Introduction : The uses of Irish-Australian literature

In a famous – perhaps too famous – proclamation, the late historian Patrick O’Farrell (1933–2003) declared that 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 12). There has been a tradition of thinking about the Irish in Australia as the grit in the oyster, a recalcitrant internal other that allows Australia to emerge as a national pearl distinct from Britain. Yet, arguably, the separatism-assimilation binary, and the presumptions about nation-building upon which it is built, has not received sufficient critical treatment in recent decades as theories of diaspora, settler colonialism and cultural encounter have developed. Historiography about the Irish in Australia, over which O’Farrell’s presence still dominates, has ebbed in recent years as the attention has turned to Indigenous histories and to the waves of migration that have occurred since the Second World War.[1] The fractious yet formative role of the Irish presence has tended to be papered over by terms like ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or ‘British’ Australia. Indeed, if Noel Ignatieff told the story of ‘how the Irish became white’ in the United States, perhaps in Australia the equivalent narrative is ‘how the Irish became British’, an identification which, as Elizabeth Malcolm recently pointed out, is remarkably ill-fitting: ‘Catholic Irish people do not usually consider themselves British and nor do most British people think of the Irish as British either. Australian usage of the category “British” to include the Catholic Irish is unusual’ (Malcolm 201).