At the top of a hill in south-west Victoria sits the church and hall of St Brigid's in Crossley, surrounded by rolling green hills of fertile volcanic soil. To the south, the hills drop away to the Southern Sea. These fields have sustained the largest rural Irish immigrant population in Australia for more than 150 years.
The Irish migrants came from a country traumatised by the great Famine of the late 1840s. It is estimated that well in excess of one million Irish people died of starvation. It was Ireland's holocaust.
My own great grandmother, Mary Cleary, was the soul survivor of her family and she was sent to Australia to her only known living relative. She sailed out of Cobh harbour in Cork, as a young girl, knowing there was no family to go back to.
Her story is not unique in this area. Many of the migrants who came to the Port Fairy, Killarney, Crossley and Koroit areas were from some of the areas worst affected by the famine. They came to Australia in desperation as a beaten people, with little but the will to survive.
Before migrants came to these shores, it was Gunditjmara country. The Aboriginal tribal clan lands of the KoroitGunditj, MoonwerGunditj and TarererGunditj. By the time the Irish began arriving in the early 1850s, the Aboriginal population had been decimated by disease, alcohol abuse and killings. Their tribal lands had been usurped and they were reduced to fringe dwellers in their own country.
Last Saturday night, in that country hall in Crossley, Archie Roach, a Gunditjmara man, a child of the stolen generation and multi award winning vocalist, sang in solidarity with the Irish Catholic descendants of those famine migrants.
Five generations after our forefathers built and paid for St Brigid's church at the turn of the 19th century, the people of Crossley and Killarney are fighting to save the gathering place from private ownership. Against the wishes of the local community, the buildings are for sale by tender by the Catholic Church.
At the sell-out fundraising concert to buy back the buildings (pictured), Archie told the audience of young and old, black and white, old residents and newcomers: 'My people know what it is like to have something you love taken away from you. This place belongs to these people.