Can You Hear the Sea?: My Grandmother’s Story

by Brenda Niall

Brenda Niall has turned her biographer’s eye to a personal subject—her grandmother, Aggie. She tells the story of a fiercely independent and intelligent woman who braved a new country as a single woman, teaching in a country school, before marrying a Riverina grazier, whose large powerful family was wary of the newcomer with ideas of her own.

Aggie dealt with hardships and loneliness after the early and drawn-out death of her husband, and brought up her seven children to be happy—all with a calm determination. But it was the memory box and her longing for the sea that captured the imagination of her granddaughter.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Biography Memoir

304 pages, Hardcover

Published October 30, 2017

About the author

Brenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. She is the author of several award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family and her portrait of the Durack sisters, True North. In 2016 she won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the National Biography Award for Mannix. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’.

Reviews

[Text Publishing]

'Few other writers have such an ability to understand and describe the relationships that create the characters of her subjects. [A] beautiful and mellow story…[with] a vibrant narrative energy.’
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Niall's skill is to listen with a discerning ear, to acknowledge the views and to seek always the social, political and historical context and influences. Her craft as a skilled biographer gives her grandmother a fresh life, one that will resonate with many in families of similar background, but wider than that, provide another piece in the picture of the European settlement of Australasia.’
Otago Daily Times

‘Agnes’s story charts the changing role of women in the colonies, the impact of the world wars and the rise and fall of family fortunes…Niall’s beautifully told tale will have echoes in thousands of other Australian families.’
SA Weekend

‘An affectionate tribute to someone who quietly but firmly shaped her own place in the world.’
Books+Publishing

‘Can You Hear the Sea? creates a portrait, from other kinds of evidence, of a woman whose silence sealed her most intimate moments. With a light touch, Niall looks at her grandmother’s life through the prism of the imaginative world in which she was immersed…Aggie’s is a story of independence and grit: understated, necessary, uncelebrated.’
Australian

‘Aggies gift of the shell and the empty box put two questions to Brenda Niall. They also addressed her craft and her desire. Could she recreate the sounds and feel of the past out of unpromising materials, and could she fill the empty box while recognising that it remained empty? This book answers both questions with assurance. One might hope that among the next generation of Aggie’s descendants another young person will hear in it the sea that flows into story telling.’
Eureka Street

‘A fascinating subject…Hopefully people still find ways to write biographies that so adeptly capture the particularity of lived experience.’
Saturday Paper

‘Insightful.’
Yours

‘[Niall] is clear about her process, asking questions, noting gaps, offering her own memories with an easy blend of intimacy and distance, in an authoritative yet conversational voice…Niall writes with respect for a woman who built a dynasty across centuries, was adventurous and stable, traditional and ahead of her time, English and embodied the best of Australia.’
Australian Book Review

‘Niall’s beautifully told tale will have echoes in thousands of other Australian families.’
SA Weekend

‘Gentle and engaging biography…Aggie was undoubtedly a remarkable and intelligent woman, and this book is a lovely testament to her life.’
Good Reading

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brenda Niall is a respected Australian biographer. In this book she turns her attention to the life of her grandmother, Aggie Gorman (nee Maguire). The title refers to a conch shell Aggie kept and used to allow her grandchildren to listen to - 'can you hear the sea'? I thought there could have been better titles for the book as the sea doesn't play a big part in Aggie's life. She grew up in Liverpool and migrated to Australia with her sister and brother but her brother died on the voyage. She later married a grazier in the Riverina but was widowed when she was 39, with seven young children. She never lived by the sea.

I found much to interest me in this book, especially as I'm currently researching my own family history. One of the things that interested me most was not the Australian story but the story of the Maguires who were driven out of Ireland by the famine and built a business in Liverpool making matches. The family became wealthy and influential. Niall comments that while her grandmother was wealthy for most of her life, she always lived simply.

Aggie was an independent woman with firm opinions and someone who worked hard for her children's futures. Brenda describes with affection the open house Aggie used to keep in Melbourne in her later life. Her grandchildren loved Sundays for their visits to 'grandmother's sanctuary'.

Yet despite its many strengths, this biography somehow missed the mark for me. Perhaps there were too many tangents. Perhaps Niall tried to keep track of too many family members. I'm not sure. I enjoyed it but I don't think it's a personal or family story I will particularly remember.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting biography of the author's grandmother, who migrated to Australia from Liverpool in 1888 at the age of 19. In telling her story Niall also tells the story of an Irish Catholic extended family in the Riverina district of SW NSW. I was fascinated by the politics of the Boer war in this remote rural community, and the family dynamics around the First World War

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brenda Niall's grandmother Aggie Maguire came to Australia in 1888 when she was nineteen. She married into a powerful farming family, the Gormans in Southern NSW. Aggie and Richard Gorman had seven children including Niall's mother Connie. Her Maguire family were in Liverpool and were part of the Irish diaspora who left Ireland during the potato famine. This didn't stop some of her Gorman in laws from referring to her disparagingly as an 'Englishwoman'. The Liverpool Maguires made their fortune as owners of match factories and were instrumental in workplace and safety reform.
Aggie fought for her children and grandchildren and this is one of her most endearing qualities. Her house was always a safe refuge from boarding school and in her later life she made sure she lived in Kew (Melbourne) close to Xavier and Genezano so her grandchildren and their friends could spend weekends with good food and easy rules.
World War 1 was a difficult time for Aggie because she had sons of military age. Her brother-in-law pressured her eldest son Jack to enlist. He was a medical student and he enlisted as a stretcher bearer. He survived the war but returned unwell. Eventually he married and finished his degree and became a country doctor.
I was surprised that the Jesuits in Australia and Ireland were enthusiastic for the war and empire. And that rich Catholic families were anxious to send sons to war to prove their loyalty. Aggie was angry and had cause to regret the Xavier Jesuit connection with her sons. The Melbourne Archbishop Mannix and the Catholic Church generally campaigned against the war.
There is a lot to like in this book. Niall has a lot of information and she uses it to build up a picture of the lives of the Maguire and Gorman families and the work Aggie lived through. But the information she has isn't enough to make them all live on the pages and she uses a lot of speculation. The children are excited to get back home from boarding school and can't wait to get to their horses and the life of the farm. People must have felt anxious, excited, resentful, pleased, overwhelmed, etc. Too much speculation. I was interested and tolerant but these things jumped out at me.

[Tessa Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brenda Niall’s biographies, in addition to being regular award-winners, generally share two features—their subjects are Roman Catholic and they emigrate from the northern hemisphere to Australia. Can You Hear the Sea?: My Grandmother’s Story continues this tradition.

Agnes Maguire, known as Aggie, was born to Irish Catholic parents in Liverpool, her family having been ‘forced into exile … in the years of the Great Hunger’. With two of her siblings, Aggie leaves England in 1888—‘in a spirit of hope and adventure’—to embark on life in Australia. Her 19-year-old spirit could have been broken from the start—her brother dies during the passage to Sydney leaving Aggie and her sister, Minnie, without their intended position (and protection) as their brother’s housekeepers.

Seemingly undaunted, the two sisters make their way in an alien land. They settle initially in Melbourne, where their mother’s brother lives with his family, and establish a small teaching academy. After a move to country Victoria, Aggie meets property owner Richard Gorman. Channelling Jane Austen, Niall describes him as ‘a single man of good fortune’, undoubtedly ‘in want of a wife’.

Marriage follows. Then children. Then death. In 1908, at the age of 39, Aggie is a widow with seven children. She navigates the children’s education through a combination of home teaching followed by boarding school in Melbourne. Aggie remains on her deceased husband’s property (managed by one of his brother’s) for a decade or so and then leaves the land to return to Melbourne. Settling in the eastern suburbs, she nurtures the family’s next generation as her grandchildren come from country districts in Victoria and New South Wales to the southern capital’s schools.

The outline above suggests a family story, modest in scope. But Niall’s admirable skill as a biographer means this story is larger than one family’s recollection of their matriarch. It offers a useful template for family history writing.

You can find an extended version of this review in my blog post ‘Blending Biography with Family History’: https://tessawooldridge.com/2018/02/2...

[Anne Fenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting well written book about the author's grandmother, Aggie Gorman née Maguire. She arrives in Melbourne from Liverpool in 1888 and lives a lot of her life in the Riverina, and later Kew. It's a family story really, with a focus on her role as wife and mother, widowed at an early age. Her husband's family plays a restrictive role in the rest of her life. Being Catholic is important. She is radical in some ways, compassionate about the suffering of the poor. Her son Jack and his wife had a medical practice in Bendigo for many years.

[Dee Michell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this only because it was written by Brenda Niall, I didn't have any interest in her grandmother at all. But I was enchanted throughout and am so glad I did read it. The only concern i have is that Brenda's family benefited enormously from colonisalisation and I don't think she acknowledged that at all, or sufficiently.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable memoir following the life of Aggie, a 19 year old Irish immigrant to Australia in 1888. The story is written fondly by Aggie’s granddaughter Brenda Niall, and provides a wonderful narrative of a life lived through two world wars, seven home births, and a challenging life on a rural property.

[Ann Koenig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was enthralled by this story of a young woman living in Savernake, Berrigan, Yarrawonga area - where I grew up. She came from Liverpool and married a Gorman

[Karine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book as a marvellous evocation of migration to Australia, family relationships, and rural life. The interaction with wider world events makes for a cohesive and engrossing story: the suffering of match makers poisoned by phosphorus, The Boer War, the First World War, the anti-Catholic ethos emanating from England but sustained in Australia. Brenda Niall is a wonderful writer and I might have given this book my rarely-awarded 5 stars but for the repetition which should have been dealt with by the editors or readers mentioned in the acknowledgments. Some of this was integral as Brenda Niall loops back and forth from her own memories or experiences to those from the past, for example the shell in which children can “ hear the sea” and the wooden box passed on by her grandmother make very effective pegs on which to hang the story. I feel inspired to attempt writing my own family history, though unfortunately lacking the documentation of letters and diaries to which Niall has access.