Irish-Australian Identity

What constitutes Irish-Australian literature – if such a category exists – is by no means clear. This essay seeks to map the field and identify…

This article surveys the history of Irish-Australian autobiography and memoir as a form of writing particularly well adapted to exploring the tensions and compromises of…

This essay surveys the viewpoints of selected Irish-Australian writers: the anthologists Bill Wannan, Vincent Woods and Colleen Burke then Bernard O’Dowd, Brian Elliott, Tom Inglis…

Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir…

This paper documents the literary origins of the notion of Irishness; why it mattered, and why it persists as a significant discourse running through Australian…

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…

Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), famously deal with the Irish denizens of Sydney’s Surry Hills…