Introduction: The Irish in Australia

St Patrick’s Day in Brisbane in March 2018 saw a joyous and colourful celebration of Irish identity and its popular symbols. A large parade through city streets featured the Queensland Irish Association pipe band, enthusiastic Irish dancers and an agile child on a unicycle wearing a large green leprechaun-style hat – all cheered on by laughing crowds waving shamrock-shaped balloons. In similar scenes that day in many Australian cities and towns, there were also family events, concerts of Irish music and outdoor tables at Irish-themed pubs, crowded with patrons drinking beer coloured green to mark the occasion.¹

The celebratory atmosphere of Brisbane’s St Patrick’s Day parade presented Irishness as a happy and positive aspect of Australia’s modern culture. But not only do large numbers of Irish Australians – and many non-Irish Australians as well – enjoy the festivities held on 17 March each year, in recent decades Irish immigrants’ achievements have been rewarded with some of the country’s highest official accolades. The 2010 Australian of the Year was Irish-born Melbourne-based psychiatrist, Professor Patrick McGorry, a leading campaigner for improved mental health services for young people. Twenty years earlier, Sister Angela Mary Doyle RSM, a hospital administrator and outspoken advocate for people with HIV/AIDS, was named the 1989 Queenslander of the Year.² Listing influential Irish-born Australians could fill many pages, while a similar listing of notable Australians of Irish ancestry would be far longer and would include thousands of women and men representing all aspects of Australian life.

Yet this story of success and celebration is in stark contrast to how earlier generations of Australians, especially those of British birth or descent, understood Ireland and the Irish. Exactly 170 years ago, the arrival of Catholic Irish immigrants – people from backgrounds similar to those of McGorry or Doyle – provoked a Melbourne newspaper to warn against an influx of ‘hordes of useless and lawless savages’, who threatened to transform the colony into a ‘Province of Popedom’. Another Melbourne paper was at the same time characterising Aboriginal people in similar terms, describing them too as ‘lawless savages’.³ The transformation of Irish-born immigrants from ‘useless … savages’ into honoured citizens highlights the vast distance that they and their children travelled during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in the public consciousness of most Australians. From being widely perceived as alien and menacing, today the Irish are included alongside the English, Scots and Welsh as founding peoples of modern Australia, even if they often disappear into broader categories like ‘British’ and ‘Anglo-Celtic’ in histories of Australian colonisation and settlement.

The current St Patrick’s Day celebrations of Irishness are therefore rather different from earlier such festivities. Gatherings and parades, beginning in the 1840s and extending into the 1920s, were often controversial and sometimes violent.⁴ Many Irish Australians argued strongly that there was no contradiction between being loyal Australians within the British Empire, while remaining proud of their Irish heritage and acknowledging it publicly each year on 17 March: in effect, they were asserting a form of multiculturalism. But most of their Protestant neighbours of English and Scottish descent perceived Irishness very differently: to them it denoted disorder, disaffection, poverty and religious oppression and constituted an existential threat to Australia’s Protestant British identity.

The Irish diaspora

The Irish-born and their descendants have always formed a substantial minority within Australian society.⁵ At the time the colonies federated into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, Catholic Irish immigrants and their Australian-born offspring made up around 23 per cent of the total non-Indigenous population.⁶ In numerical terms, far more Irish people emigrated to the United States (US) or Britain than to Australia during 1800– 2000, but they never formed as large a proportion of the population in those countries as they did in Australia.⁷

Migration, however, is not just about numbers, percentages and the movement of bodies through physical space from one place to another; perhaps more importantly, it is also about transferring and adapting ways of imagining the world. One of the most interesting, though often most elusive, aspects of migration is the process by which deep-rooted old-world beliefs and practices were reinforced, reconstituted or disregarded in the rapidly evolving circumstances of the new world. The Catholic Irish, who began arriving in Australia in large numbers first as convicts from the 1790s and then as free immigrants from the 1830s, were the bearers, according to the leading historian of the Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell, of a ‘distinctive cultural tradition, world-view, historical experience and sense of values’, not merely different from, but fundamentally ‘hostile’ to the traditions and values of the English- and Scottish-born majority of colonial society.⁸ Thus, historians of the Irish outside Ireland have emphasised that the Irish migration experience cannot be fully understood without a thorough appreciation of the culture from which the immigrants came and with which they maintained contact.

The concept of the ‘diaspora’ as applied by historians in recent decades to the overseas Irish envisages a web of complex relationships across space and time – a multi-national, multi-generational network – connecting immigrants and their offspring to their original homeland, as well as to Irish immigrant communities in other places. From the early 19th century onwards, information circulated through this network by means of newspapers, letters and personal visits to keep immigrants in touch with happenings in Ireland and elsewhere in the diaspora. Immigrants also established or joined ethnic associations – some local, others national and even international – that aimed to preserve their culture and identity and to promote Irish political causes. And, of course, immigrants usually continued to mark St Patrick’s Day as an annual national festival.⁹ It is a mistake therefore to treat Irish immigrants solely in relation to the host societies in their new homelands, for they in fact inhabited a large multi-dimensional landscape.¹⁰

The Irish diaspora in Australia

If the diaspora was a complex space, the Irish who moved through it were a complex people. While contemporaries and historians alike have generally employed the single, unqualified word ‘Irish’ to describe all those born in Ireland who arrived in Australia over several centuries, and often their descendants as well, key distinctions among the Irish are crucial to any understanding of their experience in Australia. People born in the four provinces of Ireland – Munster, Ulster, Leinster and Connacht – who arrived from the end of the 18th century onwards, were a diverse group, divided by gender, class, religion, language, identity, loyalties and historical antecedents – as well as by whether or not they were free or convicts. Included amongst them were members of the Protestant Anglo-Irish elite, who maintained close social, cultural and political ties with England. Men from this group occupied positions of power and influence throughout the British Empire, including in the Australian colonies. Below the Anglo-Irish in class terms, but also essential to the imperial workforce, were middle-class Protestant and Catholic men employed in the armed forces, the professions and the civil service or engaged in business and commerce.

The final and largest group of immigrants were Catholic men and women from poor rural backgrounds, many of whom, especially before the 1840s, were likely to have been Irish-speaking. From the 1830s, in the records of assisted immigration schemes, these Irish were identified as mostly being labourers and servants. It was primarily this last group that was targeted by the Melbourne Argus when it warned in 1848 about the threat posed by ‘hordes’ of ‘lawless savages’ coming from the south and west of Ireland.

There were also three markedly different phases of migration by the Irish to Australia, although the phases did overlap to some degree. The first involved forced migration. Between 1791 and 1867, around 48 000 Irish-born women and men were transported to the Australian colonies as convicts. Irish men made up nearly 30 per cent of all male convicts, while Irish women comprised upwards of 40 per cent of female convicts. So there is a major Irish story to tell in terms of convict history: a story in which women feature prominently.¹¹ The second phase of Irish migration saw large numbers of free settlers arrive, keen to pursue opportunities in the colonies denied to them in Ireland. These mostly young, single women and men either paid their own fares or, more often, were partially funded by one of many government and private assistance schemes. Such schemes, which operated at the same time as Indigenous dispossession, were designed to populate the supposedly ‘empty’ lands of Australia with British and Irish farmers and also with female household servants, most of whom would in time graduate to become settlers’ wives. Overall, between 1830 and 1914, proportionately more Irish took up offers of assisted passages to Australia than did immigrants from more prosperous parts of the United Kingdom, like England, Scotland and Wales.¹²

Although the period of Irish assisted immigration and free settlement included the years of the Great Famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s, far fewer Famine refugees reached Australia than arrived in the US or Britain. Most would have lacked the financial resources, and many perhaps the physical resources as well, to qualify for an assisted passage. However, the impact of the Famine can certainly be detected in a jump in the proportion of Irish convicts being transported, the majority sentenced for crimes against property.¹³ Of the nearly 20 900 convicts sent to Australia during 1846–53, 45 per cent of the women and 33 per cent of the men were Irish born.¹⁴ In addition, in 1848–50 the colonies received 4100 so-called ‘Famine orphans’: destitute teenage girls confined in Irish workhouses who were shipped to Australia by the British government in order to ease pressure on the overcrowded workhouse system and to provide female labour for the colonies.¹⁵ So, although Irish Australia did not exhibit the intense bitterness of Famine memory that came to characterise Irish America, it was by no means totally immune from the trauma suffered by Famine survivors.¹⁶

These large influxes of both convict and free immigrants meant that by 1901, as we have seen, the non-Indigenous Australian population was about one-quarter Irish. Census data does not distinguish Irish-born Protestants from Irish-born Catholics, but historians have estimated that around 25 per cent of Irish immigrants to Australia were Protestants.¹⁷ We also know that, prior to 1945, the majority of Australia’s Catholic population were of Irish birth or descent. Irish-born Protestants and their children, on the other hand, formed a minority, although often a distinctive and influential one, among the Protestant population, who were mostly of British birth or descent. All in all, from the 1790s up to the 1920s, perhaps 400 000 Irish-born people landed on Australia’s shores, around 12 per cent of whom were convicts and the rest free immigrants, and approximately 75 per cent were Catholics.¹⁸

Changes to Commonwealth immigration policies, combined with political developments in Ireland itself, meant that far fewer Irish people immigrated to Australia during the course of the 20th century. So it is fair to say that the landscape of Irish Australia was effectively laid out before 1914, even though there have been significant changes to it since. The 20th century witnessed a third phase of Irish immigration, with a relatively small but steady trickle of immigrants who were motivated to leave their now partitioned homeland by economic or political upheaval. Those coming from Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom after 1922, qualified for assistance under various Anglo-Australian migration schemes, but intending immigrants from the independent south of Ireland usually had to fund their own travel.¹⁹ At the start of the 21st century, the collapse of the Irish Republic’s economy in 2008 following the excesses of the boom period known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ decade produced a marked upsurge in immigration. This time, though, the new arrivals, many of whom were highly educated young people, generally considered themselves only temporary immigrants, and most intended to return to Ireland once the economy had recovered and the job market improved.²⁰

Patrick O’Farrell’s two colliding ‘cultural forces’

Patrick O’Farrell synthesised the broad parameters of Irish immigration and settlement in Australia in his The Irish in Australia, first published in 1986. Since then, there has been a steady stream of research that has amplified, extended and debated O’Farrell’s core findings, so that knowledge of the Irish from the perspectives of demography, geography, religion and politics is now reasonably detailed.²¹

In his book, O’Farrell made a series of striking claims concerning the role that Irish immigrants and their descendants had played in shaping the society and culture of settler Australia.²² According to him: ‘The distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishness.’ O’Farrell had in mind a specific type of Irishness: not that of the Protestant Anglo-Irish or Ulster Scots-Irish, but that of those he called the ‘Gaelic Catholic Irish’. It was the existence of this large ‘insubordinate’ minority, always ready to challenge Protestant English authority, that, according to O’Farrell, helped foster in colonial Australia ‘a general atmosphere in which exclusion, discrimination and rigid hierarchies became increasingly less possible to sustain’. He argued that settler Australia had two markedly different histories, and it was the ‘tension, abrasion and sometimes collision’ between the ‘cultural forces’ of Protestant Englishness and Catholic Irishness that, ‘far from being divisive, became the main unifying principle of Australian history’.²³

In writing his book, O’Farrell deliberately adopted a confrontational approach, determined upon challenging much of the existing historiography. On the one hand, he was reacting against the standard general histories of Australia emanating from non-Irish sources that either ignored the Irish by subsuming them into broader categories or relegated them to the sub-altern status of troublesome and disruptive outsiders. But he was also reacting against earlier populist works, often written by Irish and Catholic authors, which he saw as informed by a pious and naive Catholic nationalism.²⁴ In this latter category, O’Farrell directed his fire mainly at the writings of two men, both journalists, JF Hogan and PS Cleary.

The first publication to carry the title The Irish in Australia appeared in London almost exactly a century before O’Farrell’s book. Its author, James Francis Hogan (1855–1924), a young journalist, had been born in Ireland but raised in Victoria, and he went on to sit in the British House of Commons during the 1890s as a home rule member representing County Tipperary. His 1887 book largely ignored the convict history of the Irish and instead offered a fulsome celebration of the colonial achievements of prominent Irish men, viewed from a Catholic nationalist perspective.²⁵ Yet Hogan was no political radical: he looked forward to a self-governing Ireland taking its place alongside the self-governing Australian colonies as a loyal member of the British imperial family.²⁶

Patrick Scott Cleary (1861–1941), born in Melbourne to Irish immigrant parents, pursued a career in Sydney Catholic politics and journalism. In 1913, he helped establish the Catholic Federation in New South Wales (NSW) to lobby for the restoration of government aid to church schools and, in 1922, he became the editor of the church-owned Catholic Press. The title of the 1933 book he published about the Irish in Australia clearly revealed his approach: Australia’s Debt to Irish Nation-Builders.²⁷ Like Hogan, Cleary devoted most of his book to praising the achievements of Irish male immigrants, but, whereas Hogan had little to say about convicts, Cleary included a chapter on male convicts entitled ‘Irish Exiles’. He justified the use of the word ‘exiles’, instead of ‘convicts’, because he claimed that most of these Irish men were ‘political victims’, ‘poor fellows’ provoked into rebellion by the ‘abominable injustice’ and ‘wickedness’ of British rule.²⁸ According to this view, the Irish were not really criminals at all and were thus free of the so-called ‘convict stain’. Numbers of later works, published well into the 1980s and focusing especially on those transported for political offences, followed Cleary’s lead in rejecting the word ‘convict’ and substituting instead ‘exile’.²⁹

O’Farrell, however, emphatically rejected the notion of Irish ‘exiles’, estimating that as many as 80 per cent of the nearly 50 000 Irish convicts transported to Australia were ‘ordinary criminals, mostly thieves’, with ‘many’ of the women being ‘prostitutes as well’. Political offenders, despite the attention paid to them by Irish-Australian writers, were few: probably less than 600, he thought.³⁰ This was not a judgment calculated to please many Australians proud of their Irish heritage and increasingly of their Irish convict ancestry as well.³¹ As a consequence, despite his flattering claims for Irish influence, O’Farrell’s work was by no means wholeheartedly embraced by the Irish-Australian community.³²

British, Catholic or Anglo-Celtic?

Many writers on Australian history have not embraced O’Farrell’s ideas either; some in fact have shown little interest in the Irish at all. In 2005, for example, a collection of essays published under the title Australia’s History claimed to offer a ‘compelling’ and ‘up-to-date account’ of current ‘issues and debates in Australian history’ intended for both ‘students and general readers’. Yet no work dealing with the Irish in Australia was cited in the book’s bibliographies and, in the discussion of immigration, the Irish were largely subsumed into the category ‘British’. In all, the book contained only a handful of fleeting references to the Irish, which collectively portrayed them as ‘other’. They were generally perceived, readers were told, as ‘violent, impulsive, degraded and unregulated’ and, as a result, were ‘systematically poorly treated’.³³ Nearly twenty years after the initial publication of The Irish in Australia, this collection, intended for a large audience, ignored O’Farrell’s work entirely.

Nor has the situation changed much over the past decade. The massive 1200-page, two-volume Cambridge History of Australia, published in 2013, also relegated the Irish to a very minor role. In the index to the first volume, there were just eight entries on the Irish, compared with 42 on the Chinese; in the index to the second volume, there were no entries on the Irish at all. These volumes continued to deal with the Irish much as mainstream Australian historiography had before 1986: that is, they were consigned to the category ‘Catholic’ and treated in the context of religious history. And, as in the 2005 collection, this treatment was far from flattering, with Irish Catholics often associated with sectarianism.³⁴ Ethnicity was here subsumed into religion and Irishness into Catholicism, just as other historians chose to subsume Irishness into Britishness. Either way, the Irish-born and their Irish-Australian descendants disappeared into larger groups, stripped of much of their distinctive cultural identity.

Recently too, in the field of Australian studies, the Irish and Irish Australians have been disappearing into another larger ‘imagined community’. The old categories ‘British’ and ‘Catholic’ are increasingly being superseded by a new one, ‘Anglo-Celtic’ – an identity that will be discussed in more detail in the epilogue to this book.

Some historians have, however, acknowledged deficiencies in the way mainstream Australian history has handled the Irish. In 1988, John Rickard recognised that a ‘myth’ of British ‘homo-geneity’ had been ‘manufactured’ about pre-1945 Australia, despite there being major ethnic differences within Britain between the English, Scots and Welsh. As for the Irish, Rickard characterised their situation in Australia as ‘peculiar’, because they had, ‘against their will’, been ‘designated “British”’.³⁵ Ann Curthoys also demonstrated an appreciation of this anomaly when she acknowledged that the ‘high Irish proportion always meant that the Australian population could not be the replica of Britain many wanted it to be’.³⁶ In a recent discussion of post-1945 immigration, John Hirst included some interesting thoughts about the Irish as an ethnic, as well as a religious, group. He noted that in colonial Australia the term ‘British’ included the Irish, but he recognised that the Irish in Ireland certainly did not consider themselves British, while ‘no one in England or Scotland thought of the Irish as British’ either. Australian usage of the word ‘British’ to include the Irish was, as Rickard had remarked, ‘peculiar’.

But Hirst went on to claim that Irish Australians themselves were ‘in two minds about the offer to be included as British’. When the British were busy ‘suppressing’ Irish nationalism, the offer tended to be rejected. However, towards the end of the 19th century, when the British Liberal Party embraced the cause of Irish home rule, Hirst believed it became much easier for the Australian Irish to identify as ‘British’. From the 1870s onwards, though, the issue of state aid to Catholic schools emerged to foster divisions along religious rather than ethnic lines and Hirst argued that by the early 20th century, ‘Catholics and Protestants were beginning to live more apart’. He was not necessarily describing residential segregation here, but rather that important aspects of their lives were conducted separately. Children were taught in either the state or the Catholic school system. Catholics and Protestants tended to work in different areas of employment, even in different parts of the public service, while their social and leisure activities were largely conducted separately as well.

Hirst, who was certainly no fan of the Catholic Irish, wrote that they were a ‘disruptive’ factor, responsible for creating ethnic and religious divisions in Australia that would not otherwise have existed. Yet, the ‘commitment to containing old-world disputes or overcoming them was very strong’, and Australians developed ‘a way of being good neighbours despite their differences’. This good neighbourliness, Hirst argued, had its roots in ‘egalitarianism’ and male mateship, plus economic prosperity. And he concluded on an optimistic note, suggesting that the largely peaceful resolution of, first, the Irish-British schism and then the Catholic-Protestant one gave Australians a ‘good preparation’ for the task of successfully ‘accommodating’ the post-1945 waves of immigrants.³⁷ Although more critical of the Irish than O’Farrell, Hirst nevertheless agreed with him that, in the long run, the divisions and tensions generated by the presence of the Irish had proved to be a positive phenomenon. Other historians, however, were far less sanguine about the Irish influence on Australia.

Sexism, sectarianism and sedition

If Hirst considered the Catholic Irish a generally ‘disruptive’ force in 19th- and early 20th-century Australia, others have portrayed them far more negatively. One historian who dealt with the Irish as both an ethnic and religious group was Miriam Dixson. Like O’Farrell, she accepted that Irish influence on Australian colonial society was profound, but to her mind it was profoundly damaging, especially for women.

Dixson devoted a chapter to the Irish in her pioneering book on Australian women’s history, The Real Matilda, first published in 1976. In that she quoted approvingly historian Russel Ward’s argument that ‘Irish working-class attitudes’ were an ‘important ingredient’ in developing the ‘distinctive Australian [mateship] ethos’.³⁸ She also went on to endorse what she called the English view of the Irish as ‘not-quite-Western’ and ‘primitive in the sense of pre-modern’, at the same time quoting Manning Clark to the effect that the English considered ‘there was nothing but the shade of a Catholic’s skin to distinguish him from an aborigine’.³⁹ Dixson believed that what the Irish essentially contributed to the mateship ethos was a pre-modern ‘clan-based collectiveness’, of which misogyny was a major characteristic. Drawing upon the work of the psychiatrist and post-colonial theorist Franz Fanon, Dixson argued that ‘the Irish male, like the black, became a “victim” of English colonial arrogance’. Irish men in turn imposed the ‘humiliation and blighted self-image’ on women that imperialism had forced upon them. In addition, ‘Irish fear of sexuality’, a product of their Catholicism, had helped ‘shape the curiously low standing and impoverished self-identity of Australian women’.⁴⁰ Dixson showed sympathy for the Irish women as ‘victims’ of British imperialism, but none for Irish men, whom she believed were substantially responsible for Australia’s deep-seated misogynist culture.

Whereas Dixson held the Irish responsible in large part for Australia’s macho sexist culture, other leading historians blamed them for introducing additional undesirable traits into Australian society. In his history of Victoria, first published in 1984 and reissued in a new edition in 2006, Geoffrey Blainey included three entries in the index under the heading ‘Irish’: ‘Catholic church’, ‘negative nationalism’ and ‘sectarianism’. He informed readers that sectarianism involved ‘Ireland versus the Rest’, as well as ‘Ireland versus Ireland’, meaning Irish Catholics in conflict with British Protestants as well as with Irish Protestants. Either way, sectarianism was portrayed as essentially an Irish phenomenon. The chapter on religion was titled ‘Sunshine and Moonshine’, for, after treating the ‘sunshine’ of religion, Blainey moved on to the ‘moonshine’ of alcohol. Here too the Irish figured prominently, being described as ‘strong drinkers’. In addition to fostering sectarianism and alcoholism in Australia, the other main achievement of the Irish, according to Blainey, was to introduce what he called ‘negative nationalism’. The Irish brought this ‘noisy’ creed ‘ready-made’ to Australia, and its chief characteristic was a bitter ‘dislike of England’. Blainey contrasted this with ‘positive nationalism’, which was ‘home-grown’ and expressed a healthy love for Australia. He ignored O’Farrell’s claim that the Irish had played a crucial role in developing Australian nationalism.⁴¹

Blainey was in fact following a well-trodden path in his treatment of the Irish. Many earlier, similarly Anglophile historians had also expressed hostile views, seeing in the Irish a threat to English authority in Australia that had to be defeated. English-born Sir Ernest Scott, professor of history at the University of Melbourne during 1913–36, had, like Dixson and Blainey, a decidedly jaundiced view of the Irish. Most of the time he ignored them altogether, choosing to characterise Australia’s colonisers simply as ‘British’. But, occasionally, events forced him to take account of the Irish. Then he viewed them through the eyes of their English rulers. Relying on the hostile accounts of NSW governors John Hunter and Philip Gidley King, Scott described Irish prisoners transported in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion as ‘[r]ebels by life-long disposition, bitter enemies of … authority’. Their ‘violent hatred’ of British rule threatened ‘desperate things’ and the ‘wildest anarchy’ in the new colony. Scott made no attempt to understand the causes of Irish disaffection, instead portraying the Irish as an innately ‘turbulent’ and ‘seditious’ people, and agreeing with Hunter and King that their ‘“restless and diabolical spirit” had to be stamped out by vigorously exemplary means’: that is, Scott wrote, by ‘the cat and the gallows’.⁴²

Negative readings of the part the Irish played in the Australian story have continued. In a keynote address to the 2010 annual conference of the Australian Historical Association, the Australian-born, Oxford-based historian, Ross McKibbin, offered a comparison of Britain and Australia. He agreed that Irish influence was important, but, like a number of Australian historians, he did not consider this influence to have been at all constructive. McKibbin highlighted, among other differences, those between the Australian and British labour parties. The Australian Labor Party (ALP), he argued, unlike the British party, was and remains highly factionalised – sometimes cripplingly so. In seeking the origins of this flaw, McKibbin pointed to the Catholic Church. The Catholic hierarchy in Britain had always been largely British-born and therefore ‘more anxious to conciliate and … more cautious’. By contrast, the Irish dominated the Australian hierarchy up until the middle of the 20th century. And until the 1960s the Catholic Church remained very active in Australian politics, campaigning to restore state aid to church schools – an issue that had been resolved in Britain as far back as 1902. Moreover, the ALP had always depended more upon Catholic votes than did the British Labour Party. On top of this, the ALP had proved more susceptible to communist infiltration than had the British party. Consequently, Irish clergy, most famously Melbourne’s Archbishop Daniel Mannix, played an interventionist role in Australian political affairs that had no parallel in Britain. Having helped split the ALP during the 1950s and given it a factionalised character, many Catholics then moved on, said McKibbin, into conservative politics, especially during the prime ministership of Robert Menzies, who had finally in the early 1960s given the church the state aid it had fought so long and hard for. But, among conservatives too, Catholics often proved a divisive force.⁴³

A new history of the Irish in Australia

Popular appreciation of the Irish remains strong in Australia today, as the widespread celebrations on 17 March each year demonstrate. Nevertheless, negative assessments persist among some historians, while anti-Irish jokes remain popular, as we shall see in our epilogue. O’Farrell’s 1986 book won prizes when first published and it was subsequently re-published in two further editions. Both in Australia and overseas, the book is generally accepted as a seminal work. Yet its impact on the writing of Australian history has obviously been limited. Currently there is no clear consensus among historians as to the role or significance of the Irish and their descendants in the making of modern Australia.

The present book, as its title implies, aims to take a ‘new’ look at the history of the Irish in Australia – ‘new’ in various respects. The book draws on previously unused source materials; it examines topics not studied in the past; it takes approaches not attempted before; and it draws upon the latest research published, not only in Australia, but in Ireland and other parts of the Irish diaspora as well. Nevertheless, the book does not aspire to be a comprehensive account, as others, notably O’Farrell and Chris McConville, have produced.⁴⁴ It is concerned with certain themes and topics: some dealt with previously, but others not, or at least not previously dealt with in Australia. We interrogate issues to do with race, gender, crime, mental health, employment, politics and religion. The book is informed by new and important research published by Irish-Australian scholars since the 1980s and by major new works produced overseas, notably in Ireland, Britain, the US, New Zealand and Canada. We discuss circumstances in Ireland and other parts of the diaspora when relevant to the Irish experience in Australia. While focusing on the Irish in one country, the book still aspires to have a diasporic or transnational dimension by situating the Australian Irish in much broader contexts.

This book asks rather different questions from those that O’Farrell asked more than a generation ago, yet his work remains fundamental. Even if some of his answers no longer seem convincing, his courage in posing such challenging questions and the intellectually stimulating responses he offered cannot help but impress. For readers today, though, whether they are Irish Australians or Australians with no Irish ancestry at all, the long journey of the Catholic Irish from unwelcome ‘savages’ to respected citizens provides a compelling story and, moreover, one with considerable contemporary relevance. Today Australia is a nation of immigrants – 49 per cent of the population were either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas – just as it was during the 19th century.⁴⁵ Then the Irish, and especially the Catholic Irish, challenged the majority society with their difference, just as today other immigrant groups offer rather similar challenges. The story of how the Irish overcame often intense hostility to eventually become recognised as Australians holds out many lessons, not only about the past but potentially for the future as well.