AustLit

'This article surveys the history of Irish-Australian autobiography and memoir as a form of writing particularly well adapted to exploring the tensions and compromises of Irish-Australian identity. It draws on selected works published from the early colonial period to the end of the twentieth century written by men and women across a wide social spectrum, from archbishops, politicians and academics to bushrangers, barmaids and poets. It focuses on the process of self-construction at work in the writing, with particular attention to the ways in which contemporaneous Irish stereotypes are invoked, often rejected, and sometimes embraced as part of this process. The tentative suggestion is made that a balanced appreciation of this form of writing may have been hindered by a bias evident in much recent Irish-Australian historiography towards interpreting the historical relationship between the Irish diaspora and the dominant Australian culture in conflictual terms, and that the strong impulse towards friendly assimilation, an equally important part of the historical record, deserves equal recognition.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'There is no more common Irish journey than that made by generations of people ‘across the water’ to Great Britain. A complex set of factors, from the countries’ geographical proximity to the colonial nature of their historical relationship, combine to ensure that Irish migration to Britain ‘comprises a very large, very special case’.  Australia, too, has claims to exceptionalism as a receptor of Irish migrants. Oliver MacDonagh proposes three respects in which the Irish-Australian diaspora differs from its counterparts in Britain and North America: its historically high percentage of the total population of the new country, its very even demographic distribution and the somewhat special status of the Irish as a ‘founding people’, arriving in Australia – mainly as convicts and soldiers – at the beginning of its European colonization, thereby exercising a potentially stronger influence over the shape and destiny of the new nation than the other Irish emigrations could hope to achieve. Although points of commonality co-exist with these markers of difference – particularly for Catholic Irish migrants, who have a shared historical experience of being a denigrated out-group in both countries – any joint examination of the autobiographical writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia must expect the contrasts to eclipse the correspondences. Yet, as this chapter will show, despite being shaped by highly distinctive diasporic histories and sociocultural conditions, these respective literary corpuses reveal certain narrative preoccupations that illuminate the shifting meanings of home and belonging for those whose identities are forged across boundaries and heritages.' (Introduction)

'Like the teaching of history, the teaching of literature in Australian secondary schools – the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ – has, for the last twenty years or so, been a topic of intermittent controversy in the media; to a much lesser extent, one gathers, in the schools themselves, where a majority of English teachers seem either happy or resigned to be singing from the same songbook, with only occasional peeps of protest at the inexorable displacement of traditional literary studies by cultural studies, with the various losses that entails. A comprehensive history of the treatment of literature in Australian schools would therefore be very welcome as a way of placing some context around the recent changes.' (Introduction)

'Given that the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have been, at least for a time, the haunt of several of several eminent Australian writers — the Palmers, Dark, Herbert, Astley, Wright, Cato, Williamson and Carey, to name a few — it seemed worth asking whether the principal, and for most of the twentieth century the only, newspaper servicing the region since 1903 — the Nambour Chronicle and the North Coast Advertiser — was part of a literary culture to which these writers felt they belonged and were contributing in the first half of the century. If not, why not? And if so, what kinds of contributions did it make to that culture? The tentative finding is that while the Chronicle did not make the kinds of direct, ‘homegrown’ contributions that some other metropolitan and provincial newspapers did, it maintained a literary presence and function by means of a regular diet of imported features, and by its particularly close and consistent relationship with the Nambour Town Library (and also, less consistently, with various School of Arts libraries in the district). The continuing connection between these two Nambour institutions — the Chronicle and the library — was personal and familial as well as civic in nature, and clearly suited the literary demands and expectations of a highly dispersed community that found its unity and identity by other means.' (Abstract)

'The themes of cultural dislocation and the struggle to feel ‘at home’ in a new land figure prominently in Australian literature, and considerable critical attention has been devoted to the distinctive articulations of these preoccupations by well-known writers of Irish birth or descent, such as Victor Daley, Bernard O'Dowd and John O'Brien. Queensland's Irish writers, however, have been largely forgotten or overlooked — both individually and as a group.' (Publication summary)

'Recent scholarship on the international dimensions of Australian literature has tended to focus on the ways in which Australian writers adopted and adapted overseas models, and demonstrated overseas influences in their work, or, conversely, on the extent to which Australian books were able to reach international readerships. Our concern, however, is with the larger, more diffuse phenomenon of overseas reading by Australian readers, and what we want to suggest is that Australia's 'world reading' in the interwar period - its people's efforts to engage with the rest of the world, affectively and intellectually, through the reading of non-Australian books - might be framed by seeing those efforts as being partly a constructive and outwardly directed, but at the same time self-protective, cultural response to a growing awareness of instability, threat and uncertainty in the world, and by a sense of the danger to which Australia's geographical isolation and cultural inwardness exposed it' (p. 51).

'Much of the evidence used in researching the history of individuals' reading preferences and practices i elusive and transient. Most individuals to not leave material traces - why would they? - of an activity which nonetheless, in many cases, occupies a significant proportion of their waking lives; and the traces that some of them do leave are often enigmatic or ambiguous. The 'personal library', however - by which I mean a collection of books acquired over a period of time by a specific individual (as distinct from a family or an institution) - may reasonably be regarded with some optimism as a potentially rich source of information, at least about that individual's reading history, and perhaps also about wider patterns of reading behavior which he or she may exemplify.' (Author's introduction)

'The Australian branch of the modern Irish diaspora has several apparently distinctive features, when compared with the British, American and Canadian branches. As explained by the historian Oliver MacDonagh, these include, firstly, its large size in relation to the total population – over 30% in the eastern mainland states, and sustained at that level down to the First World War and beyond; secondly, its unusually uniform distribution around the country, geographically, socially and even occupationally, with relatively strong Irish presences in all states, and in all classes and occupations (except the higher financial professions), but notably the law, politics, journalism and teaching; and thirdly their unique position within the diaspora,as a founding people, arriving at the beginning of European settlement (mainly as convicts and soldiers), and thereby staking a claim, and an interest, in the shape and destiny of the nation as a whole.' (Author's introduction)