‘Good luck’, said the aunt, ‘Cousin Richard might be difficult. Visitors turn up at the Lalor house all the time. He’s sick of it by now’.
I was throwing things in a bag, for the trip to Ireland, under the huge replica of the Eureka flag tacked on my living room wall, to go to Dublin and Tenakill in County Laois where my great-great grandfather, Peter Lalor, was born.
My mother was a Lalor and I was the first of the Australian branch to go back. What if Cousin Richard shouted at me and ordered me off the place? It wasn’t just Peter who attracted the tourists. He was just one of three family patriots—the others were Honest Pat, Peter’s father, an MP, and his brother, James Fintan, known in Ireland as a radical and a revolutionary. The day trippers annoying Cousin Richard at Tenakill are usually descendants of the two million emigrants, the great diaspora to Canada, the US and Australia, fleeing their homes after the 1848 potato famine.
I had written to Cousin Richard (third cousin once removed, the aunt said). He didn’t reply. Why go? What was it to be a Lalor?
There has been little talk about the Eureka forebear until this year. Maybe my rebellious outbursts at school were more leniently dealt with by the Irish nuns, who had experience of resistance in their youth. (She’s a Lalor, you know.) There was little discussion of it in my family. Although, my grandmother told me sternly ‘remember you’re a Lalor’, when I fell over on the path and started blubbering one day. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and looked up at the oil painting of Him, hanging on the wall of her modest weatherboard in east St Kilda, impressive in his wig, gown and buckled shoes, sitting at a desk, the speaker of the Victorian Legislative Council. He had come a long way from being the outlaw, with wanted posters tacked on the Ballarat trees in 1854. ‘You know he was offered a knighthood’, my grandmother said.
‘Did he take it?’
She snorted.
‘Of course not. He was Irish.’ End of story.
So, why go back? For the last couple of years I had been researching the Lalors for a play I was writing. I found history books, and fumed and wept over the fate of the Irish and my mother’s family, cast off their land. Thousands of acres