William Skyvington explores the background of his maternal Irish ancestors. Their family names were Walker, Hickey, O'Keefe, Kennedy and Cranston. Among them, there was a convict and a bushranger, but most of the others were simple folk fleeing from poverty in the Old World. Rural pioneers, they were seeking greener pastures than those of their native Ireland. Their one-way journey to the Antipodes was a gigantic adventure, culminating in their helping to found a new nation.

I present the blog posts that culminated in the sale of French submarines to Australia. The second part of this short book presents unexpected happenings when I tried naively to inform the French president Emmanuel Macron that I was the person who had brought about this gigantic affair.