The union of the black and white Hagan clans

In June 2009 I received an email from an unknown source who commenced his message with “I hope you don’t mind this intrusion. I am writing to you from Kuala Lumpur where I live with my young family, one of whom is called Sam Hagan Barton.”

I’ve received numerous enquiries over the years from white people who claim to have the same spelling of the Hagan surname. Most, I’ve gathered by their lack of follow-up emails or phone calls, were more interested in confirming that there weren’t any dark secrets in their family’s background - no Aboriginal skeletons in the closet rather than a bona fide link.

I could, with a trace of irony, appreciate the palpable relief of the enquirers on finding out they’re not related to me as I’ve managed to inadvertently acquire a degree of infamy after 10 years of exhaustive legal battles to remove the word “Nigger” from a demeaning public epitaph E.S. “Nigger” Brown Stand in my hometown of Toowoomba. If I was in their shoes, and beholding to the same level of bigotry, I wouldn’t want to be related to the perennial subject of workplace and dining room derision for the better part of a decade.

As I continued to read the email I was struck by the sincerity of the writer in his endeavour to make the familial correlation. The message continued, “He was named after my grandfather, Joseph Hagan who was from Birdsville.”

The mere mention of the name Joseph Hagan had a recognisable ring to it as that was the same name as my great grandfather. I know little of Joseph Hagan except that he was born in 1863 in South Australia and that his father James Hagan was born in 1827 in Ireland. The only reason I know this much about Joseph Hagan is that it was gained from information passed onto my father last year as part of findings of an anthropologist’s genealogy report on my Kullilli tribe.

As I read deeper into the email the common line, “… to find out whether we might be related,” took on a whole new meaning on this topic. But it also became apparent that publicity surrounding the sporting prowess of my nephew Joel Hagan: youngest footballer at 13 to sign a contract with the Broncos Rugby League Club, state representative in athletics, rugby league and AFL and boarder at the prestigious Nudgee College in Brisbane, that somehow reached the writer in Malaysia, was the principal motivating factor for his email.

His comments “Sam is heading off to Nudgee as a boarder next year” undoubtedly gave the urgency of seeking lineage closure on this matter. Better to know up front, I suppose, than to have Sam and Joel, with contrasting complexions, second guessing in the school yard on their uncommon surname - or in Sam’s case, his middle name.

His closing remarks “another co-incidence. I spent 3 years in Colombo working in the media,” had me even more curious about the writer. He obviously had done some research on me, most probably, I thought, by reading my biography that linked my ties to Sri Lanka when I was a diplomat in the early 1980s.

Before responding to the email I did a quick Google search on the writer, John Barton, and discovered he was a former high profile television current affairs host of Today Tonight on Channel 9 in the 1980s. My search located him in Malaysia where he operates a very successful media and sports business, including successfully managing the Beijing Olympics entire media coverage in his capacity as Director of Sport - Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union.

I responded to John’s email informing him that I've had numerous calls over the years from non-Indigenous people with connections to the Hagan surname. I told him I'd be interested to hear from him if he had links to the same Joseph Hagan whose father James and mother Margaret Sharpe were born in Ireland. He had a sister Catherine. More importantly to me, Joseph had a son Albert to Trella, a traditional Kullilli land owner at Yalpunda on the New South Wales and Queensland border in 1895. Albert was my paternal grandfather. Joseph later married Blanche Gaden and had 13 children.

A day later I received a response from John saying “Joseph Hagan was my grandfather. My mother, Monica Hagan, was the last of his 13 children, born in Adelaide in 1925. Her mother was Blanche.”

In a later email John told me his mother Monica had followed my “Nigger” Brown case over the years and wondered if we were related, adding that Hagan is not a common name. He said she tried through other family members to make contact with me but nothing eventuated.

John contacted again me to let me know that he would be in Brisbane to enrol his son Sam at Nudgee College in late January and asked if it was possible for me to pencil in a date when we could catch up. I said I’d love to.

I asked my father Jim to come along with me and my family to meet John and his mother Monica - dad’s father Albert’s half sister - and I also invited my brother Lawrence and his son Joel, who featured prominently in my emails.

I figured it would be better not to invite all the Hagan clan on the first meeting, as I felt the emotion of the occasion might be a little much for Monica. John recommended we meet at his mother’s house as she was basically confined to her home with failing health at 85.

With a day to go before the union of the black and white Hagan clans I became a little anxious myself at the prospect of the gathering. Back in my home town of Cunnamulla in the 60s and 70s John would not have been able to sit with me at the cinema because of its unofficial, but heavily policed, segregation policy.

I was raised in a fringe camp on the outskirts of Cunnamulla and although I developed great friendships over the years with white friends, I never really thought about having a blood connection with white folk. My grandfather married Aboriginal women (Sarah and after her death Jessie), as did my father (mother Jean from the Kooma tribe), his brothers and sisters, mum’s brothers and sisters, and all my brothers and sisters had married Aboriginal partners. For most of my adult life I’ve had a mutual respect of white people - despite many of my detractors publicly accusing me of being a racist - but in reality had no real affinity, other than a social and professional connection, with them.

I figured the same scenario being applied to John Barton and his immediate family of not marrying into an Aboriginal family or having any close ties with them.

Because my story was so extraordinary: a prominent white celebrity and successful business man seeking links to a prominent Aboriginal family (father Jim was the first Aboriginal to address the United Nations in the 80s) - as opposed to an Aboriginal family searching for their white ancestors - I asked John if he and his mother would object to the story being covered by the media. John replied, “Yes, more than happy to share this story. Rather proud to be honest.”

I need not have worried about the size of my family who travelled from Toowoomba in two cars as we were greeted by John, his mother Monica and his sisters and brother and some of the children who travelled from all parts of southeast Queensland.

The greetings were cordial and sincere and the sharing of stories, especially of our common link, Joseph Hagan, was moving.

Tony Koch writing for The Australian under the headlines of “Shared histories surface at last” penned, “The key to the mystery turned out to be a tribal Aboriginal woman named Trella, who was Joseph’s Hagan’s young lover all those years ago. In 1895, Trella bore him a son, Albert, Hagan’s paternal grandfather.”

When Koch wrote of Monica he added “Mrs Barton, nee Hagan, is the youngest of 13 children, only four of whom are still alive. Her side of the family is descended from Joseph and his wife, Blanche Gaden, whom he courted and married after the relationship with Trella ended.”

I had lengthy discussions with Monica during the course of the afternoon, but not once did we broach the topic of Trella. I felt that it was neither the place nor time to raise the subject of her father’s first love. However, I felt the spirit of Trella in the room that was already overflowing with untainted kindness from people who we entered the suburban home with as strangers but by day’s end left as proud blood relatives linked through the strong Irish feisty genes of Joseph Hagan.

John told me a few days later that his nephew Jackson asked his father Mark, when they were returning to their home on the Sunshine Coast, if all those people at Nan’s house were his relatives.

On receiving an unqualified “yes” to his question, John informed me his brother’s son responded with an enormous smile and shouted out “Awesome”.

And awesome is about as apt a word as one could find to describe my family’s experience as well and one that has left an indelible impression on what journalist Tony Koch reported in The Weekend Australian on January 23 as “Two families have uncovered an extraordinary link”.