By popular demand,
Joe Journal is no more, it has become a section of interviews, like
the one below with Allison O'Sullivan; the great great Granddaughter
of Anton Wicks. Allison, despite a busy schedule, kindly consented to
briefly answering several questions in relation to the Anton Wicks
story via E mail for this site. I am pleased to display the results.
If you believe you have anything worth an interview to be placed
below, please contact
Mike.
As to Joe
specifically, it’s very hard to judge a person’s true
character after such a length of time – I’ll never be able to
ask anyone who knew Joe what he was really like, so I prefer
to reserve judgement on him personally. I know that Anton was
never fond of him – as boys Joe and Aaron used to steal the
fruit from Anton’s market garden, though from what I know of
Anton he was a very serious man, and not one to forgive
irresponsible behaviour like this, so it’s possible he was
overreacting. It seemed apparent at one point that Anton would
ask Margret Byrne to marry him, so Joe put a stop to it by
stealing one of Anton’s horses and riding it into the ground –
relations were definitely cool between the two. Annie Wicks
was probably the one person in my family who knew Joe best,
and she seems to have forgiven him a lot of his wild behaviour
– he obviously had a lot of charisma.
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Anton was very close to Margret Byrne, and as a widower and widow
raising children alone they had a lot in common. I like to think
that our greatest connection with the Byrne family is the support
that Anton and his children would have been able to give Mrs Byrne
through all her worries. I actually find myself sympathising with
Margret more than anyone else in this story – she loved Joe very
much, but you can also see that she was disappointed in him. He was
obviously very bright, literate, and possessed a natural charm – a
mother would have had high hopes for a son like that. Who knows,
given different circumstances, what he might have achieved?
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Thanks for joining me Allison it's been fantastic!
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MIKE LAWSON
email
| phone 0401 274 730
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