This piece about my uncle Sean won second prize in the Memoir section at the Eastwood/Hills Literary Competition for 2017.
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This can’t have been the first time I met Mr Sean O’Rourke, but it is the first I remember clearly. I was 9 years old and my aunty Steph arrived for a holiday with her new husband Sean. It is fair to say he wasn’t what Steph’s family, especially her parents, had in mind for her life partner. Twenty-something years older than her, he was an Irish rover straight out of a traditional folk song. He came to her with a colourful history of mining hard, living hard and drinking hard all over Australia since he’d arrived from Cork in his twenties. I liked him the first time I saw the twinkle in his eyes, the debonair wave of his silvering hair and heard him speak in his soft Irish brogue. Then the first time I heard him sing sean nos in his rich baritone, which he was likely to do with the slightest of provocations, I was quite sold on this new uncle.
Family legend goes that when they arrived for a visit that day in 1981 one of my first questions to him was ‘Who’s your favourite band?’
He had just heard Split Enz on radio and so he said ‘Um…. Split Enz?’
It j
ust so happened that they were my new favourite band. Just weeks before I’d gone into the local music shop with a voucher. I felt so very grown up to walk into a record store to buy something of my own choosing. I went into the shop intending to buy a Barry Manilow record, who I loved at the time with a now unfathomable passion. It must have been completely unfathomable to my mum. At this point in our family history we used to tussle for control of the TV on Sunday evenings. We kids wanted Wide World of Disney. Mum insisted on Countdown.
The young guy behind the counter of the record shop refused to let me buy Barry Manilow. Instead he put Split Enz’s True Colours into my hands. I immediately loved the cover: the red background with the black outlined, green and white geometric shapes. Learning to love the music took a little longer – moving from Barry Manilow to True Colours in one fateful moment for a nine year old is quite a leap, but the record guy had given me a fairly clear sense of what I should be listening to.
Sean O’Rourke ended up having much more influence than that guy in the record shop on what I subsequently listened to and read.
Sean embraced the culture he had left behind, and through him I discovered all sorts of literature and music. I’m particularly thankful for the introduction to JP Donleavy and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer of course is not remotely Irish, but thanks to Sean, I learnt so much about Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. Then of course there was the music – The Dubliners, Christy Moore and best of all Planxty and Andy Irvine. I felt an instant connection with traditional Irish music. The music grabbed me in my chest, in my heart with its minor key melancholy beauty. It still refuses to let me go.
I was an apprentice to Sean’s emigrant’s embrace of Ireland. He set me up well, even with the jobs he helped me find. In my early twenties he set me up for a job at the Irish Club in Perth. I learnt to pull a decent pint of Guinness, I served Sean himself a fair few pints, and even survived my first St Patricks Day behind the bar. This training served me well a couple of years later.
I had landed in tiny village of Doolin in County Clare where the Cliffs of Moher dwindle down to sea level and meet the moody desolate beauty of the exposed limestone landscape called the Burren. My brother Jez was not far behind me. We both stumbled into jobs at McGanns, one of the three pubs in the village, all of them famous for their Irish music sessions. We started out washing dishes then we both graduated to the kitchen to make the stew and seafood chowder. A few weeks later an opening in the bar came up. It was contentious to even contemplate having an Australian behind the bar of a touristy Irish pub, where American tourists came to discover their heritage and have an authentic Irish experience. But summer was over and I was given a go.
McGann’s in Doolin
Not everyone was convinced. A few crusty old fellas lined up in front of the taps on my first trial, forearms resting on the bar. They said ‘You’re a bloody Aussie, you can’t pull a pint of Guinness.’ I was confident. I’d served my apprenticeship, thanks to Sean. I poured a few pints, let them rest for the required time. The trick is to be patient, difficult for an impatient soul like me. I filled the last five centimetres leaving a beautiful head. I gave the lads their pints and they had a sip. Then they nodded ‘You’ll do.’
In two separate stints I stayed in that tiny village on the Atlantic coast for about nine months, spending a lot of it behind that bar, pulling a lot of Guinness and opening many cans of Bulmers cider. This was long before the Celtic Tiger years, and most young people left Ireland to find work. So there was no prospect for me to work legally in Ireland at the time. If it had been, I sometimes imagine I might never have come back to Australia. Occasionally I try to picture the version of myself that stayed – but happily I think I’m happier with the Western Australian version. Still, I’ve left a little bit of my heart behind on the West Coast of Ireland and a large part of the reason I got there in the first place was Mr Sean O’Rourke. He died a good death after a long full life on 30th August 2016.