Tales of farming and Irish immigrants from Australian poet

We’ll all be ruined said Hanrahan
“It’s looking crook,” said Daniel Croke;
“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad.”
And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
Those verses are from Around the Boree Log by Patrick Joseph Hartigan, who wrote under the pseudonym John O’Brien. If he was around now, he might still be motivated to write about when the banks went broke or the weather was bad and his friend, Hanrahan, might still be saying that we’ll all be ruined.
Older readers who remember the bishop visiting each parish and examining children before Confirmation will sympathise with the young lad who put up his hand to answer:
And so, how pleased his lordship was and how he smiled to say,
“That’s good, my boy. Come, tell me now, and what is Christmas Day?”
The ready answer bared a fact no bishop ever knew,
“It’s the day before the races out at Tangmalangaloo.”
With the curse of emigration once more raising its ugly head, the last lines of his poem, The Trimmin’s on the Rosary might still be relevant,
“Ah, those little Irish mothers passing from us one by one!
Who will write the noble story of the good that they have done?
All their children may be scattered and their fortunes windward hurled,
But the Trimmin’s on the Rosary will bless them round the world.”
Those poems, and others such as At Casey’s After Mass, could have been written about an Ireland long gone. The poet was, in fact, Australian born but he was writing in a gentle and humorous way about the world he grew up in, a world of farming and Irish immigrants.
Hartigan was born in Yass, New South Wales in 1878, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, also Patrick Joseph, and his mother, Mary Townsell, had both emigrated from Lissycasey and they married in Australia in 1871. He studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1903 for the diocese of Goulburn. He served as a curate and then inspector of schools, before being appointed parish priest of Narrandera in 1917. He spent the rest of his ministry there and is commemorated by the John O’Brien Festival each year.
He was interested in the social history of the people he knew and he published various poems on the subject in local journals. He was persuaded by friends to publish them in book form and Around the Boree Log appeared in 1921.
It was praised for writing about the ordinary people as they would talk about themselves and was a huge success. It ran to five editions and spread to Ireland and the United States. It was used as the basis for a film on Australian life in 1925 and the poems were also set to music by another priest, Dom Stephen Moreno.
He remained in Narrandera until 1944, when he retired due to ill health. He moved to Sydney and devoted the rest of his life to his poetry and historical research. After his retirement, he was named a domestic prelate and given the title monsignor.
Monsignor Patrick Joseph Hartigan, son of Lissycasey emigrants, died the day after the races out in Tangmalangaloo on December 27, 1952, 59 years ago this week.
n Michael Torpey