This month, as we prepare to celebrate 175 years of the Catholic Church in Melbourne, we have an opportunity to reflect on all the ways that God has been active in the life of our city, challenging, encouraging and shaping us as the Body of Christ through countless, often hidden ‘moments of grace’. This is the first in a series highlighting some of these grace-inflected moments in the lives of Melbourne Catholics through the years. In coming months, we will meet some of Melbourne’s people of God, some of them well-known Church figures, others more ordinary or even unlikely ‘heroes of the faith’—people like ‘Killarney Kate’.
Ellen Cahill—more popularly known as ‘Killarney Kate’ after one of her more popular songs—was a sometime petty criminal and street performer who sang on the streets of Melbourne in the early years of the 20th century.
Emigrating from Ireland in the 1870s, her family ran a hotel on Lonsdale Street. The story goes that Ellen was trained as a singer in Kilkenny before coming to Australia, and as a young woman, she sometimes sang at charity concerts. But after the trauma of a failed romance, and when she was caught stealing from the people who employed her as a domestic servant, her life started to unravel. She is thought to have lived for much of her life in poverty, dependent on the charity of the Catholic Church.
Despite her Catholic upbringing and connections, she was hardly a paragon of middle-class Christian virtue: she loved a flutter on the horses, regularly found herself in front of the magistrate and swore like a trooper. An eccentric character with a difficult history, she struggled for most of her life.
But Ellen was much more than a charity case. She had dignity and a sense of call. In a material sense, she didn’t have much, but she had this shining gift—a beautiful voice that could bring comfort or a smile or move people to tears. And she used it at every opportunity, throughout the city of Melbourne, on street corners and in public gardens, and especially on Melbourne’s trams, where she was such a fixture that the conductors rarely charged her a fare.
She was in the habit of serenading patients as they convalesced on the verandas of the Homoeopathic Hospital on Spring Street, and on other occasions, she would stand in the middle of the tram tracks, refusing to move or let the trams pass until she had finished her song. In the middle of a bustling working day, as people rushed from one thing to the next, she would literally stop her fellow Melburnians in their tracks, forcing them to pause and listen as she shared something of beauty with them, a brief moment of grace.
‘Killarney Kate’ died a pauper in 1934, her burial paid for by a member of the local theatre community. More than 300 people followed the funeral procession from Royal Melbourne Hospital to Faulkner Cemetery, where she was buried with Catholic rites.
