Oh Happy Day by Carmen Callil review - tearful compassion and eloquent rage
The Virago Press founder unearths the remarkable tale of her ancestors down under, drawing chilling parellels to the inequalities of our time
In the 18th century, the body snatchers who grubbed up coffins and sold exhumed corpses for medical research were ghoulishly nicknamed "resurrection men".
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-00.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-01.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-02.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-03.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-04.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-05.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-06.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-07.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-08.pdf
https://hdfs.msu.edu/sites/default/files/2020-11/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-09.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-00.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-01.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-02.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-03.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-04.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-05.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-06.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-07.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-08.pdf
http://www.sintapazores.com/sites/default/files/webform/diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-09.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-00.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-01.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-02.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-03.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-04.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-05.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-06.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-07.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-08.pdf
https://www.cometaimmobiliare.it/sites/default/files/webform//diretta-bologna-napoli-ore-09.pdf
Carmen Callil, whose motives are a good deal nobler, is a resurrection woman: after a decade spent delving in archives and visiting nameless graves, she has unearthed her family's past in a book that is both a heartfelt outpouring of pity and sorrow and an irate demand for restitution.
Callil's antecedents were sweated labourers in the Midlands, the "busy insects of the early Industrial Revolution". Hunger drove these paupers to commit petty crimes and some of them, when caught, had the good fortune to be shipped out to Australia. That punishment was what Callil calls their "happy day": the new world allowed them to fill their bellies, bronze their skins and shed their fetters. Callil's many-stranded narrative concentrates on three clans from Leicester and Lincolnshire whose misery was alleviated by migration to Melbourne. There, they intermarried and after a few generations, cross-pollinated by a Christian immigrant from Lebanon with the patronymic Kahlil (for a while experimentally anglicised as Kelly), they produced little Carmen.
She, however, reversed the family's history and in her 20s sailed back to the country that expelled her ancestors. Sustained by "the disputatious Australian personality" and the national "lack of deference", she founded Virago Press in 1973 and began a lifelong campaign to challenge Britain's snotty imperial delusions. Her new book completes that endeavour, denouncing the 19th-century ruling class along with the predatory swindlers who still mismanage the country.