An enjoyable anecdote: Fr Paddy Moloney MSC and the inspiration for The Old Mass Shandrydan
Recently, we highlighted the 60th Anniversary of his death and his pioneer mission work in Central Australia with aboriginal people. Perhaps our international visitors to our site do not know of the famous book of ballads, Around the Boree Log, by John O’Brien (Monsignor Patrick Hartigan). These comic poems offer pictures of the Catholic Church in Australian Catholic Communities in the country.
One of the best-known ballad, about a family and its carriage getting to Mass, The Old Mass Shandrydan.
It was inspired by a sermon preached in Albury by the Rev. Father P. Moloney, M.S.C., of musical stick' fame. (Father Moloney invented a 'stick' with prongs for striking chords as an aid to learning piano-playing.) Father Moloney's sermon was
about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. In praising the fidelity and loyalty of the old Catholics, he told the congregation of his own experiences as a boy in South Australia; how his mother, long before dawn on Sunday mornings, would be
'Rousing sleepy heads from
blankets, washing faces, doing hair,
Scolding, coaxing, bustling,
breathless in her hurry everywhere.'
No problem was too difficult when it was a question of getting her 'brood' to Sunday Mass . . .
'But she kept the tumult under till
she had us spick and span,
Packed like pickles in a bottle in
the Old Mass Shandrydan.'
When Father Moloney left the pulpit, Father Hartigan had the outline of the poem in his head and some of the verses already formed.
And when 'Around the Boree Log' finally rolled off the presses, he sent a copy to Father Moloney with an inscription on the fly-leaf:
'To the instigator from the perpetrator.'
How John O’Brien wrote Around the Boree Log. Catholic Weekly May 22 1952.
PS. On Fr Moloney’s famous music stick. In the late 1950s he was living at Sacred Heart Monastery, Croydon, playing the piano with his stick, mainly Galway Bay. Some of us who were trying to study nearby never want to hear Galway Bay again!!
