The novel is melodramatic in its tropes of obsessive love, rape, incest and suicide, but it is also satirical, as Australian critics noted.
Continue reading
Filed under 19th Century Irish Settlement …
Irish-Australian Women Writers: 1. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796–1880)
Eliza was obviously interested in people who came from different cultures, and she tried to understand them by studying their languages. We see this in some of her first poems written in Ireland. For instance, she made a point of using Irish placename spellings, rather than anglicised ones, when describing the impressive natural features of south County Down, including the Mourne Mountains. Continue reading
Ireland’s Daughters: The Earl Grey Orphans Who Shaped Australia.
Maria left Ireland aged fourteen. According to the Irish Famine Memorial’s orphan database, she left Portumna as a Roman Catholic orphan of James and Margaret Maher (both deceased), sailing on the Thomas Arbuthnot to Sydney in 1850. Continue reading
In the Footsteps of Mary: a traveller’s tale of ancestry
Mary and many of her fellow passengers – convicts – on board the Earl Grey, having left Dublin five months earlier in December 1849, and disembarking on a grey May day on the other side of the world in 1850.
Ireland’s Daughters: The Earl Grey Orphans Who Shaped Australia. How a Generation of Irish Girls Transformed Exile into Endurance and Survival into Legacy
Maria left Ireland aged fourteen. According to the Irish Famine Memorial’s orphan database, she left Portumna as a Roman Catholic orphan of James and Margaret Maher (both deceased), sailing on the Thomas Arbuthnot to Sydney in 1850. Continue reading
‘This monstrous injustice’: Colonial resistance to the Earl Grey famine immigration scheme
The Earl Grey scheme was well-ordered and well-regulated, both in Ireland and Australia. Continue reading
The Sad Tale of Eliza Fitzpatrick
Her story is one, initially, of normal native Irish family life, then blighted by the Famine, the workhouse, and being sent to Australia, where her marriage, children, and oversall loss apparently sent her into a downward spiral and a tragic death. Continue reading
The Shanahans and the Kearns: Tipperary to Australia Part 2
Late in the lean month of Iúil an Chabáiste on Friday 26 July 1850, before the digging of the new crop and at the remnants of the previous seasons harvest, agents of Government, bailiffs, crowbar men, police, army, law and land agents gathered at Ross Cottage at Cullohill or Kearns Cross to clear the surrounding townlands of Cooleen, Carrigeen, Cullohill, Mountkinane, Curraghkeale, Glenanoge and Glenarisk. Continue reading
Where’s Paddy gone? Stories of growing up local Irish Catholic
When I heard the cry ‘where’s Paddy gone?’, it started me thinking about my own childhood in South Purrumbete Continue reading
The Shanahans and the Kearns: Tipperary to Australia Part 1
No, it was not the gold discovery that brought me out. In Corrigeen, Barony of Kilmarney, where I lived, seventeen houses were burnt in one day by way of eviction. I at once made up my mind to be under Parker, our landlord, no longer, and I came out here. Continue reading
Tinteán 