Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victoria by Janet McCalman

Author:Janet McCalman [McCalman, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Australia & New Zealand
ISBN: 9780522877540
Google: sJFFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2021-09-28T00:18:44.418522+00:00

McLoughlin gave up farming and made a home in Mitchell Street, Kyneton, where he died, aged seventy, in 1896. As for his lineage, he had failed to secure a stake in the land and his children faced a struggle to make a living as the economy collapsed into the 1890s depression. Two of his sons and a daughter went to the Western Australian goldfields in the 1890s, where one son, William, died in a mining accident, a month after his father had died. The daughter who went to Western Australia had married in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, and another daughter married a Kyneton constable, Arthur Albert Calwell, who rose to be a superintendent. The family were becoming established, and even though Michael passed on the names of his family in Ireland and their history, it seems likely that neither of his free-immigrant wives knew he had been a convict. Or if they did, they changed the story. The names of his mother and siblings were passed down the generations, but his widow told his grandson, Arthur Augustus Calwell, that Michael McLoughlin had jumped ship to get to the goldfields. That grandson was born two days after Michael died, and when he rose to be Australia’s first Commonwealth minister for immigration, he asked some of his officers to check the shipping records to find out about his grandfather’s arrival in Melbourne: they found nothing.

Arthur Calwell came within one seat of becoming prime minister in the 1961 federal election and served as a principled leader of the Labor Party during a time of savage factionalism. He was proud of his Irish heritage, which had shaped his politics, but he had assumed that his grandfather was a victim of the Great Hunger. That he was more a victim of Ireland’s savage regime against Catholics may have been a greater source of pride.32

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