The personal website of Allen and Loni Hackworth is a quiet corner of the internet where original poetry, prose, family chronologies, and archival records sit side by side. Alongside the Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy lines, Allen has written essays that grow out of small objects the family has kept. One of those essays turns on a battered tin whistle that belonged to Loni's grandfather McCarthy, and has become a touchstone piece for anyone interested in how a single instrument can carry decades of migration, music, and memory.
The piece works as both writing and fragment of family history. Allen uses the whistle to open up questions about the McCarthy line that the chronology pages only touch in passing. Where the family tree lists names, dates, and the broad shape of a life, the essay slows down and looks at one item that passed through that life. That item still sits in a Queensland shed surrounded by other inherited things, and readers who come for the genealogy end up staying for the prose, while readers who come for the prose find a doorway into the wider archive.
For an Australian audience, the essay lands in a particular way. It is a story of an Irish object living in Australian weather, an heirloom played in loungerooms during summer storms and tucked away through dry winters. The tin whistle becomes a small example of how migrant families in this country build archives of feeling around modest objects, and how those objects often outlast the houses they sit in.
The McCarthy line on the Hackworth site traces back through several generations in New South Wales and Victoria before crossing the sea to County Cork and further into Limerick. Allen's essay doesn't try to retell the whole genealogy. Instead, it points to a particular grandfather, a man whose name appears in the chronology but whose voice never made it into a recording. The whistle is treated as the closest thing left to that voice, an instrument that probably cost very little when new and has been repaired more than once.
Allen handles the Irish material carefully. He doesn't claim a tidy folkloric origin for the whistle, nor does he dress the story up as something it isn't. He notes where the history is solid, where it leans on a marriage certificate, and where it leans on something softer, like a cousin's recollection of a tune hummed over a kitchen sink. Readers who know Australian genealogy will recognise the pattern: a chain of paper trails ending at a sea crossing, then a long stretch of oral memory to be treated as carefully as any birth record.
The essay sits comfortably alongside the McCarthy chronology. The chronology gives the bones; the essay gives the breath, and the whistle piece is a good example of that balance.
The whistle is a simple six-hole instrument in the key of B flat, the kind once sold in music shops in Limerick and later in suburban Melbourne. Allen describes its dents, the tape wound around the mouthpiece by someone who never quite learned to hold it, and the faint stain near the third hole where a thumb has rested for what must be tens of thousands of tunes. He is careful about what he knows versus what he is inferring, which gives the description a scholarly tenderness that fits the rest of the site.
He also writes about the music. There are polkas, slides, and airs the McCarthy family would have heard at country dance halls in Victoria, and a small set of hymns that turn up in the Tidwell branch. Allen doesn't pretend to be a folklorist, but has clearly listened to commercial recordings and the Australian folk revival archives held by the National Library in Canberra. The essay carries a short list of tunes he is confident about, and points readers toward Loni's blog for clips.
A musician could almost pick the whistle up and play it from the page, while a non-musician can still picture the quiet breath that brings it to life.
Allen's other essays on the site follow a similar pattern. There are pieces on a cast iron kettle, a worn prayer book, and a wooden-handled screwdriver that passed through three generations of Telford men. Each piece treats an ordinary object as a way into a larger story, and each is short enough to read in a single sitting. The whistle essay is the longest of the set, partly because the instrument invites sound and partly because the McCarthy line lends itself to musical description.
The approach has roots in a tradition of Australian writing about domestic life. Allen has said elsewhere on the site that he learned a great deal from listening to older relatives on long car trips between Brisbane and Toowoomba, and that those rhythms shaped how he writes. The result is prose that sounds spoken without being slangy, and that respects the silences around an object as much as the words used to describe it.
Writing about small objects lets Allen keep publishing without waiting for a major archival discovery. A tin whistle, a kettle, a screwdriver: things that can be picked up, examined, and put down again, and the essays that come from them feel close to the rhythm of ordinary life in Australia.
The Hackworth site is a private archive, but it follows some of the conventions of a public one. Allen credits his sources, dates each entry, and notes when an image is a photograph and when it is a scan of an older document. The whistle essay includes a short note on the family's approach to privacy, shaped by the Privacy Act 1988 and by the rule that living relatives are asked before anything personal is published.
This careful framing matters in an Australian context. Many family historians have run into trouble by publishing details about people still alive, or by quoting letters without the writer's consent. Allen treats the legal minimum as a starting point rather than a ceiling, and the whistle essay is one of several pieces that briefly explain how the family makes those decisions. Researchers in Hobart, Perth, or regional Queensland might find this useful when thinking through their own sites. The essay also uses small Australian conventions: metric measurements, day-month-year dates, and references to repositories using names locals would actually use, such as the State Library of Victoria or the National Library of Australia.
For readers interested in the writing itself, the whistle essay is a useful study. Allen works from observation outward, then folds in context, then closes with a short reflection that doesn't try to wrap the object up neatly. His drafts, by his own account on Loni's blog, go through several passes: describe the object, bring in the family history, then test whether the prose is doing any work the genealogy could not. Anything that fails that final test is cut, and the whistle essay is lean because it has been through this process several times, giving it quiet authority.
It is worth noting what the essay does not do. It doesn't try to be a comprehensive history of the tin whistle in Australia, or position the McCarthy family within a wider narrative of Irish migration. It stays close to one whistle, one grandfather, and one set of tunes, and trusts the reader to do the rest.
A quick comparison helps to set Allen's approach in context.
| Object kept | Family line | How it is described | Where it lives now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tin whistle | McCarthy (Loni's grandfather) | Detailed close reading, music and repair history | A Queensland shed |
| Cast iron kettle | Telford | Short prose poem, cooking memories | A Melbourne kitchen |
| Wooden-handled screwdriver | Telford | Technical description, three generations of trades | A workbench in Adelaide |
| Prayer book | South | Careful transcription, hymnal cross-reference | A bookshelf in Sydney |
| Pocket watch | Brighton | Clockmaker's notes, stop-and-start history | A drawer in Hobart |
Several habits show up across these keepsakes:
A few practical tips drawn from how Allen and Loni handle their archive:
The whistle essay is the best entry point for new visitors to the Hackworth site. From there, the natural next stop is the McCarthy chronology and Loni's blog, where the related tune clip is posted alongside other family updates and recent photographs from the household.