Emerald Hill
A SCREEN PRODUCTION IN DEVELOPMENT
AUSTRALIAN - IRISH PRODUCTION
WITH CLTV DUBLIN
IN CONSULTATION WITH HISTORIAN DR. LIZ RUSHEN
BASED ON LITERARY WORKS & FINN FAMILY ARCHIVAL COLLECTION STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA
1841 - 1978 MELBOURNE
1888 MELBOURNE
AS MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE CELEBRATES IT’S WEALTH IN A GILDED THEATRE - A BLIND JOURNALIST DICTATES A BURIED TRUTH TO HIS DAUGHTER.
IN A BOOMING CITY BUILT ON BETRAYAL & SILENCE.
Silence is not an absence of voice, but a profound presence that demands a witness.
GOING BLIND EDMUND FINN - A PRODIGIOUS IRISH JOURNALIST DICTATES TO HIS DAUGHTER IN A DARK HOUSE BUILT ON THE CITY’S PROSPERITY AND SHAME:
“ The darkness is not empty.
It is crowded. the world of the dead grows vivid.
I am losing the sun, but I am finding the souls I thought I had forgotten”.
EDMUND FINN 1888
THE ANTAGONIST
A boomtown fuelled by a frantic hunger for gold and a cold-blooded erasure of its hosts - the noble, dignified Wurundjeri.
The surveyor’s chain and the parliamentary ink that systematically renders the Traditional Custodians
In exile on their own soil.
A MEDITATION ON VISION
EMERALD HILL is ultimately a story about loss and vision.
From Edmund’s failing eyesight in the 19th century to Rebecca’s camera in 1988, the narrative traces inner darkness to outward clarity.
Vision becomes both political and spiritual, the choice to witness or look away.
a story of heroes and villains AND THE WEIGHT OF inheritance
What is carried, what is buried, and what must finally be brought home.
Outwitting the British with his fierce intellect, Finn’s rise to prominence, wealth and influence is part ambition -part covert act.
Living a double life, Finn conspires to subvert the Establishment - in honour of ‘The Three Lost Tribes’ — the Kulin Nation, the Irish 'slave girls' and the mystical 'Hebrews'
Annie Reidy captures the city’s deep gore while Finn records its policy. Her 'madness' is the only honest reaction to a society thriving on erasure.
Incarcerated in YARRA BEND asylum, Annie returns to Finn as a hyper-real presence, guiding his pen toward truth.
“I am not a writer
I am a witness to a recurring truth
I write not for the masters
But for the ghosts they strive to erase”
- Edmund Finn 1888
The Ritual of Return
Clad in white silk
IVORY cast to Sea
She is Home
EDMUND & THREE WITCHES
HANS SCHWARTZ
A manifestation of Finn’s own literary creation, the Golem emerges from the shadows of the study to taunt and goad him. Quoting Finn’s own satirical lines back to him, the character becomes a mirror for his repressed anger and debilitating addictions to alcohol and opium. Yet, the Golem’s absurdist cruelty provides an unexpected salvation: his relentless pressure forces Finn into a state of abstinence and brutal honesty, saving his life so the work can be finished.
PATRICK FINN: THE REBEL
Patrick is the primal wound of the family bloodline—the embodiment of deep-seated resentment. His radical idealism changed the family's fate, turning them into reluctant exiles forced to adapt to a "City of Mud and Disappointment." He is the living memory of the rebellion that cost the family their privileged life in Ireland, a silent sentinel of the debt owed to their heritage.
ANNE REIDY: THE IRISH CAILLEACH HEALER
A radiant figure in the shadows, Anne is not broken; she is whole.
Her magic is the violent removal of the facade—the wind that strips away the wallpaper to reveal the raw bluestone beneath.
A MINYAN OF SHADOWS
The Golem - Healer disguised as satirical wit
Patrick - historical weight disguised as violence
Anne wounded - Healer disguised as insanity
“Though no Spiritist, I had been abiding in a spiritual world, and, impelled by imagination, retraced a region dead and gone, held communion with friends and foes alike”
Edmund Finn 1888
THE EXECUTION
Finn’s body betrays his internal sensitivity. He physically vomits after witnessing the 1842 execution of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner.
For decades, he experiences visceral muscle spasms in his arms - remedied ONLY by more writing.
His amaurosis, blindness he believes is the result of the colonial spectacle he is forced to record.
Edmund Finn sits alone in prosperity, his mind trapped in the shadow of the gallows. Haunted by the public execution of two brave young men, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner.
“I had been abiding in a spiritual world, and, impelled by imagination, retraced a region dead and gone, held communion with friends and foes alike.”
THREE EXILED TRIBES
Edmund Finn encounters in Melbourne, three different cultures experiencing the same oppression.
THE WURUNDJERI Deep-time custodians rendered invisible, exiled on their own sacred soil. While Finn names the rise ‘Emerald Hill’ to evoke a distant Ireland, the Wurundjeri see ceremonial ground choked by stone foundations.
This is the First Lore; Finn realises his own exile is a shallow echo of theirs.
THE IRISH DIASPORA Shipped as "human ballast" from workhouses and famine-ships, they build the city with their bodies while their souls remain at the bottom of the Atlantic. Trapped by the British steel that broke their homes, they are the Finn fire in its rawest form. Anne Reidy is their unofficial queen.
THE SCHOLARLY RABBIS Fleeing European pogroms, wandering seekers carry the Holy Tongue into a colony that only understands gold and land-theft.
He shares their Hebrew—the only language capable of speaking to a God who feels absent. They sustain his soul and his sanity.
"The ink is not mine, it belongs to The Ghosts
Three upon my desk, stillness not
In threes they ask
No, they command
to be remembered
If I do not speak their name
I have no peace in the dark."
Edmund Finn 1888
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."
Edmund Finn
THE RING POEM
Let The Yarra deep entomb my cherished ring
Let the Yarra, with its gentle sway, Assist me to obliterate the past
And let its sweet mimosa banks allay The turbid thoughts with which my soul’s o’ercast
Why should absence deeply steep the past In sleep?
EDMUND FINN 1880
The Children
EDDIE FINN
Eddie inherits the brilliance and contradictions of his father, along with the deep artistic sensitivity of his mother, Annie Reidy. Raised in public acclaim and private fracture. As editor of Melbourne Punch, a sharp cultural observer and arts critic at the turn of the century. His novel A Priest’s Secret later sparks a landmark copyright battle over the film The Church and the Woman, extending the family’s legacy of authorship — and conflict.
JACK FINN
1976 socialist raconteur, Unionist and semi-professional golfer who rejects his elite grooming. Mentored by "The Baron," Jack leads a "chosen family" of dockside unionists. In a physical echo of his ancestor Patrick’s 1842 escape, Jack executes an audacious mid-air plane heist, concealing himself inside a cargo crate. He is a man caught between the "Gypsy Soul" of the 1976 boat and the kinetic, desperate fire of a 1988 reckoning.
REBECCA FINN
1986 A twenty-nine-year-old activist and photojournalist, inherits Anne Reidy’s spirit and courage. ADDICTION TO LIMERANCE, LOVING POWERFUL UNAVAILABLE MEN. While her marriage collapses, she navigates the complexity of the Mabo Case, and discovers Edmund’s Chronicles. Through his ink, she finds her vision—realising her work for ‘Mabo’ indigenous land rights is the modern completion of the "Architecture of Return." She is capable of bringing the family’s sedimented secrets into the light.
ANNIE & EDMUND’S DESCENDANTS
"The darkness is not empty. It is crowded.
As the world of men fades from my sight
the world of the dead grows vivid.
I am losing the sun, but I am finding the souls I thought I had forgotten."
EDMUND FINN 1888
1970 -1988
MEDIA, ETHOS, PATHOS &
POP CULTURE
"I have been often 'lone and lonesome
The figures of the past start up like spectres around me, demanding that their names be not blotted from the book of the living."
- Edmund Finn
"I hear the ancients calling me
They tell me this city is not new
I am not a writer; I am a witness to a recurring truth."
- GarryOwen, 1880
FINN QUOTES:
Social Justice & The Underdog
"The law was a net that caught the minnows and let the sharks go free. I saw the poor wretch lashed for a loaf of bread, while the land-grabber was toasted in the halls of Parliament. It was then I decided my pen would be a pike."
The Irish Mystic & The ‘Thinning Veil’
"I have been often 'lone and lonesome,' but never more so than when, in the gathering twilight of my life, the figures of the past start up like spectres around me, demanding that their names be not blotted out from the book of the living."
First Nations Advocacy
"We brought them our ‘civilisation’ in a bottle of rum and a box of smallpox. We took the soil they called mother and turned it into a ledger. My heart sickens to see the campfire extinguished by the surveyor’s chain."
Blindness as Spiritual Awakening
"The darkness is not empty. It is crowded.
As the world of men fades from my sight, the world of the dead grows vivid.
I am losing the sun, but I am finding the souls I thought I had forgotten."
Homesickness & Irish Soul
"There is a part of the Tipperary soil that never leaves the boot. I walk the wide streets of Melbourne, but in my dreams, I am climbing the Galtees, and the rain there is sweeter than the gold here."
On Protest & The Weaponised Pen
"To stay silent is to be a co-conspirator. If I cannot shout in the streets with a pike, I will whisper in the columns of the Herald until the governor’s ears bleed with the truth of his own incompetence."
Grief For The Loss of Anne
"The house is a hollow drum. To see a mind so bright descend into the grey fog of the asylum is a cruelty no Latin verse can soothe. I am the architect of a city's memory, yet I cannot rebuild the walls of my own home."
On Disgust for Colonial Pomposity
"The 'Gentlemen' of this city are often but gilded ruffians. They wear the silk of the scholar but possess the soul of the slaughter-man. I find more honour in the dust of the docks than in the velvet of the Melbourne Club."
On Irish Orphan Girls Advocacy
"These girls came with nothing but virtue and grief. To treat them as cattle is a sin that cries out to heaven. They are the seeds of a new world, and I will be the fence that protects them."
On Ancestry & Legacy
"I write not for the men of today, but for the children of tomorrow. I am leaving a map of the soul of this place. If they do not know where the blood was spilled, they will never know why the grass grows so green on Emerald Hill."
Finn’s monumental act of recording Melbourne’s history is re-rendered as an imperfect, values-driven mission. His physical blindness mirrors a spiritual inability to see the deep-time custodianship of the land. His "City of Mud" is a landscape of moral bankruptcy, where settler society is spiritually sick because it has severed its link to the land's original knowledge.
THE THREE DIASPORAS: THE YEARNING FOR HOME
The story explores the "wandering grief" shared by three distinct groups:
Irish Catholics: Displaced exiles building a city while their souls remain in the Atlantic.
Rabbis : Seekers of a moral anchor in a colony obsessed with gold and land-theft.
First Nations: The sovereign custodians rendered invisible by the colonial map.
Finn is a flawed advocate for these groups. His work is a search for a moral home in a land founded on the "Dark History of Erasure." He realises that true belonging requires the land to be ethically repatriated—governed by ancestral law rather than colonial ownership.
RECLAIMING THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MEMORY
In 1845, Finn named the rise "Emerald Hill." This was a deliberate act of Irish nostalgia—an attempt to transplant a lost "Emerald" onto a landscape that already possessed a sacred identity. This act of erasure is the story’s critical paradox.
Emerald Hill was a traditional social and ceremonial meeting place for Aboriginal, Wurundjeri tribes. Finn’s written record of the "swarthy tribe" being "removed" is treated as a colonial confession. True "brilliance" in this story lies in dissolving the romanticised Celtic veneer to honour the ceremonial memory and Indigenous sovereignty that predates the colonial map.
THE SATIRICAL WARNING
Finn’s early satirical writings, featuring the character Hans Schwartz, reflect his internal struggle with the ethical cost of colonialism. The "mask of exile" allowed Finn to express his disappointment, but ancestral wisdom reveals this dismay is actually the land's own suffering imprinted on the settler’s soul. The domestic instability of the Finn family serves as a spiritual warning:
Can a secure home be built
on stolen ground ?
APPENDIX
The Australian Media Hall of Fame
The Melbourne Press Club Inductee
1819 - 1898 | Victoria | journalist
By Martin Flanagan
The Argus said in 1944 that more details are known about the beginnings of Melbourne than most large cities, ancient or modern, because of one man: Edmund Finn.
“ He must have been a raconteur of note since another prominent Irishman in the colony, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, persuaded him to put his many stories into book form as “an anecdotal history” of Melbourne. Thus was born The Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835 to 1852 by “Garryowen”
An article about Finn in The Argus newspaper of December 1944, described him as “the Walter Winchell of his time; a merry debunker and candid cameraman”. There is about Finn an undeniable Irishness, both in many of the subjects he described – Melbourne’s first two hurling matches, its Saint Patrick’s day celebrations, its response to the Irish famine of 1846 – but also in the wit and zest of his writing. Parts of what he wrote – eg a mayoral procession where a bull being led to slaughter got away from its owner and charged the mayor – remain funny to this day.
Of the perennial dispute over who founded Melbourne, John Batman or John Pascoe Fawkner, Finn wrote:
“It was not Fawkner, but Fawkner’s party of five men and a woman, and the woman’s cat, were the bona-fide founders of Melbourne.”
“Fawkner was sort of a spoiled child with the old colonists, and even those who thoroughly disliked him, and often repelled his ill-bred arrogance, were ever-ready to concede a large latitude to the man who, by common repute, shared with Batman the honours surrounding the foundation of ‘the settlement’.
Batman was dead, and ‘Johnny’ was not only alive but poking his nose into every public movement, from anti-transportation to separation. The prestige that would have to be divided between him and Batman, had he lived, was not unnaturally claimed by Fawkner, and as he had a finger in every pie, and was jumping about like a squirrel wherever there was anything astir, either at a fire or a public meeting, an election or a street row, a public dinner or a charity sermon, he was accorded a certain toleration which clothed him in a privilege that fell to the lot of no other man.”
Martin Flanagan
Further reading
'The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, VOL 2 1835-1851', by Garryowen.
