Elizabeth O'Conner (1913–2000)

Elizabeth O’Conner (1913-2000) was the fourth winner of the fledgling Miles Franklin literary award, and the first woman to win the prize. The Irishman’s win in 1960 would have pleased Miles Franklin; it is a quintessentially Australian story set in the Gulf country. It celebrates what we might call ‘bush character’: stoicism, courage, self-discipline and determination.

O’Conner won the prize in 1960, in the years of postwar prosperity and well before the Swinging Sixties challenged long-established mores across the globe. Cities in Australia were being transformed by post-war immigration from Europe and by the growth in manufacturing which was driven by the sudden availability of cheap labour. The Irishman, however, explores a different period of transition. O’Conner was writing about what was already a vanished era – the inter-war years when bush life was being transformed by the arrival of the motor-vehicle in the early 1920s. While at one level it’s an engaging coming-of-age story, it is also the story of a remote community confronting decline.

The novel opens to the tune of the stampers at the battery beating down on the gold ore that is the life-blood of the town’s economy – but the boy Michael is alert to the shout that rings out across the town: ‘The teams are coming!’ He races away with the other boys to greet the arrival of his father, a teamster, ‘to where the red gravelly road curved away from the river and the town. The boys could hear the creak of the loaded wagon, the rumble of the wheels and the rich singing voice of a teamster calling to his leader.’

It is not entirely a romanticised scene: Paddy Doolan is a drunk who terrorises his family, and he’s more interested in going to the pub than he is in seeing his wife after weeks away. Michael knows this means trouble when Paddy eventually lurches home, but his fears are tempered by his admiration for his father’s skill in managing the horses. Will, his brother, hates Paddy but is powerless to intervene – so he abandons his demoralised mother to work as a stockman on a cattle station. But Michael hero-worships his father, and runs to meet the team, recognising Paddy’s approach by the sound of his horses’ hooves and the jangle of their harnesses. He knows each one of these horses by name, a far cry from the impersonal motor vehicles that are beginning to make their presence felt in these back-blocks. For there is not only talk of motor vehicles replacing the mail run, there is also the prospect of them replacing the teams which have ferried goods in and out of these backblocks since the days of first settlement. This talk is met mostly with suspicion, derision and outright hostility, and the pioneers of the industry get a rough time when they first set up shop. Will’s eventual decision to cast his lot with a local firm of carriers only cements the hostility between father and son.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2012/04/19/the-irishman-by-elizabeth-oconner/… (mer)