Brenda Niall's biographies characteristically begin with simple and enigmatic stories, whose significance becomes clearer as the book develops. This sympathetic exploration of her grandmother's life takes its point of departure in two of her possessions. The first is a wooden box made for Aggie Maguire by her brother as they sailed from Liverpool to Australia. In 1940 she gave the box to Brenda.
The second item is a conch shell with which Aggie entranced her grandchildren, asking them, 'Can you hear the sea?' For children who grew up in the Riverina, it evoked new horizons. For Aggie it evoked memories of the Liverpool of her childhood.
Aggie's story is rich in its detail. She lived through and was touched by the large events of the day, always at pains to mark out territory of her own so that others would find there space to play and grow. She was one a large family of Irish immigrants to Liverpool who had begun to better themselves. One of her brothers became very wealthy and later owned an Irish castle and horse stables.
In 1888 she came to Australia with her sister — also a teacher — and with her tubercular younger brother Joe to begin a new life. Joe died at sea. The sisters began schools and found employment as rural teachers. Aggie met and married Richard Gorman, a member of a large Irish immigrant family like her own, who had prospered and taken up land in the Riverina.
Her challenge was to carve out for her family a space that was not simply an appendage to the Gorman dynasty. She insisted that she should be given away in marriage by her uncle in Melbourne and not in the Riverina as the Gormans wanted, and that the family property should be properly defined, giving her space from a critical and powerful mother in law. Her independence of mind was expressed in naming one son Nugent after the radical Liverpool priest James Nugent, and another after Piet Joubert, the Boer general in the Anglo War.
Her domestic world unravelled in 1908 when her husband fell ill and died of a painful and disfiguring disease. She moved to Melbourne with her family to care for him, and later moved back to the Riverina where she felt both the generous support and the presumption of her husband's family.
This came to a head in the Great War, in which families were