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and meat or butter in
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the evening.' He also noted in 1828: 'I recall the time, around 35 years ago, when every able-
bodied farmer had peas and beans, but they're outdated now because of potatoes, and few sow
them except the well-born'.
The better-off farmers and above all the priests ate the best in village communities; meat of any
sort was apparently something of a rarity among the peasantry.
'It is well known,' wrote a social commentator in 1845, 'that the great body of the people pass
through life without ever tasting beef or mutton'. But he added: 'There are to be found in all fairs
what the people term spoileen tents -that is, tents in which fresh mutton is boiled and sold out,
with bread and soup'. Much beer was drunk at fairs and festivities, and whiskey, which WM
Thackeray in 1843 described as 'a very deleterious drink... Two glasses will be often found to
cause headaches, heartburns and fevers to a person newly arrived in the country'. A brew called
scailtin was popular: hot whiskey, spiced or flavoured. Thackeray also remarked: 'Nor can
anyone pass through the land without being touched by the extreme love of children among the
people: they swarm everywhere'. A female visitor in 1841 wrote: 'It is impossible to overrate, in
describing, the devoted attachment of Irish mothers to their children - to their sons especially'.
Young Patrick Casey must have been well loved. And Mary Honeycombe's anguished cry - 'I
don't want to leave my children!" - makes even sadder sense.
Henry Inglis wrote a few years earlier: 'The lower orders of Irish have much feeling for each
other. It is a rare thing to hear an angry, or contemptuous expression, addressed to anyone who
is poor... and it is a fact, that they are most exemplary in the care that they take of their destitute
relatives'. And William Carleton, observing revellers at Christmas, wrote: 'Many a time might be
seen two Irishmen, who had got drunk together, leaving a fair or market, their arms about each
other's necks, from whence they only removed them to kiss and hug one another the more
lovingly'.
Is it improbable that a version of such male affection was transmuted by the Irish emigrants,
along with their close family concern and loyalty, into the Australian mateship of today?
Certainly Mary Honeycombe's ancestors were a happy people, despite their poverty, rejoicing
when they could in dancing (to fiddle or flute), in singing, in fun and games; and because a large
majority were illiterate, they delighted in the spoken word, in proverbs, quips and sallies, and
the telling of tales around the fire. Nothing was more Irish and more ancient than the keening
over a corpse at the wake preceding a funeral. In an Irish dictionary of 1768, the keen or
keening is described as 'a cry for the dead, according to certain loud and mournful notes, and
verses, wherein the pedigree, land and property, generosity and good actions of the deceased
person, and his ancestors, are diligently and harmoniously recounted".
This was all a part of the early life of Patrick Casey and his wife, Winifred, and in their teenage
years that keening over the dead would cut through the Irish
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air and assail their ears a thousand times before they lost all hope of happiness in their native
land and crossed the sea to England.
Patrick was born at Rath in County Clare about 1829. His birthplace was later noted as such
by the Immigration Board in Sydney on his arrival. But according to his death certificate it was
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