For the Hackworth family archive, Allen's poem "The Candle Flicker on the McCarthy Bible" sits among the quieter pieces — writing that settles into the reader's hands like an heirloom. The verse observes a small domestic moment: a candle burning near an old family Bible, its flame unsteady against a draft, the wax pooling in shapes that resemble nothing and everything. From such a modest scene, it draws a meditation on inheritance, the way faith and lineage pass through generations in gestures as quiet as a hand turning a page.
The McCarthy Bible referenced in the title is one of the archival objects documented on this site. It belongs to the broader family record that includes the Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy lines, gathered across obituaries, chronologies, and photographs. A reader approaching the poem without that context might still hear its textures: the leather cover softened by decades of opening, the gilt dulled to pale honey, the thin paper that has absorbed the smell of every room it has occupied. Allen's lines treat these surfaces as living things.
Australian readers will recognise the kind of evening the poem describes — that twilight hour when a southerly buster pushes through Melbourne and the power has gone out in a Carlton terrace, or when the inland heat of a Longreach summer makes the curtains lift and fall. There is a recognisable domestic patience in lighting a candle not for romance but because the light switch will not cooperate. The poem's speaker knows that patience. He knows the candle is doing work the bulb cannot.
What gives the poem its weight is its refusal to sentimentalise the Bible. The book is not described as sacred. It is described as heavy, awkward to carry, containing a pressed sprig that may once have been a flower from a christening decades ago. The candle flicker becomes a small event of attention, a moment when the speaker looks at the object his relatives held before him and allows himself to imagine them doing the same.
The poem's central image is not the Bible but the flame. The verse writes the candle as a small, breathing thing — alive in a way the book is not, yet dependent on the book for the occasion of its burning. The wax drips onto the open page and the speaker does not move it. He lets it fall where it falls, knowing that what hardens there will be part of the record tomorrow.
There is a specific Australian quality to this kind of stillness. It resembles the hush of a verandah in the Adelaide Hills at dusk, when the cicadas slow and the gum leaves give off their resin scent. The poem does not name such places, but its rhythm borrows from them. Sentences arrive short and unhurried. In a country where summer storms can knock out power across entire suburbs from Geelong to the Hills, the candle is not a metaphor but a familiar companion.
A line near the middle of the verse compares the flame's behaviour to a traveller on a country road at night — headlamp dipping, lifting, dipping again over the corrugations. The image is unmistakably Australian, even though the poem never says so. Country roads and headlamps are the unmarked spaces of inland Australia, where light is provisional and arrival is something you negotiate with the dark.
Allen treats the McCarthy Bible the way a conservator would — as a physical object with a biography. He notes where the spine has cracked along a particular psalm, where a thumbnail has darkened a corner, where a marriage entry has been overwritten in a different hand. The candle is held near these places long enough for the speaker to see them as evidence of lives rather than as quaint detail.
This way of looking at an heirloom sits comfortably in Australian family practice. Country households across the Wheatbelt and the Riverina keep Bibles, almanacs, and ledgers in the same drawers as letters and recipes, and the contents are read for what they say about the people who came before, not for theological instruction. The poem honours that habit. It does not instruct; it witnesses.
The McCarthy Bible, like many such books held in Australian homes, may have travelled further than the family it now belongs to. It carries the marks of whoever owned it before — a different climate, a different diet of dust, a different angle of sunlight across whatever table it lay upon. Allen's poem is sensitive to this layered geography. The candle, he suggests, lights each layer in turn.
A recurring motif in the poem is the inheritance of attention — the idea that what is passed down is not a thing but a way of looking. The McCarthy Bible was passed down because someone decided that looking at it mattered. The candle is lit now because someone in the present has inherited that disposition. The poem frames this as an unbroken chain, though a quiet one.
There is no grand statement in the verse, no claim that the family line is special or chosen. The poem's modesty is deliberate. It makes a case for the small repeated act of attention, the kind of act that a grandmother in Bendigo or a grandfather in Townsville performs every evening without thinking to call it anything. The Hackworth archive, with its chronologies and obituaries, is built from such acts. The poem simply adds one more.
A reader may also notice that the candle is never quite steady in the poem. It gutters, recovers, gutters again. This is the inheritance made literal — uneven, almost extinguished at times, but continuing. Allen lets the flame represent whatever the reader wants it to represent: faith, memory, the family itself, the willingness to keep looking at an old book in a quiet room.
There is a quieter resonance in the poem with sites elsewhere in the world where light falls on old surfaces and reveals what hands have left behind. A field report on the abandoned baolis of Delhi describes how sunlight, after centuries, still reaches the carved walls of those old stepwells and illuminates the marks left by those who drew water there. The poem asks for a similar attention — the willingness to stand in a dim place and notice what light still finds.
What the candle illuminates on the McCarthy Bible is small and specific: a smudge of wax from a previous reading, the dried edge of a pressed flower, the handwriting of a great-aunt who recorded births in the back pages. These are not grand things. The poem understands that they do not need to be. The stepwells and the Bible share this. Both are structures of memory that depend on someone returning with a source of light.
The connection is not stated in the verse. It sits in the reader's mind afterward, the way a candle's smell sits in a room long after the candle has been put out. Allen's poem is content to leave that work to whoever picks up the book next.
Among Allen's other poems on this site, "The Candle Flicker on the McCarthy Bible" is one of the shorter pieces, and its brevity is part of its effect. It does not try to compete with the longer chronologies or the photographs of the McCarthy line. It sits alongside them, complementing the documentary record with a literary one. The archive contains facts about who lived and when; the poem contains what it was like to hold their things.
For Australian readers browsing the site, the poem may recall their own family Bibles — many of which survive in the backs of cupboards in suburban Brisbane or in farmhouses outside Ballarat. The poem asks nothing of those readers except that they remember, for a moment, what it felt like to open such a book, perhaps as a child, perhaps while the adults were elsewhere.
The Hackworth site is, in part, a record of such small things. Genealogies and chronologies give the dates; the poem gives the temperature of the room where the dates were lived. Read together, they show what it has cost to keep a Bible in a family for as long as this one has been kept, and what it has given back when the candle was lit and someone bothered to look.
The reader who came to the poem curious about the McCarthy line will leave with a sense of how the line has handled its own objects. The reader who came simply for a poem will leave with a quiet prompt: there is probably a Bible, or a book that has been treated like one, somewhere in their own house. The verse does not say so. It simply keeps flickering, page after page, as though it has all the time in the world.