Early Life
Kearney was born on 22 August 1936 at Canterbury Memorial Hospital on Canterbury Road Campsie a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales. The hospital had opened in 1929 and Kearney was the third and last child of Kathleen and Jack. His family lived in Bondi a beachside suburb of Sydney where he grew up in a Park Parade apartment looking out to the Pacific Ocean and opposite Waverley Park. In February 1942 he became a student at Christian Brothers Waverley College, Our Lady's Mount, Waverley where he remained for the next fifteen years.
Kearney's paternal and maternal families were early arrivals in Australia forming part of the invasionary force that came from Ireland in the mid-1800s, his mother and his father were born in March and January, 1898 respectively and Kearney's maternal grandfather, Bernard Reilly was elected as an alderman to the first Crookwell Shire Council, New South Wales in 1905 Kearney's father, Jack Kearney, and mother, Kathleen Reilly, married in May 1924 at St. Mary's Cathedral, Australia's largest church, on the corner of College and Cathedral Streets, Hyde Park in the Sydney CBD. Their marriage was officiated by Archbishop Michael Kelly, the fourth Archbishop of Sydney and a Christian Brother from Waterford, Ireland.
In December, 1957 Kearney left Sydney and travelled to Port Augusta, South Australia and took the old Ghan on the original 1929 narrow gauge rail to Alice Springs, Northern Territory following the route of the original Muslim cameleers of Rajasthan and Baluchistan and worked on the Alice Springs to Darwin road in the land of the Walpiri, Anmatyerre, Arrente and Liritja peoples where he experienced a true South Asian Australian Aboriginal lifestyle and was invited to corroborees by the Mutijuli elders of the Anangu people.
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