Emerald Hill
Annie Reidy is the somatic and spiritual antithesis
Silence is not an absence of voice, but a profound presence that demands a witness.
If The Chronicles are the bones of the city, and Annie is its breath, can the story ever be complete without the reclamation of her vanished verses?
Emerald Hill is a study of vision
Witnessing a City into Being
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.
Emerald Hill
A story of Love, Lies and Legacy
COLONIAL MELBOURNE
History, satire and heartbreak
Capturing moments of profound joy
With deep longing for home.
"What does the past tell us?
In and of itself it tells us nothing.
Three Generations.
Three Diaspora.
Three Witches.
History may not be remembered accurately - but it may be inhabited.
Colonial history often functions as selective amaurosis - to witness certain truths while remaining blind to others.
Edmund Finn is An Scríobhaí (The Scribe). He navigates nineteenth-century Melbourne in an attempt to build a pluralistic city, championing the Wurundjeri, Irish workhouse girls, and the Jewish congregation. His strategic success in securing land grants for Rabbi Rintel demonstrates a mastery of the colonial machine. Yet we must ask: does this public genius necessitate a private mandate of silence? The choice to recognise the stranger while erasing Annie Reidy—An Mhór-Ríoghain, the Morrígan—is the foundational wound of the series.
The union of Edmund and Annie
is a collision between Catholic logic and pagan ritual. Edmund employs the 'Options of the Book': documentation as a shield against erasure, strategic mediation through land grants, and the 'mask' of the high-collared clerk. His logic treats the unwritten as non-existent.
Conversely, Annie is compelled by an elemental mandate. Her sea rituals at St Kilda Pier express Cailleach energy—a somatic necessity to cleanse the blood of a city Edmund only records. While the Scribe’s logic views Annie’s rituals as a pathology to be cured, the Morrígan’s vision understands Edmund’s paper reality as a delusion to be mourned.
This interfaith philosophy evolves
in the next generation. Pat and Eddie Jr are Catholic but educated at the Protestant Scotch College. This exposure to the establishment provides a new 'option'—a Protestant mask that allows them to move through the city as sophisticated bridge-builders. They become fluent in the languages of both power and dispossession, yet remain haunted by the somatic inheritance of their mother.
The structural echo
repeats when both brothers marry Jewish women writers. These unions mirror the parental collision of faith and intellect. By marrying into the Jewish faith, do they seek a culture that has long used the written word as a tool for surviving exile? Do these women provide intellectual anchor and the emotional literacy required to navigate the somatic trauma inherited from their mother.
Does the brilliance of the lineage remain a somatic burden?
The body becomes a whistleblower
muscle spasms and neurological blindness manifest when the public mask fails moral truth. This is Lagán—cargo sunk by one generation that becomes a mandate for the next to recover. To heal this inherited blindness, must the lineage move towards Uéron, the absolute truth that transcends colonial records?
Ultimately, we explore whether the mandate requires an admission of topographical erasure.
Naming Emerald Hill
in 1845 may have been an attempt to heal Irish grief, but it overwrote Wurundjeri ground. Can redemption exist without the realisation that the hill was never ours to name?
Perhaps the grass grows green only because the blood spilled beneath it is blessed—nourished by forgiveness.
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 a movement from inner darkness to outward clarity.
Vision becomes both political and spiritual, the choice to witness or look away.
This is not a story of heroes and villains, but of inheritance:
What is carried, what is buried, and what must finally be brought home.
THE TRINITY OF EMERALD HILL
The Infiltrator
The Public Mask Outwitting the British Colonial Giants with fierce intellect, Finn’s rise to prominence, wealth and influence is part ambition part covert act.
The Secret Architect
Living a double life, Finn conspires to subvert the Establishment - to honour ‘The Three Lost Tribes’ — the Kulin Nation, the Irish 'slave girls' and the mystical 'Hebrews'
THE MUSE, THE SACRED MIRROR
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 a stone asylum, Annie returns to Finn as a hyper-real presence, guiding his pen toward the 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
The Ritual of Return
Clad in white silk
Damp body cast to Sea
She is Home
As Edmund documents the city
Anne is the wound it was built over
'A schoolboy, to this country, I brought with me a cheap but treasured souvenir of the land I had left and still love.'
The souvenir is the word itself.
A name.
The Limerick suburb, where Annie was born, Irish air, Owen's garden, the poitín and the dancing.
THE 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 CAILLEACH
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.
MINYAN OF SHADOWS
Together, these three form a collective memory:
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 that can only be remedied by more writing. He writes that his amaurosis blindness 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.
“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.”
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. They are Finn’s secret brothers. He shares their Hebrew—the only language capable of speaking to a God who feels absent. They provide the "Minyan" that sustains his soul and his sanity.
I am disposed to think that there is no country or era without its special psychological absurdities, and some of the supernatural fads of the present day are just as absurd and irrational as the gruesome traditions evolved from the Old Cemetery.
From all I have read and heard of such mysterious influences, I have formed a conviction that the ghost theory in all aspects and ages is about the most arrant myth that ever imposed upon humanity.
I cannot by any mental process bring myself to believe that any churchyard ever yawned in the sense enunciated by Shakespeare, or that in the discomforting dictum of Milton
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."
Edmund Finn
THE RING
Let Yarra deep entomb my cherished ring— ’Twas given in colder climes to memory dear— And let its sombre waters o’er it fling, A gloomy pall upon its darken’d bier.
For why retain a pledge of vows misplaced, Which, broken like a mirror only shows The image which its spotless surface graced, In fragments fragile, which no spell can close?
Then 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.
But why should absence deeply steep the past In sleep, as...
Melbourne
Unclassic Anti-native Name!
MELBOURNE.
Melbourne! Unclassic, anti-native name!
And yet, as by Magician's spell up-sprung,
Thee have I chosen, subject fit for song.
No antique relics, pyramids sublime
May be thine to boast. But who thy history
Knows? Whether primal city, embattled
Tower, or imperial throne on which have
Sate tyrant Czars, a long succession, the
Muse informs me not. No seer am I, nor
Doth my vision scan time past; sufficient
'Tis the present to describe. Then aid me
Austral Muse, if such exist.
The swarthy
Tribe appear'd, removed, or with force of arms,
Into the interior driven back;
(For power, the law of right, too oft overcomes)
A savage to a civil race gives way.
At first, selected, is large patch of land
Deem'd suitable, and for water standing
Well. A weather-boarded hut is rear'd, or
One of turf shingled or thatched, not to rain
Or penetrating winds impervious,
Or against the sweeping storm secure; round
It the electric fluid fork'd or sheet
Is seen terrific; while above is heard
Of thunder loud, peal after peal: Meantime
The lonely hut shakes at its very base,
If base it may be nami'd. The affrighted
Inmates now, their isolated thoughts, in
Turn express and other neighbours wish. They
Wish not long. Man must not dwell alone. So
Hut unites to but, to acre, acre,
A site thus fixed, a town is plan'd; the streets
At angles right are then divided off,
And Anglicised. The whole a Statesman's name
They give, and call it Melbourne. It's fame now
Sounded far; emigration's tide rolls in,
And population swells. Lot after lot
Is sold. The lonely weather-boarded hut
Is lost. The turf-built house is taken down.
Now brick to turf succeeds, and stone to wood.
Now spacious stores, and dwellings palace-like
On every hand are seen. Enacted now
Are laws and magisterial rod, the
Rights of each protect. Tis thus men form the
Future empire; the central city build.
Melbourne! thy rise an Austral poet sings;
But who thy fall shall see and thus record?
I leave thee now, and distant be the day,
When "Here stood Melbourne," shall the traveller say.
Or is he using Annie’s Voice ?
The Austral Muse is a forced to record the violence of the tribe's removal
The Children
Courage coupled with fierce intellect, resistance
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. 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.
"The darkness is not empty. It is crowded.
As the world fades from sight, the world of the dead grows vivid.
I am losing the sun, but I am finding the souls I thought I had forgotten."
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."
"I hear the ancients calling me
They tell me this city is not new
It is merely the latest layer of a story that began in the dust.
I am not a writer; I am a witness to a recurring truth."
- GarryOwen, 1880
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 & Pride
"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."
"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."
"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 from the book of the living."
- Edmund Finn
Full moon over Port Phillip Bay
She jumps.
A body vanishing into dark water.
Fabric flashing white, then gone.
She surfaces, gasping, laughing
Motion repeats, Anne jumping again. And again.
Big moon. Velvet water.
Back on the pier, wet footprints.
A suitcase left behind
Paint and paper, words soaked, glistening
A sister watching, disturbed
Children standing still, watching stillness
The iron gates. Anne behind them, contained.
Finn in a vast, silent house, children sleeping
The bay under moonlight unchanged
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:
The Irish: Displaced exiles building a city while their souls remain in the Atlantic.
The Jewish: Seekers of a moral anchor in a colony obsessed with gold and land-theft.
The 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.
The film reveals that 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 cannot 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.
