I greatly admire real hermits, male and female. I have a cousin in Australia who is a hermit monk. Quite a person, who has been a mentor of mine since I met him (the only time) in 1991. He is the only priest I have ever felt a connection with. He knows the Dreamtime, he lives it, but through Christianity. He had the perfect blend of Old Man and Innocent Child, he’d be the Wise Man if you pulled a card. He gave me a beautiful explanation of Neo Platanism which I was studying at the time in Art History. I remember thinking of floating bubbles of perfection orbiting above the clouds, and reaching up to take one at a time.
I had always heard stories about my father’s cousin, Father Daniel O’Donovan, who lived in a hut in Fitzroy Crossing in the middle the bush in Australia. That he fell out of a jeep once and wasn’t found for several days in the bush, that he wrote poetry inspired by the Aboriginal Dreamtime and spoke the aboriginal dialect of wherever he was stationed at the time. When I was in India for the first time in 1997, in Dharmsala, studying Tibetan, Dan was in India on sabbatical for that year and while I was there for most of it, I never found him. India is obviously vast, and I had no idea at the time where he was studying in Ashrams in Chennai and Rishikesh. I ran up to a bunch of old, white men in Dharmsala in the Blue Cafe, as I overheard them talking about Christianity and Buddhism- my logic was that they’d know where Father Dan was. But they thought I was a bit unhinged I think, looking for a random priest in India. I might have been homesick.
Australia was kind of significant in my life anyway, since my sister-godmother Kristin had gone there in her twenties, when I was a teen locked up in a boarding school. She’d send me pictures in the bush, pictures holing Koala bears, pictures at Ayer’s Rock/ Ulluru pictures with her cousins (we were half sisters) and letters in her calligraphic writing about her adventures.
I had ancestors who charged off to Australia in ships. They weren’t convicts, they just ended up there by strange twists of fate. My mother’s great grandfather was a man called John McGrath who may have narrowly escaped a workhouse in Bagnelstown, Co. Carlow during the Great Genocide in Ireland (1845-50), which devoured a million and forced another million into migration, thousands dying on the ‘famine ships’ to America. John McGrath somehow got to England, possibly to a Liverpool workhouse, and then moved to London where he met Elizabeth Hannah, his neighbour on Holland Street, while he was working as a house servant for Colonel Henry Johns. Colonel Johns was of the 6th Dragoon Guards in the Crimean war. John, my Great Great Grandfather, may have learned dispensary skills in the Crimean War.
My Great Aunt Eileen McGrath wrote of John:
“John was a character and Irishman with a suitable temper when the occasion called for it. Black hair and blue eyes. Threatened to knock down the front door when he bought Elizabeth home late one night and her father refused to let her in.” - Eileen McGrath
John and Elizabeth were married in Cairo, Egypt, on the 20th March 1865. Nobody knows now why they married there, maybe they eloped. John had possibly been in the army, under Col. Johns, and after he served 10 years, he may have found work painting and decorating in Egypt, according to one family theory. The Suez Canal was being built around about that time so there would have been plenty of work. He lived in both Cairo and Suez with Elizabeth. How insanely romantic in my eyes, but perhaps not in others. I have a thing about Egypt and I’m itching to go.
They had two children while living in Egypt, Eliza and Blanche, but Eliza died young and their third child Florence was born in May 1869 in Balmain, Sydney they emigrated and where John worked as a painter. On 10th July 1871 their first son, Alfred, was born in Melbourne in the Lying-in-Hospital.
“Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
They moved to New Zealand to Hokitika which is on the west coast of the South Island where there had been a major gold rush in 1864 and later a large mental asylum was built and John may have worked in the dispensary. Their next child, Ernest, was born there in November 1873 and in 1874 their eldest son Alfred died from septicaemia when he was 3 ½ years old. Sometime in the next year, the family moved once again, this time to Auckland where John became a constable and there, their son Ernest died. John was by now a constable. The Auckland Star reported:
“Yesterday the infant son of Constable McGrath, we regret to announce, was drowned in a well situated in Albert Barracks. The well was an unused one, and covered with boards, which had become decayed with age, and the little fellow (he was only about two years old) must have fallen through these when crawling over them. There were about six feet of water in the well, and before it was known the child had fallen in he must have been dead. Dr Hooper, who was sent for, pronounced at once there was no possibility of restoring animation. We understand that the deceased was the only son of his bereaved parents, and their other two children being girls. Much sympathy has been expressed on all sides for the family, Constable McGrath having many friends, and by whom is he greatly respected.” - The Auckland Star, 1874
They moved to Australia after the tragedy, after Herbert Edgar had been born on the 5th March 1876 in New Zealand. My Great Aunt Eileen wrote that John “answered and was accepted at Brewarrina to become dispenser of the hospital there. Authorities not too pleased when he arrived with wife and family but he insisted it was he and his family or nothing.”
His two sisters had already been sent to Australia already, from Ireland, along with 4,000 other Famine Orphans between 1848 and 1850 in a resettlement scheme for destitute girls. Their mother, (and John’s too of course) Mary, was still alive and living in one of the workhouses in Bagnelstown.
Life went on in Australia for them, where my grandfather Raymond and my Great Aunt Eileen were born up the Paramatta River in Sydney. Then they moved to Cambridge and London and then they moved to Ireland and USA, in another scattering across the globe. My ancestors liked to charge around a lot.
“Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Anyway back to Father Dan. The hermit. The latter day Desert Father who lived a hermit’s life in Broome, Western Australia, who studied Yoga in India and the Jesus prayer of Syriac Christianty. He is a poet, who is familiar with a lot of aboriginal dialects and has lived with and among aboriginal Australians for most of his decades there. His contributions to “Nelen Yubu, The Journal of Aboriginal Theology and Life” have been collected in Dan O’Donovan, “Dadirri” (Kensington: Nelen Yubu Missiological Unit, 2001).”
“For life is a journey through a wilderness”
― Bruce Chatwin
Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth inhabited not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but hunter-gatherers. They had labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent that they called Songlines or Dreaming Tracks- which to the Aboriginals were the very tracks of their very ancestors—the Way of the Law. They travel these roads to sing, dance, marry and to arrange territorial boundaries by agreement rather than by force. That was of course how it was, once, before the colonialists arrived.
“You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things" in it?”
― Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
Dan wove aboriginal stories and dreamtime into his poetry.
I’m pretty sure that Dan was living in Fitzroy Crossing or Wyndham in Kimberley, WA, when my parents came to see him in 1990, to get married for a second time. He gave them this carved piece in memory:
He moved to Beagle Bay in WA, a medium-sized Aboriginal Community on the western side of the Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome, a community established by Trappist Monks around 1890. Dan lived there mostly as a hermit, entirely open hearted to the indigenous traditions there. He contemplated ‘Dadirri’ and wrote a book about it- an aboriginal word for contemplation, which he learned about from the elder , Miriam-Rose Ungunmer-Baumann.
This humble tale tells how Dan entered the Cistercian monastery at Roscrea, Co. Tipperary and then, after studying in Rome, arrived at Tarrawarra monastery, Victoria in 1962. Now, 62 years later, he is still in Broome, WA.
Dan was influenced in his earlier years by Charles de Foucauld of Algeria, one of the Desert Fathers, Enda of Aran, Ita of Limerick and Kevin of Glendalough. ‘Two thousand years ago, Ireland was an oral society that entered into dialogue with literate Christianity.’
Dan is the only person in the world in the last 15 years that I have had a correspondence with, by real post. I took up the gauntlet when my father died in 2009. He has been a great mentor to me and is a person with an immensly kind heart. When he was on sabbatical in what he called ‘the holy country India’ in 1997, I went looking for him but I was in Dharamsala and he was in Chennai.
I think of the Dreamtime that Dan embraced. Across the landmass of Australia is the Rainbow Serpent, associated with rain and water, fertility and food, and with the prosperity of a community, found in rock art there from 6000 years ago and further back in time. The all-powerful rainbow serpent travelled across the flat land in search of his own people. As he travelled from the south to the north of the country, he made formations in the land. I think of my own ancestors, and their migrations. And Dan’s.
This brings me to Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, one of my favourite books. Chatwin writes of two companions, traveling and talking together, exploring hopes and dreams, and the people they encounter. Set in almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?
He asks the questions that help me map the wild migratory tracks of my ancestors - the McGraths, and the extraordinary Father Dan. He maintains in Songlines that migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones and that ‘migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey-
a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
In a bizarre crossing of songlines, a woman turned up in a workshop on memoir writing that I taught with Liosa McNamara, a few years ago. Her name was Elizabeth and she was a missionary nun who had lived in Australia for about forty years.
“Did you ever meet Father Dan O’Donovan there?” I asked her.
“I knew him well. He was the priest in Fitzroy Crossing. Everybody knew him. He’s the priest in Bruce Chatwins’ book Songlines, who lived in a hut.”
Now, that’s something I might put in my own memoir, one day.
–Many thanks to my cousin Sylvia Embling for all the information about the McGrath family history
Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it. The Bushmen, who walk distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul's survival in another world. 'When we die, we die,' they say.- Bruce Chatwin, Songlines
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Excellent!
This is a facinating blog, woven with art and literary insights and so many possibilities, what incredible details of your family tree, I loved it!🌿💞💖