They came and survived and their descendants are all over Australia. Continue reading
Filed under diaspora …
Seasonal Poems
Vermeer would have made much of it Continue reading
What’s On
Upcoming Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar on Heaney’s visit to Australia in 1994. Continue reading
The Old School
t wasn’t so much that I went to school, but rather that school came to me. In every single waking moment of my life school surrounded me. I never could escape from it. I breathed school air. I heard school sounds. I saw school everywhere. I felt the school pumping in my blood. How could this be? Continue reading
His First Rodeo A Chéad Róidió
He turned on his heels and walked out of sight like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers. Continue reading
St Patrick’s Day in South Australia
From the beginning of European settlement, St Patrick’s Day in South Australia has been commemorated annually as a rallying call to express Irish identity in a new land. Continue reading
Irish dust devils
My poem was written in English and in Irish, so I needed to find a suitable Irish term for a Dust Devil. Continue reading
Paul Strzelecki, Hero in Australia and Ireland
The highest peak of the Snowy Mountains. He named it after the Polish-Lithuanian statesman Tadeusz Kosciuszko, giving us Mount Kosciuszko. Continue reading
Ghosts of Irish Australia: Catherine Scullin
Caroline Chisholm had worked hard in Australia for the families of convicts to be reunited. No one knew we had been rejected from the list of travellers. Continue reading
Ghosts of Irish-Australia: Barnaby Fitzpatrick
Nobody wanted to know convicts in early British settlement of Australia and now family historians are eager to find a connection to a convict in their family tree. How times have changed. Continue reading