 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Flanagan) died in the famine years, as both are recorded on Patrick's arrival in Sydney as being
dead then. So they must have been dead when he sailed from England. Winifred's mother was
also dead by this time, although her father still lived in dunes.
She and Patrick married in Clunes before they left for England. The ceremony took place in
1853, with the sound of keening still rank in the air and a mournfulness in their hearts. But
whatever jollity could be found in Clunes or thereabouts must have been theirs on their wedding
night. The famine years were over: they were alive. Did anyone dance, or bear to dance, at their
wedding? Probably not Winifred. For it seems she was already pregnant. This perhaps
prompted the marriage, as it often did in those days, as well as the Caseys' departure for
England, with Patrick resolutely turning his back on his home, his family, his parents' graves, and
seeking a better life for himself and his future children, away from the bitter earth of Ireland.
They crossed the Irish Sea and came to Wigan, and there the Caseys' first child was born, on
11 August 1853. They called her Mary. What else? For both their mothers, now dead, had also
carried the name.
Patrick was a labourer when Mary was born. But he gave his trade when he stepped ashore at
Sydney as 'coal miner1. Clearly he must have toiled for all or part of 1854 in one of the pits of
the south-west Lancashire coal-field.
Wigan's industrial prosperity was built on coal, as well as on engineering, machine-making, brick
and drain-pipe making, on chemicals, castings, breweries, printing and dyeing, timber and saw-
mills, cotton and clothing, and the manufacture of oil and grease. Wigan was a whirlpool of
activity and noise. Black trains and wagons steamed and whistled, clattered and clanked,
carrying and fetching raw materials and manufactured goods, as did the long barges on the
grimy canal linking Liverpool and Manchester. Wigan, with its warehouses, wharves and piers,
was the halfway house. The city was booming, belching steam and smoke. How far removed it
must have seemed to the young Irish couple from the misty hills and the little lakes of Clare.
How confined, squalid and raucous the little room that was their home. It must have seemed to
the Catholic Caseys like an ante-room in Hell; and in the summer of 1854, a few weeks before
the Crimean War began, they entered a ship in Liverpool, to lodge for five months on the rolling
sea. Mary was one year old.
243
They travelled steerage, as assisted emigrants, and their ship, the Nabob, reached Sydney on 2
February 1855, at the end of the Australian summer. The Casey's second child, Norah, was
conceived on the voyage out.
What happened to the Caseys after their arrival is a matter of much conjecture and more
research.
We know that Patrick and Winifred Casey produced many children, 13 at least. Mary, the
eldest, was followed by four other girls and eight boys. They are listed on Patrick's death
certificate. But none, as far as we know, was born in Tasmania, where Mary, in later life, said
she had been born, in Launceston. Tasmania appears as her place of birth on her children's birth
certificates. But on her death certificate it is given, presumably from information provided by a
younger brother or sister, as County Clare. Wigan was long forgotten. Either Mary was
disseminating a falsehood about her place of birth - but why? - or had been misled by family
information. Again, why? For surely every child knows where it was born. There is also no
reason to suppose that Patrick and Winifred Casey, who were poor Irish immigrants, moved
 |