When Vanessa O’Neill stood on the corner of Pall Mall and Bull Street on Monday, gazing upon the elaborate facade of the Bendigo courthouse and the near-naked trees that line the thoroughfare, she could not help but feel nostalgic.
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“I was really struck by the grandeur of it. It has such a majesty about it,” she said of the street.
The Melbourne-based performer had been to Bendigo before, but this was her first visit since discovering an important family connection to the regional city.
Her great-grandfather, the subject of her one-woman show, In Search of Owen Roe, operated a barber shop along the shopping strip during the 19th century gold rush.
Owen Roe O’Neill was the son of an Irish immigrant who sought wealth on the Victorian goldfields before working alongside his father as a barber in Bendigo.
After a stint cutting hair in the central Victorian city, Owen Roe followed the path of prospectors across the continent, taking his trade to the West Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie.
Ten years ago, after the birth of her son spawned a new interest in family history, Ms O’Neill traced her great-grandfather to an unmarked grave in Perth’s Karrakatta cemetery.
Because the family knew little about the man, and because his resting place was curiously blank, Ms O’Neill started out scouring century-old newspapers for hints about her family history.
What she discovered still astounds her.
Owen Roe O’Neill was a descendant of an Irish revolutionary with the same name, one who fought in his country’s 1641 rebellion.
Phillip O’Neill, Owen Roe’s father, emigrated from Ireland to try his hand mining for gold, but like so many who left behind their homelands for a chance to strike it rich, their fortune was not to be found in the ground.
Even in the newfound land of hope Phillip, joined in his barbering business by Owen Roe, found himself insolvent.
But despite these tarnishes to the family’s reputation, the major, surviving legacy of Owen Roe was his gift for the gab, with men who visited his barber shop lauding him as a colourful storyteller.
Tales of his time spent working the goldfields in Bendigo were among their favourites, Ms O’Neill said, as were stories about his trek across the rarely traversed core of the Australian continent.
It is also believed he crafted wigs for the gold rush theatre scene in Bendigo while working in the burgeoning centre of trade and culture.
Ms O’Neill suspects his interactions with “footlight personalities” would’ve provided good fodder for discussion while he worked away at Bendigo men’s hairdos.
It was a poignant discovery for Ms O’Neill, who has dedicated her life to writing and performing on stage.
“The satisfying thing is, that's exactly what I'm doing in my play, and I'm a storyteller,” she said.
While she did not discover the reason for the man’s unceremonious burial, Ms O’Neill believed the answer lied in Owen Roe’s behaviour behind closed doors.
“You find out certain things and then you have to guess at certain things,” she said.
“There seems to be an interesting distinction between how he was publicly and how he was privately, and what that might have meant for the family.
“Perhaps not unusually for someone of Irish descent, he was also a heavy drinker.”
The idea of the inter-generational ties that bind a family together is explored in Ms O’Neill’s show.
She plays eight generations of O’Neill in the play, which also uses song and poetry to create settings as diverse as Middle Ages Ireland and the Victorian goldfields.
Regional Arts Victoria is touring the production to schools across the state, with hundreds of VCE Drama students studying the work for their final-year coursework and exams.
Despite the story’s age, Ms O’Neill said school students could still connect with the work.
“It jumps to the present and tells the story of my own father, who’s been losing his memory,” she said.
“Students really responded to story of my own father because they might have their own experiences with dementia.”
On Tuesday, Ms O’Neill performed In Search of Owen Roe at Murrayville Community College and will visit schools in Red Cliffs, Shepparton and Echuca later this week.