Bye-Bye Dolly Gray

Patrick McCarthy's Invented Family History

Patrick and Suzanna McCarthy,
Date December 1902
On their wedding day.

Patrick McCarthy was the Australian born first son of Irish immigrants Dan (1845-1906) and Kate McCarthy. Dan fled Ireland as a 16 year old, in 1861 and escaped to Southern Africa with some relations. Dan lived and worked for several years among the Boers, following an African massacre of Irish relatives, from which he barely survived. While living among the Boers, Dan rode and served on commando if farms were attacked. Dan’s twin brother Liam (1845-1910) also fled Ireland in 1861, but arrived in New York and immediately signed-up into the US Army where he served with distinction and promotions in the cavalry, until discharged after the Civil War in 1866.

In the early 1870s, Dan migrated to The Colony of Victoria and went gold mining and after a year of hard work, unearthed a nugget worth 1,000 pounds ($2,000). That golden discovery, gave him a future and solid financial base, which enabled him to marry and select land at Glenrowan. In the late 1870s, ongoing social and land conflicts, between small selectors and the large squatters erupted into the Kelly Outbreak. The small selectors, like Dan, sided with the Kellys, while the establishment sided with the squatters and their Royal Irish Constabulary police. The conflict ended with the destruction of the Kelly Gang, but its aftermath led to land reforms which gave the small selectors greater freedom to acquire farming land, produce a wider variety of crops improved their lot. Land reform coupled with the nearby railway allowed farm produce into the growing markets in Melbourne and London. Dan ever careful with monies obtained from his discovery invested in farming land, stock and equipment. Dan, like many of Victoria’s Irish, at the time, feared the police based on experiences in Ireland. When Patrick and his sisters were born, their births were unrecorded, because the father of the child had to attend a local police station and fill out a form registering that birth. Despite that omission, all the three McCarthy children born from 1880 onwards, in Victoria, had their baptisms recorded at St. Patrick’s church in Wangaratta. (This obstinate Irish trait caused havoc when researching the family history during the 1980s)

In 1880, Patrick was born and in his last years of schooling went to Melbourne. Dan encouraged learning and taught Patrick the Boers’ Taal as well as his native Gaelic. That a lad could speak his father’s native Irish tongue was not uncommon in those days before federation, and Patrick, by the time he was 18 years old, was fluent in the Taal and Gaelic. Returning to the farm Patrick was desperate to see the world, and once he understood that a war was imminent in South Africa he opted to go to Durban with his mate ‘Blue’ Reilly from Beechworth, during 1899. Ironically, Patrick’s and Blue’s entire fare from Melbourne to Cape Town was picked up several wealthy pro-imperialist businessmen in Melbourne, organized through the Victorian Mounted Rifles.

‘Bye-Bye Dolly Gray’ relates Patrick’s troubled service and rise through the ranks a volunteer colonial unit called the ‘Imperial Rough-Riders’, which was formed in the Colony of Natal at Estcourt in late 1899. The ‘Rough-Riders’ comprised men from the various Australian colonies who could ride and shoot and match the Boers. In that, the unit succeeded and it was during Patrick’s first hot fire-fight against the Boers on 15 November 1899, that he wounded a Boer commando, Jan Overberg. Patrick, always the Good Samaritan, tended Jan’s wounds at the end of the battle and ‘borrowed’ Jan’s horse and his rifle. Not only did Patrick carry and use Jan’s rifle for his entire service, he kept running into Jan during temporary battlefield armistices, which enable both sides to collect their wounded. Though on opposing sides of the conflict, Jan and Patrick formed a solid friendship based around their battlefield hardships and occasional exchanges of food. When Pretoria fell in June of 1900, Patrick met a Boer nurse, Suzanna Coetzee. Suzanna stole Patrick’s heart and he, hers… And nothing further will I write, because now its up to you, dear potential reader, to buy and discover the secrets, the conspiracies and murders that are, ‘Bye-Bye Dolly Gray’.

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