Last September I stood in a packed Brooklyn courtroom, held up my right hand, and solemnly swore to renounce my ‘allegiance to any foreign potentate’.
After 20 years as an Australian expatriate in New York, I was a brand new American citizen. Mild depression followed. I anxiously wondered, ‘What is it that I have so shamefully renounced?’
I decided it was time to do a little on-the-spot research, so booked a flight from New York to Melbourne with my nine-year-old daughter Grace. Allie, her cousin, joined us on a drive up through the Great Dividing Range and then down into the Goulburn Valley. We were searching for marks left behind by the ancestral Hamiltons who had taken up selections in the area.
At the cemetery outside the pretty town of Alexandra, a cracked, bitumen path separates the relatively substantial Protestants from the scrappy Catholics. We quickly found my grandmother’s gravestone, which dominates the Catholic section. The large pedestal is crowned by an imposing column that seems to have strayed across from the Protestant side. The grave is well preserved except for some rust on the ornamental iron fence.
We went back into town and bought crayons, butcher’s paper and masking tape. Despite a breeze that tore at the paper, Allie and Grace worked up a bright, red rubbing of the finely chiseled inscription:
In Memory of
Hannah Hamilton
(née Costigan,)
Wife of
Charles Hamilton
(Cremona, Molesworth.)
Born at Borrisnoe.
Co Tipperary, Ireland.
Died at Molesworth
29th Aug st 1905, aged 29 years
R.I.P.
I had been taken to Hannah’s grave when I was about Grace’s age, but had never since felt any curiosity about her. I was told she had died of a fever passed by an infected midwife from home to home as she delivered babies throughout Central Victoria.
My father James was three when he lost his mother, and he was the eldest of three boys. Charles came next. The baby, Jack, never celebrated his birthday, because it was so linked to the day his mother died.
As we picked scraps of masking tape off the gravestone, I wondered if my father’s remoteness could be traced back to the tragic story revealed in Hannah’s inscription. I remember standing next to him in church when I was little and reciting the ‘Hail Holy Queen’. I felt his chest expand at the verse ‘To Thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve’. Even then, I guessed that the crying and banishment