Psychiatrist president welcomes new thinking for Australia’s oldest Irish Club BY LLOYD GORMAN Main image: AAP
A FORMER (2010) AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR IS THE NEW PRESIDENT AT MELBOURNE’S TROUBLED CELTIC CLUB (INSET). BUT IRISH BORN PROFESSOR PATRICK McGORRY ALSO HAS DEEP ROOTS REACHING BACK TO EARLY DAYS OF WA’S GOLD RUSH ERA. AN ABC RADIO INTERVIEW OF MR McGORRY BY MELBOURNE BASED HOST DAVID ASTLE WAS BROADCAST ON ABC RADIO PERTH ON JUNE 15. THIS ARTICLE IS BASED ON THAT INTERVIEW. 4 | THE IRISH SCENE
Born in Dublin and raised in Wales, he came to Australia with his family when he was fifteen years old. “I thought I’d landed on my feet,” he said about the move and his new home and life in Newcastle, NSW. Prof. McGorry said that growing up then and even now his identity was “completely Irish”. “You know, I never felt Welsh at all, even though you have an affinity and connection with the place you grow up, but identity-wise, absolutely Irish down to my toenails basically, and I still feel that even though I’ve spent the vast majority of my life in Australia. The Irish-Australian identity is very, very strong for me and I know for hundreds and thousands of Australians if you think about it, maybe even millions have a connection with Ireland.” His father hailed from Monaghan and Donegal while his mother’s family’s background was also Donegal, and Belfast. But curiously his mother was actually born in Tasmania – a story that reveals a long familial association with Australia. “My grandmother had emigrated to Australia with her parents before the First World War,” he explained. “Her father was a North of Ireland Protestant Doctor while the other side of my family was Catholic, but he was a doctor in Western Australia on the Goldfields. Just after the First World War my great grandmother and my grandmother’s siblings were on a boat back to Ireland in 1919 and their father was killed in a tram accident in Perth. So the family went back to Dublin. My grandmother married a British soldier, an Englishman who had actually been in Australia before the First World War as well, and he was at Gallipoli in the AIF and then in Palestine with the Light Horse. So she married him and they settled back in Dublin but for a couple of years they were in Tasmania and that’s where my mother happened to be born. There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing in those days.” Prof. McGorry said he was grateful for the “fantastic decision” by his parents decision to emigrate.
