Here and There – Éire
To someone brought up in England, the west coast of Ireland, Éire, always seemed exotic and different. This was where the sea could be warm and the weather balmy because the North Atlantic Current impinges on the western shoreline (don’t you love that word ‘impinge’). This was the land of green beer (well, on St Patrick’s Day at least), uncertain numbers of troublesome and irresponsible ‘little people’, and a tongue twisting, totally incomprehensible language. If I am going to be really honest, it was also off the radar for English boys, too far away in so many senses from the comfortable world centred around London, English Kings and Queens, and Shakespeare. Yes, there was bombing and terrorism, but that was in Northern Ireland, and we thought Éire had to be different, or we hoped it was.
Travelling to Cork many years ago was to both confirm and challenge my prejudices. Cork is an ancient place, once a monastic centre, claimed to have been founded by Saint Finbarr in the 6th Century. For a while it was a trading destination, popular with the Vikings in the 10th Century, and, unbelievably, became a walled city in the Middle Ages, an outpost of Old English culture in the middle of the countryside. Englishmen surrounded by Gaelic speakers, it must have been tense. I recently learnt the good citizens of Cork had to pay rent to the surrounding Gaelic lords to save them from being attacked. Rent? It sounds to me like good old-fashioned protection money! Foolishly, in 1491, it became involved in the Wars of the Roses when one Perkin Warbeck called in to gather support for his rebellion against Henry VII. The English links slowly dissipated, and by the 1800s Cork became one of the centres of the emerging Irish nationalist movement.
All that tangled past seems irrelevant when you arrive in Cork today. With a population a little over 200,000, the centre of the city is on an island between two arms of the River Lee. Gentle green hills on either side of the river, it is hard to imagine it as a centre of rebellion. Rather it comes across as a place for tourists, albeit fairly cool, and with a moderately heavy annual rainfall: is that what balmy really means? Indeed, the records indicate there are some 200 ‘rainy days’ a year , close to 75 with heavy falls. It can be foggy for around 100 days each year, especially in the winter. Tourists are recommended to go there in the summer months, when it is warmer and, surprisingly, enjoy the fact that it is one of Ireland’s sunniest cities, with an average of some 4 hours of sunshine every day. Balmy Irish summer sunshine.
I was there for a conference during an Indian summer many years ago, and it was delightful. I didn’t manage to spot any of those famous ‘little people’, but I did meet a lot of friendly locals. They were to provide the first of my surprises: those guys dressed up like monks drinking beer in the local pubs were monks! They might have been celibate (well, careful, they might not have been able to marry), but they seemed happy to drink what seemed like pretty substantial amounts of beer – Guinness of course – as well as join in the ongoing banter with the female serving staff. It was a relaxing place to hold meetings. Perhaps you’re surprised to hear that I found this laid-back experience slightly unexpected. The troubles in Northern Ireland left most people like me more than a little fearful of the Irish, and this reaction did spill over into views of Éire. After all, it was next door!
Those same fears reappear when we turn to look at the Irish in Australia, as it often appears as if their main concern is to recapitulate the dramas, battles and hatreds that frequently coloured the Emerald Isle’s relationship with the UK. No sooner had the British stuck a flag in the land around Botany Bay than the Irish began to arrive. Their influence upon, and contribution to Australia has continued from that time to the present: for more than 200 years the Irish and their descendants have comprised a large proportion of the non-indigenous population, more than a quarter of the total up to 1914. In terms of numbers, I read that Australia remains the most Irish country in the world outside of Ireland. Irish Australians figure in so many critical moments of the country’s post-settlement history, from the Great Famine during the period 1845-50, the Eureka rebellion during the gold rush in Victoria, the Kelly gang, so central to the country’s history, and the Irish Sisters of St John of God in north-west Australia, whose role I’ll touch on later, let alone their more recent contributions.
Back in the 19th Century travel from Britain to Australia was hard, and the Irish were quick to tell everyone about the misery of their experiences. Until the end of the 19th century, the Irish journey to Australia was largely made under governmental supervision, either as passengers in a convict transport or in a vessel chartered by a colonial government. There were many disasters, but most arrived at the end of the long sea voyage under conditions clearly superior to those faced by convicts and by various groups from other nations drawn by the lure of gold. Irish reports describe death- and disease-ridden ‘coffin ships’ heading for North America during the years of the Great Famine, but colonial government emigrants to Australia were, by the standards of the day, generally well fed, adequately clothed and medically cared for. However, there was a long history of bad relations to be remembered, and many preferred to suggest their travel was yet another form of British oppression.
That history is stubborn. When I was working in the western side of the Melbourne CBD, there was an ‘Irish’ pub close to my office. With my blatant English-Australian accent, I kept quiet when passing the men smoking outside, and I never had the courage to enter. Too late now, as it has disappeared and in its place there’s the Paragon apartment tower. That pub, the Kilkenny Arms (?), was quite different from the upmarket pseudo-Irish pubs like the Irish Times Pub, with its big screen for sporting events, in Little Collins Street. As it always was, two Irelands: one for the real Irish and the others for anyone else (usually those with more money in their hands, especially tourists). That division replicated the one between Northern Ireland and England. In Éire, those class and wealth differences were less jarring.
Like most immigrants, the majority of Irish coming to Australia settled down to creating a better life for themselves and their families. However, there was evidence to support the view, “Where the action was in Australian history, there also were the Irish” as Patrick O’Farrell suggests in his history, The Irish In Australia. In part this was a function of most Irish Australians being Catholic, as opposed to the majority of British migrants who were Protestants. As a result, from the 1840s through to the end of the First World war, support for the various national causes of ‘old Ireland’ led many of the British colonists to describe Irish Australians as potentially violent, rebellious and ‘hostile to the Empire’.
Famously, in 1868 an Irishman, claiming to be a ‘Fenian’ (a secret brotherhood dedicated to overthrow of British rule in Ireland) attempted to assassinate Australia’s first British royal visitor, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh. That failed. However, matters worsened when in 1876 the American Fenians organised Australia’s first and last trans-oceanic prison break, snatching 6 Irish Fenians from Western Australia’s Fremantle Prison, taking them to freedom in the United States. I’m sure there’s going to be a Netflix movie about it!
Of course, all these events pale into insignificance in the 1870s when the outlaws of the Kelly gang rode around the outback. Combining their colonial Australian background with a typical Irish sense of grievance, the Kelly gang created a legend based on the struggles of the ‘common man’ against the oppressions of a society whose laws and institutions grind him down. In case you thought this was another element of ‘old Ireland’ troubles, this was domestic. The Kelly Gang were the epitome of local tensions in the Australian bush, where small farmers and selectors faced off against haughty pastoralists and landowners backed by the police. It seems appropriately ironic that many of the pursuing policemen were themselves from a poor Irish immigrant background.
If Ned Kelly retains some kind of heroic status in Australia, which must say something about a national dislike of authority, there was another series of events that were to leave a very different inheritance. This concerns the rather complicated story of the Irish Sisters of St John of God in north-west Australia. The sisters were implicated in the system that removed Aboriginal children from their families, the Stolen Generation. They did so, they claimed, because of the transformative power of education. Whatever was believed at the time, the aftermath of the Stolen Generation lives on to the present, one of the thorns in the side of attempts to bring about reconciliation between immigrant and indigenous Australians.
Tensions between the Catholic Church with its strong Irish base and the Anglican (Protestant) Church with its British core continued to reverberate through to the 20th Century. In 1884 an Irishman Patrick Francis Moran became archbishop of Sydney, and subsequently Australia’s first Catholic cardinal. He led the church between 1884 and 1911, a time characterised by tense moments, driven by Protestant–Catholic rancour, and bitter sectarian feeling. Moran insisted Catholics recognise their place at the centre of Australian society, but on 24 May 1911, shortly before his death, he promoted an ‘Australia Day’ in Catholic schools in opposition to the celebration of Empire Day in state schools on that same date.
That’s enough background! There is a lot more to be said about the Irish in Australia, but I’ll leave that to historians and experts. As an alternative, I will explore a little about my own meetings with Irish Australians, and that will give a platform to make some outrageous and quite unsupportable generalisations. Rather than dwelling any further on religious tensions, I will address the Irish and the arts: this will include humour, broadcasting, writing and acting.
I have worked with many Irish Australians over the years, but pride of place has to go to a man I knew for only two weeks, and whose name disappeared from my memory forty years ago. I was working for Shell, and one of the roles a development adviser was expected to undertake was to run training courses. Back then Shell was very keen on Kepner Tregoe, a consulting and development business that had a proprietary course on ‘Problem Analysis and Decision Making’. To run the course for Shell employees required I took a two-week Kepner Tregoe training course for course facilitators, held in the Blue Mountains above Sydney.
We stayed in Wentworth Falls, suitably isolated so that all you could do was learn about the training materials and the courses based on it. Our free time was whatever short period of time we could grab in the evening, before or after learning the material set for the next day, in other words ‘not much’! However, one day, possibly at the end of the course, we had a free evening, and the opportunity to relax, enjoy our meal and drinks (I will never drink Bailey’s Irish Cream again, but that’s another story), and chat. One of my co-isolates was an Irishman. As we sat around after dinner, he told a joke. That led to another, then another. This continued for at least three hours! It was a masterly performance. Incidentally, at one point he stopped after the end of a joke and was silent for what seemed like a minute. Then he started again. I realised the last words of one joke usually reminded him of the next, and for once a joke ended and he hadn’t instinctively heard the link to next.
Well, you probably don’t usually associate joke telling with ‘the arts’, and so I should move on. For a number of years, I worked in ‘multiculturalism’, in a federal government agency concerned with developing and enhancing programs to sustain Australia’s diverse ethnic heritage. One of the topics of considerable importance to many recent immigrants was broadcasting, including both the multicultural radio stations and the early stages of what would become SBS television. As with all our work, community consultation was important, and I and the other staff were sent to cities around the nation to find out about the issues.
I met some fascinating people, men and women from more than 60 countries involved in the field at the time (the range is far greater today). One of these was Claire Dunne. She had first achieved national recognition through co-starring in the film They’re a Weird Mob, based on John O’Grady’s book. It was a whimsical film, funny and at times touching. More to the point Claire Dunne had been the founder of the multicultural (ethnic) radio stations 2EA and 3EA (in Sydney and Melbourne), and had been appointed as the Foundation Director, under the Whitlam government. By the time I met her, she was a presenter and producer for radio and television. Her fame within Australia was described by Thomas Kenneally: “Clare Dunne, she was a goddess to me. She was this exquisite bone-structured Irish woman who was beloved on the media in Australia.”
Not just beloved. She was a fighter. In 1986, the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke delivered a ‘series of blows aimed at multiculturalism’, including a decision to close the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, and proposed legislation that would merge SBS into the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Dunne was a vociferous opponent of both changes. She said at the time: “I think there is going to be an uproar. There seems to be an undeclared Government change of policy about multiculturalism. Last week they announced that the Institute of Multicultural Affairs would be closed. Now it is the SBS-ABC merger in spite of the fact that only six months ago the Government decided to let it be independent.” She led that uproar, one which led the Prime Minister to call off the merger.
Next choice from the long honour roll of Irish Australians is Thomas (Tom) Kenneally. Tom’s grandparents lived in – County Cork! They moved to Australia in the latter part of the 19th Century. As for the grandson, he is a novelist, playwright and lecturer, well known in Australia, but even more to the point also well known internationally for his 1982 book Schindler’s Ark, which was later adapted into the 1993 film, Schindler’s List. Oskar Schindler’s story was brilliantly told: a member of the Nazi party, he saved the lives of around 1,200 Jews during the holocaust, a remarkable but brief period in an otherwise unremarkable life. I’d like to add that Nicole Kidman appeared in the film, but she didn’t, but she does have Irish, Scottish and English roots. Liam Neeson did, and he’s Irish!
It seems every nation needs a group to embody the less desirable characteristics of the population, a group to despise, a group to fear and a group to fight and attempt to crush. Just as the French felt that way about the Algerians, so the British did about the Irish. It must have been disconcertingly familiar for many British migrants to travel half-way round the world and find themselves in a ‘new’ land with the old antagonisms with the Irish still evident, sometimes vibrantly so. Why do we do this? The Irish I have met, there and here, have included funny, clever, thoughtful and beautiful, people just like you and I (perhaps not the beautiful bit!). Do we really need to identify the ‘bad’ them to reassure the ‘good’ us? We don’t, but we do. The consequences run deep, and I have to admit I have never quite lost a slight fear to combine with my fascination with the Irish. Surely, it’s time I grew up.
