My great-great-grandfather Seamus Millane and his wife Brigid had come from Ireland to the gold rushes in the Colony of Victoria in 1857 on the sailing ship Mangerton. They were already in their fifties, farmers from near Ennis in County Clare. Rather surprisingly they brought with them, also as ‘Unassisted Passengers’, their five grown sons, including the seventeen-year-old Peter, who subsequently became my great-grandfather. The family made its way on foot from the port of Geelong to Ballarat and on to the diggings near Castlemaine. The extent to which they tried their luck digging for gold we do not know, but within a few years they had opted to mine the miners and had opened a general store in the main street of Castlemaine. Nearby was a butcher’s shop run by a family from Athenry in County Galway and in 1866, young son Peter married one of the girls from Athenry, Honorah Elizabeth Fyans.
A hundred years later my efforts to locate descendants of the Fyans family in Athenry in Ireland proved unsuccessful, but I did learn that ‘Fyans’ seems to have been the Irish rather phonetic way of pronouncing the Norman-French name ‘Fiennes’. Fiennes is a tiny village near Calais on the Channel coast of France. Jean de Fiennes was one of the six ‘Bourgeois de Calais’ represented in the great statuary group by Auguste Rodin and created in homage to the resistance by Calais to the invading English in 1347. The local seigneur, Eustache de Fiennes, had accompanied Duke William of Normandy in his conquest of England in the eleventh century and some of the Fiennes descendants who had then settled in England52 had, in the fourteenth century, crossed to Ireland and seized land near Dublin. The spelling/pronun-ciation of the French ‘Fiennes’ subsequently appears in Ireland as Fyans, Foynes, Fines, and so on. One of the Fyans had been Mayor of Dublin in the fifteenth century, as had another Fyans in the sixteenth century. Finnstown House Hotel now stands on the site of Fyans Castle in County Louth just outside Dublin. The Fyans family must have ‘conformed’ to English rule under the Tudors, just as the Fiennes family in England must have changed from Catholic to Protestant in the same period, in order to keep their property and status. So now I see that my genes link me to eleventh century France and to the fortune-seekers who helped Duke William in the conquest of Saxon England and also, through their near descendants, to those Anglo-Norman go-getters who helped the Plantagenets in their invasion of Ireland. The Fiennes/Fyans family was an influential one in the Dublin area for the following four centuries, turning its coat from Catholic to Protestant in the sixteenth century when continuing prosperity depended upon doing so … and in the eighteenth century permitting members willing to turn back to Catholicism, to intermarry with the ‘native’ Irish and to move beyond The Pale53 and into the nationalist west of Ireland. Captain Foster Fyans, first Commandant of the penal settlement at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) and first Police Magistrate in Geelong, who figured prominently in the development of Geelong and of the Western District of Victoria, came from County Louth, always within The Pale, and the more conformist side of the family. However, by the time he joined the British army in 1811, there were Fyans living in County Galway in the west of Ireland, and it is from those Catholic Fyans, whom I was unsuccessful in tracing, that Honorah Elizabeth descended. Is this evidence of a ‘pragmatic’ gene, of a well-developed instinct of survival? Is it evidence of a ‘realism’ gene, one that helps distinguish between the important realities of life and the less important myths of religion? At this early stage in the development of the science of genetics it would be premature to make such a claim, but such speculation would seem to be reasonable.
Peter Millane and Nora (nee Fyans) set up house in Campbells Creek, on the outskirts of Castlemaine and, like his father Seamus, Peter had five sons (and one daughter), the middle son being Will, my grandfather. Will went on to have five sons too (plus two daughters, one of whom was my mother).