Nicholson Street

It is Christmas Day Mass in Our Lady Help of Christians church on Nicholson Street. This church celebrated its centenary earlier in 2011, and its story is very interesting and you can read about it on their website. The most striking feature of the church is certainly the golden statue on top of the church tower, of Our Lady holding her child. She faces East, towards the sunrise and looks down over busy Nicholson Street, which, along with Sydney Road, is one of the grand routes leading into the city of Melbourne.

I have a recollection of being told that my father lived in a room of a house somewhere on Nicholson Street. That was in 1948, when he and my mother arrived in Australia from Czechoslovakia as displaced persons. After a short time in the Bathurst migrant reception centre, they were brought to Melbourne to work off their 2 year bond to the Chifley government which had opened its doors to this wave of Europe’s “tired”, its “huddled masses”.

Although they were married, my father was not permitted to live with my mother, who was placed to work in the Royal Park orphanage.  He lived alone in the back room of someone’s house and worked digging sewerage trenches in the expanding suburbs of Melbourne and out in Gippsland.

I often wonder what this area looked like when my father lived somewhere on Nicholson Street. Although we all think of it as a very Italian area now, with the old men sitting in cafes, playing cards, or tending their vegetable gardens in front of their houses, back then in 1948 these old men would not yet have been born and their families would not yet be considering the move to the other side of the world. That would come a decade or so later. No, in 1948 perhaps the area was still Irish, working class. The factories, warehouses and quarries would still have defined the area. Our Lady help of Christians church would have celebrated Christmas Day to a mostly English or Irish congregation. How did my father and mother spend their first Christmas in Australia?

All my Christmases have been tinged with the sorrow of exile, the ache of distance and the sense of dissonance between the European ideal of Christmas and the Australian reality. But I have never thought about what that first Christmas would have been like, until now.

The parish priest, instead of a homily, reads an Irish story on this morning of 25 December 2011. It is the story of Brigid’s cloak. In the fifth century, in Ireland, the cloak was a gift to Brigid from a wise old Druid on the night of her birth. She wore it every day, until one night, at the age of ten, she was transported, in prayer, back to the night of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. It was she who led the small family to the stable and placed the cloak around Mary’s shoulders. After the birth, Mary returned the cloak. As Brigid turned around to leave the stable, she was suddenly back in her home in Ireland, five centuries later. The cloak, however, shone with stars.

This story resonates with my wish to travel through time and space to find out what it was really like. Perhaps there is a ribbon of time, a string,  a thread, which is twined through my life and which I can follow to lead me back to that time in 1948 when they here, alone.