Cec & Carmel C

ECIL and Carmel Halpin aged 86 and 82, originally from Dublin and born to Dublin parents. We met when we worked together in the late 50’s and fell ‘head over heels, and never looked back’. We married 2 years later on 6 September, 1960, when we were in our early twenties. We arrived in Brisbane in June 1975, on the Queen’s Birthday weekend with our 4 children aged 14, 11, 7 and 2 and a half. We had a stop off in Darwin on the way and we will never forget the heat! Even the heat in Brisbane in June was too much for us. Carmel ‘With all the excitement and commotion of getting off the plane jet lagged with 4 kids, luggage, etc., I ended up leaving my purse with all our money and other documents in the trolley. Cec had to go back to the airport the following day to look for it. Luckily somebody had handed it in and I though ‘well this is an honest country, at least. I took it as a good omen for our new life. My sister, her husband, and their 4 children had come here 2 years previously and settled in Ipswich, so we moved there as well’. There were so many differences, which you couldn’t call problems, between Ireland and here at the beginning. The school year was different starting in January and ending in December. Also the names for some everyday things confused our kids like the Oval instead of a Park and a Port being a Schoolbag. The toilet was not only outside but was called the ‘dunny’. One time we were asked to a party and we were asked to ‘bring a plate”, so we thought one plate wouldn’t be enough for six of us so we brought 6, but NO food - we didn’t know we had to put food on the plate as well! It took us many, many years to live that one down.

At the beginning, adjusting to living here was not all that easy. Carmel “Cec got a job pretty much straight away and worked long hours, the kids settled into school but I was left at home and found it quite lonely at times, as I missed my family and friends, and events.

I did make one or two friends, which helped, but I really found it difficult to settle”. So we decided to return to Dublin in 1978, as we still had our house there. Cecil “When we were at Sydney Airport we had the same fella at Customs that we had in 1975 when we arrived, and he remembered us. He asked us if we were going home for a holiday, so we said we were and he said that he had better give us a visa so we could return. At the time we thought there we wouldn’t need it, but didn’t say anything’.

After 3 years back in Dublin, we decided to go back to Australia in 1981, mainly for the sake of our kids, although at this stage, our eldest was old enough to make up his own mind and decided to stay in Dublin. We got involved with the Irish community from the beginning, which at the time centred around the GAA, at Bottomley Park, near the Gabba. At that stage, they (the GAA) had started a ‘buy-a-brick’ scheme as a fundraiser to help build their current home in Willawong. Cec ’I played Gaelic football. I was lucky enough to be selected to play in Perth 8 weeks after arriving back, even though I was nearly 10 years older that most of the players. There is a lovely photograph somewhere of the group, which we were all supposed to get copies of, but because of various events, this didn’t happen. For the next few years, Sundays were the highlight of the week for us all as a family. Only the men played football, and the kids ‘went wild’ playing with other Irish kids who understood their accents and Carmel met up with other Irish women’. Carmel ’We lived for our Sundays, going to Mass and then mixing with other Irish families and it played such a big part in our lives. We poured our hearts out to each other – we all helped each other and others in the Irish community here. To this day we still meet some of those people when we go to Willawong. By then, we were more settled and we built a house on a 1 acre block just outside of Ipswich. Kids were settling into school and it was a really lovely time, but busy. Around this time ourselves and 6 or 8 other couples, including my sister, started playing weekly card games in each others houses and it ballooned and became so popular that we ended having to hire a hall in North Ipswich. It got bigger and bigger so we then decided to run dances which included a meal, on a monthly basis. We regularly had 30 to 40 people but sometimes ended up having up to 100 people, mainly Irish but also many Australians through their Irish friends. Eventually we had music and a licensed bar. Very few of us drank, so we hired somebody to look after all that.

It grew simply by word of mouth, we never advertised it. At first, a few women, 6 or 8 cooked all day Saturday – it was great fun, boiling big pots of potatoes, corned beef….., and at Christmas I would spends hours and hours making puddings, often staying up late at night to get them done. We charged $10 for a three course meal which mainly just covered our costs. We go to a stage where we were able to get caterers. This lasted for about 15 years. Sometimes we had small amounts money left over and after getting financial advice we opened a bank account.

Ireland rather than say go ‘home’ but we still call it ‘home’. We have always had a very good life here – we never struggled. Our happiest times were when we saw our children settled and do well in school and go on to have careers, then marry and have their own children. We have 7 grandchildren but we would have liked more but they wouldn’t oblige. We are now asking our grandchildren to make us great grand parents but they just tell us that we are great grandparents! However, they are doing well for themselves and are always ready to help us, so we feel very fortunate. We love telling them about Ireland and how everyone goes to Ireland ‘for the craic’. We string them along because the ‘craic’ we are thinking of is very different to what is in their minds. Another cultural difference.

Cabrina

CABRINA Miller I’m 74 and I was born in 1949 in Dublin in Ballyfermot. My mother was from Galway and my father was from Tipperary. I first came I left Ireland in 1966. I moved to London with my school friends, we both wanted to get away from our parents to have bit more freedom. After being in London for about six months later I met my husband at a dance in North London and that was it – we were married a year later. I started to get restless feet, and a friend was staying with us at the time who had papers to go to South Africa and he brought home the paperwork and all the information on New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and Australia. Our friend had chosen South Africa but I said to my husband “what about New Zealand?” and he said “I’ve just built a house for you what do you want to go there for!” It was a time of great turmoil in England with the coal miners’ strike and the unions and of course the weather wasn’t great.

We decided to go somewhere warm and where there was work and the travel agent suggested Dunedin, which didn’t turn out to be warm at all! We had 6 wonderful years there, my children went to the local Catholic School and I was in choir at the church and

Catholic women’s league, we had great togethers with friends as it was the 1970s the entertainment wasn’t out cafe so as such, it was people bringing plates of food to houses and we have dances in people’s houses and great laughs, good music.

After six years I got restless again, I was fed up with the cold. My husband said well I’ll get work in Sydney first and check it out. Our third child was on the way by then. He went and worked there for six months and returned saying it wasn’t a great place to rear children so we had to rethink again. I asked my next door neighbour whose husband went over to Brisbane regularly on business and she said the weather was warm so we just picked up and went. We arrived in Australia in November 1980 and the first thing I thought when I got off the plane was there must be a fire outside with this sort of humidity. It hits you in the face and I had no idea what humidity was at all – it didn’t help that I was in the tweed suit either!

Our friend booked us into a motel in Kangaroo Point, we stayed there for a week and then she managed to get us a flat in Norman Park. It was under someone’s house but we made do. The cockroaches really got to me, I kept spraying them! The mosquitos also got to me. We didn’t know anybody there except for this one friend, and she lived the other side of Brisbane.

One day I thought I better for look for schools for my children. We were walking down the street and it was a woman coming towards us and I said “excuse me can you tell me if this is the way to catch the bus to school?” We got so got chatting and I’d only been in Brisbane

CABRINA two weeks by then but I asked her if there was any chance she had a cot and she did, she actually had a few of them. weeks by then, I said I don’t suppose you have a cot? She said yes we do, we have several of them under the house and you can have them. She lived in Norman Park as well and from then on that started a friendship that lasted forty years. That Christmas we were at their house, they had a magnificent view over the Brisbane River and every year after that on Christmas Eve for years we spent it together. Her husband was English and she was from Sydney so none of us had family here and I think that’s what brought us together.

Then we moved to Redland and bought a house and that February I said to my husband that I wanted to go home for a holiday. Home meant England at the time as my mother and two sisters had moved there. I didn’t think that I could take the heat anymore. I had a wonderful time catching up with my family and caught up with friends and thought how am I going to go back to the heat. I arrived back in Australia seven months pregnant and when I got back it was May and of course the heat had gone so it was gorgeous. There was a warmth but no humidity. My husband had found a job by then and the children went to school in the Bay and we lived there for 28 years.

Well when we first moved into the house, every time I stepped outside these huge insects. I remember writing to my mother about them, telling her that there were huge jiminy crickets here and when they run into you they scratch you. There were also big stick insects and green frogs running around the place and oh my god, those frilly lizards and blue tongue lizards! And then we had trees in the garden with two white cockatoos and parrots, which I didn’t actually mind those. The moment you woke up in the morning you had this enormous noise from the birds and I thought Christ to myself “Christ, I’m in a Zoo!” But after a while I became to appreciate those things. I never became used to the cockroaches though.

I also remember the trees being different, they didn’t look like trees from home at all. I remember writing to my mother and telling her that all the barks on the trees were peeling. My Australian friend who had a keen interest in nature used to tell me that the trees were beautiful, but I couldn’t see the beauty in them because they didn’t look like the green trees at home. She said that’s why people call it a bush, it’s not a forest. But I missed the forests.

I also couldn’t get used to the way the houses were built here. They didn’t look like houses from home, with their wooden walls and tin roofs. The inside of the houses had boarded walls and I said to my husband to put up wallpaper because I wanted it to look like home. He was forever doing renovations to fit in with the style we left in England. It did look like home for a while. But I suppose I couldn’t wallpaper everything. After a few years here, when I appreciated the Australian architecture, I asked him to pull it all down and he did. He put the house back to the way it was. For a long time I was trying to make the house look like England or Ireland.

I never had an education in Ireland. I was offered a scholarship to go to secondary school but they would only pay for the fees, not the books or anything so I couldn’t afford to go. When I became restless again in Australia I thought that I had to do something. My daughter was going into Grade 8 and I noticed at the end of her prospectus that they were offering adult classes so I enrolled. I had attempted before, but this time I was determined. My husband was actually off work that year in 1983 because there was a recession. He said that he would stay home with our four children while I went back to school and he did. So that year when my daughter started Year 8, I started Year 11. That was an eye opener being in a classroom with Year 11 girls. I completed Year 11 and 12 and that afforded me the opportunity to go to the University of Queensland. I did an Arts Degree at UQ and it took me a while to get through it, with four children and running a home, often I’d be up to 1am studying. I then went on to do my Diploma of Education and I became a teacher. By that time my daughter had grown up in 1997, she was planning on doing a year in London, like most Australians. So I took time off and went to visit her and while we were there I said that I would take her to Ireland. I’d never really spoken about Ireland before and I hadn’t been in the country for 30 years. We hired a car and went all around Ireland and caught up with relatives that I hadn’t seen since I was a child. I wanted to show my daughter her ancestral home, that it was generations of Irish women that had lived there. We went to Tipperary and visited my father’s grave because I never saw him again after I moved.

Not really. The Church doors were locked up and I had never seen that before. The places hadn’t changed aside from the fact that the islands had gotten electricity. There was also a big motorway because Ireland had joined the European Union by then and it was a lot easier to drive around the Country. I think one of the things too, I remember when I went to New Zealand there was a lot of conversation about the Johnson & Johnson report about contraception. I remember being at a meeting with women who were talking about it, and saying that its wrong. And I said “I beg your pardon, this is the best thing that’s ever happened us!

I’d be very involved in the Church and I suddenly thought I don’t want to be Catholic anymore, and I didn’t. I thought I’d pick it up again and I didn’t, you can’t go backwards. That is something I thought was terrible about Ireland, that you couldn’t get contraception. Whereas in England you could and no one would ask you questions about it, or if you were married or anything. When I heard those women discuss how contraception was wrong, I just thought that was stupidity and ignorance and I couldn’t accept that. I think that weather was the one thing with me, I valued being warm!

The freedom of expression, and the freedom to do you want is important to me. That was one thing about England, they had a lot of freedom over there and were able to do what they want. I valued the fact that they did anything they wanted to – the choice. You didn’t have choice in Ireland. I also highly value education. Both my parents only went to primary school. Education opens doors and broadens your horizon on life and I wanted that for my children, more than anything. All my children have had University educations and I’m proud of that.

I’ve had happy times wherever I’ve lived. My proudest achievement is achieving my degree. I’ve made lot of wonderful friends, and that’s one of the things that’s made me most happiest. For me, it’s about your relationships and connections with people – if the right people are with you then you can live anywhere.