Ned Kelly's Immigrant Song
Categories: In the News , History , Award Winners , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
I’ll be after the wearin’ o’ the green in this space during March, which makes a fine Irish History Month. It’s not just the St. Patrick’s Day that’s in it; rain and spring air recall the Emerald Isle, so fertile that the Sassenach (English, or “Saxons”) kept it “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.” Bad as it could be to have a thriving neighbor, it was even worse for Protestant England to have Catholic harbors next door from which other Papist countries could (and did) try to launch invasions.
“They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.” My ancestors came to America over the past 300 years of increasing crisis in the homeland. The most fortunate ones were 18th-century refugees from the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Meade family and Stephen Moylan (first president of The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick) fought alongside George Washington. Thomas Riley, one of the “wild geese” who found work as mercenaries, arrived in Lafayette’s Irish regiment to whack the Sassenach over here.
At the other extreme were my Toohey great-great-grandparents, who disembarked dead in New Orleans from a "coffin ship" during the Famine of the mid-19th century. In True History of the Kelly Gang, a Man Booker Prize-winning novel about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Peter Carey makes a beautiful immigrant song out of the lives of the luckless exiles, especially in a passage that intones the names of convict ships like Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad.
“When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships the ROLLA and the TELICHERRY and the RODNEY and the PHOEBE DUNBAR and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 5 crosses nailed one atop the other.”
In the same frank, pungent, and musical (i.e., Irish) voice throughout, Carey lays out the elements of the traditional tale within the story of Ned’s adventures: The consequences, good and bad, of Celtic independence. The longing for land with the family safe on it. The complex relations between family members desperate to survive – together, but sometimes at the expense of each other. After reading True History, my sister, eyes a-blazin’, said of Ned’s beautiful, dangerous Quinn mother, “Do you know what she does to him?” (This is probably a good time to mention award-winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s recent release, Mothers and Sons: Stories.)
As for the banshee and how long she can survive in a foreign land, yiz might remember that on a 2002 trip to Newport and Covington, Ky. – the town where my great-grandmother Toohey was sent as a baby – Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams gave a speech at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, attended a fundraiser, rang the World Peace Bell, and became a Kentucky Colonel.
This hero’s welcome should come as no surprise, since Irish Americans heavily financed the War of Independence which created the Irish Free State, now the Republic of Ireland – but more about that amazing story, as told by two great novelists, in a later post.
