She also admires the succinct cartography of the indigenous people, whose maps were wiped clean by the colonial invaders. She likens the birds to “flying jewellery”, smiles at their babbling coloratura and gazes in rapture at the high blue dome that replaces the dank, discoloured English sky. With Australia no longer available for the dumping of human flotsam, Priti Patel fancies opening an offshore “processing centre” for these stateless wretches on Ascension Island.īy contrast with Callil’s angry political salvos, her evocations of Australian nature ache with homesickness. Perhaps she exaggerates when she suggests that universal credit has revived the hated Victorian Poor Laws, but her claim that refugees and asylum seekers are our equivalent to the convicts is only too plausible. The “social pyramid” that crushed Sary or George is still intact and the charred sentinel of Grenfell Tower, which overshadows Callil’s house, is a daily reminder of the lethal inequality she condemns. Photograph: Courtesy of Carmen CallilĪs the book’s subtitle implies, “those times” are not so very different from “these times”. What maniacal kink, Callil asks, made the British such devotees of flagellation?ġ4c Robinson Street, Prahran, Melbourne, the former home of Carmen Callil’s great-great-grandmother, Sary. Another note-taker smirks as a victim’s skin ruptures at the eighth stroke, then gloats when, eight lashes later, it is “decidedly flayed off”. “Blood effused slightly at the sixteenth lash,” says the documentary record of one whipping: the finicky verb has a ghastly frisson. In one incredulous chapter, she examines the rituals of flogging, sickened by the surgical precision with which the jailers tallied the damage they did. When Callil tracks the parallel journey of the canal navvy George Conquest, one of Sary’s impregnators, transported for seven years after filching hemp, she laments the anguish of the men who were maimed by the penal system. Sary is an antipodean Mother Courage, a downtrodden battler rather than a feisty cultural warrior like her great-great-grand-daughter. The heroine of Oh Happy Day, reared in this “excretal miasma”, is Callil’s great-great-grandmother Sary Lacey, who bore three children to various mates, professed piety whenever she needed a charitable hand-out and periodically changed her surname to confuse officialdom at last, she escaped to Melbourne and attained respectability as the wife of a goldminer. She deftly reconstructs the household conditions that oppressed her female forebears – lice-infested and incestuously congested beds, stinking privies, meagre rations and the rattle and bang of rickety looms installed in the cramped cottages where they knitted stockings that were destined, as Callil snarls, to adorn “the wealthier male leg”. Hughes modelled The Fatal Shore on sacred epics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost Callil’s more domestic narrative takes its cue from the social novels of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Oh Happy Day has a precursor in Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which followed the transported convicts on a journey that unexpectedly led from hell to heaven: the penal colony, intended as a place of infernal suffering, turned out to be a balmy, unspoilt Eden. Photograph: Kaupo Kikkas Photograph: Kaupo Kikkas There, they intermarried and after a few generations, cross-pollinated by a Christian immigrant from Lebanon with the patronymic Kahlil (for a while experimentally anglicised as Kelly), they produced little Carmen.Ĭarmen Callil: ‘deserves to be called Dickensian’. Callil’s many-stranded narrative concentrates on three clans from Leicester and Lincolnshire whose misery was alleviated by migration to Melbourne. That punishment was what Callil calls their “happy day”: the new world allowed them to fill their bellies, bronze their skins and shed their fetters. Hunger drove these paupers to commit petty crimes and some of them, when caught, had the good fortune to be shipped out to Australia. Carmen Callil, whose motives are a good deal nobler, is a resurrection woman: after a decade spent delving in archives and visiting nameless graves, she has unearthed her family’s past in a book that is both a heartfelt outpouring of pity and sorrow and an irate demand for restitution.Ĭallil’s antecedents were sweated labourers in the Midlands, the “busy insects of the early Industrial Revolution”. In the 18th century, the body snatchers who grubbed up coffins and sold exhumed corpses for medical research were ghoulishly nicknamed “resurrection men”.
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