Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

10 Chapter One Escape From Poverty The uproar accompanying the ‘Bodyline’ Test matches in 1932/33 was probably the first time many British people were aware of a new Australian hostility to the mother country. From a population of just four million over 38% of males aged 18 to 44 had fought in the Great War. A 65% casualty rate was almost 20% higher than Britain’s. Soldier settler schemes to help many survivors re-establish their lives were soon undermined by a Depression made more acute in Australia than most other countries by the loss of British markets and subservience to British financial strictures. The very significant proportion of people with Irish ancestry also contributed to anti-British sentiment. When Britain requested still more Australian volunteers late in the war, the Irish-born Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, and the Premier of Queensland, Tom Ryan, the son of Irish parents, were prominent in the movement that twice successfully opposed referenda to introduce conscription. Douglas Keith Carmody was born on 16 February 1919. His ancestry was Irish but it’s more likely that an expanding family, rather than hostility to the Imperial cause, made his father resist the belligerent urge that took over 60,000 Australian volunteers to their deaths in the Great War. The twentieth-century Carmodys may well have been unaware that their first Australian ancestor was one of approximately 40,000 Irish convicts sent to Australia. In a period of frequent Irish protests against English rule James Carmody (alias Carny and Carnedy) was sentenced to life imprisonment as an Irish rebel, transported from Cork to Sydney in 1821 and assigned as a servant to Thomas White Melville Winder, a rising London-born merchant and pastoralist in the Hunter Valley in northern New South Wales. After absconding in 1827 from the region’s principal town, Newcastle, and from an ‘iron gang’ the following year, he was sent to the Australian penal colony of Norfolk Island in the Pacific Ocean about 1,500 kilometres from the mainland. Eventually given a ticket-of-leave in Windsor, New South Wales, James, a bootmaker, remained a Catholic. So did some of his descendants from a union with Anne