Kelly Country 1946

My father wasn’t my father when this photo was taken in 1946; he was an 18-year-old carpenter’s apprentice on his way to a “Launch Picnic”, dress code smart casual.  

He was third generation Irish Australian, the son of a builder who was in turn the son and grandson of horse-and-dray brick carters from Gore Hill on Sydney’s lower north shore.

My father was 11-years-old at the start of the Second World War and 17-years-old when it ended. He was too young to be embroiled in the carnage yet old enough to be shaped by the Great Depression that preceded it; old enough to know, for example, that if you took care of the pence, the pounds would take care of themselves.

My father was as sentimental as his cousin Timmie O’Grady who was born in Ballylahiff and who lived there all his life. Timmie wrote poems when he wasn’t working at Ballykisteen Stud, next to Tipperary Racecourse; he lived a version of the life my father would have lived if not for the famine that sent so many Irish elsewhere. In any event, there were shared affections: for horses, dogs and music, for family and old-time stories, for potato and lamb neck stew.

When Kel completed his apprenticeship he joined his father’s building business and together they built houses and churches across Sydney. He had no need for an everyday suit and tie but he did eventually buy himself a black dinner jacket and matching trousers which he took with him when he and my mother boarded the Silversea.

He never won the lottery – at least not the ticketed kind – but in the course of his golfing life he sunk two holes-in-one, which I’m sure would be harder than solving Wordle first go although I don’t have the mathematical skills to prove that.   

Only the tax collector, the electoral officer and the undertaker called my father by his given name, which was William. Everyone else knew him by his nickname, Kelly, later shortened to Kel. When you asked him how he got his nickname he’d say he used to play cops and robbers when he was a kid and liked to pretend he was the bushranger Ned Kelly. The name stuck.

I never asked Dad why he chose Ned Kelly; never asked if he had artefacts to inspect, perhaps a cardboard suit of armour and helmet. I didn’t ask for proof because none was required. It was enough to know that my father was someone who imagined himself to be someone else.

On the flip side of the photo of 18-year-old Kel are two handwritten messages: one from Kel and the other from a young woman named Doreen Doherty. Both wrote their notes as if the photo would be rolled up and put in a sea-worthy bottle, to be thrown overboard if and when the time came…

From Kel we learn this photo was taken on Saturday 5 October 1946, at the family home in Epping Road, Lane Cove. Kel stood in the shade of the backyard gum trees, at ease, his hair cut in a style carried over from his time with the Christian Brothers: short back and sides. The Hills Hoist was invented a year earlier, was soon planted in almost every backyard across the country, but it hadn’t reached Epping Road in 1946, which would explain the clothes line strung between the gum trees.

Three months later, Kel gave this photo to the woman he fell in love with. It was a pre-engagement keepsake, I suppose, an expression of interest much like the dance a satin bower bird performs to attract his mate.

Sometime later, Doreen added her own notes: went to tea and pictures, 1st time, 8/2/47. Doreen’s husband to be!

At first I didn’t know why Kel had written the words Launch Picnic on the back of this photo. There were no clues other than the possibility – which only occurred to me on closer inspection of the clothes Kel wore – that my father’s definition of smart casual was synonymous with tennis whites.

Kel was the go-to parent when we struggled with our homework. He often got frustrated when we failed to put two and two together and he must have carried that sense with him into the afterlife. Eventually he whispered: check the eulogy. When I did that I came across mention of his role as a founding member of St Michael’s Lane Cove Tennis Club and its president for many years. Ah ha, so that’s the Launch Picnic referred to. Minor mystery solved.

Kel and Doreen married in 1952. They had eight children in quick succession, enough to fill a pew at St Michael’s Catholic Church, which we did every Sunday and on Holy Days of Obligation. My parents had a good life together. They were honest people who worked hard and loved each other a lot. They loved their sons and daughters, too, and their sons-and-daughters-in-law, and their grandkids and great-grandkids. To quote Virginia Woolf after reading David Copperfield: life flowed into every creek and cranny; some common feeling – youth, gaiety, hope – enveloped the tumult, brought the scattered parts together and gave the whole thing an atmosphere of beauty. 

In the speech he gave on his 90th birthday, Kel spoke at length about his own father, the builder William John, and it was then that I understood an old father’s love, like a Dickens story, flows backwards as much as it flows forward.

After he died, Dad’s dinner suit was one of the last artefacts to find a new home. It didn’t fit any of us, so Malcolm and I took it on a post-lockdown road trip through regional New South Wales.

The right moment presented itself in Cowra. The Vinnies op shop looked good and the people who worked there liked what we had to donate: Kel’s suit was dry cleaned before he put it away for the last time, it was in next-to-mint condition.

The person who found it at Vinnies probably bought it for their Year 12 Formal or a B&S Ball. They’d be 18-years-old or thereabouts, about to fall in love.