Moriarty’s Flight of Fancy: A Migration to Australia

By Melvin Freestone

Moriarty’s Flight of Fancy is a story of migration to a new life in Australia. The challenging adventure is full of enterprise, risk, struggle, and plain hard work, laced with a spirit of ‘get on with it’. Central to the story is the growth of a personal and family heritage and the demands it placed on the Moriarty family.

When Moriarty and his wife, B., escaped from their mundane existence in the Emerald Isle, they struggled until they met the MacDonalds and built a lifelong partnership with them. The sheep property—the Homestead—went through a kaleidoscope of good times, severe drought, fire, and threats from development.

Moriarty’s children were different in character and aspiration. Patrick married a part-aboriginal person. Together they made a big impact on the Flying Doctor Service. Siobhan was a changeable personality who had mixed fortune, eventually finding happiness only for it to be cut short by tragedy. The wild one, Kaitlyn, slid down a skid row after a meteoric success. With help from a special friend, she was able to reinvent herself.

All the while, Moriarty grew young through a curious dialogue with experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984504968

Melvin Freestone

Melvin Freestone exemplifies a global, 21st century person - collaborative, reflective, active and often surprising. He has a world of experience in teaching and learning and continually inspires those around him with stories and shared wisdom. He has written numerous educational resources including the full-length resource books - A Practical Guide to Technology – from pigs to optical fibres, and Thinking for Understanding. Moriarty’s Super Gene was his first venture into the field of fiction. Moriarty’s Flight of Fancy – is a sequel and part of a series he is writing.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Melvin Freestone.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2019900167

ISBN:                     Hardcover                             978-1-9845-0498-2

                              Softcover                               978-1-9845-0497-5

                               eBook                                     978-1-9845-0496-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/31/2019

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Challenging Uncertainty

Building Relations

Together People

Changing Realities

Wild Ride

Real Dreams

Wise Owls

PREFACE

T his book is a fanciful story about the Moriarty family. While the characters may resemble people in real life, they are not intended to describe any person. They are fictional. Some readers may find the story far-fetched, even unbelievable.

One of the purposes in writing the book has been to incite reflection on what has been in life and what might be in the future. In this sense, the narrative evokes personal conversations. The story is an eclectic mix of historical, social, and philosophical consciousness.

Special thanks to my wife Nom – patient as always – and to Gill Shadbolt, Kimbra Watling, Graeme and Sue Cooksey, Bill Edmunds, and Nicholas Hawker for helping me ‘get the writing right’. I am indebted to Warren Boyles for his invaluable advice throughout the writing and publishing process.

Melvin Freestone

January 2019

Tasmania, Australia

CHALLENGING UNCERTAINTY

M oriarty left the emerald isle a lifetime ago. In his own words, it was ‘a hell of a risk to take a journey into the unknown. But you live life once. Get on with it’. Nothing special as countless Irish families found sanctuary in far-off lands after the great famine. His choice was the sunburnt island continent down under.

Back in those far-off times, Moriarty and his wife Brigit, B for short, felt threatened by the prospect of a mundane life with their talents and aspirations destined to either atrophy or remain dormant for the rest of their lives. At times, their emotions jangled to a point where their feelings of angst and frustration bordered on a volatile mixture of resignation and explosion. To a practical bloke like Moriarty, these tensions were far worse than exhaustion from back-breaking physical work. Thankfully, the bond between them was resilient enough to enable them to put up with their lot for a while despite daily life being a struggle, with survival an ever-present challenge.

Being a passionate person, Moriarty was full of vigour and zest for life, strong as an ox, with hard work being no hardship. In his early years, patience may have been a weak suit, but with the passage of time and experience, he had developed a dogged persistence – something that would stand him in good stead for the rest of life. His wife and mother of his three kids was a quietly spoken yet resourceful person. Cross her on something she felt strongly about and watch out. She could fire up either when irritated or when something important was not going quite right. Her children knew not to tangle with her although she had endless stamina for listening to their stories and helping them overcome difficulties. She was the rock that held the family together and gave her husband strength in his moments of self-doubt.

Moriarty had a steady labouring job with the local council and lived with his family in a small corporation flat. You couldn’t swing a cat in it, but it was warm, and the roof did not leak. The four-storey block of flats with an ugly external circular staircase, no lift, invited inertia rather than action. The outlook from their living room on the top floor was drab, a sea of well-worn, red-brick, terraced houses adorned with an array of chimney pots and a tangled mass of TV aerials. The overcast skies often accompanied by drizzle or soft rain encased the amorphous smoky mess into an anesthetised cocoon, just short of a health hazard. They weren’t starving, not even close, but their sense of enterprise felt stymied, and personal fulfilment seemed a forlorn hope. Imprisoned by sameness? Well, yes and no. Sure, the humdrum way of life may have dampened their enthusiasm, but Moriarty could not and would not give in. His attitude of ‘Get off our backsides and do something about it’ was bolstered by B’s wholehearted encouragement to take a chance for a better life. But the thought of digging up their roots evoked mixed feelings of melancholy, apprehension, and challenge.

B was a perfect counterfoil for Moriarty. With loving patience, she helped her man come to terms with his curiously reserved character and cautious nature. She had the kind of resilience that had enabled Irish people to withstand the rigors of hardship, poverty, and oppression throughout the ages. Personal strength exuded out of the pores of her skin. Whatever might happen would not matter anyway because she would go to the ends of the earth to be with him. Her husband’s no-nonsense style bespoke a practical man with a built-in caution against fanciful action divorced from reality. As he put it, ‘Beware of hasty, ill-thought-out action.’ When faced with challenges or contentious problems, he would talk them through in his mind and with others to get his head around the issues involved before acting. Maybe a cheeky irreverence helped him deal with harsh experiences and challenging moments in life. By making light of it what appears impossible suddenly becomes doable. Indeed, his dry sense of humour often lit up the airwaves.

B and he had an OK social life. After work having a jar – a drop of the black stuff – or maybe two but never a skinful was a bright light in Moriarty’s life. He could argue as well as the best of them and split sides with laughter. For B, it was a night playing bridge or, if minds were not up to it, a less demanding game of whist. Local gossip would fill the airwaves to capacity, garnished with a spicy cocktail of conjecture and speculation and sometimes intrigue. On an odd occasion, she would accompany Moriarty to the pub, but it wasn’t her cup of tea, so to speak. Sure, couples spasmodically frequented the place, but the ambiance was more attuned to male needs than female desires. These moments were enjoyable distractions from the bleak prospects of everyday-life, which helped alleviate pent-up tensions and feelings of being unfulfilled.

Many people who left the emerald isle in the past had little or no option. The stark question of survival or the need to escape oppression or rank poverty or all of these ran roughshod over the luxury choice. And there was transportation to antipodes, obliged by the colonial power for trivial reasons like stealing a cabbage. With considerable effort, Moriarty and B forced themselves to face up to the lack of prospects in their stultifying circumstances. Weighing up the risks involved in migration against the safety of their current existence required courage and determination. Indeed, it would have been easy to let the tide of life wash over them day after day with monotonous and unerring predictability, but that would have been a slow death to them.

For a long time, threat of the unknown agitated their minds, only to be superseded by a slow-burning sense of excitement and adventure. In the end, they chose to migrate to OZ based on the good stories they had heard about the place being ‘a land of opportunity’, coupled with the inviting prospect of sunshine replacing mist and rain. Sunburnt images on television created a magnetic attraction that fuelled their volatile heartbeat of expectation, anticipation, and enthusiasm. And when the beat was at full strength, it became a passion that could only be satisfied by action. A flight of fancy? Maybe nevertheless soon to become a reality. The energy to ‘get on with it’ was counterbalanced by fear of the unfamiliar and a nagging uncertainty of whether they were up to the challenge. Sure, they were ready to take it on, but would they have the personal capacity required? Or might some unforeseen circumstance thwart their dreams? Ingrained knowledge of hardship and suffering during the great famine from 1845 to 1848 made it easier for their extended family and close friends to understand and support their decision to migrate to the island continent. The whole was a pulsating mix where to dare was key.

To Moriarty and B, their children were magical. The eldest Patrick was seven years of age; Siobhan was two years younger; and Kaitlyn, the baby of the family, had turned three. Mum and Dad felt confident that they would thrive from the forthcoming move, yet their confidence did little to alleviate their anxiety. A leap into the unknown may be courageous, but the spectre of risk is never far behind. To Mum and Dad, the prospect was momentous; to their children, it would be just another experience in their young lives. Legal requirements finalised, they were off on an assisted passage – a £10 job – to the sunburnt country. No waiting to be transported on a filthy, overcrowded, and disease-ridden hulk ship but instead an immediate passage on a civilised aircraft flight known as the migrant special.

On the day of departure, their bubbling expectation was almost tangible. Talk about the human spirit knowing no bounds! Goodbyes were kept short to avoid prolonging the pain. The prospect of not seeing people again for a long time, maybe never, was hard enough without making it worse than it needed to be. Still, emotions were screwed up like crepe paper. Not so much for the kids as the immediacy of adventure consumed their minds. For Mum and Dad, it was harrowing, especially when hugs and tears flowed amongst family and valued friends. Mike, one of their best friends, shouted as they passed through the departure gate, ‘For the love of God and his holy mother, you’d better keep in touch or we will send the peelers (a caustic historical term for the police) after you to bring you back in a cage!’

For the kids, everything was moving too fast for them to comprehend. Their trust in Mum and Dad meant they weren’t scared. Indeed, the comforting sense of security helped them take the challenge full on. Fear, if there were any, was in the unknown as they had no experience of potential dangers familiar to adults. Their uncertainty was wide-eyed as opposed to threatening, and if things became too much, they had each other to fall back on for comfort.

The silver wings, which would be their home for the next day and a half, was decked out in Qantas Livery, prompting the rhetorical question in their parents’ minds: How would they cope with the culture of a strange community? Just to break in, never mind understanding the language and metaphor, would be a challenge, and the ironic stirring sense of humour might be a saviour or a blocker.

Their thinking about future scenarios faded quickly when getting ready to land or take off. The fuel capacity of aircraft in those days was limited, which meant the silver wings had to stop to refuel several times on the way. Waking their children up when they had been asleep was a pain to be endured with minimum complaint. Having to do it six times became a thankless chore, with making sure harnesses were buckled up and untangled from everything else on the seats a hassle. To their relief, Moriarty and B only had to endure one truly oppositional episode from Kaitlyn. Toilet stops were a bother too, especially when there was a queue, never mind the difficulty of clambering over people who were asleep.

Arrival at immigration was a sweaty affair. The day was warm, not hot, but to the Moriarty family, it felt like an oven, even allowing for the air conditioning. Anything other than cool soggy, often cold, dampness was foreign to them. Queuing to get their papers checked was short, with the bloke behind the desk a surprise. Athletic-looking, albeit a bit blown out from the fruits of a good living, he enhanced the ‘front desk’ of the island continent. His welcoming smile and matching words were far from the hard-nosed scrutiny they had expected. The ‘G’day welcome’ wasn’t fanciful; it was real with recruitment of migrants being a priority of the time. Population growth coupled with the knowledge, skills, and diversity of cultures that migrants bring with them were seen as important aspects for nation building. All stamped, they progressed through the gate into the buzz of the arrival hall.

Finding a trolley for their heavy suitcases and keeping three kids safe were taxing, especially amidst the fast-moving noisy hubbub. A few pushy people were barging their way through without thought for others, but most were laid-back and easy-going, with an air of unpretentious friendliness, some of whom offered their help as it was obvious the Moriarty family were new to OZ.

When Kaitlyn wandered off without Mum and Dad knowing anxiety went through the roof. After a few minutes of blind panic which ironically seemed like an age, she was found sitting in a corner, trying to get away from the hassle in the baggage collection area which scared her. Relieved though everyone was, it didn’t spare Kaitlyn from a stern dressing down from Moriarty. Suitably contrite, she clung to her mother with head down and tears streaming down her face. Had anything disastrous happened to her, the emotional devastation would be been indescribable.

They had hardly recovered from the lost-and-found incident before they were whisked off to a migrant hostel, managed like parcel post, and trucked off in a bus. The place was surprisingly well appointed, and the people running it were welcoming and friendly, just like the bloke at immigration despite the joint being organised like a military operation with all the regimentation that entails. A warm yet distant sense of community seemed to pervade the hostel, creating a bizarre ambiance of being lost on a calm sea once outside the ambiance of one’s own family group. The plain stewed food alleviated the Moriarty family’s pangs of hunger, and the sleeping quarters were comfortable with nice warm showers, a short distance down the corridor. Compared with their corporation flat in the auld country, their two rooms were an unexpected paradise.

The hostel management people appeared quintessentially OZ in their disposition and tone of language. Yet many of the people who provided the services had southern European features, presumably migrants like themselves. The difference from Moriarty’s previous life was quite stark. Despite this awakening, there was no time to be disconcerted as the need to get on with their new life and ‘have go’ consumed all. Top priority for Moriarty was finding a job.

People at the hostel said work was available at a huge hydroelectric scheme not far away with workers needed to build dams and roads as well as excavate channels and tunnels. No problem. ‘I can mix, barrow, and pour concrete until the cows came home, all day every day 24/7 if needs be.’ He was told that when completed, the project would literally reverse the flow of rivers from one side of a mountain range to the other. Incredulous, he nodded at what he thought must be an overstatement. Yet irrigating the dry interior of OZ was at least as important as the production of electricity in the design of the project.

In no time at all, the Moriarty family were on the local bus to the construction village. The passing stark landscape with see-through eucalypt trees was a revelation, very different from trees with dense foliage in summer and steely grey sticks in winter that adorned gentle landscapes in the auld country. The vista sparked a sense of adventure and excitement that offset their feelings of challenge and uncertainty. After about two and a half hours of travelling on a bumpy dirt road, they got to that construction village to discover it had a general store and a school with a children’s playground at the back – an unforeseen luxury. Their small apartment at the rear of the single men’s quarters was heartening, more than they had expected, even if the absence of soft furnishings and the bland interior colour scheme gave the place a hard-functional character.

Straight away, B got in and sorted the place out, while Moriarty took the children off to the playground. They came back with smiles on their faces after the friendly albeit inquisitive reception they got from other children. There were no staring looks, snide comments, turned backs, and the like. Instead, it was ‘Come and join in’, accompanied by lots of chatter from playing together. True to form, Siobhan had been quiet without being too standoffish, Patrick got in and had a go, and Kaitlyn did her own thing as if no other children were around. Moriarty and B felt relieved by the reception their children had received.

The place, much of it covered in forest and dense bush, may have been remote, but it didn’t feel that way because everyone had to craft the best out of the circumstances. Yet the unpredictability of what might happen next provoked a brittle feeling in Moriarty and B, a kind of agitated energy. When Moriarty signed on at the site office a couple of days later, the paperwork was minimal as the practicalities of ‘getting on with the job’ thankfully overrode bureaucratic niceties. He was given a hard hat, steel-capped boots, and a warm bluey with yellow luminous strips front and back. He was assigned to a work gang building a concrete spillway for one the dams. The whole scene was a hive of activity with every conceivable type of heavy machinery adding to the organised chaos. After a tough day, he returned quickly to his family, anxious to find out how things had gone for them. He need not have worried. They were fine, and the meal B had prepared seemed like a banquet. The tea washed it down just right.

When their children were safely tucked up in bed, Moriarty with a warm brew in hand sank onto one of the hard chairs. ‘Gees, I’m buggered.’ Once his tension had dissipated a little, his telling about who, what, and how filled the airwaves with B’s sensitive understanding shoring up his anxiety. The good and bad, the challenging and frustrating, and the soul destroying were all there. Already he could sense why mateship is a cherished OZ quality of working together and helping one another out, often predicated on the need to survive. Talking about what had happened to their children during the day was special. The silent moments were good too, two complementary spirits united in their love for each other. They may have been strong people, but they needed each other like a fire needs oxygen. Later, the fire couldn’t be extinguished until they fell asleep.

Moriarty worked long hours of overtime. At times, the stress it caused was hard to handle, on occasion making Moriarty and B get upset with each other. They didn’t fight outright, but voices were raised with sharp words said. Emotions were vented. Thankfully, the periods of angst between them were rare as a fracture of any kind would have been damaging beyond words. The challenging times called for togetherness not divisiveness as they engaged with relative strangers at the construction village and tried to understand the cultural intricacies of life in their new country. The fact that many of the construction workers came from all over Europe added emotional stress and challenge, and the inherent language difficulties didn’t help. Yet there was no ghetto like isolation of different groups or pollution from an ‘in’ and ‘out’ group mentality. Instead, everyone was driven by the need to make a go of life in a new country by putting their best foot forward without too much backward-looking reflection. For some, the horrors of war or persecution made working together imperative. Struggle was shared.

As time wore on, B got to know a few of the families living on the site, mainly through the weekly get-togethers that occurred in one of their homes. The venues were rotated, with the host Mum providing coffee and nibbles and sometimes more substantial fare. Everyone looked forward to these events, steeped as they were in gossip, enough to make the invertebrate life in the crevices of their homes blush. All good fun. Yet when Moriarty was working on the construction site, B still felt alone as distinct from lonely. As far as her kids were concerned, life for them was full of adventure, with little time for argument much less loneliness.

Moriarty was careful to engage with his workmates on the job and in the pub afterwards. He would laugh and joke with his workmates often around the eight-ball table – with the odd, scratchy, mediating, quieter times – especially when the tension of the day had been overwhelming or his physical self had taken a beating. Refereeing the discourse was seldom required, except when someone full as boot lost it. The ambiance made light of the construction work in the main through a stirring sense of humour which helped people in fully conscious and paralytic states overcome the hard-bitten conditions. But Moriarty was no boozer beyond being a means to an end. The amber fluid had little attraction to him. His family was number one.

On the job, Moriarty was quietly spoken. He just got on with it without any drama or big noting. The other blokes liked him and respected his physical strength and friendliness. He learned quickly too, either in how to drive machinery or in how to carry out difficult construction tasks. Of course, there were all kinds of personality quirks amongst the workers, but he never let them get under his skin. The bloke who was always telling people what to do made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle; the idiot didn’t understand that you never tell an Irishman what to do. Yet Moriarty wouldn’t allow his irritation show or indulge in the avalanche of snide comments other workers directed towards the bloke. Soon his work ethic and attention to detail was noted by the management. Months later, he was offered a supervisory role which, in the auld country, would be called a ‘charge hand’. The extra pay would come in handy, perhaps enabling him to save a little cash towards the future.

On the construction site, danger was an ever-present menace, unseen and, most of the time, ignored. Not long after taking on his supervisory role, alarm bells rang when one of the workers fell down a deep chute and got stuck at the bottom. How could they get him out, and was he badly injured? After much fretful argument, a makeshift hoist was set up, and one of the rescue team was lowered into the gaping hole. To Moriarty’s relief, the bloke only had a broken leg and a multitude of bruises; at least that was all that was obvious at the time. It could have been much worse, with his life in the balance; as it was, he had to be sedated to help him deal with his distress and physical discomfort. Getting him out was slow and hazardous because the rain-drenched earth on the sides of the chute was in danger of caving in. Time was not on the side of the rescuers, adding to their anxiety. The top of the chute had to be widened to stop sludge-like soil, almost liquid, sliding down into the hole and burying the bloke stuck at the bottom. Boarding up the top of the chute to prevent a slide was agonisingly slow. After many hours of frantic work, the bloke was hauled out and transferred to hospital at breakneck speed on dirt tracks saturated by the recent heavy rain. The fear of internal injuries, more than the