Ireland, Australia and New Zealand: History, Politics and Culture

24.95

Laurence M. Geary and Andrew J. NcCarthy (Eds.)

Irish-Australian-New Zealand shared culture is explored, including material culture; folk culture; literature; music; dance; architecture; written and oral cultural transmission; cultural influences; intercommunal cultural transference and cultural assimilation and dissemination. Neglected political links are examined and perceptions of the IRA in mid-twentieth century Australia are reviewed

ISBN: 9780716528623 Categories: ,

Description

Seventeen contributors offer a fascinating range and diversity of explorations of Irish-Australian-New Zealand shared culture, including: material culture; folk culture; literature; music; written and oral cultural transmission; cultural influences; intercommunal cultural transference, and cultural assimilation. Often neglected political links are explored, with Carla King assessing the impact of Michael Davitt’s Australian tour in 1895 on his subsequent radical politics. De Valera’s only visit to Australia/New Zealand in 1948, part of his ‘anti-partition’ world tour, is analysed in the context of media both in Ireland and Australia. Ruán O’Donnell explores uncharted territory in reviewing perceptions of the IRA in mid-twentieth-century Australia.

 

Literary contributions range from Frances Devlin-Glass’s reconsideration of Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles, to Brega Webb’s engaging biographical study of poet Mary Anne Kelly, better known as ‘Eva of the Nation’. There is a balance between particular experiences of emigrants, and a reassessment of some traditional views. Academics, including Brad Patterson, Malcolm Campbell and Lyndon Fraser, explore many of these issues with new material and reconsiderations of traditional approaches. Irish history abounds with biographies, and the book contains some fascinating Irish personalities who contributed enormously to the making of Australia, ranging from a lawyer, a composer and musician, and landowner/public servant. Richard Davis provides a splendid historical survey of the influence of the Irish on Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania from Bushrangers to the Celtic Tiger.

About the Editors

Laurence M. Geary lectures in history at University College Cork, and is the author of Medicine and Charity in Ireland, 1718-1851 (2004). He is co-editor (with Tome Dunne) of History and the Public Sphere: Essays in Honour of John A. Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), and co-editor (with Margaret Kelleher) of Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005).

Andrew J. McCarthy is a lecturer in the Department of History, University College Cork, and has a number of publications on twentieth-century Irish history. He is co-edited (with Dermot Keogh) of Limerick Boycott 1904: Anti-Semitism in Ireland (Cork: Mercier, 2005), and a forthcoming documentary reader on the Making of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann), 1937 (Cork: Mercier, 2007).