Early Years
Joe Cahill, as he was popularly known, was born in Redfern, and was educated at St Brigid's convent school, Marrickville and the Patrician Brothers' College, both in Sydney. He became an apprentice at the Eveleigh workshops of the contemporary equivalent of NSW RailCorp in 1916.
Politically active even at the age of fifteen, he was even more politically active during his twenties. He opposed Conscription in 1916, and lost his railway job in 1917 after taking part in a workers' strike and had difficulty finding permanent employment afterwards, working in many small jobs (including selling insurance for a year). In 1922, he married Esmey Mary Kelly.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Cahill
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)