Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Miles Franklin published manuscripts, 1925 - ca.1950, undated: All That Swagger
MLMSS 6035 / 20

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All that Swagger !

"..........
And I'm loyal to my Queen,
But I can't forget old Erin,
Where the grass grows green"

That is the only tag of an old song that careless memory can catch as it wistfully echoes through the generations of Blaise, as the and records of "Old Hopping Fearless Danny" Blaise's eventual friend nostalgia. He used to croon, rather than sing it softly to himself as he sat alone, thrust aside by his sons as "childish". His eyes would glaze with the far-awayness that comes when age-frailty has wrung the colours from the present and leaves only to the distant fields of youth their original roses and greens.

"Oh moi, oh moi !" he would ejaculate, talking half to himself, for rarely was there a sympathetic listener. When there was, he would use her to make his talk becoming - to save him from the

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accusation imputation of "hatting" - and his eyes would look far away backward into what had once been the future and suffered as he indulged belatedly the poignant ineradicable emotion endured by all those of any sensibility who, for whatever reason, are permanently separated from their birthland. Such a separation whatever the reason is always exile.

The old man would return to dwell on the picture of his mother at the corner of the highway, taking her farewell of him, and of his father, shut in his school room, because he had lacked the courage to leave the house to see Danny meet the coach.

The sombre scene of the wild Murrumbidgee tumbling sinking into Bunyip Hole and tumbling therefrom into Blaise's Crossing would dissolve, and the golden Shannon takes it place, graciously traversing its ancient plain, by Limerick, the beauteous city. The white road leads on to old Ennis in County Clare and the ruined Abbey where the boys played, and Clare Castle. It is a May day with the whinchats merry in the gorse, and the larks high in the soft air. It is such a day as Ireland can brew - a cajoling, seductive day, a day to caress a man's youth's heart to water, and to turn a maid's towards a man. And it is about a hundred years ago as near as maybe, because young Daniel Brian Robert Blaise had been born in

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in the year of Waterloo, and he was stretching towards eighteen. He stood in the road
awhile, the beauty, the tradition of the scene soaking his being even as the sun, not that he was at that date a lad given to meditation, but his home was on the rise out of Ennis to the west that looks N.E. to the Slieve Aughty Mts. and N.W to the Aran Isles and the ungracious N. Atlantic which had swallowed entirely or expatriated so many Clare and Galway lads. Roads always excited Daniel Brian Robert. He felt the romance of them running out to take the winds and the weather of all the seasons. They were a foe to stagnation. And he loved the open view obstructed by nothing but the little thatched white cabins on the treeless hillsides. The spring sunshine lay like a benediction right away to Kilrush and Liscannon Bay, and to Kilkee and Killaloe, to lilting Kildare and hilarious Kilkenny and Tipperary. Ah, the loves and doves of darling names that swell in the heart of one with Irish heritage till he is thrappled. A soul wrought through a thousand conscious years of legend & poesy till the soul of the old land existed as a palpable presence even to the inarticulate & materialistic.

He looked around at the fair green land with a sense of deprivation that none of it was his, nor could be. Agrarian agitation had fostered a land hunger in him. The only soil he could dig

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his spade into were the two acres around his father's school and they were mostly pre-empted as a play ground for boys and a plot for the cow.

The Blaises, though there was a legend that they had come to Ireland with Strongbow, had still an alien or "planted" name and followed clerical pursuits as differentiated from those of the reverberating aboriginal cognomens like O'Brien, O'Shaughnessy, O'Neill, O'Sullivan, O'Flaherty, O'Donoghue whose bones and brains had fertilised the soil or culture of Eire in days before culture or agriculture began in Albion, so Irish archaeological research - or perhaps only boastful pride wd. have it. And as for the Blaise Christian names there was never a Kevin, a Patrick nor an Aloysius, among them which tells its own tale lack of their Milesian Blaise Firbolgian descent relationship.

School master Blaise was principal of a small preparatory school for boys. His curriculum lacked erudite subjects but he administered or transmitted something with his canings that was of infinitely better wear to his third son in his after life in the antipodes - character unflinching and resourceful. In the dislocation and stringency following on military glory Mr. Blaise could make but scant provision for three sons. One in due time wd. step into his

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father's shoes but it is debilitating to wait for old men's shoes and no one knows what became of Richard William Blaise. No doubt he inherited the school and he and it petered out. No record remains of it today. The second son, Henry was engulfed by India. It is known that he rose, or sank, to be a major in the army there, but nothing more.

And now Danny was reaching maturity and crying out for land, and that was crying for the moon insofar as his father could help him. But there was an opening to appeal to one of his ardent courageous temperament. The poverty following the Napoleonic wars had driven thousands across the seas to the American States, and the Australian colonies also were now greedy for settlers. Golden prospects of land for all free men were circulated and penetrating even to Ennis in the County Clare. Mrs. Blaise discouraged all talk of this as she did not want to lose her nursling.

Danny then turned to the Cooleys about two miles over the hill. He loved to walk around with old Cooley looking at his turnip fields, discussing the bull in the meadow or the pigs in the sty. There was also pretty Johanna Cooley who was mistress of the

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dairy and who could turn the heel and toe of a home-spun sock with the best.

 Danny was as bundle of energy and always ready to lend a hand for the sheer love of all work with the land and old Cooley thought him an obliging gossoon. It was the acuter Honoria that opened his eyes.
"Hilpin' you is it - God hilp you, have you seen his eyes light on our Johanna?"
"The divil an' all - I'll break the young spalpeen's back. If my girl was to wed a prodestan'."
"Make no rumpus. I'll get Father O'Leary to say a special word on her duty."
"A prodestan', an' him with nothing to his back - will have to got for a soldier most loike."
"He does be talkin' of going to Australia"
"An' a good thing too - the sooner the better. And there's Kevin O'Gorman wid a property near as good as me own waitin' for her to say the word."
"But afther all, he's an old widow man with big childre and not to touch the heart of a little girl."
"Touch her heart be damned, I'll touch her back with a good stout ashplant if she shows

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any nonsense."

Danny on that inspiring spring day was not only looking at the scene by and large. He was inspecting one corner of it for a handkerchief on a gorse bush at the foot of a coomb at the back of Cooley's barn. There was cover in that direction to hide his approach, and on this day old Cooley went to market.

There had been incidents following on Cooley's awakening with reference to Danny's companionship. Danny had not been forbidden the premises but he had been frigidly received, and Johanna confessed to undergoing extra penances.
"But 'twas worth it," she said, tossing her curls, a confession that made Danny feel like a king. He too had been taken to task by his father and mother. All the unpleasantness suffered by love's young dreamers on opposite sides of a sectarian fence were theirs in mild degree, for the parents involved all had kindly dispositions and were among the enlightened. Also, Danny's emigration was becoming practical politics and both sets of

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parents looked at this as a way out of the danger. The Cooleys welcomed it with relief, the Blaises with grief and misgivings, but also a little as the lesser of two evils where marrying a Roman Catholic was involved.

Danny however had taken matters into his own hands with a precocity and enterprise to be expected of one who was as Danny was and did what Danny did when known to those who still recall him as Fearless Danny, and honest Danny, as well as by the aboriginal title Nullah Mundowy.

On that beauteous day all being well in the shelter of the gorse in the coomb back of Cooley Hall Danny had in his pocket a leaflet to read to his Johanna. He was a hero in her eyes that he cd. see tho he was no great potatoes of a man. He was not yet 18 and he stood had but 5ft.6in. - a paltry stature for a man to face the wilds of the antipodes in the old bravura day of convicts and aborigines in a scarce-explored continent. Neither had he classic features - a small pointed nose, a stubborn mouth - full of ugly teeth later ambushed in an unmolested beard. But ah, Johanna saw his eyes as blue as the heavens on the days when the salmon went to go up, and his hair with the

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sheen of a raven's wing and was as soft as floss silk and his forehead was broad & full and his voice was a deep and brave as a baying hound's.

" Johanna, Mavourneen," said he, scarce waiting to take precautions against being descried before he had pulled a worn paper from his bosom and began to read.
"Listen to this, I've got it all laid out in moi moind."
 
Johanna had rather he had first noticed the red ribbon on her gown, her dainty new shoes and bright kirtle. She was an inviolable maiden, but what pleasure is there in such valiant virtue that cannot strive for is given no opportunity to win spurs. Kevin O"Gorman - nasty old widow man of the advanced age of 35 - was ready enough to test her, but she fled shrank (resisted with) in loathing from his continued attempt to place his hands on her jimp form, whereas Danny wd. never be that kind of admirer. She doubted if he cd. be provoked out of his respect for women by any tactics possible to a spotless maiden. But Danny & Johanna were as unsophisticated as Adam & Eve in the Garden before the Fall.

Danny was reading. He liked to hear himself and he had more facility than Johanna who had been educated by an inferior governess. "Shure out there there's new developments at every turn of the moon. Listen will ye: 'The short space of little more than four

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decades has converted the horrid and trackless wilderness - the transient hunting field of some migratory tribe of naked and un-idead savages into the busy mart of civilized and enlightened intercourse where there is yearly exported to the Mother-country produce of many kinds, and where the tastes, the pursuits, the comforts, and even the elegancies of English Society are valued and enjoyed to a far more substantial extent than in many of the large towns of Great Britain itself.'"

"It reads like a grand story," said Johanna.
"Shure it means that there are towns like Limerick and foine establishments like your aunt's already there."
"Can that be true?" exclaimed Johanna.
"Thrue, why thrue, this is the actual printed word I'm reading you. This is from official sources. It says so at the beginning. Listen to their aims, 'to induce respectable and virtuous families among the industrious ranks of society at home, to transfer their capital and labour from an arena where the whirl of competition stand formidably in the way of successful exertion, to a field where not competency alone, but certain fortune can hardly fail to reward the efforts of careful, persevering and honourable toil." "Certain fortune! You A man'd be dhriving in his carriage with high steppers like Lord Limerick before you cd. turn round."
"Ah it would take too long I'm thinking," said

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Johanna dubiously. "My Aunt Delia had a letter that came from Johnny O'Toohey that wint out after the Rebellion and it was full of terrible hardships and convicts and nothing to eat. I saw it meself for 'tis kep in the ould Bible."
"Och, Johanna I have trouble getting things into your head and then they come out again. The Rebellion, Shure they were rebels and convicts."
"They were noble heroes foighting for freedom."
"Maybe they were, but I'm trying to prove that they were treated as felons and transported and that's an old story of our grandfather's day. Shure that's all dealt with here. "Listen, it says that Sydney Cove was a repository of national crime, a vast territorial gaol inhabited only by felons and their overseers. Shure what cd. there be but superfluity of naughtiness. Shure even the Governors thimselves scarcely exceeded either in dignity of importance anything but superintendents of houses of correction. This was at the beginning, but since 1820 a tide of respectable immigration has been diluting that deplorable state of affairs at the furthest extremity of the globe."
"It sounds desperate to be so far away," remarked Johanna.