Voice of the dark land soars - Martin Flanagan The Age
Téanam Ort! Come Away
Mossie Scanlon grew up in the village of Baile An Lochaig at the foot of Mount Brendan, in West Kerry. A relic of the church of Saint Brendan is to be found at the top of the mountain, the second highest in Ireland.
Mossie was called Mossie Fiunn – Mossie, son of the story-teller. “My father was renowned around our district for story-telling and his knowledge of people’s ancestry. When people of Irish descent came from the US he would tell them where their graves were and who was in them.”
His father had in turn acquired the knowledge from his father. In Irish, says Mossie, this is called “learning from knee to knee”. His accent is like a soft song, one voice in an otherwise hidden choir.
His father had a farm of 12 hectares, half a dozen cows and 12 children. Also in the family home was one of his father’s uncles, Muiris Mor – Big Morris. No decision was taken about the farm – where to build a shed, what to do with a field – without Muiris Mor being consulted out of respect for the knowledge of his years. When he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he told the nurses: “don’t fuss, I have come to die.” Mossie, whose full name is also Muiris, never heard Muiris Mor utter a word of English in his life.
The family on both sides spoke Irish. Mossie says his parents tried to remember to speak few words of English to their children when they were small to acquaint them with the language they would eventually meet in the outside world. “But as soon as we went outside to play with our brothers and sisters it was forgotten.” The family had no radio, no TV. “We were so lucky to be born at that time,” he says. “Without outside influences.”
What they did have was music. “Everyone sang,” he says Mossie. Someone with the gift for music never went to a house with a squeeze box in the corner and left without playing a tune. At Begley’s pub in the village, men with fiddles and accordions played jigs and reels that set people dancing. Then, in the pauses, someone would call for a song and it would be sung “sean-nos”, in the old style, the voice alone and unaccompanied.
When he was 10, Mossie heard the man from the next farm, Thady Flaherty, sing Roisin Dubh (Dark Rosheen). During the centuries when Irish culture was being actively persecuted and the language was retreating to a few enclaves on the west coast, Ireland emerged in songs as a woman with names like Dark Rosheen, one to whom the singer swore to keep faith.“Thady Flaherty was my hero,” says Mossie. “ I was so moved by the sweetness of his voice, the depth of his emotion.”
He always knew that one day he would have to leave. Only one of the 13 children could inherit the farm; the rest would have to emigrate and find new lives elsewhere. He had a spell in the Irish navy, then worked on building sites in Dublin. In pursuit of work he went to London and then, in 1981, as a married man, emigrated to Australia. Two months later, in a pub in Perth, he met some Aboriginal men with whom he talked about what they had in common. He felt at home, and has done so since.
Mossie Scanlon is a backhoe operator based in Epping. As Muiris O’Scanlain, he is a sean-nos singer and earlier this year he released an album titled Teanam Ort (Come Away) and sub-titled Songs and Music From My Two Lands. What is striking about his voice is its purity and his clear, unadorned style. With every song, it sounds as if he is standing at the foot of Mount Brendan, looking up, acknowledging the memories the mountain embodies.
He sings Roisin Dubh, but with equivalent passion he also sings the great Irish-Australian convict lament, Moreton Bay. “I feel close to those people,” he says. “A lot of them would have been Irish speakers.”
During his years in Perth he realised how much he missed his language and culture. He learned that a woman from a neighbouring farm, Eileen Begley Loughnane, had settled Melbourne. They arranged to meet. “I didn’t care what we talked about, so long as we talked in Irish.” Mossie is now a leading figure in the Irish Language Association of Australia.
He has been back to his home village twice, the last occasion being a month ago. He went to the graveyard where his parents are buried. He was away when his father died. Someone said to him it must have been as upsetting experience visiting the grave, but, no, it wasn’t. “I felt very much at peace. They’d gone back to the land they lived in. Every ancestor as far back ad you can remember is in that place.”
Mossie Scanlon describes his formal education as “dribs and drabs”. “It’s what you carry in your heart that counts,” he says. He sees what happened to Irish culture as still going on in the world to other cultures, and understands the bitter harvest that is reaped thereby. “Why can’t we sit down with these people and say we respect your culture, we respect your religion, now let’s work together?”