Dianne Hall

Imperial spaces : placing the Irish and Scots in colonial Australia

General editors introduction 1. Introduction 2. (Re)Presenting Empire 3. Place and Diaspora 4. Dislocations? 5. Relocations: Land, Legislation, and Memory 6. Pastoral Places 7. Urban Enactments 8. Sites of Faith and Memory 9. Conclusion Index

Defending the Faith: Orangeism and Ulster Protestant Identities in Colonial New South Wales

The Orange Order was never as prominent in the Australian colonies as its own publicity asserted and its arguments against the power of Rome in Australian politics and society were more shrill than accurate. However, it held a clearly defined position as a vector of anti-Catholicism and ultra-Protestantism in many parts of colonial Australia, and its parades and social gatherings were important spaces for the formation of Australian Protestant identities imbued with varying levels of Irishness. The use of public space meant that the Loyal Orange Institution had a wider impact than their often small numbers might otherwise suggest.With their parades, sermons, public meetings, and demonstrations many Orangemen and women attempted to claim colonial public space not only as Protestant, but as a particularly Irish inflected anti-Catholicism.

'Now him white man': Images of the Irish in Colonial Australia

At Federation, Australian citizens were popularly considered to be white and British. The apparent simplicity of those adjectives, however, underplays the ambiguity and contestation associated with both terms. This article examines cartoons published in the Bulletin and Melbourne Punch, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to analyse how poor Irish Catholics were imagined and represented. It argues that the Irish were often understood as racially distinct and inferior to Anglo-Saxon British Australians and were positioned on the outer borders of the racialised category of ‘white settlers’. The visual stereotypes of the cartoons indicate that these Irish carried ‘contingent’ or partial ‘whiteness’ before their full acceptance as members of ‘white’ Australia. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Points of departure: remittance emigration from South-West Ulster to New South Wales in the later nineteenth century

This paper considers aspects of the local geographies of Australian emigration created in south-west Ulster by the New South Wales government-sponsored remittance emigration scheme between 1858 and 1884. The scheme mobilized the financial resources of settlers in New South Wales to part-fund the passage of friends and relatives from Britain and Ireland. The paper utilizes the comprehensive socio-economic and demographic archive generated by the scheme, to explore the response of rural communities in thirteen civil parishes in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to this opportunity to emigrate. It concludes that although the emigrant samples demographic profile accorded with conventional models of Irish assisted emigration, it was also marked by pronounced over-representation of Protestants and under-representation of Catholics. Possible explanations for this are considered in terms of the positionality and human capital of the three major denominations and the efficiency of their social networks in negotiating the bureaucratic process in Australia.

Place and displacement: introduction

Large cities are constantly being reshaped by technological change, migration, shifting economic needs and by the abrupt and traumatic changes of disaster or war such as those behind the current crises in Europe and the Middle East (Vieten & Valentine, 2015). Methods developed by residents to maintain connections and identities through placemaking in cities are challenged by the rapidity of technological change and by the unplanned movement of vast numbers of people fleeing wars, economic and other disasters. Cities are also constantly being remade through structural transformations of gentrification and expansion into semi-rural areas to accommodate increasing populations (Çağlarb & Glick Schiller, 2010). As these urban places shift there are disjunctions and displacements of the old for the new, while at the same time many urban spaces are contracting, their porous boundaries opening up to decay and disuse. The papers in this special section on “Place and displacement” were first aired at a conference at Victoria University, Melbourne, hosted by the College of Arts’ Community, Identity and Displacement Research Network. The conference aimed to explore the effects of mobility – forced, voluntary, external, internal – on ideas of displacement, community, identity and memory. As groupings of papers from disciplines such as history, sociology, performance, politics and anthropology coalesced there was a clearly defined section that explored displacement and identity, place and memory in urban sites. The papers in this special section are from that group. Displacement – being and feeling out of place, away from certainty in place – can occur through movement of peoples fleeing the trauma of war and economic collapse. It also occurs with the literal fracturing of earth, buildings and peoples in disasters. Apart from these loud cataclysmic shifts in place, there is the slower, perhaps quieter, displacement when familiar places disappear before our eyes until they only remain in memory. Each article in this special feature focuses on one of these aspects of displacement in and of cities. Public places within cities are sites that significantly impact on individual and collective identities (Amin, 2008). Redolent with meanings associated with social connectedness, civic engagement, individual and generational memory, these spaces are where the effects of displacement are most visible. Public buildings destroyed by natural disasters are a stark example of this. The traumas of abrupt destruction of familiar streetscapes and public places are explored in Cretney and Bond’s article on the aftermath of the earthquakes in 2011 in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Displacement through disaster occurs in multiple dimensions; there are those who have to leave and re-establish in different

'And so began the Irish Nation': Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-Modern Ireland by Brendan Bradshaw (review)

Ermine de Reims was at the periphery of an era that saw a restructuring of the belief in and the purpose of supernatural forces. This was a period of transition when demonic visions, especially by women, were beginning to be seen as signs of witchcraft or demonic possession rather than symptoms of aspiring sainthood. The danger was particularly manifest in the sexual nature of some of Ermine’s visions at a time when copulation with demons, which, although several decades before the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, was being linked to witchcraft. We are thus given insight into the way the challenges to Ermine’s faith focused on the central tenets of Christianity, as her battle with demons challenged orthodox dogma, and questioned religious practices, such as the Eucharist, the Resurrection, the existence of the soul, and the need for penance and good works. Indeed, in Visions, le Graveur had to struggle to interpret Ermine’s battle with demons as evidence of her great strength of faith and his learned influence and teaching. It was le Graveur’s task, then, to show Ermine’s visions as tests of faith and not signs that she was in need of exorcism or indictment for sorcery. Blumenfeld-Kosinki writes compellingly and with clarity, providing ample historical background to facilitate our understanding of Ermine’s case. She intersperses the political, religious, and social background of late medieval France with detailed explanations of religious lives and saintly models, holy couples, religious education, and the evaluation of Ermine’s visions by contemporary theologians. This case study of Ermine de Reims, together with careful use of background material, tells us a great deal about the importance of the discernment of spirits in this transitional period and contributes new insight into Nancy Caciola’s thesis that the discernment of spirits was modulated by local mentalities, the self-interest of observers, and the constraints of power. Judith Bonzol, The University of Sydney

'Fama' and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe eds. by Heather Kerr, and Claire Walker (review)

Aumerle, as a traitor. York stands out in stark contrast to both Richard II and Gaunt as an embodiment of ‘devotion to the divine Law beyond the law that both Richard and Gaunt incorrectly assumed they possessed’ (p. 74). In the chapter on Titus Andronicus, Jackson contrasts the pre-Christian Titus with the pre-Muslim Aaron the Moor. Titus and Aaron differ in their willingness to sacrifice their children for the ‘Other’ (the Roman state being a stand-in for the divine). Jackson views Aaron’s refusal of the command to kill his son not as compassion, but rather an instance of someone who has ‘no desire for the absolute Other’ (p. 89) and thus refuses to offer an Abrahamic gift of sacrifice. The last two chapters of Shakespeare & Abraham focus on the characters of Shylock and Timon of Athens. Both Shylock and Timon strive for Derrida’s ‘impossible gift’ (p. 117), one that allows an ‘an economical relationship between the self and other in which neither has an advantage’ (p. 111). The trial scene in The Merchant of Venice places Shylock in the position of Abraham in Genesis 22, called to give death even though it will ‘cost him everything’ (p. 106). Jackson reads Timon’s excessive generosity in the play’s first half as driven by the same impulse as his misanthropy in the second: a desire for a pure gift without exchange, an Abrahamic sacrifice. Shakespeare & Abraham is clearly written, and the short length makes for an easy read. The book features detailed notes and an index. Shakespeare & Abraham has much to offer for scholars interested in the work of Shakespeare, particularly those interested in both Shakespeare’s religious perspective and how dramatic texts are capable of internalising and participating in the interpretative tradition of the Bible.

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand

book is a pleasure to read, finely organised, carefully crafted and always engaging. While readers will find much to enjoy in this book, historians familiar with the experience of the Irish in colonial Australia may have reason to question the propositions that underpin it. Commencing in the late 1970s, Irish historians, influenced by the rise of social history and subaltern studies, began to investigate the structure of pre-famine society and the causes and consequences of rural violence. As well as identifying the oppressive effects of competition for land and the imposition of tithes, these studies scrutinised the complex hierarchies of status and internecine conflicts that divided the rural population. Their relevance for Australia was highlighted soon after, for example, by the late Patrick O’Farrell’s insistence on the need to search for this ‘hidden Ireland’ in early colonial Australia. The idea that the Irish were simply peasant sheep-stealers may have retained a place in the Australian imagination but holds little credence among historians of the Irish. Those same Irish studies also highlighted intense anxiety over economic and social status as key markers of pre-famine Catholic rural communities. Given this book’s insistence on the egalitarian nature of the Australian convict experience, the process by which the Hive prisoners transitioned from a highly stratified and status-conscious Irish background to the level playing field of colonial life seems underexplored. Smith’s argument that the Irish experienced little discrimination prior to 1840 is also likely to prove contentious. Many historians would agree that the tendency of the early colonial years was to diminish the salience of national and religious differences. However, to go so far as to assert that early European Australia was a place largely devoid of division, where between prisoners ‘differences of race, religion and class were irrelevant’ (229), where men who were ‘feckless peasants in Ireland’ (231) easily became mates with all others, and racism existed only in relation to indigenous Australians, seems overstated. The Luck of the Irish will be warmly welcomed for the rich store of human experiences it brings to life and the vibrancy with which it tells the remarkable story of the Hive and its survivors. It is a story of positive Australian foundations and mostly harmonious community relations save the enduring stain of the brutalities shown towards the indigenous Australians. However, in the early twentieth-first century, readers from a variety of social, political and ethnic standpoints may have reason to question the prevalence of the beneficent characteristics modern-day Australia is said to derive from its convict inheritance.

List of figures and tables

Paleo-Ice Stream Behavior: Retreat Scenarios and Changing Controls in the Ross Sea, Antarctica by Anna Ruth Weston Halberstadt Studying the history of ice-sheet behavior in Antarctica’s largest drainage basin, the Ross Sea, can improve understanding of patterns, timing, and controls on marine-based ice-sheet dynamics, and provide constraints on numerical ice-sheet models. Newly collected highresolution multibeam swath bathymetry data, combined with two decades of legacy multibeam and seismic data, are used to map glacial landforms and reconstruct paleodrainage. Last Glacial Maximum grounded ice reached the continental shelf edge in the eastern but not western Ross Sea. Recessional geomorphic features in the western Ross Sea indicate virtually continuous retreat of the ice sheet in contact with the bed. In the eastern Ross Sea, wellpreserved linear features and a lack of small-scale recessional landforms record rapid lift-off of grounded ice from the bed. Physiography exerted a first-order control on ice behavior, while seafloor geology played an important subsidiary role. This new analysis of retreat patterns suggests that: (1) a large embayment formed in the eastern Ross Sea; (2) retreat was complex and asynchronous between troughs; and (3) the eastern Ross Sea largely deglaciated prior to the western Ross Sea. Previously published grounding-line retreat scenarios are based on terrestrial observations; however, this work uses Ross Sea-wide geomorphology to constrain marine deglaciation.

Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas

crossed in myriad ways. Hunter’s approach is less focused on the practice of criminal jurisdiction, and more on the policy debates that were spawned by the everyday intersections of Indigenous and settler lives in Swan River. Her story is less the failure (the impossibility) of one law for all, than the persistent trope of the demeaned Indigenous subject, the savage who constantly falls short of the civilised standard that settler polity asserted. However, given the overlapping chronologies, there is much shared between the books*in debates over the status of Aboriginal evidence for example, a subject that highlights the selfcontradictory impulses of colonial and imperial motivation. As readers familiar with these particular colonial histories will know, there is even an important overlap in personnel, with explorer and imperial careerist, George Grey, developing a policy for Aboriginal governance following his travels in Western Australia, and finding himself with the challenge of implementing this in South Australia a few years later. Hunter finds much value in pitting Governor Hutt’s more open and gradualist approach to Aboriginal amenability against Grey’s inclination to a strict legalism. In the end, however, did it matter? Whether one looked to strict application of the law to accomplish the transformation of the Indigenous person into civilised subject, or to missions and education to effect a transformation that would fit the Indigenous person for British legal personhood, was a matter of means not ends in these settler colonies. Inevitably these are books that primarily speak through settler voices*many of them expressive, troubled, even empathetic, and sometimes imaginative. Police Commissioner Warburton in South Australia imagined the possibility of a magistrate sitting on a circuit court with an Aboriginal elder advisor (Pope, 162)*an idea floated by A. P. Elkin in the 1930s. But both authors are also close enough to the riches of colonial newspapers and archives to resurrect some powerful Indigenous voices, articulating their expectations of justice in a period that is too commonly depicted as void of its possibility, and in startling and challenging moral tones. ‘Why does the white man interfere?’ asked the Noongar man Eannun, restrained from taking revenge for the death of his father, ‘I saw before me the murderer of my father, and you would not let me kill him’ (Hunter, 136). Regrettably, the production of Hunter’s book displays too many signs of a shoestring budget*copy-editing and proofing are well below the standard that enables the author’s work to be read with ease and shorn of ambiguity. The problems begin in the Foreword with the verbatim repetition of a sentence in succeeding paragraphs. Random changes in font size in later pages add to the problems of comprehending the author’s often careless prose. The marvellous archival research that underpins the work will nevertheless repay the reader willing to engage a resistant text. The superior production values and clarity of writing in Pope’s work will help ensure that it remains the ‘must-read’ authority on criminal law’s encounter with Indigenous people during the early decades of Australia’s settlement history.