CHAPTER 1

The Irish race

That the Irish were different seemed self-evident to Australian settlers of English and Scottish origin or descent. Historians have usually thought the main points of difference were religion and class: that the Irish were predominantly Catholic, while most colonists were Protestant, and that many of the Catholic Irish were poor. These were indeed major points of difference and ones that cannot be dismissed. However, were they the only ones? If this is so, what of press comments in 1864 about the very public divorce of middle-class Irish Protestants, Henrietta and Robert Molesworth? In its remarks the Melbourne Age suggested that even though some ‘latitude’ should be given to those who came from a country where ‘people and pigs huddle together promiscuously’, the behaviour of the couple exceeded ‘the licence of that primitive and innocent’ society. As historian Frank Bongiorno has pointed out, for the Molesworths, their sin was ‘racial not religious’.¹ Clearly it was not just religion and class that marked the Irish out as different; there was something else, and for some this difference could still be perceived in later generations. The writer Jack Lindsay in his memoirs described the sculptor Guy Lynch, whose grandparents were Irish, as having an ‘Irish-Australian face, rough and tough, of the wildwood, yet sensitive’.² These comments point to a focus on perceived physical differences: deeply rooted, unavoidable and often couched in the terminology of race. In this chapter we will trace this thread of racialisation from negative stereotyping in the convict era to the positive interpretations of Irish distinctiveness advanced by increasingly confident Irish Australians in the latter part of the 19th century.

From the beginning of European settlement in Australia, there has been a constant stream of writing about the inferiority of the Irish. The Anglican clergyman Samuel Marsden was scathing in his criticisms of the moral shortcomings of the Irish convicts he encountered.³ When large-scale immigration of free settlers started, the conservative Melbourne Argus castigated the Irish as ‘lawless savages’, whose arrival threatened to destroy the Anglo-Saxon racial character of the colony.⁴ In 1881, Melbourne businessman and journalist AM Topp, who had been born in England, declared that: ‘It cannot be too strongly impressed upon the minds of Englishmen that the Irish are not a mere variety of their own race.’⁵ Over 90 years later, when Patrick O’Farrell started to publish research on the Irish in Australia, he received a letter claiming: ‘These [Irish] natives were a long way back in evolution, stupid, stubborn, strong physically and very dull.’⁶ Even after an independent Ireland had weathered major economic, political and social storms during the 20th and early 21st centuries, jokes and political comment assuming Irish stupidity continued to be popular in Australia. In 2011, Tony Abbott, then federal Opposition leader, found it acceptable to try to score political points against the Labor Party by claiming that it was behaving a ‘bit like the Irishman who lost 10 pounds betting on the Grand National and then lost 20 pounds on the action replay’.⁷

Many more such examples could be cited, but in this book we are more interested in exploring what such attitudes have meant for the Irish in Australia. Equally important, what were the implications for Australia when such a large minority, considered ‘alien’ by many, formed a significant proportion of the founding settlers? During the 19th century, the Catholic Irish were widely despised and feared, yet at the same time there was never any real prospect of excluding them from the Australian colonies or from the rights guaranteed to subjects of the British crown. Indeed, by the end of the 19th century, increasing numbers of Irish-Australian writers were claiming that the distinctiveness of the Irish was a positive attribute that should be celebrated, not condemned. This chapter will navigate a path through these numerous disjunctions and argue that racial theories about the Irish, both positive and negative, are as essential to understanding the Irish in Australia as are religion and class.

Race and the Irish

Throughout the 19th century, Europeans worked to make sense of the world around them in light of new discoveries and ideas. As they expanded their colonies and gained knowledge of different peoples, they increasingly attempted to categorise and explain observed differences between societies in terms of race.⁸ This was no benign endeavour. Dividing peoples into racial hierarchies allowed them to intellectually justify exploiting, colonising and devastating societies composed of those deemed to be at the bottom of such hierarchies.⁹

Nineteenth-century European race theorists created different categories based on investigating the physical, cultural and moral differences they perceived in those around them. They looked for and found such differences amongst groups within the British Isles and in Europe and then encountered many more at the outer reaches of the empire.¹⁰ When we try to make sense of the way writers understood these differences, and the implications of their work, the task is complicated as words shift meaning, particularly the word ‘race’. This word was generally deployed when writers wanted to explain perceived differences using factors such as physiology, anatomy, biology, history, culture, class and morality.¹¹ Historian Catherine Hall, following the sociologist Stuart Hall, has suggested that two broad categories of meanings were involved when 19th-century writers used the word ‘race’. The first involved biological markers of difference and the second cultural markers. These two meanings were effectively two different ‘registers’ of racial thinking: ones for which in the 21st century we would use different words, most likely ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. However, the registers of meaning in the word ‘race’, as used by 19th-century writers, were often not separate but instead used simultaneously and interchangeably. This means that the word and the concepts it tried to capture were inherently unstable and they shifted to accommodate changing political, cultural and social circumstances.¹² As postcolonial theorist Robert Young put it: ‘Race has always been culturally constructed. Culture has always been racially constructed.’ ¹³ The concepts of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ were so firmly entwined they are difficult to disentangle.¹⁴

The question of whether during the 19th century the Irish were considered to be racially different from the English, and from other Europeans as well, has been the subject of considerable academic debate since the 1990s, when American scholar Noel Ignatiev published his provocatively titled book, How the Irish Became White.¹⁵ The scholarly context in which Ignatiev framed his arguments is often referred to as ‘whiteness studies’. Scholars in this field argued that in order to fully understand the historical and contemporary intricacies of racial thinking, the term ‘white’ needed to be seen as a racial term just as much as ‘black’ or ‘coloured’.¹⁶ In his book, Ignatiev claimed that during the mid-19th century the working-class Catholic Irish were subject to discrimination that kept them at the bottom of the American economic and social class system, competing for jobs in the big cities of the east coast with poor, recently emancipated African Americans. In a society where skin colour had become a crucial marker separating slaves from citizens, the working-class Irish pushed to be recognised as different from African Americans and more like white working-class Americans of British or northern European descent. They achieved this through becoming increasingly involved in anti-abolitionist politics, using overt violence against African Americans and competing directly with black people for menial jobs. Ignatiev argued that, for the Irish to be accepted as white, they had to be seen to be doing ‘white man’s work’, which by definition was work from which black men were excluded.¹⁷ Once the Irish had displaced African Americans from a range of low-paid jobs, these then came to be redefined as ‘white’ jobs, confirming black exclusion. By such means, the Irish asserted and gained membership of the racial category ‘white’ with all its social, cultural and economic benefits, at the expense of African Americans.¹⁸

Ignatiev’s book has been influential outside the United States (US), although some historians have challenged his arguments and his work is situated very firmly within the context of 19th-century American labour history.¹⁹ Questions regarding Irish racialisation and whiteness are different in Britain and different again in Australia. In Britain there has long been disagreement among scholars as to whether racialisation existed at all and, if so, what its consequences were. Some have argued that religion and class were more significant factors in promoting anti-Irish sentiment than race.²⁰ In summing up these debates, historian Michael De Nie suggested that race was rather ‘a meta-language in Anglo-Saxonist discourse, a vehicle for expressing multiple anxieties and preconceptions, among them class concerns and sectarian prejudices’.²¹ In other words, the ‘language of race’ could be used to express religious and political differences, as well as perceived racial ones.

However interpreted, it is clear that hostile attitudes towards the Irish as a people and a culture have a long intellectual history and this is especially true in Britain. The English began their conquest of Ireland in the late 12th century and their hostility towards the Irish intensified during the conflicts of the Tudor and Stuart periods, which saw the whole of Gaelic Ireland finally brought under the control of the British crown.²² For centuries the English perceived the Irish as primitive, treacherous, violent, lazy and stupid. Such stereotypes were often gendered: Irish men were feminised as treacherous and Irish women masculinised as violent.²³ Irish insistence on clinging to Catholic ‘superstition’ in the face of the Protestant Reformation only served to confirm their intractability in Protestant British eyes.²⁴ The bloody rebellion of 1798, when the Irish not only fought to overthrow British rule but allied themselves with the traditional enemy, France, only further entrenched notions of Irish barbarity amongst Britain’s ruling classes and in British popular culture as well. During the 19th century, Catholic Irish immigrants to Britain swelled what had earlier been a small, select group of Catholics into large, mainly working-class Catholic communities based especially in the big urban centres. There Irish workers competed with the English for jobs. The rise of Irish republicanism in the form of the Fenian movement, funded largely by Irish Americans, saw bombing campaigns and assassinations carried out in England during the 1860s and 1880s. The Irish had imported their disloyalty and political violence into the very heart of the empire. Negative racial stereotyping of the Irish did not end when the south of Ireland gained its independence in 1922, but continued throughout the 20th century and especially when the Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s.²⁵ As sociologist Steve Garner has pointed out, ‘racialisation of the Irish in Britain involved focusing on difference in three overlapping arenas: religion, class and race’.²⁶ The ingredients were the same as in the US, but the mix was rather different in Britain since the Irish were not competing for jobs against black people during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were competing against and attracting hostility from the white British working class.

The racialisation of European settlers, in particular the Irish, has not attracted the same scholarly attention in Australia, where academic interest in recent decades has focused on the role that racial theories played in dispossessing Indigenous peoples and excluding Asians.²⁷ Patrick O’Farrell, when he was writing in the 1980s, certainly recognised that in colonial Australia the Irish were perceived in racial terms, but he preferred, he said, to deal with ‘the higher ground of the anti-Irish argument’, which was religion.²⁸ However, in his last, unfinished work before his death in 2003, O’Farrell was more careful in defining these terms. He argued then that the word ‘sectarianism’ was by no means restricted to religion; it was all-encompassing and included ‘a tangle of history, culture, race, religion, politics, class status and possessions’.²⁹ Since O’Farrell’s death, some scholars have approached the Irish in Australia through the lens of the international debates on racialisation and whiteness, relying for much of their information on O’Farrell’s own research. In a 2005 article, cultural studies scholar Jon Stratton claimed that the Irish had largely achieved full acceptance as white by the time of Federation, when the borders of the new state were closed to ‘coloured’ races, but remained open to the previously despised Irish.³⁰ Historian Ann McGrath, in her analysis of relations between the Irish and Indigenous Australians, criticised the inclusion of the Irish among white settlers without differentiation, and called for further work to break down this category. A ‘renewed emphasis is now required’, she wrote, ‘not only on the difference of the Asian, Pacific and other ethnic groups that settled in Australia, but on difference amongst the British colonisers in various timeframes’.³¹ In an earlier article, historian Ann Curthoys had echoed the need to analyse difference amongst the so-called ‘British’, and proposed unpacking the category of ‘British’ to recognise the varied regional and class groups who made up ‘white’ settlers. However, although she mentioned the Irish, the main focus of her argument was on English settlers who came from different regions.³²

In Australia, the initial reliance on convict labour and then on only small numbers of non-European workers meant that the dynamics of labour competition between non-Europeans and the unskilled working-class Irish were different from those in the US and Britain. The Catholic Irish were a foundation settler group. They were not newcomers moving into a longstanding Protestant society, as they were in the US; nor were they the largest group of immigrant workers, as they were in Britain. In Australia all settlers were new arrivals. But although the circumstances were different, similar theories and attitudes about race and the Irish had been imported into Australia. AM Topp, in his 1881 polemic about the unfitness of the Irish to participate in English legal and political institutions, buttressed his arguments with the work of English and German historians, combined with information about the Irish in the US.³³ Racialised stereotypes of Irishness based on physical appearance also circulated by means of newspapers and magazines and, as we shall see in later chapters, local Australian content was shaped by material drawn from British and American publications. So the transnational context of ideas about Irishness is important to any discussion of the Irish in Australia; equally important, though, are the specifics of the Australian context. We will consider both in turn.

Transnational race science and the Irish

The transnational context includes negative English attitudes towards the Irish arising from their long and brutal conquest of Ireland, which English immigrants took with them as mental baggage to all parts of the British Empire. Such longstanding attitudes were bolstered during the 19th century by theories developed in the emerging fields of ethnology, anthropology and race science. These theories argued that there were fundamental differences between human groups based on inherited physical features bound up with cultural and moral differences.³⁴ There was much debate and disagreement, and the Irish in particular posed problems. They were widely perceived as different from the British and from other western and northern European peoples, and this fact puzzled scholars who were striving to develop race theories they thought would prove the superiority of white Europeans.³⁵

In 1850, Robert Knox, a Scottish physician and anatomist, published a book about European races based on a series of lectures he had delivered over the previous five years.³⁶ The Irish and the Celts were far from the only focus of Knox’s work, but his assertions about them were hotly debated, particularly his argument that, because of racial deficiencies, the Irish could not ‘comprehend the meaning of the word liberty’.³⁷ Knox had set out to prove that ‘the European races, so called, differ from each other as widely as the Negro does from the Bushman; the Caffre from the Hottentot; the Red Indian of America from the Esquimaux; the Esquimaux from the Basque’.³⁸ For Knox, the most successful European race was the Scandinavian or Saxon one, of which the Anglo-Saxons were the most important branch. Knox was perfectly aware of the political implications of his theories and was forthright in prescribing what the Saxons of England should do about the Celts of Ireland. The Irish race, he wrote, ‘must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it.’ ³⁹ In his conception of the Irish Celts as a race, Knox merged physical characteristics with moral traits. According to him: ‘The Celtic race presents the two extremes of what is called civilized man; in Paris we find the one; in Ireland, at Skibbereen and Derrynane, the other. Civilized man cannot sink lower than at Derrynane.’ ⁴⁰ Here he was referring to two places which would have been familiar to his audience. The small town of Skibbereen in County Cork, which had recently been devastated by famine, had been the subject of a series of widely publicised illustrated newspaper articles. Derrynane in County Kerry was the birthplace and home of Daniel O’Connell, the leading Catholic Irish politician of the first half of the 19th century, a campaigner for Catholic rights and for Irish self-government. In singling out Skibbereen and Derrynane, Knox was forging a link between abject Irish economic failure and dangerous Catholic political aspirations.

For Knox and others like him, a key factor distinguishing the Irish from the English was the refusal of the former to be governed by English common law, which he believed to be the fairest and most civilised legal code in the world.⁴¹ This meant that the Irish had to be ruled firmly and by force if necessary. Knox’s influence on anthropological thinking about the Irish as a race can be seen in lectures given at the Anthropological Society in London in 1868. A paper delivered by anthropologist J Gould Avery claimed that the disordered political state of Ireland during the 1860s was due to racial differences between the Saxon and the Celt and that the ‘peculiarities of the Irish character are not due to political causes … but they are racial, hereditary and irradicible [sic]’.⁴² While some in the audience disagreed with the tone of this paper, there were others who agreed wholeheartedly. Captain Bedford Pim RN announced that: ‘The Irish question was simply a race question … the Celt was a different being to the Saxon.’⁴³

Knox, in teaching anatomy in Edinburgh, had used the physical characteristics of skulls to categorise people by race. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of other craniologists, including a number in the US who were also working to prove the inferiority of the Celtic Irish.⁴⁴ Publications by Knox and others, including Darwin’s disciple Thomas Huxley, influenced medical practitioners as well as political commentators. One doctor noted Huxley’s work on Irish and English racial difference when seeking to explain why the Irish tended to succumb to ‘granular’ disease of the eyes more than did the English.⁴⁵ After the 1850s, the ‘science’ of measuring skulls and skeletons, as well as eye and hair colour, was developed further to try and provide quantitative proof of profound racial differences.⁴⁶ Scientists collected skulls and skeletons from graves, hospitals and asylums, often without consent, in Europe and throughout much of the colonial world, and took elaborate measurements. While much of this work eventually focused on identifying the alleged inferior characteristics of non-European racial groups, there was a strand of this research that included the Irish and the British in its calculations.⁴⁷

One of the most influential of these researchers was the English doctor John Beddoe, who was active in the Ethnological Society and Anthropological Society from the 1860s until his death in 1911.⁴⁸ He devoted himself to uncovering physical differences amongst the peoples of the British Isles and in 1885 he published the results of decades of work in his best-known book, The Races of Britain. During his extensive travels, Beddoe collected data on the inhabitants of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, to whom he applied his ‘Index of Nigrescence’, a measurement of hair and eye colour. From this he concluded that the inhabitants of the western coasts and islands of Ireland were racially closer to African than to European populations.⁴⁹ Generally speaking, Beddoe imposed few overt value judgments on his voluminous statistical findings, although on occasion he did annotate human ‘types’ he had found in Ireland. Of one type, common in the Scottish highlands and Irish west, which he identified as resembling prehistoric Cro-Magnon man, Beddoe wrote: ‘the intelligence is low, and there is a great deal of cunning and suspicion’.⁵⁰ In his memoirs, he recalled meeting people in County Sligo whom he considered ‘a primitive race, swarthy and sombre of feature with high cheekbones and reminding me of a common Welsh type’.⁵¹

Beddoe and other anthropometric researchers who measured heads and heights and interpreted hair and eye colour were influential in the latter half of the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century. One of the pioneers of English anthropology, who began his career in anthropometry, was English-born Alfred C Haddon, who during the 1880s and 1890s worked in Dublin.⁵² Haddon made his most important contribution to anthropology during two expeditions to the islands of the Torres Strait in 1889–90 and 1898–99. But as well as studying the people of the Torres Strait, Haddon was simultaneously conducting anthropometric and ethnographic research on the people of the west of Ireland.

Haddon’s initial thinking on race was influenced by the Irish ethnologist John Grattan and by John Beddoe and later Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics, with all of whom he was in friendly correspondence and at times collaboration.⁵³ Building upon their methodologies, he used physical measurements in his search for definitive examples of racial types. During his first trip to the Torres Strait in 1888–89, he concluded that contact with European civilisation had already irrevocably changed the islanders’ original way of life – to the islanders’ detriment. Back in Dublin, he continued his interest in looking for ‘original’ peoples by next travelling to the west coast of Ireland, where he interviewed many Aran Islanders, photographed them, measured their skulls, noted their hair and eye colours and collected skulls surreptitiously from their graveyards. He then returned to his laboratory in Dublin convinced that he had found what he had failed to find in the Torres Strait: an isolated people, racially distinct and uncontaminated by outsiders.⁵⁴ With grants from the Royal Irish Academy, Haddon established an anthropometric laboratory at Trinity College, Dublin. Between 1894 and 1901, he was also working part-time at the University of Cambridge, which helped fund a second and more extensive Torres Strait expedition in 1898–99.⁵⁵

Throughout Haddon’s writings, his use of the term ‘race’ was somewhat ambiguous, for at times he was referring to cultural groups and at other times to physiological similarities. When he came to define ‘race’ in The Races of Man and their Distribution (1909), he stated that the Irish were not a separate race, but were instead a subset of the Mediterranean race and so distinct from Anglo-Saxons.⁵⁶ He had obviously accepted the categorisation, popular at the time, of Europeans into Nordic or Aryan, Alpine and Mediterranean, with the English belonging to the superior Nordic group, while the Irish were among the inferior Mediterranean peoples. Haddon was not hostile towards those he met and studied in the west of Ireland, but he certainly considered them backward, needing to be persuaded to have photographs and measurements taken and tricked so that he could acquire their ancestors’ skulls. In many ways he saw the Aran Islanders as more primitive than the people he had encountered on the islands in the Torres Strait. In a letter to his son in 1890, he wrote: ‘The people here as a rule, live in worse houses than the people of Torres Strait and they do not keep them anything like so clean and tidy as the black savages do.’⁵⁷ But at the same time, he spoke admiringly of the physical characteristics and wisdom of some of the Aran Islanders and conceded that the British had governed the Irish badly.⁵⁸ Haddon used much the same techniques in all his ethnographic work, whether he was in Ireland, the Torres Strait or later Borneo, measuring, photographing and collecting examples of folklore, cats’ cradles, spades and carts, demonstrating – to his own satisfaction at least – that many objects and stories were similar across different racial groups.⁵⁹ During the 1880s and 1890s, Haddon clearly saw no contradiction in simultaneously researching peoples living on islands off the west coast of Ireland and off the north coast of Australia. According to his theories, which reflected much contemporary racial science, both peoples belonged to less advanced races than his own and he was intrigued by the similarities and differences he believed he had discovered between them.

Nineteenth- and early 20th-century anthropologists and ethnologists, like Beddoe and Haddon, were sure that they were describing reality when they assigned different human groups to racial categories and hierarchies. Scientists disagreed as to the exact nature of the categories and where different groups should be placed, but there was general agreement that Teutonic/Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Nordic peoples were at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy due to their capacity for reason, hard work, high culture and civilised values. There was just as much general agreement that the ‘savages’ who still lived on the lands these same Anglo-Saxons were now colonising were towards the bottom of the hierarchy and, amongst these, ‘Tasmanians’ were often situated at the very bottom. As many scholars have shown, such racial theories justified confiscating indigenous lands and systematic attempts to reshape if not eradicate indigenous societies.⁶⁰ Scholars disputed where the Irish sat exactly in terms of racial hierarchies, but it was never as low as the ‘Tasmanians’ and nor were the Irish subjected to the same degree of violent colonisation during the 19th century as were Indigenous Australians.

The ‘low’ Irish in colonial Australia

The Irish were negatively stereotyped in racial terms both explicitly and implicitly in 19th- and early 20th-century Australia, as we shall see throughout this book. In this section, we examine aspects of the way the Irish were overtly racialised during the colonial period. Race and religion were closely intertwined in negative attitudes towards Irish immigrants and not only did officials, politicians and commentators hold these widely, so did neighbours and even sometimes, tragically, family members too.

Thousands of Irish convicts, transported to the eastern Australian colonies between 1791 and 1853, were distinguished from their fellow prisoners by their ethnicity, religion, culture, language and sometimes by their race as well. About 29 500 male and 9100 female convicts were sent directly from Irish courts, while about another 8000 of the Irish-born came from Britain. Since they made up around 28 per cent of the total convict population, the Irish were impossible to ignore.⁶¹ To many British colonial officials, they were the lowest among the low convict population. David Collins, captain of marines and deputy judge-advocate during the 1790s, was particularly outspoken. He employed traditional anti-Irish terminology in describing Irish convicts as ‘ignorant’, ‘obstinate’, ‘cunning’, ‘restless’ and ‘diabolical’. They were so ignorant as to be scarcely human, according to Collins. After reporting that a group of Irish convicts had tried to escape in 1798, he wrote in exasperation: ‘Could it be imagined … there was existing in a polished civilized kingdom a race of beings (for they do not deserve the appellation of men) so extremely ignorant, and so little humanized as these were, compared with whom the naked savages of the mountains were an enlightened people.’ ⁶² Another strident critic of Catholic Irish convicts was the Reverend Samuel Marsden. According to him, the Irish were a ‘most wild, ignorant and savage race’.⁶³ Some, on the other hand, saw the Irish in rather more benign terms, as ‘simple, innocent and as tractable as a child’.⁶⁴ Yet this paternalistic view was still in keeping with assigning the Irish to the lower levels of racial hierarchies and it justified the colonial state in directing and monitoring Irish convicts’ lives both during and after their sentences.⁶⁵

Once free settlers began to immigrate on a large scale during the 1830s, mainly funded by government schemes of assistance, the Irish proved particularly adept at managing the complex bureaucratic processes involved in such schemes. This prompted much public debate over the quality of the immigrants arriving, and many people objected to the Irish on the grounds of religion as well as their innate racial inferiority. Indeed, the two were closely intertwined. One of the loudest critics of Catholic Irish immigration was Scottish-born Presbyterian minister and politician John Dunmore Lang, who throughout his long career opposed increased migration from Ireland for fear that the ‘low’ Catholic Irish might corrupt if not swamp Protestant and British colonial society.⁶⁶ Immigrants from Ireland, however, showed no sign of heeding any of Lang’s diatribes, if they were aware of them, for they continued to arrive in large numbers from the 1830s up until the 1880s, taking full advantage of the various assisted migration schemes then available, their numbers declining only when such schemes were curtailed.⁶⁷

That the Irish had rejected Protestantism and chosen to remain Catholic was often ascribed to basic flaws in the moral character of their race. They were incapable of seeing the shortcomings of Catholicism, while the church’s teachings in turn helped blunt their reasoning powers. As one newspaper commentator put it in 1891: ‘He [the Irishman] has an imperfect conception of causation, in common with the inferior races of man, due almost entirely to his religion.’⁶⁸ But for this writer, the Irish, unlike other low and ‘inferior’ races, had the chance of advancement if only they could be freed from Catholic indoctrination. A decade earlier, in two articles in the Melbourne Review, AM Topp had expressed a similar view: that state education could eliminate the disastrous consequences of the inferiority of the Irish ‘race’ in Australia.⁶⁹ Topp was indebted to Edward Augustus Freeman, the English liberal historian of Anglo-Saxonism, who combined contempt for the Irish with support for Irish home rule, on the basis that the Celtic Irish should be left to settle their own affairs.⁷⁰ Topp might have agreed with leaving the Irish to themselves, but was faced with the problem, as he saw it, that the Irish could not be isolated in the colonies and must therefore be educated out of their undesirable mental and moral characteristics. Topp’s assessment of the Irish threat was certainly mediated by political concerns, especially concerns about Irish republican violence during the early 1880s, nevertheless, he was forthright in his opinion that the Irish were a race of ‘morally, socially and intellectually’ inferior people.⁷¹

Ideas about the savage nature and low moral character of the Irish were not, of course, restricted to newspaper commentators, government officials or Protestant clergy. As we shall see in a later chapter, there were always employers who would not hire Irish workers because they perceived them as unreliable and untrustworthy. That such attitudes seeped into personal and even family relationships is perhaps not surprising. Insults like ‘dirty Irish’ were thrown about during disputes, some of which ended up in the courts. In 1865, for example, two female neighbours faced a Bendigo magistrate on charges of offensive language. Mrs Scott had called Mrs Webb a ‘dirty Irish beast’ and accused her of being of ‘low Irish extraction’ and of only knowing how to live on ‘potatoes and buttermilk’. In addition, she had alleged that Mrs Webb had left illegitimate children behind her in Ireland. Mrs Webb in response flung at Mrs Scott that at least Irish men were better than the Chinese men some members of Mrs Scott’s family had married.⁷² Courts and newspapers usually treated such exchanges with amusement, however, there were more disturbing cases as well. An Irish woman living in Adelaide, Julia Meadows, attempted in 1869 to get a court order restraining her husband from beating her. She claimed that he had told her he would ‘never wash again until I have dirtied myself with your dirty Irish blood’.⁷³ In a tragic and widely reported case of family violence near Wollongong in 1877, an English-born man killed his two children and himself, leaving a note blaming his Irish-born wife. ‘I love my little children too much to leave them to their brutal mother,’ he wrote, ‘that dirty, drunken, selfish, and unfeeling Irish savage.’⁷⁴ People used the culturally available vocabulary of the time to express personal and family conflicts, and notions of the ‘dirty’ and ‘savage’ Irish were clearly readily to hand in colonial Australia.

The Irish and other races

Commentators on the expanding British imperial world of the 19th century often compared Europeans to Indigenous peoples, Asians and Africans. In the US too, people often compared European immigrants and African Americans during the mid and late 19th century. In such discourses, the Irish sometimes constituted a liminal category: they were European and were accepted by most people, although not by all, as ‘white’, yet at the same time, they shared characteristics with groups who were not European and definitely not ‘white’.

In the 1830s, for example, one official defended the living conditions of slaves in the West Indies on the grounds that: ‘I have seen more Misery in Ireland in One Day than I have seen in the West Indies during my Service there.’ Wesleyan missionary the Reverend John Barry, who had worked in Kingston and Spanish Town, reported to the British House of Commons that ‘Negroes’ were ‘just the same as other men’, possessing ‘as high a Degree of Intellect as the Irish Peasantry’.⁷⁵ Other writers did not intend their comparisons of the Irish with Indigenous or black peoples to flatter either group. The French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages wrote that the Irish reminded him ‘of the very lowest tribes of Australia’.⁷⁶ English novelist Charles Kingsley, on a visit to Ireland in 1860, was deeply unsettled by the sight of what he called ‘white chimpanzees’. If ‘they were black’, he wrote, ‘one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours’.⁷⁷ In 1843, Scottish-born Dr Alexander Thomson of Geelong, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council representing the Port Phillip district (now Victoria), gave evidence before a select committee investigating immigration. In answer to one question, he said he had encountered many immigrants from the south of Ireland ‘who are utterly useless; in point of intellect they are inferior to our own aborigines’.⁷⁸ A somewhat similar comparison was made by James Bonwick when he wrote in 1863 that ‘[Aborigines] pronounce English far better than half the Scotch or Irish emigrants’.⁷⁹ All such comments comparing the Irish to black people, whether in the West Indies or Australia, reflected minds that perceived the Irish as being closer to the people of colour at the bottom of the racial hierarchy than to the white people at the top.

Many leading proponents of racial science abhorred the idea of interracial marriage, or ‘miscegenation’ as it was then often termed. But a few thought that the mixing of the races might prove beneficial in certain circumstances. In 1864, an anonymous American pamphlet entitled ‘Miscegenation’ praised interracial marriage, specifically identifying the Irish as a group that might benefit from it:

He [the Irish man] was originally of a coloured race, and has all the fervid emotional power which belongs to a people born in or near the tropics. His long habitation north, however, and the ignorance in which he has been kept by misgovernment, have sunk the Irishman below the level of the most degraded negro.⁸⁰

Intermarriage between the Irish and black people, according to this writer, would likely improve the Irish. The pamphlet outraged a reviewer in the British Anthropological Review, who, after quoting it at length, claimed that it was too painful to read.⁸¹ The pamphlet circulated widely before it was revealed to be a hoax concocted by members of the Democratic Party who wanted to influence the 1864 presidential election.⁸² But by then its arguments had been summarised in the Sydney Morning Herald, based on a report appearing in the London Times.⁸³ The Australian press showed a marked interest in American race relations. In 1867, for example, the Melbourne Argus and other colonial papers reprinted statistics on the ‘coloured’ population of New York from the London Pall Mall Gazette. After listing 82 ‘miscegens’ families, the article continued: ‘although the Irish are loudest and most forward in their declarations of hostility to the negroes, in almost every case of miscegenation the parties are Irish and blacks, so nearly akin is hate to love’.⁸⁴

There was clearly a widespread belief that ‘miscegenation’ mostly occurred between black people and the Irish, and such alliances were not considered to reflect well on either group. Later chapters will discuss marriage between the Irish and Indigenous Australians and Chinese immigrants, but it is worth emphasising here that, although the Irish were ridiculed for intermarrying with African Americans and the Chinese in both the US and Australia, there were no race laws preventing them from marrying non-Europeans. But such laws were often applied to people of colour in both countries. This difference points to the fact that the Irish, despite their perceived racial inferiority, were still generally considered to be white and thus not targeted by laws intended to control non-white races.

The Irish: a superior race?

While theories and attitudes that relegated the Irish to the lower levels of different racial hierarchies persisted into the early 20th century, from at least the mid 19th century Irish people had begun to argue forcefully against such stereotyping. As members of the Catholic Irish community acquired education, employment, prosperity and confidence in Australia, so they angrily refuted the many attempts made to characterise them as ‘low’ or as sharing characteristics with the ‘native blacks’.

In 1881, Topp’s widely publicised anti-Irish articles met with strong opposition. The Melbourne Catholic Advocate reported rather gleefully that Topp had been snubbed in the streets of Melbourne. It also published a letter from Topp’s lawyer brother repudiating his ideas as likely to ‘embitter sectarian and racial prejudices’.⁸⁵ An Irish immigrant, Joseph O’Brien, writing in the same journal, also quickly challenged Topp’s arguments. He highlighted the fact that the English were a racially mixed people and went on to claim that their behaviour both at home and in acquiring an empire was far worse than anything the Irish had ever done.⁸⁶ O’Brien’s swift intervention was typical of Irish and Irish Australians’ responses to racial slurs. If required to look at themselves as a race, the Irish saw only positives where many English writers saw only negatives. Then the Irish used these to argue with increasing force in favour of self-government.

From the 1880s onwards, a cultural movement which scholars call the ‘Gaelic Revival’ emerged in Ireland and spread through the diaspora. It aimed to restore pride in Gaelic history, literature, language and sport.⁸⁷ Organisations and clubs which strove to foster pride in Irish culture and history formed in Australia during the 1880s and 1890s. The Melbourne Celtic Club, various Sydney Irish associations, the Perth Gaelic League and the Queensland Irish Association were part of this movement.⁸⁸ Some members of these organisations read a small, attractively bound book published in 1899 that argued the Irish were racially superior. Its author, the distinguished Irish-language scholar and historian, Father Edmund Hogan, was a member of the audience at a public lecture given in Dublin in 1893 by Alfred C Haddon and the next day he passed on to Haddon his own research on the positive connotations of Irish physical characteristics.⁸⁹ Hogan finally published this research in an 1899 book, The Irish People, their Height, Form and Strength, in which he noted approvingly that Haddon had shown the Irish were physically superior, or at least not inferior, to other races. Hogan’s book was an extended refutation of what he called scurrilous views about the ‘degeneracy’ of the Irish ‘race’, appearing in commentaries, satires and cartoons outside Ireland, particularly in English magazines like Punch and American ones like Puck. These, Hogan complained, ‘invariably represented the Irishman as of a low savage type’.⁹⁰ As we will see later, Hogan might also have included in his list of objectionable publications Australian periodicals like Melbourne Punch and the Sydney Bulletin. Hogan’s book was well known in Australia through the excerpts from it that appeared in the Catholic press.⁹¹

Those, like Hogan, who were writing within the optimistic glow of the Gaelic Revival assumed that the Catholic Irish and their descendants were physically and morally distinct. Irish nationalists and republicans joined him and his Irish-Australian readers in seeing only positive Irish characteristics in the differences between Celts and Anglo-Saxons. Towards the end of the 19th century, race was becoming an increasingly essential feature of arguments that Ireland should have more political independence.⁹² That the Irish race was distinctive, both physically and culturally, and that it had an illustrious history, long predating the arrival of the English in the 12th century, was seen as prima facie evidence that Ireland deserved a measure of self-government. A homogenous Irish race was ‘in keeping with contemporary European nationalist criteria for a territory to become a self-governing polity’.⁹³

The Advocate in Melbourne, as well as other Australian Catholic newspapers, regularly reprinted articles on the findings of anthropometric studies that showed the Irish were physically stronger, taller and generally more able than the English. As one such article put it, these studies ‘successfully vindicate the claims of Irishmen to be very unlike what the “savage representations of the comic journals” describe them to be’.⁹⁴ By claiming that the Irish were members of the Aryan or Indo-European family of races, supporters of Irish home rule argued that they were white and, as such, they, like white colonists in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, deserved a measure of self-government.⁹⁵ As the Irish home rule politician John Dillon explained to a New Zealand audience in 1899, the Irish deserved home rule because ‘we are white men’.⁹⁶ Whiteness and the right to self-government went hand in hand. Thus, even if the Irish were not Anglo-Saxons or even Protestants, their perceived whiteness meant that they were entitled to rule themselves, though of course only within the confines of the British Empire.

We have seen that ‘race’ was an ill-defined and slippery concept during the 19th century, the period when the Irish were settling colonial Australia. It could encompass physiology, culture, religion and morality, often in the same scholar’s work. In the latter part of the 20th century, the meanings of ‘race’ solidified under the weight of the horrifying consequences of colonisation, eugenics and Nazi racial ideology. ‘Race’ or ‘racism’ came to mean believing that human diversity derived ‘from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes’, especially physical characteristics, that were ‘usually considered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority’.⁹⁷ We can definitely find the antecedents of such beliefs in 19th-century racial theories about the Irish, while there are also numerous instances of the Irish being included in the category ‘white’. For many, the Irish were a liminal people, uncomfortably close in physical appearance and character to Indigenous Australians and other non-white peoples, yet, at the same time, similar in significant ways to the white British. In settler colonies like Australia, as well as in Britain and the US, there was never any question that the Irish would be denied legal rights or targeted for the sort of extermination, exclusion or assimilationist policies that were applied to indigenous and Chinese peoples. In fact, as we shall see in the following chapters, many Irish Australians supported and participated in the policies and actions of British settler colonialism aimed against Indigenous and non-European populations. Perhaps it is most helpful to think of the Irish as a group who played a significant role in delineating the boundaries of what it meant to be white in Australia.