News

Published in Tinteán no 1 August 2007

The north-west of Melbourne developed separately from the rest of Melbourne - Moonee Ponds Creek is the dividing line. These suburbs became a sort of world of their own, as people did not usually move out of them. If you made money in Essendon you moved to Strathmore, not to the south-eastern suburbs. So the rest of Melbourne doesn’t know much about of these suburbs - they have lower social visibility and mobility.

Maps of Irish Catholics in Melbourne show them settling first in the inner suburbs, but when they moved out, it was mainly to the north-west. These suburbs had the highest Catholic proportion in Melbourne, and this was reinforced after the second world war with the addition of Catholics from Italy and Malta, and from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states.

After the second world war, the federal electorate of Maribyrnong, which included Essendon and surrounding suburbs, had the highest proportion of Catholics in Australia. Essendon council figures in the 1970s demonstrate this: it was 40% Catholic (much higher than the national average), Church of England was 17% (low), and other Christian 23% (high). The Catholic national average at the time was about 23%, and Church of England 28%.

North Melbourne

We know Irish immigrants to Melbourne usually boarded first at Emerald Hill (South Melbourne), but the place of employment for many was the North Melbourne area, also know as Hotham and West Melbourne. Here there were a number of important employment centres, all connected with transport: Spencer Street railway station, the market in Victoria St, the Newmarket stockyards, the Metropolitan Meat Market in Courtney St, North Melbourne, and Flemington racecourse. Connected to these were associated industries, like tanneries, abattoirs for the meat and allied trades, horses for transport and racing stock, and drays for transporting building materials for roads, sewerage and houses as Melbourne grew. The north-west suburbs were characterized by these trades, rather than, say, manufacturing industries, which were in the inner east and later the south-east.

People in the transport and livestock trades moved out northwest as they successively set up homes in Flemington, Ascot Vale, Moonee Ponds, Essendon, North Essendon and Glenroy, as the stock and station agent Harry Peck’s book Memoirs of a Stockman shows. Kirk’s Horse Bazaar moved out from the city to north Essendon. The Irish, being poor immigrants, often with rural backgrounds, naturally gravitated to these trades. Our family and our Ascot Vale cousins, the Spillanes, were typical Irish Catholic families starting in the later 19th century at the labourer, not proprietary level, but gradually rising in the social scale. There were other trades in the north-west suburbs, but these were the most noticeable.

Moving Out

There is a further, earlier dimension to this story. It’s a story of moving in to Melbourne, as well as moving out. In transport terms Melbourne is accessible only to the north and west - there are three great roads to the hinterland, the Ballarat Road to the west, the Sydney Road to the north and Castlemaine-Bendigo Road, called Mt Alexander Rd, to the north-west bisecting the other two. The rest of Melbourne is blocked by hills and forests to the north-east and east, and by the bay. The north-west area therefore became the hub for transport to and from the hinterland and interstate. Livestock brought to Melbourne to be sold came in by walking, by train or by truck through this northwest salient. Just outside the suburbs, properties were used for agistment, the last chance to feed up the animals before the final walk into Newmarket.

As the Irish Catholics moved out to Essendon and beyond, they eventually met up with an original, much earlier Irish Catholic settlement of farmers around Keilor, such as the Dodds, Foxes and Hogans, all old Keilor families. When my grandfather Patrick Morgan bought the ‘Niddrie’ property (now the Essendon airport) in 1900, he first went to Mass at St Augustine’s Church, Keilor, the nearest Catholic Church. The natural link and orientation was to Keilor, rather than to the suburbs of Melbourne. Later St Monica’s, Moonee Ponds became the family’s parish church, then later on St Teresa’s, Essendon.

Great Houses

As the Irish moved out beyond Essendon past the suburbs they also met Protestant Irish, Scots and English landlords and their great houses. There were mansions in the suburbs e.g. Travancore at Ascot Vale (which got its name from the family selling horses to the British army in India), and McCrackens at Strathmore, but further out there existed a ring of comfortable farms with great houses (at Bulla, Tullamarine, Keilor, Sunbury, Broadmeadows, Cragieburn, and so on) where those who had made money and had some social pretensions wanted to set themselves up as landed gentlemen on comfortable properties outside a large city, as they had seen wealthy people do at home in the British Isles. Brewster and Foster were early Protestant Irish, as was William Pomeroy Greene at Woodlands, Oaklands Junction. Other large houses included Taylor’s Overnewton, McDougall’s Arundel and Big Clarke at Rupertswood at Sunbury. The Catholic foundling home at Broadmeadows had originally been one of these grand houses. The property ‘Niddrie’, begun in the early 1860s, was a minor example of this type.

The McCrackens ran hunts starting from the Lincolnshire Arms Hotel in north Essendon, and around 1890s the Melbourne Hunt Club operated from Oaklands Junction. It’s hard to realize it today, but this was a ‘snob’ area of Melbourne then, because other areas didn’t have these broad acres, or broadmeadows. Ultimately these properties didn’t succeed as farms because the fields are dry and full of stones, scotch thistles and tussocks. The Aborigines called the area ‘dutigalla’, treeless plains.

The famous Australian writer Rolf Boldrewood was a relative of the Greenes of Woodlands, and in Old Melbourne Memories he remembers an early steeplechase there with his Protestant Irish relatives and friends. Then he adds: ‘In this connection came Tom Brannigan, an active, resolute, humorous young Irishman. He was stud groom, and a model retainer during the first years of the settlement of Woodlands’. So there were Irish Catholic workers on these farms, and Irish small farmers at Donnybrook, Ballan, and the Romsey area.

Three Families

Patrick Morgan came to Melbourne as an uneducated Irish farm worker from County Louth with nothing. He worked as a navvy on construction sites, then bought drays, moved into transport and small construction, building laneways, gutters, streets, and finally sewers, some under the Yarra, under contract to the MMBW, and became moderately wealthy. For the first two decades of his life in Australia he lived as a bachelor in various North Melbourne boarding houses, mixing with his fellow Irish immigrants. His business partner Patrick McGrath came from West Meath only 10 miles way from his home in Ireland. My grandfather educated himself at evening classes, had a love of learning and in 1900, after two decades of hard work and at 45, married his partner’s daughter, Catherine McGrath, aged 20, and brought the ‘Niddrie’ property as a family home, but also as a vertically integrated investment, as horses and oats were raised there for his business. He knew Archbishop Mannix but was not entirely a supporter; coming from a part of Ireland with strong English influence, he admired the British Empire for its progress and organizing abilities, and so didn’t fit the anti-British Irish stereotype.

Our Spillane cousins were an Irish Australian North Melbourne family who started at the Melbourne Meat Market, and graduated to being wholesale butchers over three generations. My uncle John Spillane went to CBC North Melbourne, and eventually bought a large house with extensive grounds, ‘St Ives’ in Ascot Vale. The Morgan and Spillane families had enough money to visit Irish relatives and kept up contact by letters. They sang ‘The Mountains of Mourne’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, and ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, and were conscious of Ireland, not as a place of persecution, but as an amiable country, but with lesser prospects than Australia. My grandfather subsidized his family back in Ireland, and bought out sisters and cousins and settled them here.

My wife’s family were also from North Melbourne, but they got there by a different route. Irish Catholics with the family names of Hearn, Hehir, O’Donnell and Livingston (a converted Scot), they moved from Maldon after gold and their small farm failed, and arrived at North Melbourne during the 1890s depression, a typical move at the time. They were closely connected with Dr William Maloney, the local Federal member in Labor politics, and himself the illegitimate son of Big Clarke of Rupertswood and an Irish Catholic North Melbourne lass. My wife’s father graduated through the CYMS to be an ALP branch secretary and union official, and then after the split to be a DLP branch secretary. One part of the family moved to Kensington while working in the railways.

Social Composition

The Irish Catholic families of the northwest suburbs were dutiful, respectable and hard working, by no means Brendan Behan types. Senator Frank McManus was a typical example in personality – formerly a school teacher, direct, basic, without frills. The northwest suburbs had a large number of influential Evangelical churches, puritan, low church, wowserish, and the Catholics in some ways assimilated to the Methodist image – many rarely went to a pub or the races, in spite of proximity of the horse racing industry, there was no wild behaviour, no singlets at the table, there were a large number of unmarried aunts and uncles at family gatherings, women wore fox furs like Dame Nellie Melba, respectable even if lower middle class.

Before you tried anything, you were taught to ask in your mind: what would people say? what would people think? It was not a Catholic ghetto, but though we mixed with others, Catholics also kept tightly together, wholly caught up in spiritual and moral world deriving from Catholicism of a traditional kind - an endless round of novenas, retreats, emphasis on the final things, worry about sin, personal prayers, embracing a collective mind of some considerable antiquity. Tribal habits of mind persisted, even though we were not living a tribal life.

Sectarianism

I went to school at St Bernards CBC Moonee Ponds with the Tobin family, who told me their family laid out the bodies of their fellow Irish in North Melbourne who were too poor to pay for funerals during the great depression of the 1930s, and so they got into the funeral business. Uncle Phonse Tobin was president of the North Melbourne Football club as it, like Collingwood, was a predominately Catholic club, so Catholic its club history has been written by a priest, Monsignor Gerry Dowling. In contrast the Essendon team, dominated by Essendon Baptists-St Johns, with John Birt, a lay preacher, Ken Fraser and Ken Fletcher, had surprisingly, given the demographics, few Catholics in it in the 1950s, though later contemporaries of mine at St Bernard’s like Paul Doran and Kevin Egan made the firsts. The brothers told us in the 1950s that the Essendon City Council was allegedly Mason-controlled and perhaps anti-Catholic, and wouldn’t allow CBC Monee Ponds to use the Essendon Football Ground for weekly sports days. But sectarianism was generally mild.

In the mid 1960s three out of the four Labor Federal parliamentary leaders, Senators Pat Keneally and Nick McKenna, and Arthur Caldwell, were all Catholics from this part of Melbourne - the other was Gough Whitlam. Senator McManus and Bob Santamaria were also prominent. They were all from the same stable, CBC North Melbourne, except for Keneally who was from South Melbourne, which had a Catholic Tech. My father and his brothers went to CBC North Melbourne and knew these politicians as acquaintances, rather than as political friends or enemies. CBC North Melbourne was founded after 1900, and St Bernards CBC Moonee Ponds in 1941 for the same group of Irish Australian Catholics who had moved further out. St Aloysius North Melbourne and St Columba’s Essendon were equivalent Catholic girls schools. The brothers were mildly anti-British: we were told not to admire Churchill who had sold out Australians in both world wars. Australian nationalism was stronger than Irish nationalism, though the penal law injustices in Ireland that led to hedge-schooling (and to the Christian Brothers) were frequently mentioned. Catholicism, of the moral and anti-Communist variety, was the dominant influence, not Irishness.

Patrick Morgan is currently a Fellow of the State Library of Victoria, editing two volumes of the writings of the political activist B. A. Santamaria for publication by Melbourne University Publishing.