Hugh M Vaughan - retirement

On retirement, Hugh Vaughan reflects on his life in Melbourne and Ireland from afar. This is an extract from Tintain and precovid.

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” André Gide

In 1989, I bought a book in Sydney for my father called Spycatcher, by Peter Wright, a MI5 officer. The British government fought to prevent its publication, but thanks to a young lawyer, Wright was able to publish in Australia. Peter Wright worked for my father, who was a senior Imperial Civil Servant in Northern Ireland. The young lawyer was Malcom Turnbull. It was in that year I moved to Sydney, after emigrating to Wellington, New Zealand, a few years previous.

My father always maintained that Northern Ireland was used as a testing ground for up and coming British civil servants. He saw a revolving door of such personnel, much like the revolving door of Australian prime ministers. After the second world war, there was a shortage of administers in the British Empire, my father was offered work in any part of his choosing. He declined. Unlike his son, he was not a traveller. Unfortunately, he never read my book set in Derry about the true story of a back channel between MI5/6 officers and a Derry pacifist attempting to arrange a ceasefire in the 1970s.

The sudden death of my mother in Ireland while I lived in Sydney necessitated my return home, but my passport was in the immigration office as I was updating my visa and thus I could not leave the country. Luckily, a civil servant in the Immigration Office, never having worked on a Saturday in her 20 years of employment there, arranged to give it to me, that weekend morning. But, with a broken visa application, there was no return down under.

So why did I, with six siblings, all with homes in Ireland, except one in Scotland, and that doesn’t count, emigrate down under twice? Together with my wife, also with 6 siblings, all living within shouting distance in Derry, we moved with our two children to Melbourne 20 years ago. With the aid of my wife’s employer, we returned to Australia, which has proved mostly, to be a positive experience. Within days of arrival, a winter storm sent us scurrying to purchase overcoats. Like many who moved from the UK and Ireland our expectations of warmer climes were quickly confounded.

IRA training outside my school in Derry during the 1970s.

Living and working in Ballymena, County Antrim, we felt reasonably safe. Although, travelling at night, if we were stopped at a security check point we preferred it was the police or the British Army and not the locally recruited, Ulster Defence Regiment. With a name like Vaughan and an address in Ballymena, it helped to speed the process. However, the Troubles came to my front door when during anti-Anglo-Irish Agreement demonstrations, a member of Paisley’s Third Force, and my neighbour strode up to my living room window on that day of loyalist insurrection, as his armed colleagues in combat gear looked on. We had been thinking about moving somewhere new and this scary episode was the catalyst. Initial plans of moving to England were put aside when a recruitment campaign for New Zealand took me to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.

The freedom experienced down under made me realise that while living in Northern Ireland I was always aware of one’s location and who I was talking to. Encounters with the Irish community in New Zealand were limited, though a fellow Irish teacher came from Cork to teach in my college. It was a time when distance meant infrequent communication with home and limited phone calls. Even our ability to get information about NZ before we left Ireland, was inadequate.

Wellington, remote and picturesque, had a sense of life lived in earlier decades, and very pleasant it was too. Tokens for milk deliveries were placed in the glass bottles at the gate. It was not purchased at the supermarket. Years later, upon arrival in Melbourne in the late 90s I got that similar sense, that it too, was a city from an earlier decade. It was impossible to find a corner shop for milk when living in the city centre, no 7-Elevens, the ubiquitous corner store selling satisfactory 1-dollar coffees (but I don’t tell anyone I buy them). These past 20 years have brought a huge change to city life and the cityscape - it has become a cosmopolitan metropolis.

Seamus O’Hanlon, Monash’s urban historian, researches the effects of globalisation, the resurgences of inner city suburbs and the CBD for places to work, live and play. In his most recent book, City Life, he traces that transformation that has taken place in my lifetime here.

The city has also seen a huge change in the type of Irish immigrant, educated, experienced and mobile. As my children attended catholic schools in Ireland, they initially went catholic schools here and I immediately saw the difference in academic rigor, schools here were all about ‘sticky stuff’. They both ended up in reputable state schools. I saw a similar difference in higher education too, having taught at university level here and in Derry. Interestingly, my son’s school celebrated St Patrick’s Day, and many years later, with the aid of a few colleagues, we had a departmental bring-a-plate at Deakin University to celebrate all things Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. However, my wife and I met few colleagues from Ireland. While working in the multicultural university sector, I saw a huge increase in Asian colleagues, as did my wife in her consultancy firms. Despite work and school providing few Irish connections, I feel this society makes it relatively easy for Irish immigrants to settle, as one Irish President noted. Buy the books here.

Trish O’Connor found in her PhD research on Irish emigration of the 1980s that most did it for adventure, as I did. Now with retirement and cognisant of untimely deaths of family members and wishing to travel, we up-sticks again for another adventure.

Recently I read a list of barely amusing anecdotes that reflect that you may be from Melbourne. For instance, when you mention ‘Bougainville’, you think of Northland. Or you don’t get jokes about Melbourne weather. I do get the jokes about Melbourne weather which is why I am writing this in a sunny street called Bougainville in the hinterland of Byron Bay.

For the past 20 years, like the song celebrates, I call Australia home. Melbourne, to be precise. Excluding time spent overseas, Ireland, being central to those journeys but I spent, extended periods in France, beside the canal basin of the Canal du Midi and in Alicante, and in Spain, on the Mediterranean. Now following the sale of our home, and joining a house-sitters’ website, we find ourselves wintering in sunny and warm Queensland and Northern NSW. I am currently enquiring about cat-sitting in an 1899 mansion on a Greek island.

Over the past few years I wrote two books and essays that reflected my early life in Northern Ireland, and my life in Melbourne and Ireland from afar, and indeed the whole emigration process. Before we left Northern Ireland in 1986 for New Zealand, the Troubles was exploding all around. I was schooled by the Christian Brothers in Derry’s Bogside and Creggan, during the 1970s. Many of my class-mates were ‘involved’, and that period was reflected in my book, Cillefoyle Park. Gun battles outside my school and IRA checkpoints, bombs, shootings and riots were commonplace. Those manning the checkpoints turned up for afternoon class.

The Age cartoon acknowledging the demise of the Irish session at the Corkman.

So, what of the country and city where I worked and raised a family? Melbourne, famous for its liveability for business expats, has creaking infrastructure, huge housing debt, under-employment and predicted to become bigger than Sydney in population. Geoff Achison, a local Melbournian and renowned blues singer, calls it the little country in the state of Victoria. Melbourne like most great cities, is a city state. Events in Canberra shows us we are not immune to the rise of populism and the Alt-right. Yet a recent survey of younger Australians demonstrated a satisfaction with life. Buy the books here.

There have been many groups and societies maintaining sporting, cultural and musical connections with Ireland, but today building coherence and solidarity within the Irish community is challenging as their interests are as varied as the groups themselves. Today’s mobility and cheap airfares attest to this movement. The tyranny of distance, no more. There exists in Australia a rich and varied breeding ground for many things Irish, but are they supported as they were once before? The BBC production – Bringing it all Back Home, recognized the contribution of Irish musicians in Australia, the Fitzgerald family, Billy Moran and Kathleen Harte. Ex-Irish President, Mary Robinson, said Australia was the most Irish outside the island of Ireland. Where and what is home today for the Irish immigrants? But O’Hanlon also poses the same question for Australians in the twenty-first century, what is home for today’s Melbourian?

Jobs, products and services flow back and forth across the 310-mile border, so what is to become of livelihoods dependent on that flow? Peter Robinson, the ex-First Minister provides a seemingly Remainer-view (on the RTE website) of the potential crises for N.I. of a hard border. He found, like John Hume before him, for all its faults, the corridors of the EEC provided opportunities for the betterment of Ireland as a whole. The current Secretary of State, Karen Bradley sent incredulous waves of shock through NI by displaying, in an interview, her lack of knowledge of tribal politics.

My intention is to stay youthful and vigorous, and I have always liked Blake’s observation that we have three stages in life – innocence, experience and creative innocence. Not only discovering new lands and new places but also new things to write about, a creative innocence. It’s still the same old bugbear though, as Colum McCann advises the writer, arse on the seat, arse on the seat, only for me in new lands and places, maybe with cats at my feet, looking over the Aegean Sea. Buy the books here.

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