'After Transportation': Some Memories/Reconstructions of a Late 19th Century Irish-Like Colonial Frontier in Northern New South Wales

Abstract

Keith Garvey (1922-1997) and Col Newsome (1914-2008) were two bush writers, who enshrined in their personally presented/performed (historical) stories and poems/ballads, an engaging Irish sensibility, a like moral anger [indeed, a true saeva indignatio, particularly against those who 'led' their fellows to war, social squalor, or other abasement], and a plain workaday sense of morality that was less censorious of their [Protestant cynical] fellows, than defiantly contemptuous of English/absentee pomposity and corruption. Even so, they were both full of disgust at brutal police officers, especially towards bushrangers, and venal and weak clergy, and so deeply concerned for the tragic fates of the countless numbers who were abused and betrayed in the new land, whether they were of convict stock, driven out by the 'Clearances' or the Potato Famine, or cheated of their very pathetic huts by the corrupt supervisors and managers so regularly employed by the great pastoral companies. And, very quietly, in the background - for both writers and for the readers of their works, however laconic they may seem - there is the practice of a great compassion, a respect for all the Aboriginal peoples, and a frank acknowledgement of sinfulness in all, and the refusal to 'knock' each other for human frailties, let alone despise them because of colour, faith, job or indifferent health. In truth, in their own crowded lives and enacted philosophies, they were truly whole men, the last of the Australian bushmen for whom the greatest betrayal of one's fellows was indifference to their needs.