The seventh in Elizabeth Sharkey is my grandmother’s grandmother, through an all-female line. I like to imagine this line as a fine gold thread coming from my heart and connecting me from mother to mother, spanning the oceans and the centuries back to a bleak workhouse in the town of Omagh in County Tyrone, Ireland. … Continue reading
Filed under History …
Invitation to a book launch
A new book about a Cistercian monk who served in Broome. Continue reading
The Irish Australian Literature Symposium (22 November 2019)
The Irish-Australian Literature Symposium of 2019 may be remembered in years to come as the event that marked the formal initiation of ‘a distinctive new field of research’. Continue reading
The Women Who Changed Australia
The subtitle of this book reflects the ambitions of its author: ‘The women who changed Australia’. It’s a big claim… Continue reading
Mary McConnell, a Belfast Girl
Mary Mc Connell entered the workhouse in Belfast in July 1847 as an orphan and a pauper. Continue reading
Women on the Frontier
‘Unsettled’ by Gay Lynch breaks new ground in Irish Australian fiction. It is aptly titled. Continue reading
Happiness is …
This is a love story, one that could be easily summarised in a single paragraph, but that would be to demean it. Because it is above all a paean to a simpler time, simpler people and a simpler meaning of happiness. Continue reading
Seasonal Leitrim Poems, and a Dublin one, by Mary Guckian.
Poems from the Leitrim soil…. Continue reading
Margaret Cooke (1833-?): from Carbury in Kildare to Gladstone in Queensland, and Monte Cristo Station on Curtis Island
Stories about women who made an indelible impression on their children are often preserved in family folklore handed down the generations, but memory of Margaret Cooke doesn’t appear to have survived in this way… Continue reading
Poems for an Irish Family
A bush poet turns his mind to his Famine ancestors. Continue reading
Tinteán 