Ellen MacAuliffe sailed out from County Cork to the Colony of Victoria at the age of sixteen. She did not stay long in Melbourne, however, but instead went north to spend the rest of her life living out in what in Australia today is still referred to as ‘the bush’. In her final years, as Ellen Quigg, she was nursed by Eileen, her teenage granddaughter. Eileen Kelly was my grandmother and liked especially to tell us stories about her time in the small Victorian town of Kyneton caring for old Grandma Quigg. The one we all remember best was that Grandma Quigg was dead afeared of banshees; I can still picture in my mind the poor old woman kept awake at night by her strange Irish tormentress. Obviously a woman of the elves had followed young Ellen on the boat that sailed out from Cove Harbour well over a century ago – a supernatural stowaway hiding somewhere in her cabin no doubt, or perhaps hanging on grimly to the aft or the keel.

Celtic studies in the 1960s was especially keen on establishing the nativeness of traditions such as the wailing banshees who haunted Irish families, presaging the deaths of their loved ones much as if they were a curse. A mixture of Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalism and the naturalism of the folk movement combined to produce a welter of works dedicated to establishing the essential Celticness of folktales, traditions and beliefs. As with the romantic surge in Celticism of the time of the Fenians, claims that early Celtic culture was dependent on foreign, classical and Christian learning were played down, marginalised and all but carpeted over by this kind of learning. Most focus was placed upon the earliest Irish tales, centuries older and more numerous than those of the Welsh, expressions which were now to be celebrated for their archaism, their preservation of what even seemed to be pre-Christian understandings and ancient native truths. Despite stemming from the pens of medieval monks, deep indigenous roots were thought to underlie the practices and sayings ascribed to Cuchulainn and the other early Irish heroes and kings of these famous tales.