Jack The Hatter: A Politician With No Past (Upcoming)

Louise Shellshear

The Politician With No Past.

What Was He Hiding?

The first time I saw a photo of my great grandfather, I felt a strange rush of kinship and solidarity.

He was such an obvious outsider in that solemn photo of him, Sir Henry Parkes and the twelve other pompous-looking Federationists. My childish eyes, my DNA saw immediately what the official records could not.

The first time I saw a photo of my great grandfather, I felt a strange rush of kinship and solidarity. Sixty years later, explosive new information has proved me uncannily right.

We knew our great grandfather John Murtagh Macrossan was an ancestor of whom we could be proud. His death at the 1891 Federal Convention was mourned all over Australia and even internationally. In Queensland, flags flew at half-mast all the way from Cooktown to Brisbane.

The panegyrics of Griffith, Deakin, Parkes and other luminaries highlighted the national loss.

Yet when my Uncle John began researching his famous grandfather, he was in for a shock: shipping lists showed no record of anyone called Macrossan arriving in Australia in Melbourne in 1853. There had to be a mistake. He tried the archives in Donegal, Ireland, from where my great grandfather’s family had originated. Nothing. Undaunted, he tried other sources. Nothing, nothing. Nothing!

How could you be so famous, so respectable, so erudite, so blue-chip, yet have no past? It was as if our great-grandfather had fallen from the sky, aged 44, onto our goldfields. He clearly was not who he said he was, the son of a Donegal farmer, educated privately in a Scottish school. So, who was he really?

I was determined to find out.

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