This memoir, put together from a manuscript and other papers left behind by a cousin, is being published in the hope that it will prove informative in its portrayal of a minor family saga, amusing with its rather whimsical account of a youth’s passage through adolescence to adulthood and, perhaps most importantly, helpful to those confused by current attitudes towards sexuality, social mores and religion.
My cousin’s tale really begins in eighteenth-century Ireland under English occupation. In 1798 Seamus Millane, my cousin’s great-great-grandfather, was born in a tiny village in the west of Ireland. He grew to adulthood, married, and late in life migrated with his wife and five grown sons to the Australian goldfields. In 1861 Peter, the second-youngest son, married my kinswoman, Honorah Elizabeth Fyans (the Irish form of Fiennes).1 Completing the circle, one of the sons of this later union travelled in the early 1900s from Australia to England where he settled down, married and produced children of his own.
My cousin set out to put together the many fragments of the histories of the one English and seven Irish families from which he descended; he believed that the glimpses of nineteenthcentury life – in England and Ireland, on the sailing ships en route to Australia, on the goldfields, in the Australian bush, and in the rapidly developing metropolis of Melbourne – would be of interest as social history. However, the bulk of this historical material is here presented in a series of appendices rather than in the main text; as explained in his Introduction, my cousin’s original intention had been to trace inter-generational behavioural characteristics in the family but this project remained incomplete. The core of the project was to be a detailed examination of his own life and persona, which he did complete and set out with disarming frankness, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the tension between sex and religion … and that core exercise in self-analysis constitutes the main part of this book. My cousin had neither delusions of grandeur nor pretensions to be someone of note; he saw himself rather as John Citizen, Everyman, a face in the crowd, and for that very reason believed that this story, the story of his inner life, might be of interest to other ordinary people.
He looked back and tried to identify mistakes made and actions regretted, not as an exercise in maudlin self-indulgence but in the hope that by highlighting his own errors of judgement, he might help others to avoid similar pitfalls. His ruminations on family life, education, sexuality, religion and social mores are more often droll than dreary and they carefully lead the reader to his personal conclusions that the very foundations of western society, the belief in God and in an afterlife, the moral codes of the ‘People of the Book’ and the concept of the nuclear family are all notions that require serious and urgent revision. He came to believe that there is no heaven or hell or reincarnation or hereafter of any sort; that as a consequence we have only one life each, one chance at happiness; and that our best chance of finding happiness is to help others to do the same.
This is not a totally new message but this story presents it in a new way.
John Fiennes
Melbourne 2012