THE GHOST OF EMERALD HILL
IRELAND - SCREEN AUSTRALIA CO-PRODUCTION
IN DEVELOPMENT WITH
CLTV DUBLIN
IN CONSULTATION WITH HISTORIAN DR LIZ RUSHEN
BASED ON PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED LITERATURE OF
EDMUND FINN ESQ. (AKA GARRYOWEN)
AND THE FINN FAMILY PAPERS
ARCHIVAL COLLECTION
STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA
LOGLINE
A young Irish scholar in exile devotes his life to documenting colonial erasure and advocating for the dispossessed, only to tragically realise, as old age and blindness close in, the collateral damage of the erasure he fought to expose is his own family.
SYNOPSIS
1841. Suddenly exiled from Ireland, twenty-year-old Edmund Finn arrives in Melbourne, carrying the weight of Catholic oppression under British occupation and the burden of his younger brother Patrick, accused of killing a British soldier in Tipperary.
His wife, Annie Reidy, a gifted young poet, is haunted by the loss of another child, deep longing for her homeland - and a growing rage against the Establishment.
Melbourne is a frontier town of mud, tents and misery, ruled by squatters, corrupt judges and frontier violence.
A gifted linguist with a command of ‘The Dead Languages’ - Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin, Edmund is appointed lead reporter at The Herald newspaper.
Shaped by his own people’s dispossession, Finn develops an unexpected affinity with Indigenous Australians. His curiosity and empathy evolve into a lifelong connection, grounded in a profound respect for their mysterious intelligence, knowledge and culture.
Drawn to visiting their remote camps, Finn documents the Bangalang and Wurundjeri peoples, immersing himself in learning their languages and culture.
But an unexpected phenomenon occurs: The Great Comet of 1843.
The elders issue a warning: malevolent spirits have hurled The Great Burning Spear.
The Chief Elder speaks to the tribe and Edmund will translate the event to his newspaper under the pen name Jaga-Jaaga:
“The Great Comet heralds the imminent collapse of Natural Order.”
Years later the Finn’s wealth and power increases while Annie’s power is fading.
Annie’s extraordinary collection of works will disappear decades later while incarcerated at Yarra Bend Asylum.
The narrative shifts intermittently -from Edmund’s troubled youth as a child prodigy in Tipperary under British occupation. Mercilessly bullied for his pale appearance, unusual adult-like vernacular and his devout Catholicism - to an elderly Edmund in his study, engaged in seemingly real conversations with ghosts.
Isolated, lonely and blind, powerful visitations from the dead appear as messengers, driven to transform and guide poor old Edmund.
Witnessing the direful panic throughout the tribes - the blazing comet forever changes young Edmund’s fate - a family curse on the Finn family for generations.
Lead reporter at The Port Phillip Herald, Edmund leverages his unhindered access to the press - and his gift for words - as a weapon for whistleblowing. Writing under a web of pseudonyms, covert journalism becomes a campaign against corruption, exposing the Establishment and documenting the systematic oppression of the Wurundjeri, Irish Catholic and Jewish communities.
To the marginalised and dispossessed the mysterious ‘Garryowen’ is a champion. To the Establishment, he is a dangerous agitator, pursued through libel suits, fines and death threats.
But as Edmund's public influence grows, his private world begins to unravel.
A devastating personal tragedy breaks Annie's spirit. In a society that silences women, Annie is ultimately institutionalised. Edmund, who has spent his life challenging abuses of power, is forced to confront his own place within the structures he despises.
Grief will blur the boundaries between memory and reality.
Elderly Edmund is haunted by three figures from his past: Irish Liberator Daniel O'Connell, his friend Rabbi Moses - and eventually, Annie herself.
Each ghost appears as a messenger archetype.
At times, the ghosts issue poetic, abstract warnings - appearing in the form of the Three Witches from Macbeth.
At other times, they appear candidly as their younger, or older selves, casually conversing, or jesting - with an unexpectedly driven, energetic Edmund in his study at night.
Edmund Finn is legally blind by the time he takes on the gargantuan mission of writing The Chronicles.
As elderly Edmund races against time - and vision loss - to complete The Chronicles, his final act of resistance is to document the truth.
Annie’s disappearance, their son’s mysterious death and homesickness for Irish soil results in the deepest form of grief - and it will blur the boundaries between memory, reality - and sanity.
“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”
Though no Spiritist, I’d been abiding in a spiritual world. Impelled by imagination, I retraced a region dead and gone. Held communion with friends and foes alike.
-Garryowen, aka Edmund Finn Esq.
ANNIE REIDY
In a brilliant, yet tragic act of defiance, Annie dances alone, in public at the Cremorne Fair - owned by THEIR larger than life theatrical friend, Mr. George Coppin.
Investing his entire fortune into creating this massive, dreamlike folly - complete with a menagerie of exotic animals, fire twirlers, Chinese acrobats, ice-skating rink and the world's first hot air balloon ride, Mr Coppin and the growing crowd are entranced by Annie’s beauty and sense of freedom.
But only momentarily - as the Irish jig-band plays faster and faster Annie is spinning in a dervish-like trance under a gaze of horrified faces belonging to the peers of her husband’s elite powerful friends and politicians.
Home from their elite boarding schools for the holidays, the three Finn children scold their mother, while Edmund silently packs his bags for another one of his sold-out public speaking tours.
While Edmund is away, Annie’s jealous, childless spinster sister, Eliza Reidy, tricks her love interest, Mr. George Coppin, into committing Annie to the recently built Yarra Bend Asylum - located across the river from his Cremorne Gardens venture.
The Aboriginal people are the Lords of the Soil - And we are the interloping trespassers.
I have watched with regret - the fading away of a people who once roamed these hills - with a freedom we can scarcely comprehend
.
DIRECTOR TONY ROGERS
PRODUCER BELLE STEWART
PITCH DECK - NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT FUNDING - SHORT FILM
OPENING SCENES LOCATION: GARRYOWEN LANE, FITZROY, VICTORIA
WHERE EDMUND FINN AND TONY ROGERS RESIDE
APPENDIX
HISTORICAL RESEARCH DOCUMENTATION
“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
They are very superstitious. Comets are their peculiar aversion. The first night the great comet of 1842 appeared, there was dreadful commotion and consternation among the Australian tribes.
A large number were encamped close to the station where I resided, and I remember the intense alarm it created-different spokesmen gesticulated and speechified far into the night; but as the comet still remained, and all their endeavours to explain the unusual appearance were fruitless, they broke up their camp in the middle of the night—the only time I ever remember its being done — and crossed the river, where they remained huddled up together until morning. Their opinion was that the comet had been caused and sent by the Ovens blacks to do them some direful harm. They left the station, and did not return until the comet disappeared.
“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
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."
Edmund Finn
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
ETHOS, PATHOS & POP CULTURE
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 2
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.
