Irishness

I am writing up a paper that I will give at the Labour History conference in Melbourne in a few weeks. The conference is on "Fighting against war: Peace activism in the twentieth century" and there is a great line up of papers.  Labour history and twentieth century history are a bit outside my comfort zone and so I have been pushing myself rather on this one. I have done some thinking and researching on how ideas about how Irishness was thought about, defined and acted upon in late colonial Australia and it is a natural enough extension to go into the first few decades of the twentieth century. Which of course means thinking about World War I and the way that Irish Catholics in Australia were associated with anti-conscription and general anti-war activism.

What is has evolved into so far is an exploration of the propaganda that washed over the electorate in 1916 and 1917 through two plebiscites on conscription and a general election. There has been a huge literature on the topic to come to grips with and that has occupied me for several weeks since returning from Christmas holiday. What I am finding fascinating is the way that old cartoons from London Punch were recycled by a newspaper proprietor and fierce anti-Catholic. Critchley Parker used his newspaper The Australia Statesman and Mining Standard to attack everything that he saw as hampering Britain's war effort, including publishing pamphlets and leaflets which he distributed widely. The reuse of racialised images of Irishness in this context is interesting and worth exploring in more detail.

A new year

Well this blog has been very quiet, no action for 2014. This is not to say there was no action in 2014, more of course that there was a lot! So this is a post to start again by recapping my research and writing in 2014.

2014 was the first full year of funding for a project (funded by the Australian Research Council) on the Irish in colonial Australia that I am conducting with a colleague from the University of Melbourne, Elizabeth Malcolm. 

The title of the project is "The Irish in Colonial Australia: Race, Representation and Repression"  and its main aims are: 
 

 1.    to analyse the racialisation of the Irish in Australia between 1788 and 1914, charting their movement from an excluded group to part of the founding ‘white’ race;

 2.   to evaluate how such racialised perceptions impacted the lives of Irish immigrants who were institutionalised in colonial Australia;

             3. to analyse how the Irish interacted with other racialised groups

 So far we have had some very good research assistants work with us to collect data on Irish-born patients of Mental asylums in Sydney and Melbourne and we will be starting to collect similar sorts of data on prisoners in the NSW and Victorian colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
We have also worked on representations of the Irish visually through cartoons published in some of the major periodicals of the late ninteenth century in Australia - The Bulletin and Melbourne Punch. We published an article "Now him white man: Images of the Irish in Colonial Australia" on this analysis in History Australia in late 2014. I will post more about the cartoons another day, they really are lots of fun. 

So that is one project that has been occupying me over 2014. The other major one is the Gender and Violence project, which Elizabeth Malcolm and I have been working on for some time now. Although life - by way of changing jobs, new jobs, families expanding etc - have meant this has taken longer than we had hoped. The length of time we have spent on writing the monograph, thinking, talking and writing about our ideas has meant that the results are much better than they would have been otherwise. 

So far I have committed to writing three articles on aspects of this project in 2015 as well as continuing with the remaining chapters of the monograph. I have been able to secure support for some of this by way of fellowships, including one as Associate Investigator with the Centre for the History of Emotions, for research on the ways that violence associated with children was written about and incorporated into emotional responses to violence in 17th century Ireland. I will post more about that over the coming months as well. 

So all in all there has been much to occupy me over 2014. Now for 2015, with my full writing program.