forest as we Europeans call it. It gives them a feeling of peace and solitude and also an escape from the stifling heat of the City. To many it is the true Australia, the place where Koalas and Kangaroos live, people drive Utes with a large sheepdog in the back and all the pubs serve homemade pies.
On February 7th, Australia’s love affair with the bush died.
Its hard to imagine the horror those poor people felt on that day from hell. To be surrounded by fire roaring as loudly as a jet engine is too frightening to even contemplate. The stories of their struggles are starting to emerge with each new tale more horrific than the last.
Now that the dust is settling (both literally and figuratively), the search for explanations has begun. There seems to be a need to find a culprit, as though Mother Nature herself could not be so cruel to her off-spring. Stories of potential arsonists lead the evening news, although it’s clear that only a small proportion of fires were started this way. Faulty power cables are also talked about frantically as they appear to have caused the largest fire. This would point the blame at negligent people and give the community a focus upon which they can direct their anger.
Nobody wants to face the awful truth. Last Saturday was a spectacularly hot day and the wind that whipped down from the deserts reached speeds of 100kph. Add that to the tinder dry vegetation that ten years of drought have created and you have a powder keg just waiting to explode. A piece of broken glass or a lightening strike would have been enough to set it off. And the scary thing is that all these elements are likely to repeat themselves in this climate change condemned country.
The fact that people choose to live in areas at high risk of fire is the real issue that needs to be addressed. If people lived on the cusp of live volcanoes, we’d consider them mad. But people want to live in the middle of forests in an area that will burn regularly. It is the Australian way and a symbol of the freedom that people in this country so desperately crave. Three hundred people have paid the ultimate price for that freedom.
However, “Epic” is the only word that can describe Australia this week. Queensland has just gone through three cyclones in a fortnight resulting in torrents of water, while down in South Australia, they baked through a week of 40c plus days with not a drop of water to be seen.
Here in Victoria, we’ve had our own record weather to deal with. God teased us with a week of hot days and steamy nights towards the end of January. The mercury stayed above 40 for four days in a row that drove the citizens of Melbourne to light headedness and caused thousands of them to sit in the murky waters of Port Phillip Bay at midnight in a desperate attempt to stay cool.
Melbourne houses are not built to manage hot weather, because seemingly these high temperatures are a relatively modern development. It is as though we are seeing global warming through a magnifying glass in this part of the world. So it was with some trepidation that the City braced itself for Saturday February 7th. The meteorologists warned that records would be broken. None of us realised how awfully accurate that statement would become.
On the day itself, temperatures reached a new official record for Melbourne of 46.6c, although in parts of the City it reached 49c. It’s hard to describe how hot that feels. I walked 100 meters from my air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned cinema and it was like a trek through Dante’s Inferno. The first thing you notice is a tingling on your lips as the moisture sizzles and evaporates. You don’t sweat because your body somehow recognises how futile that would be. You simply bake in an oppressive heat and scamper for whatever cover you can find.
We were lucky in that we found a movie that was both enjoyable and lengthy and were able to escape the heat of the afternoon in a pleasantly chilled cinema. The cool change had been forecast for late afternoon. This is a weather feature that seems unique to Victoria. The hot winds that swirl down from the Central Deserts bring scorching weather to South East Australia. They are met by cooler winds coming from Antarctica and eventually these cool winds push through. When this happens temperatures can fall by twenty degrees in twenty minutes. On one occasion I was chased up Bourke Street by a cool change on my way back from lunch and a very pleasant experience it was too.
Melbournians look forward to the cool change in the way six year olds look forward to Christmas. On hot days, the expected time of arrival of the change is the main subject of conversation at work, particularly at this time of year when there is no AFL football to talk about.
As we left the cinema on February 7th, the smiles on the faces of people in the foyer told us that the cool change had arrived. On this occasion, the temperature had only dropped by 10 degrees to a still extreme 36c, but to us it felt like we’d been dipped in ice cream and we lingered on our stroll back to the car.
So the City survived its hottest day since records began and we settled in on that Saturday evening to prepare the stories we would tell our workmates about how we got through the big heat. In country Victoria however, a tragedy was emerging that would make our stories of discomfort simply ridiculous.
Nature gives us the beauty that this world possesses and also the bounty to enjoy it. Many Australians choose to live in the bush, or forest as we Europeans call it. It gives them a feeling of peace and solitude and also an escape from the stifling heat of the City. To many it is the true Australia, the place where Koalas and Kangaroos live, people drive Utes with a large sheepdog in the back and all the pubs serve homemade pies.
On February 7th, Australia’s love affair with the bush died.
Its hard to imagine the horror those poor people felt on that day from hell. To be surrounded by fire roaring as loudly as a jet engine is too frightening to even contemplate. The stories of their struggles are starting to emerge with each new tale more horrific than the last.
Now that the dust is settling (both literally and figuratively), the search for explanations has begun. There seems to be a need to find a culprit, as though Mother Nature herself could not be so cruel to her off-spring. Stories of potential arsonists lead the evening news, although it’s clear that only a small proportion of fires were started this way. Faulty power cables are also talked about frantically as they appear to have caused the largest fire. This would point the blame at negligent people and give the community a focus upon which they can direct their anger.
Nobody wants to face the awful truth. Last Saturday was a spectacularly hot day and the wind that whipped down from the deserts reached speeds of 100kph. Add that to the tinder dry vegetation that ten years of drought have created and you have a powder keg just waiting to explode. A piece of broken glass or a lightening strike would have been enough to set it off. And the scary thing is that all these elements are likely to repeat themselves in this climate change condemned country.
The fact that people choose to live in areas at high risk of fire is the real issue that needs to be addressed. If people lived on the cusp of live volcanoes, we’d consider them mad. But people want to live in the middle of forests in an area that will burn regularly. It is the Australian way and a symbol of the freedom that people in this country so desperately crave. Three hundred people have paid the ultimate price for that freedom.
Monday, 16 February 2009
You've Got Mail
Nicole, if you’re reading this, the Sacred Heart mission has been on again looking for more money. I guess Scott was right. You give once to these bleeding heart charities and they’ll keep trying to suck more out of you. Mind you he can’t talk. He thought investing in all those American companies was child’s play and the only time they would write to him was to tell him that his latest dividend cheque was now nesting in his account. Little did he think that the global financial crisis would mean those companies would end up writing to him every month looking for more cash?
Capital raising is the latest buzzword among big companies as they desperately try to get out of this crisis. Luckily they have a database of greedy capitalists known as shareholders that they can write to. And that’s where most of Scott’s mail is coming from these days. Invest in these companies once and just like the charities, they’ll keep coming back to you for more.
You can learn a lot about somebody from their post. I should know, I’ve been getting a lot of it lately. The previous tenants in my apartment had clearly set up a one year redirection of their mail, because I got nothing for them for the first twelve months that I lived here. That all changed one day when the Post Office computer system reverted back to normal. Suddenly I started getting more mail for them than I was getting for myself. I don’t get much, it has to be said. I’ve gone down the green route and get most of my stuff by email and I’m paranoid about those little boxes on websites that ask you if you want to be kept up to date on the company’s promotional activities, upcoming offers and every other devise that evil marketing people can think of. I have a particular rule that I invoke which means that I refuse to use websites in the future that have this pre-ticked box and leave it up to the customer to un-tick if they don’t want to be bombarded with a mountain of junk mail. It does mean that I’ve missed out on Jetstar’s offer of $5 flights to Bali, but there is a price to be paid for Principle.
Nicole obviously failed to un-tick the appropriate boxes because she’s been inundated by mail from every dodgy promotion office this side of Las Vegas. The Smith family help disadvantaged Australian kids. They run most of their fund raising around Christmas and back in 2006 I guess husband Scott was upping his investment in Altria at around the same time as the TV was running ads with pictures of malnourished children. The price of capitalism and greed is paid by the conscience. As Scott was writing out cheques to his broker, Nicole was balancing the books by paying a little to the Smith Family. Little did she know that they would spend most of the money she gave them on promotional literature that would end up back in her mailbox, or mine as it is now.
And I think she made a mistake one day in the centre of Melbourne. Chuggers stand on every major intersection and pounce on anyone who looks vaguely middle class and whose heart sinks at the sight of poor children, animals or criminals locked up in foreign prisons. These charity muggers operate in teams and act like lions on the African plains as they track down and surround the weakest of the herd. Nicole was clearly that one day. But she should have realised that her first year’s direct debits to Amnesty International would have gone to the chugger’s employers and that most of her future payments would be spent by Amnesty printing literature to ask her for more money. While I’m at it, I should point out to Amnesty that Guantanamo Bay is about to be closed, so can they stop writing to Nicole about it. As someone said on TV today, it’s a sure sign of the recession when torturers are being laid of.
Apart from keeping the family conscience clear, it was also Nicole’s job to look after the cultural side. She obviously enjoyed that Matisse Picasso exhibition at the Arts Centre because she asked them to add her to their mailing list. From the post Scott gets, it’s clear that he is a philistine. Gym club memberships and company reports make up his in-box. I like to think of him being dragged along to the exhibition and then embarrassing Nicole by saying to the guide that he thought Picasso’s first name was Pablo.
I’ve been meaning to drop Nicole and Scott’s mail down to the letting agency, but the only time I can make it there is on Saturday mornings. But somehow their mail does seem important enough to get me out of bed on my morning of rest. I guess they had the good sense to write to all the major people like banks, taxman and family to tell them of their new address. I just get the junk. The charities and the companies that Scott invested in but would rather not think about now. The last ten years have seen an explosion in communication methods from email to text messages. Snail mail seems so old fashioned now. Left to ones who want to send you brochures and twenty Christmas cards, mouth painted by people with no arms and legs (charged to your credit card Nicole, unless you write back within 30 days!).
We move house and we throw out the junk when we do. But I think we forget that some junk just keeps coming at us. It’s hard to know how many boxes you ticked in the past asking to be added to mailing lists. It’s even harder to remember how many boxes you failed to tick asking not to be added to such lists. Somewhere in Ireland, the unfortunate person who bought my house before the property market crashed is faced with the additional dilemma of dealing with my unwanted post. If they are reading this, I can but apologise. And if Nicole is reading, can you contact all those charities and ask them to change your contact details? And dump Scott, the man invested in Phillip Morris who make cigarettes. He doesn’t deserve a lady who likes Matisse.
Capital raising is the latest buzzword among big companies as they desperately try to get out of this crisis. Luckily they have a database of greedy capitalists known as shareholders that they can write to. And that’s where most of Scott’s mail is coming from these days. Invest in these companies once and just like the charities, they’ll keep coming back to you for more.
You can learn a lot about somebody from their post. I should know, I’ve been getting a lot of it lately. The previous tenants in my apartment had clearly set up a one year redirection of their mail, because I got nothing for them for the first twelve months that I lived here. That all changed one day when the Post Office computer system reverted back to normal. Suddenly I started getting more mail for them than I was getting for myself. I don’t get much, it has to be said. I’ve gone down the green route and get most of my stuff by email and I’m paranoid about those little boxes on websites that ask you if you want to be kept up to date on the company’s promotional activities, upcoming offers and every other devise that evil marketing people can think of. I have a particular rule that I invoke which means that I refuse to use websites in the future that have this pre-ticked box and leave it up to the customer to un-tick if they don’t want to be bombarded with a mountain of junk mail. It does mean that I’ve missed out on Jetstar’s offer of $5 flights to Bali, but there is a price to be paid for Principle.
Nicole obviously failed to un-tick the appropriate boxes because she’s been inundated by mail from every dodgy promotion office this side of Las Vegas. The Smith family help disadvantaged Australian kids. They run most of their fund raising around Christmas and back in 2006 I guess husband Scott was upping his investment in Altria at around the same time as the TV was running ads with pictures of malnourished children. The price of capitalism and greed is paid by the conscience. As Scott was writing out cheques to his broker, Nicole was balancing the books by paying a little to the Smith Family. Little did she know that they would spend most of the money she gave them on promotional literature that would end up back in her mailbox, or mine as it is now.
And I think she made a mistake one day in the centre of Melbourne. Chuggers stand on every major intersection and pounce on anyone who looks vaguely middle class and whose heart sinks at the sight of poor children, animals or criminals locked up in foreign prisons. These charity muggers operate in teams and act like lions on the African plains as they track down and surround the weakest of the herd. Nicole was clearly that one day. But she should have realised that her first year’s direct debits to Amnesty International would have gone to the chugger’s employers and that most of her future payments would be spent by Amnesty printing literature to ask her for more money. While I’m at it, I should point out to Amnesty that Guantanamo Bay is about to be closed, so can they stop writing to Nicole about it. As someone said on TV today, it’s a sure sign of the recession when torturers are being laid of.
Apart from keeping the family conscience clear, it was also Nicole’s job to look after the cultural side. She obviously enjoyed that Matisse Picasso exhibition at the Arts Centre because she asked them to add her to their mailing list. From the post Scott gets, it’s clear that he is a philistine. Gym club memberships and company reports make up his in-box. I like to think of him being dragged along to the exhibition and then embarrassing Nicole by saying to the guide that he thought Picasso’s first name was Pablo.
I’ve been meaning to drop Nicole and Scott’s mail down to the letting agency, but the only time I can make it there is on Saturday mornings. But somehow their mail does seem important enough to get me out of bed on my morning of rest. I guess they had the good sense to write to all the major people like banks, taxman and family to tell them of their new address. I just get the junk. The charities and the companies that Scott invested in but would rather not think about now. The last ten years have seen an explosion in communication methods from email to text messages. Snail mail seems so old fashioned now. Left to ones who want to send you brochures and twenty Christmas cards, mouth painted by people with no arms and legs (charged to your credit card Nicole, unless you write back within 30 days!).
We move house and we throw out the junk when we do. But I think we forget that some junk just keeps coming at us. It’s hard to know how many boxes you ticked in the past asking to be added to mailing lists. It’s even harder to remember how many boxes you failed to tick asking not to be added to such lists. Somewhere in Ireland, the unfortunate person who bought my house before the property market crashed is faced with the additional dilemma of dealing with my unwanted post. If they are reading this, I can but apologise. And if Nicole is reading, can you contact all those charities and ask them to change your contact details? And dump Scott, the man invested in Phillip Morris who make cigarettes. He doesn’t deserve a lady who likes Matisse.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
The Wild Colonial Boy
Van Diemen's Land is a hell for a man
To live out his whole life in slavery
Where the climate is raw and the gun makes the law
Neither wind or rain cares for bravery
Sam Nolan wasn’t a rebel, except when it came to people telling him what to do. He grew up on the grimy streets of Dublin in the early 19th century and had committed many felonious acts before the law finally caught up with him. It was slippers that got him in the end. The Jewish shoemaker on Bachelor’s Walk went to the Synagogue every Friday and being a holy day, he naively assumed that he could leave his shop unlocked. Sam had less respect for religious protocol and helped himself to six pairs of fine silk finished slippers. What he intended doing with them was unclear as the sewer like dwelling in which he lived wasn’t exactly suited to fancy footwear.
Unfortunately for Sam, his escape coincided with the departure of two Policemen from Murray’s Tearooms next door and almost before his feet touched the ground he was heading towards Botany Bay and seven years at the mercy of her Majesty’s Government. While Australia seemed like the end of the world in those days, in figurative speech it wasn’t like that at all. For most transportees the trip over in the musty hull of an English sailing ship was the worst part of their punishment. Once arrived, they were allocated to a free settler to work on farms or in the businesses around Old Sydney town. They didn’t wear shackles and they didn’t sleep in prison cells. The banishment itself was seen as the punishment and for those who came to terms with this; Australia could be a bright new start.
Sam was one of the large minority however, who were recidivist criminals and would have started a row in a phone box. He quickly worked his way up the Imperial punishment system, getting 200 lashes for turning up drunk for work and a month on a chain gang for bashing his overseer for having the temerity to ask Sam to do some work. When he stole two sheep from his master and sold them to the local butcher, Sam had committed the most heinous crime in that colony that didn’t result in hanging. The punishment was considered to be the harshest available. Imprisonment in Port Arthur on the south east corner of Van Diemen’s Land.
His cell is still visible in the magnificently restored prison that sits 100km south of Hobart in modern day Tasmania. It’s an eerie place, haunted by ghosts of the poor creatures who were tortured there in a place that resembles Guantanamo Bay. Many of them were Irish and I was most drawn to their stories.
We Irish have a romantic view of transportation of course. In our mind the English who were banished to Botany Bay were Dickensian scallies caught dipping their criminal fingers into the pockets of passing Gentlemen, or indulging in unnatural but loving acts with the animals that roamed Albion’s hills and dales.
The Irish on the other hand were brave rebels, plucked from the bosoms of their family by a cruel coloniser. They were a gallant band of political prisoners punished for patriotic acts such as stealing Trevelyan’s corn or liberating Irish cows from the land of absentee English landlords. Our songs and ballads mythologise these convicts and nowhere are they described as criminals. “The Fields of Athenry” is probably Ireland’s most famous songs and is sung at sporting matches and whenever two Irish people meet each other in a pub while outside the country. The song’s hero, Michael, is sent to Botany Bay and we’re asked to see this as a family tragedy.
Likewise, the lads chained below decks in “Back Home in Derry” were all gallant rebels, with not a pickpocket among them. The truth of course is messier. Sam Nolan was just one of thousands of petty criminals sent from Ireland to Australia in the 19th Century. You can see details of their crimes and transportation in a database kindly supplied by the Irish Government in 1988 as part of the 200 year celebration of Australia’s settlement. While most countries made gifts to the Aussies along the lines of a set of steak knives or a nice book, we sent them a list of all the criminals we had off-loaded to their continent over the past two centuries.
There were some genuine political prisoners of course, such as William O’Brien and the rest of the Young Ireland brigade from 1848. When you get to Port Arthur however, you discover that these gallant rebels were housed in a comfortable cottage apart from the general prisoner population. It’s a crushing disappointment as we like to think of our heroes being abused by the cruel British captors. Not invited down to the Commandants House for Tea and Tiffin every Sunday afternoon.
The irony of Port Arthur is that it is the Irish common criminals who provide a sense of pride to the modern visitor. Their stoic faces stare out from pictures adorning the museum wall and the records tell of their fortitude in facing the lash. But their finest moment came in the 1840s. The fine church of St David had been built to provide religious instruction to the prisoners. Attendance was obligatory but the arrival of a papist hating Irish clergyman led to a revolt among the Irish convicts. They refused to attend church and insisted on the appointment of a Catholic priest and a separate service. Despite punishments that would make an Al-Qaeda suspect crack, they refused to budge and eventually the authorities gave in to their demands. And so Australia got its first Catholic prison chapel.
I like to think that Sam Nolan was one of those who fought for the right to speak to God in the way he saw fit. It seems to me that this is how they retained some dignity in this dehumanising place. It’s odd the things that make you proud to be Irish.
To live out his whole life in slavery
Where the climate is raw and the gun makes the law
Neither wind or rain cares for bravery
Sam Nolan wasn’t a rebel, except when it came to people telling him what to do. He grew up on the grimy streets of Dublin in the early 19th century and had committed many felonious acts before the law finally caught up with him. It was slippers that got him in the end. The Jewish shoemaker on Bachelor’s Walk went to the Synagogue every Friday and being a holy day, he naively assumed that he could leave his shop unlocked. Sam had less respect for religious protocol and helped himself to six pairs of fine silk finished slippers. What he intended doing with them was unclear as the sewer like dwelling in which he lived wasn’t exactly suited to fancy footwear.
Unfortunately for Sam, his escape coincided with the departure of two Policemen from Murray’s Tearooms next door and almost before his feet touched the ground he was heading towards Botany Bay and seven years at the mercy of her Majesty’s Government. While Australia seemed like the end of the world in those days, in figurative speech it wasn’t like that at all. For most transportees the trip over in the musty hull of an English sailing ship was the worst part of their punishment. Once arrived, they were allocated to a free settler to work on farms or in the businesses around Old Sydney town. They didn’t wear shackles and they didn’t sleep in prison cells. The banishment itself was seen as the punishment and for those who came to terms with this; Australia could be a bright new start.
Sam was one of the large minority however, who were recidivist criminals and would have started a row in a phone box. He quickly worked his way up the Imperial punishment system, getting 200 lashes for turning up drunk for work and a month on a chain gang for bashing his overseer for having the temerity to ask Sam to do some work. When he stole two sheep from his master and sold them to the local butcher, Sam had committed the most heinous crime in that colony that didn’t result in hanging. The punishment was considered to be the harshest available. Imprisonment in Port Arthur on the south east corner of Van Diemen’s Land.
His cell is still visible in the magnificently restored prison that sits 100km south of Hobart in modern day Tasmania. It’s an eerie place, haunted by ghosts of the poor creatures who were tortured there in a place that resembles Guantanamo Bay. Many of them were Irish and I was most drawn to their stories.
We Irish have a romantic view of transportation of course. In our mind the English who were banished to Botany Bay were Dickensian scallies caught dipping their criminal fingers into the pockets of passing Gentlemen, or indulging in unnatural but loving acts with the animals that roamed Albion’s hills and dales.
The Irish on the other hand were brave rebels, plucked from the bosoms of their family by a cruel coloniser. They were a gallant band of political prisoners punished for patriotic acts such as stealing Trevelyan’s corn or liberating Irish cows from the land of absentee English landlords. Our songs and ballads mythologise these convicts and nowhere are they described as criminals. “The Fields of Athenry” is probably Ireland’s most famous songs and is sung at sporting matches and whenever two Irish people meet each other in a pub while outside the country. The song’s hero, Michael, is sent to Botany Bay and we’re asked to see this as a family tragedy.
Likewise, the lads chained below decks in “Back Home in Derry” were all gallant rebels, with not a pickpocket among them. The truth of course is messier. Sam Nolan was just one of thousands of petty criminals sent from Ireland to Australia in the 19th Century. You can see details of their crimes and transportation in a database kindly supplied by the Irish Government in 1988 as part of the 200 year celebration of Australia’s settlement. While most countries made gifts to the Aussies along the lines of a set of steak knives or a nice book, we sent them a list of all the criminals we had off-loaded to their continent over the past two centuries.
There were some genuine political prisoners of course, such as William O’Brien and the rest of the Young Ireland brigade from 1848. When you get to Port Arthur however, you discover that these gallant rebels were housed in a comfortable cottage apart from the general prisoner population. It’s a crushing disappointment as we like to think of our heroes being abused by the cruel British captors. Not invited down to the Commandants House for Tea and Tiffin every Sunday afternoon.
The irony of Port Arthur is that it is the Irish common criminals who provide a sense of pride to the modern visitor. Their stoic faces stare out from pictures adorning the museum wall and the records tell of their fortitude in facing the lash. But their finest moment came in the 1840s. The fine church of St David had been built to provide religious instruction to the prisoners. Attendance was obligatory but the arrival of a papist hating Irish clergyman led to a revolt among the Irish convicts. They refused to attend church and insisted on the appointment of a Catholic priest and a separate service. Despite punishments that would make an Al-Qaeda suspect crack, they refused to budge and eventually the authorities gave in to their demands. And so Australia got its first Catholic prison chapel.
I like to think that Sam Nolan was one of those who fought for the right to speak to God in the way he saw fit. It seems to me that this is how they retained some dignity in this dehumanising place. It’s odd the things that make you proud to be Irish.
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