Crónán an Beiche Aonair (Hum of the Lone Bee)

My first encounter with her is in a lecture referencing this article from the Argus, a Melbourne newspaper, in 1875. She is described as a 60-year-old woman, dressed largely in black; further to this description of physical appearance, it is said that she appears to be of weak intellect. This woman was remanded for a week as she could not intelligently account for herself — she spoke bad English but fluent Irish.

She appears in other records of the colony, her name repeating in the hospital records of her treatment for hysteria, for religious mania, for insanity and alcoholism. Other instances, too, sit in the peripheral: minor traces of her lack of language or intelligence parsed from newspaper accounts of ‘lost causes’, arrest warrants for ‘offences not otherwise described’, descriptions of a community that ‘will not learn’.

I know her too through reputation — most stereotyped of Irish names, daughter of An Daghdha, goddess of spring and new light, worshiped by filidh; patron saint of healers, her name and reputation Christianised as a means of bringing a religion to a new place. Alternatively, Brigid, Bríd, Briget, Brighid, Birgitta, Biddy. With all the connotations that a name contains: exaltation, renewal, healing; Imbolc and spring; she is said to have established caoineadh na marbh as a practice of grief. It is this name that identifies her in the archives of the colony as a person who experienced this trauma; equally it is this name that anonymises her amid its myriad of associations. For the sake of this essay and her private personhood I have not named her other than through these associations.

I focus on this encounter in Coburg, 1875. It feels close. Have not many of those reading found themselves a bit out of sorts on Sydney Road? On a February evening at the hottest point of the day? I can feel in my armpits the 40-degree oppression of the early evening, and she’s dressed entirely in— well, we will get to that.

Some phrases in the article keep snagging at me: to give no intelligent account, the appearance of intellect, a long description of her clothing, to speak bad English but fluent Irish, and the threat of a lunatic asylum if no friends enquired after her.

So perhaps the whole article bugs me.

I will start, as many do, with this obsession with women’s appearance. The extent of her outfit’s description — the blacks suggest she could be widowed, the silk bonnet I just love and aspire to — and just how hot these layers of shawl and dress would be to wear on a February evening. I’m bringing my own contemporary bullshit to it. But, but — this description of physical appearance secondary in the article to the fact that she ‘appeared’ of weak intellect.  Not a visual appearance but a description of appearance regardless.

At this point so many years afterwards, we might only guess what this appearance of weak intellect might look like.

Intellect, intelligence, both from Latin intellectus: discernment, perception, understanding. In this instance, whatever appeared or was perceived, it was enough to be ‘taken in charge’ of Sergeant Joyce.

Because she could not give no intelligent account of herself in English. She could give no —
she could not give, she could not hand over, she did not have it to give —
there is no intelligent account of her-self in English, so she could not give it.
It did not exist.
Her self —
sí féin —
to count and accord for whatever ephemeral form this is —
was not in the language of her oppressor.

On the front of Maddens Pub in Belfast the following is painted (I have a cheesy selfie with it):

Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste

‘broken Irish is better than clever English’

and though this is clearly a logic Brigid lived by, even if without alternatives, the same generosity of language was not encouraged by the English-speaking community of colonial Melbourne.

Sergent Joyce himself — se féin — born and raised in Cliften, in the far west of Connemara, Ireland. In the 1871 census the majority of people there spoke Irish, and they certainly would have a few decades earlier when Joyce was born and raised. He would have accounted for himself in Irish, been able to account intelligently for himself in Irish.

There’s a certain flavour of forgetfulness that comes with leaving your language at the door in order to play a role. There is also much to be said about Irish ‘becoming’ white and their keenness for persecution of other minority groups, theorised particularly in America but also keenly represented here, through their overrepresentation in the police forces of America and Australia.

In the colonies of Britain, to misspeak becomes criminal under the civic assimilation leveraged against communities by British rule. To speak in languages other than English is to speak against the police, the education system, the court systems, and the health system’s logic of containment. People chose a side.

The Irish language was politicised and legislated in the Ireland since the 12th century through a cascading system of legislation, punishment and na Péindlíthe (The Penal Laws), so that by the 19th century many Irish speakers could not read or write but rather the language continued orally — especially for those that brought the language with them to the colony of Australia.

Here, a punitive encouragement of European languages was leveraged to control immigration and the ‘Australia’ that the government wanted to build. Introduced in 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act (the foundation of the White Australia Policy) required immigrants to sit a dictation test. Officials could administer this in any European language, making it impossible for immigrants not from Europe (or, those that weren’t white) to pass the test and legally enter the country. White British migrants were not made to sit the test (or Irish for that matter, as whiteness expanded to include them), and if someone did pass they could be required to sit it again in another language.

Only 52 people passed the test between 1901 and 1909 (from 1359 tests) and no one did so after 1909. In the 8 years from 1901 to 1909, only 3% of people that took the test passed.

At least two Europeans were blocked from Australia under this policy because of their anti-war and anti-imperialist views and advocacy (they were ‘undesirable’). In 1934 Egon Kisch, a Jewish Czech communist and anti-war activist briefly imprisoned in Spandau Prison and expelled from Germany for his activism, visited Australia to speak against the war. He was made to sit the test in Scottish Gaelic, as it was assumed he would pass the test in other European languages. He failed the test, which was ultimately contested — Scottish Gaelic found to not be a European language under the intentions of the Act.

Gerald Griffin, Irish nationalist, peace activist and unionist, and anti-war delegate travelling with Kisch from New Zealand, was also refused entry to the country after failing to pass the test in Dutch. He snuck back into the country in disguise and surprised the authorities by speaking at a number of closed door rallies, before speaking at a public rally in Domain in Sydney which led to his dramatic arrest.

One cannot ask ‘who was Bridget’ because there are many Bridget, and women and men and children by other names who’s ‘lack’ of a language erased their story.

Early Irish society was governed by the Senchas Már, pre-historic oral traditions and laws that were practiced for millennia but first recorded in writing around the 500s or 600s. Highly responsive to the hierarchal society, these laws were administered by a class of judges called an breitheamh (the Brehons) and were a locally based arbitration system focussed on restitution rather than punishment, incarceration or revenge. Instead of prisons or death penalties, the law relied on restorative justice and an eric fine — a precise scale of financial compensation paid to victims or their kin for offenses. Before coins and money existed in Ireland, much of these payments were made with cows (the main form or currency or wealth) or other forms of agricultural or land-based currency. There was no central court system or policing process and disputes were settled through mediation. These laws supported social welfare and women’s rights — those who were caught stealing food out of need were not met with harsh punishment, and women were able to initiate divorces and keep their dowries.

The 21st text in the Senchas Már is the Bechbretha, the bee judgements. These laws governed beekeepers, specifically issues around ownership of bees, bee trespass on neighbouring land, bee pollination of neighbour’s flowers, and bee injury. Issues of bees swarming onto neighbour’s land are attributed more weight than bee injury.

Across many contexts bees are associated with wealth and are analogous for community, collaboration and cooperation. In Ireland, hives were made of woven and twisted wicker to make skeps, a small dome-shaped hive. To harvest honey, the skep was burnt or smoked with sulphur, often killing the bees or at least destroying the hive in the process.

There is something here about burning a colony to harvest their product. Perhaps, about burning a system of control and extraction. But, more specifically, there is also something of burning a structure that houses a community that beekeepers were not enslaving but rather working in dialogue with. Not quite collapse or destruction — that would be overstating the metaphor — but rather something about the relationship between working collectively, rubbing up against an individualist gain extracted from the group. Burning a bridge, if you will.

Clocháin or bee-hive huts were built structures of a similar shape, made from dry stone, used by early Christian monks in Ireland for hermitage for prayer, spiritual isolation and meditation. There is mention of the huts in the Senchas Már and as the early monks were who first brought Latin writing to Ireland, a direct connection between their arrival and the laws being written down. There are huts remaining that have stood for over almost 1500 years.

I am circling these opposing yet similar architectures as a framework to think with Bridget. How structures for hermitage and spirituality could withstand 800 years of colonial imposition yet structures of hive collectivity and community are destroyed repeatedly for material gain. How ancient laws held trespass and the pollination of neighbouring crops as greater transgression than injury.

In the small regional town I moved to early this year, there is a family bee-keeping business I am growing increasingly interested in. I pass by their property on dog walks or my morning run, sometimes I can smell gentle wafts of honey as I pass. They advertise pollination as a wing of their business, where farmers can organise for bee hives to be strategically placed around their crops to assist in large-scale pollination projects, to help with crop yield. In this instance, bee trespass is encouraged to increase capital gain. Yet the European, honey-producing, bee is an international interloper in the local ecosystem, putting pressure on the dwindling habitat and ecosystem of native bees.

Some native local bees are solitary bees that practice buzz pollination, meaning that female bees mate and build solitary nests for themselves, supporting endemic plant pollination with a specific vibration of their body to release pollen.

Bridget was remanded for a week with the threat of further incarceration in an asylum if no friends enquired after her. It seems in this instance it is not so much her intelligence, wellbeing, or intellect that determines her need for incarceration and state ‘care’ — she could not account for this herself, remember — but rather the responsibility of friends and community to call on and claim her as their own.

Countless women, countless Bridget’s listed in the Kew Asylum records for such modes of insanity as ‘melancholia’, ‘mania’, ‘hysteria’, ‘alcoholism’, ‘dementia’; many victims of a pathologised system of normativity. A woman (of weak intellect) was not granted permission to exist in the world in solitude. Legislation required a community of support who could account for her, on her behalf. A woman (who could not intelligently account for herself) was not afforded the option of the clochán, with its solid permanency and independence. A woman (who spoke bad English) could not choose to build a nest in solitude.

Remember it was Joyce, with his convenient fluency in the Irish language, that was able to help connect with her family so that they could collect her from the lock up and take her home.