Agnes Maguire, as she was named in 1869, or Aggie, as she was always known, was one of eleven children born to Jane and John Maguire, owner of a Liverpool match factory in Britain’s north. A brief history of match-making (in the old sense of tinder rather than Tinder) seems at first a detour but becomes fascinating and central to the fortunes of the family, as John and his sons campaign to replace deadly white phosphorus with the red phosphorus familiar in safety matches. The men of the family would become rich, influential, and honoured for their work.

Young Aggie received a solid education for her time while also teaching. Yet at the age of nineteen she seized the chance for greater freedom by taking a ship to Australia with her artistic sister Minnie and brother Joe, for the sake of his delicate health. After Joe died on the voyage, the two women made the bold decision to stay in Melbourne and start their own school.

Aggie’s life was reshaped by her marriage to Richard Gorman. He rode into a northern Victorian town where she was teaching and took her home to his Riverina property, Galtee Park, and his domineering family of graziers descended from an Irish-born settler. Although Aggie was a practising Catholic, the Gormans referred to her as ‘the English bride’, marking her as an outsider and setting up a lifelong tension that is valuable to Niall as a storyteller.

Independence is Aggie’s strongest quality, but she missed her distant Maguire relatives and became a resourceful, caring wife and mother of seven children, including Niall’s mother, Connie, born in 1902. She disciplined her children lightly by sending them outside to resolve their fights, and insisting they did not scribble on her books. Literature runs through the biography as a theme. Aggie read every afternoon and passed her love of books on to her ‘seven little Australians’ and twenty-five grandchildren. Niall sees as significant that she gave the grandchildren Wuthering Heights but not the more sedate Pride and Prejudice. Connie’s identification with the heroine of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series must surely have planted a seed in Niall, whose first book was on the work of the children’s authors Bruce and Ethel Turner.

Brenda NiallAggie’s strong marriage ended with Richard’s death from a degenerative disease, leaving her a widow at thirty-nine to raise her family and deal with a complicated inheritance. Her practical and quietly rebellious nature is illustrated by the light floral dresses she wore while mourning. She accepted help from her brothers and brothers-in-law, but resisted efforts to take one son to England for a privileged upbringing. Her politics were always expressed indirectly but clearly, for example by naming one of her children Joubert, after a Boer general and in defiance of the British.

Niall neatly brings to life the next generation as individuals, with Aggie’s sons going onto the land, into medicine, and to war. Miraculously, she didn’t lose any of them. The Depression hit the family hard, especially the graziers, and Aggie calmly shifted her comfortable life again into a more modest style. Her small Melbourne flat, shared with her daughter Nesta, overflowed with grand- children until the end of her life in 1953.

In an interview after Mannix won the National Biography Prize in 2016, Niall told me that as a child she often saw the archbishop walking to St Patrick’s Cathedral and wondered where he bought his buckled shoes. She was pleased to find the answer during her research. A lovely touch in this book is that Aggie’s only personal extravagance in her later years was taking a taxi to Lygon Street, Carlton, to order handmade boots ‘from the maker of Archbishop Mannix’s famous silver-buckled shoes’.

Two other possessions are central to Niall’s relationship with her grandmother. When Niall was ten, Aggie gave her a cedar box that her brother Joe had made during the fatal ship voyage from Liverpool. She seemed to know Niall would be a writer. A conch shell, which Aggie had found on a French beach and held to the children’s ears, provides the book’s title and cover. ‘We knew that Grandmother had crossed oceans; somehow she’d brought home the sea,’ Niall writes with respect for a woman who built a dynasty across centuries, was adventurous and stable, traditional and ahead of her time, English and embodied the best of Australia.