Casual Racism and Cattle Rustling in Northern Australia

The Irishman
by Elizabeth O'Conner
p. 1960

Despite being set in northern Australia, Elizabeth O’Conner’s The Irishman is an inherently Irish novel, as it is tragic and naturalistic and chiefly concerned with the sins of the father. For awhile near the beginning, I kept forgetting it wasn’t set in Ireland; what kept bringing me back to reality is the overwhelming presence of racist undertones in response to the assortment of aboriginal characters.

At its heart, The Irishman is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age story. Young Michael Doolan—twelve years old at novel’s start—is a shadow of his father, Paddy Doolan, the notorious, stoic and often drunk teamster in an early 20^th century remote Australian town. To Michael, Paddy can do no wrong and he stands tall in the boy’s eyes, in spite of his cowering mother and rebellious older brother Will, who hates his father’s uncivilized, selfish ways. Michael sees none of this though, enamored as he is with the hero his father represents. To the reader, the cracks are already beginning to show but to Michael, it understandably takes a bit more time and perspective, and it all starts when Paddy abandons his family about halfway through the book. Michael, determined to truly know his father, sets out to find him, but it takes him a long time and a lot of trouble to get there and when he finally does, he’s not the same boy that set out.

Michael is growing up in a rough, constantly changing world. He often straddles the line between the old ways of his father and the new method which his brother—exiled from his home until his father exiles himself—later adopts. The contrast between the old and the young is felt and there is no clear emphasis on which way is the best way, but it is clear that with the advent of the automobile and other technologies, the old ways, for better or worse, are dying. In both his chosen profession and his place in his boy’s heart, Paddy Doolan is slowly becoming obsolete. It is a tough theme to wrestle with and O’Conner handles it with grace and beauty. This would have been a novel worth reading again and exploring its complex themes... if not for the casual racism.

It starts somewhat innocuously. Will, having left home for a job wrangling cattle at a nearby station called Timbooran, finds himself in thrall with a black aboriginal servant girl who works for the station manager’s wife. The girl—for lack of a proper name, simply called Bo-Bo, a pile of gibberish she uttered when they found her as a baby—is educated and appears to be a favorite of the missus, and it is her unusual forwardness that both repulses and attracts Will to her. But he cannot start a proper relationship because people will talk so when he knocks the girl up then shuts her down refusing to acknowledge it, poor Bo-Bo throws herself off a cliff to her death. Will not only moves on, but his life gets infinitely better. I kept waiting for the novel to revisit the Bo-Bo story and Will’s own tale of growing up and accepting his sins but it never does and—unless you count getting his face punched in by Paddy, which anyone could see coming a mile away—Will never even receives his comeuppance.

The only reason I could summon for this awkward and unpleasant side story is to draw a parallel between Will and Mr. Dalgliesh, the station manager Michael comes to work for who alters the course of Michael’s life. Dalgliesh, a stern, taciturn, humorless man, is at first a bad match for wild, charismatic Michael, who is constantly planning to escape this work detail. Dalgliesh gives Michael grunt work, is moody and laconic, and at one point retaliates against a cattle-stealing neighbor by murdering 200 of his cattle in what can only be considered the act of a sociopath, and yet his ‘darkest’ secret is the implicated affair with his aboriginal servant Paula. I spent far too long trying to find the part where Paula was revealed to be a sympathetic character and Michael learned to get over his racism. Sure, she harbored a crush on a married man, but the only sin anyone was concerned with was that Paula dared to be familiar with white people. From the moment she appears, O’Conner’s language makes it very clear that there is something sinister about Paula and Dalgliesh. We are never given an opportunity to view her situation in a sympathetic light... not until Paula is brutally murdered by a frustrated and off her rocker Mrs. Dalgliesh near the end. Michael hears of these events later and shrugs it off, thinking Paula probably didn’t deserve it but it’s no matter because the black characters are treated as disposable and their loss is never felt. Michael even goes back to work for Dalgliesh in the end, having seen that his way was 'best.'

All of this I might have overlooked, but then O’Conner had to throw in one last far-too-forward black servant who overstepped his boundaries. This one had the audacity to try to tell others how to do their job and for that he got his face punched in by a pissed off kid with missing daddy issues and no one felt bad for him at all. Look, I know this book was written in the fifties, so I ought not to be surprised, but the dogged racism really distracted me from the whole experience and pulled me out of the events. They weren’t even necessary to tell the story of boy and man and that rocky path called adolescence. It’s as if O’Conner just really had some racist things to say and invented a venue from which to spout them.

All of this criticism and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the white women (the only ones we’re supposed to like, apparently), are all timid, fearful messes accepting of verbally and physically abusive relationships. For a book written by a woman, it sure does a disservice to female writers, and yet it still won the Miles Franklin Award in 1960.

I suppose it’s fitting that I’m reading a novel with outdated, politically incorrect language and attitude, when the underlying theme is about accepting one’s obsoleteness in a changing world.