Brenda Niall: The Riddle of Father Hackett: a Life in Ireland and Australia. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2009. Online
Brenda Niall, one of Australia's best biographers, has written a highly readable and surprising life of William Hackett (1878–1954), the Jesuit priest who was pressured out of Ireland to Australia in 1922 for his involvement with republican armed forces during the Civil War.
Until now, Australian writers have remembered Hackett as the founder of a remarkable Catholic library in Melbourne. Niall adds to that memory an extraordinary range of fascinating context, colour and nuance.
Growing up in the 1930s in what she calls the Catholic enclave around Studley Park Rd, Kew, in Melbourne's inner east, Niall first knew Father Hackett as 'a charming old man' who was a friend, and patient, of her doctor father.
'Hackett would take an armchair by the study fire and talk happily about books, people, places and ideas, enjoying a good cigar and scarcely noticing that the baby of the family, not yet walking, was expertly untying his shoelaces,' she records.
A few years ago, when she began to consider writing a life of Hackett, Niall had the good fortune to discover that, soon after Hackett's death, Fr Doug Boyd had collected a remarkable set of letters and papers, all in one place, the Australian Jesuit archives. Letters between Willie and his sister Flo are a special resource in Niall's attempts to unravel the riddles of Hackett's personality and behaviour.
This passionate biography mixes the private and political in an account rippling with insights into Hackett's family, friends and career as well as into some key events and people in 20th-century Irish and Australian history, religion and politics.
There are excellent photographs including one of a letter to Hackett from Free State leader Michael Collins, one of the last Collins wrote. The result is a rare combination of personal memoir and public history.
William Hackett was the fourth of nine children of a well-to-do doctor and his wife in Kilkenny, who sent several sons to Jesuit schools. He joined the Jesuits, adopted a generally austere and ascetical lifestyle, studied in Ireland, France and Holland, taught in Limerick and Kildare, and from 1915 on gave his energies to being a publicist for the republic.
Then, most exceptionally among Jesuits, he supported the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. By way of background Niall shows that Willie's father had, at some cost, taken Parnell's