Bloodlines

Chapter 15: Mudgee

From the lookout atop Flirtation Hill, you can see Mudgee nestled into the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range, snug as a bug.  It’s a prosperous town on the banks of the Cudgegong River, on the far edge of the Sydney basin. The area sheltered the Wiradjuri people for untold generations and it’s these custodians who gave Mudgee its name, which means ‘resting place’ or ‘nest in the hills’. 

Our grandmother Hilda Byrnes grew up in Mudgee, along with her sister Ethel May and their three bothers Jim, Frank and Bert.

Hilda’s parents and grandparents also lived in and around Mudgee. So did numerous uncles and aunts. All of them were descendants of Irish and English immigrants who farmed around Mudgee, Broombee and Mullamuddy from the mid-1800s onwards. They were good-humoured people, not inclined to blow their own trumpet, although on occasion they made news, as was the case for Hilda’s uncle George, her brother Jim, and her mother, Eleanor Esther Byrnes.

Jim Byrnes caught the media’s attention when he renewed his driver’s licence at the age of 103.

How does it feel when you are 103 and you’ve just earned your licence for the 20th time? Journalist Samantha Selinger-Morris asked that question during an interview with Jim for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005. [1]

‘There’s nothing tricky about the test,’ he says over the phone from his home in Mudgee. ‘As long as you follow the rules and look where you're going, you're all right.’

Mr Byrnes says he drives his white, 1963 Holden – mostly to the grocery, the doctor and the bowling club – for the same reasons as when he first got his licence in 1927: independence.

He admits that onlookers are ‘sometimes shocked’ to see him behind the wheel, but is concern lies with less cautious drivers.

‘There’s a lot of drivers on the road at the present time that wouldn’t pass the test,’ he says. ‘You see them run a bit of a risk, at corners and that sort of thing.’

Mr Byrnes doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be driving, saying, ‘Once you get up around your 90s you just take it from year to year.’

He could already by Australia’s oldest registered driver. No national database exists to confirm his status, but Andrew Tyrrell, manager of the Mudgee Motor Registry says: ‘He’d have to be awful close. At 103, he’s starting to lose his competitors.’

Had Jim been around at the same time as Father James Dunphy, he might have offered the same advice; and had Father Dunphy heeded that advice and looked where he was going, he might have avoided a premature death. Be that as it may, Hilda’s uncle George Byrnes, who had a farm alongside the Cudgegong, found himself named in local accounts of Father Dunphy’s untimely end in winter 1845.

There’s no suggestion of wrongdoing. It’s more a case of good intentions over-riding a young man’s better judgement. A request had come from a family in Mudgee, asking for a priest to baptise a group of local children; Father Dunphy rode out from Hartley to fulfil his parish duties.

Father Maher, who wrote a history of Catholic Mudgee for the parish centenary in 1952, describes what happened next:

Father Dunphy crossed the river at Mullamuddy and performed his priestly work of baptising the children in the Hayes family. He was warned not to go back over the river, now flooded, but he had further duties calling and must needs be at Mudgee for Mass on the following Sunday. At Mudgee were 90 Catholics awaiting him amongst the 240 people in the village.

A shepherd caring for his sheep nearby saw the priest enter the flooded Cudgeong, and noticing that he was washed from his horse, rushed down to render assistance, but in vain. The horse alone came through. The river was dragged for two days before the body of Father Dunphy was eventually found and brought to Mudgee.

The place of the ‘priest’s downfall’ would assuredly be the old ford across the river at the bend between George Byrnes’ residence and that of Ern Goodman. [2]

Hilda Byrnes was born in Mudgee in 1900. She walked down the aisle of St Mary’s Catholic Church in Mudgee to marry Vince Doherty when she was 28-years-old. Hilda had lived and worked in Sydney for some time before she met and married Vince. He was a reliable fellow, originally from East Maitland, and during their life together they raised three beautiful children: Moira Joan, Doreen Eleanor, and Gregory John.

I wandered past St Mary’s in Mudgee several times before I found myself walking down the aisle, retracing Hilda’s steps on the day she married. When I got to the altar I stepped left so I could stand where Vince stood. He had his chest out, shoulders back, pleased as punch and just a little nervous on this special day, aware of his family in the pews behind him, outnumbered but not discomforted by the Byrnes’ and their guests ranged behind Hilda’s proud mum and dad, Eleanor and Joe.

Among the artefacts Hilda left behind is an obituary for her mother, Eleanor Esther Byrnes. It appeared in Mudgee’s newspaper on Monday 25 October 1948:

Mrs Eleanor Esther Byrnes, wife of Mr J Byrnes, died in the Mudgee Hospital this morning, aged 74 years. The greater part of her life was spent in the Broombee district, where she was held in the highest regard by the while community. Like her husband, she was a keen supporter of the Mudgee Agricultural Society, and exhibited with great success in the prepared fruits and cookery sections at local shows. She was a wonderful neighbour, a devoted wife, and a fond mother, and her passing came as a terrible shock to her family and friends, to whom universal sympathy is extended. The funeral will take place from St Mary’s Church at 2 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Messrs. J.C. Swords & Son being in charge of the arrangements.

They’ve gone now. The bride and groom, their parents, siblings and friends. So too are those who came to St Mary’s 20 years later to pay their respects to Eleanor Esther Byrnes. But if you turn around slowly you can see their outlines in the pews, gently illuminated by the afternoon light filtering through St Mary’s stained-glass, a tumble of ghosts wondering who we are.

‘We’re you,’ I say. ‘You’re us.’

Hilda left Mudgee as the first World War came to an end. It must have been an exciting time to be in Sydney, especially for a 19-year-old country girl. She got a job as a typist at Goodyear and ended up staying at the tyre company for almost a decade, becoming ‘order clerk’ before she resigned in May 1928, five months before she married Vince.  

Goodyear published a farewell photo of Hilda, along with a commentary. It said:

Miss H. Byrnes, Order Clerk at Sydney, has been with Goodyear since 1919.

Miss Byrnes is a tennis enthusiast and plays a masterly game. In fact, we go so far as to say that we believe she is capable of comfortably defeating some of the Goodyear men tennis cracks. This enthusiastic Goodyearite is also a member of a Debating Club, and we presume, rivals William Morris H and other Parliamentarians in oratorial eloquence.

The ‘William Morris H’ referred to here is none other than William Morris Hughes, better known as Billy Hughes, Australian Prime Minister from 1915 to 1923, Federal Attorney-General for more than 13 years, and a parliamentarian for almost 52 years. He ‘had a patriotism, a fire, a rare eloquence and a pungent wit’, according to Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and Goodyear’s presumption that Hilda might be as gifted an orator as Billy Hughes was a generous comparison.

Hilda was in her 60s by the time I came along. I didn’t know what oratory was then, and I’m pretty sure none of us grandkids was aware that Hilda played a masterly game of tennis. We knew Hilda simply, as Nanna Doherty, a grandmother who grew sweet alyssum around the edges of her goldfish pond to blur its hard edges. This was in the backyard of the house she lived in with Vince, in Howell Ave Lane Cove. She grew snapdragons, too.

I’m sure Hilda was fond of us because she smiled as she listened to our chatter, but having pulled her own kids through the Great Depression, and having done so while Vince was often away from home, travelling for work, she might have felt she had crossed the Cudgegong enough times to warrant some peace and quiet in her senior years.

When I look back on those times I get the sense that Hilda preferred not so much to get down and directly engage, but instead to float an inch or two above the confusion of grandkids swirling around her feet. She had a calmness about her, a quietness that was rare in the O’Grady mash-up.

Mum drove some of us to Mudgee when we were kids. We visited Hilda’s brother Jim and his wife Thelma on their property at Broombee.

At that time, Jim’s 1963 Holden, the one her was still driving when he was 103, would have been fresh off the production line, although we paid it scant attention because we were city kids and besides, Dad owned a Ford Falcon, and once your parents had made that choice, the alternative wasn’t worth considering.

My brother Kieran remembers Jim’s horse, though. It was called Rainbow.

Colin Boylan, one of Hilda’s 15 grandchildren, has compiled a Byrnes family history, and many of the names and dates I’ve used in this chapter are sourced from Colin’s work. [3]. He notes that Hilda’s grandparents James and Eliza are buried in Mudgee cemetery, as are Hilda’s parents, Joe and Eleanor, and other relatives. Which explains why we’re there on a bleak winter’s day in 2022, Malcolm, myself, and our Kelpie called Hope. It’s the kind of day that makes fingers turn blue, and for that reason, Malcolm stays in the car while I scout the cemetery looking for signs.

No luck. But I take comfort from the thought that I come from a family who had a horse called Rainbow.

There was a direct route back to Malcolm and Hope: an access road for hearses and mourners’ cars. The alternative was a muddy old footpath that weaved between yet more illegible headstones. My head said ‘direct route’, my heart said ‘mud’, and sure enough, after taking a few steps along the muddy path I saw Hilda’s parents Joe and Eleanor, and her sister, Ethel May, sharing a plot of rich Mudgee soil and a headstone etched with their names and dates. We had a quiet word.

In Loving Memory, Rest in Peace.

Hilda died on 8 February 1980. Vince followed her seven years later, on 4 April 1987. They’re buried together in Macquarie Park, Sydney.

[1] At 102, Jim’s freedom know no bounds. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 October 2005. Retrieved 15 June 2022. https://www.smh.com.au/national/at-103-jims-freedom-drive-knows-no-bounds-20051001-gdm61c.html

[2] Mudgee Catholic Centenary 1852 – 1952. Rev, A. Maher. Retrieved 4 July 2022, National Library of Australia: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2203193212/view?partId=nla.obj-2203193273#page/n0/mode/1up

[3] Boylan, Colin. Origins: From Campbelltown to Milsvale to Mullamuddy to Mudgee. Self-published, May 2012.