Away from Tipperary - Nicholas Sadleir, Australian Gentleman

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A Long Way from Tipperary

The author, a retired 70-year-old, starts a quest for the story of his great-grandparents on the Birdsville Track by talking to his great-grandfather who has been dead for 107 years. It is the best season for 50 years. They rejoice in it as the great-grandfather describes his drovers grazing the channel country as they walked cattle for months to the railhead at Marree for shipment to Adelaide. They talk of sheep and cattle runs the great-grandfather had. The great-grandfather talks of his privileged childhood in Ireland, insurrection and the potato famine before he leaves with his brothers for Australia.

Mungerannie, August 2011 – I sat in my car parked on gravelly clay outside the hotel opposite the fuel pumps talking to my greatgrandfather. Mungerannie was on the Birdsville track between Marree in South Australia and Birdsville in Queensland. The place was a waterhole on an abandoned desert stock route where cattle walked from Queensland cattle runs for months to the railhead at Marree for rail transport to Adelaide. Only tourists, geologists and stock transporters use it now. The pub was a commercial gamble and my great-grandfather, who had been dead for 107 years, said it was when he was alive too. He told me about Mungerannie:

‘We walked the stock route to the railhead at Marree for several drives of cattle we sold in Adelaide. The South Australian government sank a bore here, if I remember correctly in about 1900, but there was a well here long before that, with a hotel of sorts and our drovers used to water our cattle here on the way down from Queensland.’

Pam rapped on the window. She was smiling at me tentatively – middle-aged – she had the friendly and tolerant look of someone who was used to motorists chatting to a windscreen.

‘Are you okay? Can I help you?’

I started, blushed, got out of the car, looked at her with a silly grin, looked at the ground and muttered.

‘Sorry. I was sort of talking to myself. Yes. I hope you can help me.’

I asked her humbly for a room, a meal, and said, almost casually, ‘I have a small hole in my fuel tank and I wondered if anyone here could help me fix it.’

‘Well there’s no problem with the room or the meal, Phil’s out the back, if you can wait five minutes, I’ll get him to have a look at the problem, he’s pretty handy.’

Great-grandfather Nicholas Sadleir remained silent. I imagined him smiling. His awkward 70 year old great-grandson, daydreaming and ill-prepared, had been rushing about and getting into trouble in Ireland, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and now in South Australia. He spoke in a familiar way to unreliable people of uncertain political stances and he seemed to believe what they told him – Australians, it seemed, had become more ill-mannered and independently spirited. The questions about Sadleirs in Ireland and Australia made Nicholas Sadleir reflect on his life and times – his 15 children and the fortunes he had and lost, but it was strange to be talking to a great-grandson who was older in years, had lived in the luxury of the 20th and 21st century (he even had a motor car with a telephone and interrupted conversations by taking calls on it and used it to photograph a couple of dingos on the track) and asked so many questions about Ireland and Australia in the 19th century. The great-grandson spent extravagantly.

Dingos on the Birdsville Track

He posed questions about blackfellows, money, marriage, crime, affection, friendships, politics, nobility and class, law keeping and religion in Australia and Ireland. His journey down the Birdsville track served no purpose. The track was for drovers with cattle, or mailmen, not for lone motorists. What was the point? He, Nicholas, had never travelled south of Boulia on it. There was a family to care for, stock to buy and sell and stations to manage.

Nicholas Sadleir wasn’t there. Neither were his siblings who came to Australia: Richard, a Melbourne surgeon, Marshal, a Mansfield lawyer, famous John, the policeman who supervised Ned Kelly’s capture at the siege of Glenrowan, nor Nicholas’ twin, Helena, who vanished. I’d imagined them from stories about them and the history of the times they lived in. I thought they were noblemen. History, photographs and imagination drove me. He and his brothers and sister had been real. I wanted him real again but there was nothing spiritual about it. He simply made a good travelling companion. With 15 children, he had to have been a reasonable parent. That made him a useful great-grandfather and storyteller. We were on our way south from cattle stations he had in Queensland. The country was looking wonderful. It had had good rains for two years. Before we got to Mungerannie we’d got to know each other better. Nicholas knew I was his daughter, Georgina’s, grandson. I’d told him that when I’d started the conversations we had on the way to Queensland but we were awkward with the way we talked. He called me Robbie at first to not confuse me with his son Robert and I called him Great- Grandfather.

‘Robbie, it seems we are getting to know each other. Greatgrandfather seems too formal, and, in the scheme of things, you are my senior. I died when I was 68 and you are 70. You address me as an old man and I address you as a child. What do you your friends call you? ’

‘Red.’

‘Why.’

‘Because I had red hair.’

‘Had? Are you grey now? I went grey in my forties, but I had a redheaded daughter.’

‘No. It’s still red.’

‘Why aren’t you called Blue. I had several redheaded coves we called Blue on Albemarle. We had a Menindee Blue, a Booligal Blue and a Victoria Lake Blue. They were reliable coves although one was a bit quick-tempered and spent a lot of time in the Wilcannia lock-up after a spree whenever he went to town.’

‘When I went to boarding school there was already a Blue there before me so they called me Red, Great-Grandfather.’

‘Well I shall call you Blue henceforth, but please desist from calling me Great-Grandfather. Call me Nicholas.’

“No. If you choose to call me Blue, you will be Holas."

“Holas! I’ve never been called that.”

“And I’ve never been called Blue.”

‘A hard bargain Blue.’

‘Yes but Holas isn’t a bad name. It’s dramatic with its oratorical beginning, dignified and soft-sounding and it gets rid of Nic – the devil in you – if there is any. I believe you were something of a church administrator in Tasmania. To support that, Holas sounds holy. And it’s ideal for somebody who’s dead because there isn’t a living soul I know who answers to that name – so nobody will get mixed up and answer for you when I’m talking to you.’

‘You’re planning a long conversation, Blue?’

‘I reckon you may have a hell of a story, Holas.’

‘What do you want to know Blue?’

‘Everything. But to begin, how did you learn enough to manage one of the biggest sheep stations in Australia less than 10 years after your arrival from Ireland as a raw teenager?’

‘Teenager, Blue?’

‘It means someone between 13 and 19, Holas. It’s the TEEN in the word that helps to classify them – someone moving to adulthood from childhood. Did you not call them that? ’

‘Never.’

‘Well what did you call them, your children, when they were at that stage?’

‘Youth! Blue. We called them Youth. We spoke the Queen’s English. ’

‘Yes well I suppose you did at home Holas. But what about in the goldfields or the stock camps?’

‘Yes well – perhaps that was another matter – but no one ever called anyone a TEENAGER’.

‘Well what did you call yourself when you arrived in the colony? Surely you didn’t call yourself a youth, Holas. Did you call yourself a young gentleman?’

‘Well yes.’

‘You’re bloody joking.’

‘Usually I left out the young.

‘Did you call yourself that all your life?’

‘It became a slightly more awkward to use it by the time of the federation of the colonies. People wanted to seem slightly more equal, and we didn’t normally use it in conversation – it came up mainly in correspondence or newspaper reports. I was often called Nicholas Sadleir, Gentleman. Other people used it. One didn’t usually denote oneself a gentleman even if one was.’

‘Nowadays being a gentleman can literally mean keeping one’s unwelcome hands off females – or, with more refinement, good manners, opening doors, making people feel less shy in new circumstances, and so on. I think it has changed a bit. In your day Holas, it was a rank, a position even an obligation. It placed you as a wealthy man who did no work?’

‘Yes. You described it correctly, Bluey. Gentlemen worked, but not manually. They directed and planned and invested. They commissioned professionals. They led good order. That sort of thing.’

‘Were you ever called a shearer, Holas?’

‘Never,...