[In the following essay, Molloy studies the considerable appeal the heroic themes and emotionally-charged language in Moore's Irish Melodies had for many nineteenth-century Irish-Australian poets.]

He crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. There is not in this wide world a vallee. Great song of Julia Morkan's.¹

Leopold Bloom's musings on noting the statue of Thomas Moore have long amused readers of Ulysses. Some may even have smiled with approval at Joyce, a master of modern literature, putting in his place one whom the Victorians dared to call ‘Ireland's national poet’. But the discerning reader will know that Joyce's humour was directed more at the Dublin Corporation than at the poet. Indeed, not only did Joyce greatly admire the Irish Melodies,² but such a thorough Dubliner was no doubt aware that this statue and its location in College Street had been the subject of derisory comments since its unveiling in 1857.³ However, neither Joyce nor those familiar with Dublin statuary would have known how ill their statue compared to that of Moore in Sturt Street in the city of Ballarat, seventy miles west of Melbourne, Australia. This statue, sculptured by John Udny from Carrara in Italy, presented the poet in a natural and elegant pose, pointing to a song his audience would like him to sing.⁴ It was unveiled in December 1889 in the presence of 5,000 citizens, and proclaimed as a fitting tribute to a great poet and a great Irishman. It was acknowledged as complementing the statue of Robert Burns, erected some years before, and that of William Shakespeare, soon to be added to the streetscape of Ballarat.⁵

While such adulation was understandable in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century, and even for a time in Britain, we may wonder at its surfacing twelve thousand miles away, in a country whose only mention in Moore's work was as an appropriate destination for the transported Captain Rock.⁶ Discussing Moore's career on that December day in Ballarat, Sir Bryan O'Loghlen,⁷ probably unwittingly, accounted for the perennial admiration Moore and his melodies engendered amongst the Irish in Australia. He alluded to ‘Dear harp of my country’ producing ‘the finest chords of self-sacrificing patriotism, of manliness, of love, of mirth and of sadness, that thrill the human heart’.⁸ The combination of advocacy for Ireland together with those uplifting sentiments that permeate many of the melodies had indeed proved very seductive to Irish migrants and their descendants who wished to maintain a cultural and emotional attachment to their native land. And the speakers's train of thought was likely to find further approval amongst the Irish in his audience when he affirmed Moore as a name to inspire the hearts and minds of all in this new land. Public support for the building of the statue, he believed, ‘was an evidence of the present—and he hoped might be a happy omen for the future—unity of all our races in one nation in this happy and blessed Australian land of ours. (Cheers)’.⁹ This was almost an Australian celebration. It was certainly one in which the Irish, or Irish Australians, could be seen in a most favourable light. Thomas Moore, beloved by many throughout the civilised world, was in a sense providing a pathway for them towards full incorporation into colonial society.

The newspaper report of the day's proceedings would not have been complete without the inclusion of a poem composed for the occasion. ‘Tom Moore’ revealed just how well the poet, one Mona Marie, knew her Irish Melodies. Derivative phrases occurred line after line: ‘Erin's dear harp’, ‘shrill'd its sweet strings’, ‘a race brave and free’, ‘yon isle of the sea’, and so on, fitting homage to Moore and to Ireland.¹⁰ The writing of such verses signified that Moore was not just an icon for Irish Australia in general but also for local poets who found in his lyrics sentiments and styles they wished to emulate. From the early years of white settlement until the late nineteenth century, Moore-inspired themes of remembrance of family and friends, of recollections of times past, and of Ireland and liberty were adopted by poets because of their appeal to the migrant psyche. It is their work and the role of Thomas Moore in interweaving the Irish element into the fabric of colonial society that are the subject of this chapter.

The initial appearance of Moore in Australian literature provides in an unusual manner an insight into the nature of early colonial society. The second song in the Seventh Number of the Irish Melodies (1818), “As slow our ship”, was printed virtually unchanged in the Sydney Gazette two years later with a new title, “Song”, and attributed to ‘E’.¹¹ Plagiarism was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, but one might have expected the editor¹² to have been more circumspect about the origins of the poem, especially since ‘E’ never published any other poems. One might also have expected that at least one reader would have been sufficiently conversant with Moore's (comparatively) recent work to write in protest to the editor. But subsequent editions of the Gazette, Sydney's only newspaper at the time, were silent on the matter. While there were occasional letters, their subjects were unseemly behaviour at church services, dangers from prowling dogs or the like, not literary matters.

A question must therefore arise as to why this thoroughly British society seemed so ignorant about the work of a most popular poet. During the years when the Irish Melodies were published (1808-34), the two colonies in the antipodes, New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, were not particularly rich in cultural matters. Until the mid-1820s, each colony had only one newspaper, and while original poems were occasionally published—nine in the Sydney Gazette for 1820-1—the readership for such literary endeavours was very small. These were essentially garrison societies: convicts and their military gaolers formed the bulk of the population. There were few schools, no colleges or universities or theatres or cultural societies, and consequently, little opportunity to engage in literary discourse.¹³ Moreover, that genteel, leisured society, to which Moore's melodies were addressed, was largely non-existent. In his “Letter on Music” Moore had stated that the melodies were not composed for the general population; instead, ‘it (the work) looks much higher for its audience and readers: it is found upon the piano-fortes of the rich and the educated’.¹⁴ Few such people lived in the antipodes, and commentators did lament the absence of polite society. Peter Cunningham, for example, writing in 1827, complained, ‘Agreeable amusements are still much wanted to relieve the full monotony of a town like Sydney … cut off, in a manner, from all communications with the other parts of the civilized world’.¹⁵

But, one may venture, surely there were some Irish readers in New South Wales who would have protested to the editor of the Sydney Gazette about the plagiarism of Moore's lyric. None did so, a principal reason being that there were few Irish readers of the Gazette. The vast majority of Irish were convicts. From the arrival of the Queen in 1791 until the 1850s tens of thousands were transported, some for political offences (especially after the 1798 rebellion), others, for various crimes.¹⁶ At the first census in New South Wales in 1828, over 7,000 Irish-born residents were classed as convicts or emancipists (freed convicts) while only 500 or so were free settlers, and some of these were relatives of convicts.¹⁷ As Patrick O'Farrell has indicated, many of these convicts had Irish as their first language while others were not literate.¹⁸ Once freed, they tended to settle quietly in recently opened-up lands west of Sydney, often out of regular contact with the town. They were eager to melt into the emerging society and not arouse any suggestion that they still harboured rebel traits. They might have heard of Thomas Moore, but few would read the Gazette, and even fewer consider writing to the editor.

Certainly, Moore was at least a name to that small Irish group who did achieve prominence in the early decades of colonial society: bushrangers. Escaped convicts could achieve fame, or notoriety, by evading recapture, shooting at soldiers or robbing terrified settlers. Their methods were similar to those employed by the tories, rapparees and whiteboys who had long roamed the troubled districts of Ireland, the type commemorated by Moore in Captain Rock.¹⁹ Like their Irish counterparts, they acquired a host of admirers. Peter Cunningham with righteous indignation, protested that songs were composed to record the deeds of such ‘foolish fellows’; one, Michael Riley, for instance in 1821, ‘vaunting that he should long be spoken of, … in fear by his enemies and in admiration by his friends’.²⁰ One song about Jack Donohoe became so popular among the ‘lower orders’ that its singing was banned in public houses, an indication that the authorities were frightened about the unsettling effect of such ‘treason’ songs on the lower classes.²¹ The reasons for their appeal are not hard to establish. They celebrated in verse opposition to the colonial positives of resignation and acceptance of one's lot, as well as a victory even for a brief period against the hated penal system, and the achievement of a kind of independence in the wilderness. They naturally alluded to freedom from British oppression—an Irish ingredient added to the Australian adventure. Jack Donohoe, for example, ‘scorn'd to live in slavery or be humbled to the Crown’, while Francis MacNamara announced, ‘I was convicted by the laws of England's hostile crown’.²² ‘Tyrants’, ‘chains’, ‘oppressed’ were terms that frequently surfaced in these ballads, terms with distinct Irish connotations, and not unknown in Moore's Irish Melodies. It is in one such ballad, on Jack Donohoe, that a reference to Moore occurs:

I've left the old Island's hospitable shores,
The land of the Emmets, the Tones and the Moores.

This ballad is reputed to date from the time of Donohoe's escapades in the late 1820s,²³ so Moore's association with Emmet and Tone indicates that within an Irish Australian rebel ethos he was acclaimed as pro-Ireland and pro-liberty.

This association would not have impressed the colonial garrisons, but such poems as “As slow our ship” would not be considered offensive. On the contrary, the feelings of the poem's narrator as he is wrenched from family and friends would have appealed to many as they read the lines:

As slow our ship her foamy track
          Against the wind was cleaving,
Her trembling pennant still look'd back
          On that dear Isle ’twas leaving:-
So loath we part from all we love,
          From all the links that bind us;
So turn our hearts, as on we rove,
          To those we've left behind us.(24)

Looking back to the ‘joy that's left behind us’ became a recurring refrain for the Irish and others who saw themselves forever exiled in this remote southern continent. In his novel, The Playmaker, Thomas Keneally presents the isolation of early colonists in twentieth-century terms. He speaks of New South Wales as ‘this penal planet’ or ‘convict moon’, which is ‘eight months travel in space’ from England, an expressive metaphor of the psychological as well as physical distance all had travelled.²⁵ The awful realisation of the unlikelihood of return prompted some to pour forth their thoughts in verse, always derivative and often poorly written, but appealing to many who shared their angst. The exercise of writing was undoubtedly therapeutic. The restlessness induced by exile may have been abated, poetic reclamation of the past a way to assuage a dreary present or uncertain future. Specifically, this dabbling with words to express feelings towards a land now distant was a way of warding off, at least for a time, confrontation with a continent that seemed forbidding. Many would have agreed with a much later (and temporary) migrant, D. H. Lawrence, when he wrote: ‘This land always gives me the feeling that it doesn't want to be touched, it doesn't want men to get hold of it’.²⁶ In the early decades of white settlement, such expressions of alienation were commonplace. Moreover, Barron Field in 1819 struck a typical note when he determined that, like America, this new land was bereft of material for literature:

… (here) Nature is prosaic,
Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where
Nature reflecting Art is not yet born;-
A land without antiquities …(27)

A view no doubt shared by many of the early newspaper poets who took comfort from the familiar rather than test their language on the unknown.²⁸

Especially for such verse writers of Irish extraction, Thomas Moore provided themes and styles appropriate to their mood. The first to betray Moore's influence was Edward O'Shaughnessy. He was transported from Dublin in 1824 but due to his education, was assigned to work for the Sydney Gazette and some time after his release, became the editor.²⁹ In the late 1820s he began publishing lyrics, inspired by a girl left behind in Ireland. Past times with her are sweetly remembered and inevitably contrasted with present ennui. In suitably wistful tones she is admonished not to forget,

That hour so sweet, when first we met,
Those smiles and tears we've had together.(30)

Such vocabulary is everywhere employed; ‘fondly cherished’, ‘warm blush of youth’, ‘flowers fade’, ‘bright scenes flown’ and so on also owe a debt to Moore. In particular, his frequent reflections on the morning sunlight of youth and the evening clouds of age recall ‘I saw from the beach’ or ‘Has sorrow thy young days shaded’, and his dwelling on the memory of ‘Affection's broken chain’ contains echoes of “Oft in the Stilly Night”.

Such unambiguously derivative verse was probably unavoidable from the pen of one who was more interested in the curative powers of writing than in developing an original style,³¹ and a similar conclusion can be drawn about a more accomplished poet, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. She had been born into an upper-middle-class Protestant family in County Armagh in 1796, but her sympathies were not Unionist.³² Support for the aims of the Volunteers, concern for the decline of Gaelic culture and a knowledge of the Irish language are all evident in poems written before she migrated to Australia.³³ She arrived in Sydney with her husband, a magistrate, in 1838, and within months was contributing a series of exile songs to local newspapers. As with O'Shaughnessy, in the foreground of her verse was the trauma of separation from family and friends. She also summoned up childhood times, and indulged the pain of nostalgia by recalling landscapes, especially around Rostrevor, which were dear to her. Like Moore, who responded emotionally to landscape rather than delineating it, she experienced a frisson from summoning to her mind what now appeared idyllic scenes:

'Tis morning! from their heather bed
          The curling mists arise
And circling dark Slieve Donard's head
          Ascend the drowsy skies.(34)

She did, however, go beyond Moore by juxtaposing the desert ‘here’ with the lush ‘there’. In “Tho the last glimpse of Erin” Moore vaguely envisaged ‘the gloom of some desert or cold rocky shore’,³⁵ but despite his own experience of exile in Europe, his imagination never left Ireland. His few exile poems seem written, as it were, on board ship, looking backwards.³⁶ He never explored the contrast between foreign places and those in Ireland. For Eliza Hamilton on the other hand, such a contrast was worth dwelling on:

Away! these clustering grapes and olives ripening round,
For the cloudless sky is brass, and she treads on iron ground
The bright Azelia blushes on its bed of burning sand,
But oh! the brook that gushes, in her own green land.(37)

A harsh land in which plants had to fight for survival, so unlike that soft Irish countryside with its gushing streams, seemed a suitable metaphor for a spirit now withering since removed from its native soil.

Despite an overwhelming longing for Ireland, she was not blind to future possibilities for this developing continent. So, she accepted an invitation from the composer, Isaac Nathan,³⁸ to write the words for a national song, ‘Star of the South’. But her vision of ‘Happy homes and free altars, broad land and bright skies’ was hardly original, even in the 1840s, and a somewhat patrician image of Australia with ‘soft flowing tresses’ and ‘proud eagle glance’ annoyed local critics.³⁹ The poet defended her song, but its poor reception may have alerted her to an underlying philistinism in Australian society, which, I suspect, she would have treated with disdain.⁴⁰ She was also disturbed by the callous attitudes towards the Aborigines, and her sensitive poems on their culture met with hostility.⁴¹ By the late 1840s, she seems to have abandoned poetry—she had exhausted her store of exile thoughts—and retreated instead to increasing her understanding of Aboriginal societies.⁴²

Ironically, her transfer of scholarly interest from one indigenous culture in decline (Gaelic) to another (Aboriginal) reflected a measure of assimilation she would not have acknowledged. In Australia she did choose to write poems on Aboriginal issues rather than reviving topics such as the need to restore the minstrelsy of Gaelic Ireland. And she was not alone in avoiding Gaelic topics. A review of Australian poetry confirms that until the 1840s very few poems were published on Ireland's cultural and heroic past.⁴³ Some writers were surely familiar with “Let Erin remember the days of old”, “The Harp that once”, or similar Moore airs, yet few chose to imitate them. One, “Eathlina's Lament”, published in 1825, is a rare exception. The poet declaims on Irish heroes of former times and the harp, now broken, which once sang of their victories:

Thro' thy halls Castle Connor, the harp once with pleasure
Would tell all the battles my father had seen;
Whilst princes have gather'd to list the soft measure,
And recall with delight the days that have been.(44)

The narrator is depicted wandering, a lonely Romantic figure, along a desolate Sydney beach, an appropriate location for such sombre thoughts. There was probably a personal context here; the poet was the daughter of William Gore, an Anglo-Irish gentleman and senior official under Governor Bligh, but by the 1820s, financially disgraced and his family forced to live north of Sydney.⁴⁵ His daughter at least had developed an antiquarian interest in Gaelic society, and felt that its despair matched her own. But she wrote no further poems on this theme.

One can speculate on reasons for this neglect of Irish heroic themes. Moore himself admitted that some of the Melodies which touched on Ireland's ‘national complaint’ were regarded by some in England as treasonable: ‘It has been accordingly said that the tendency of this publication is mischievous and that I have chosen these airs but as a vehicle of dangerous politics’.⁴⁶ While any censure was unlikely for long to outweigh popular acclaim in England, in penal colonies where a garrison mentality was never far beneath the surface, poetic attention to Irish heroes might be seen to have threatening implications for the present. The legacy of 1798 was difficult to live down and Irish emancipists and free settlers were barely tolerated by influential people who saw them as a threat to the ‘British way of life’.⁴⁷ Secondly, the number of Irish people in the colonies with a scholarly interest in Gaelic society must have been pitifully small. The Australian Dictionary of Biography indicates that until the 1840s there were few educated colonists of Irish origins, and middle-class settlers were more likely to have a mercantile rather than a cultural disposition. Most significantly perhaps, the general reading public had no interest in Ireland's ancient past. Brian Boru, Malachi, Tara, Kinkora, were not only remote in time, but their society was totally foreign to most residents in the antipodes who looked to England for their culture.

Neglect, however, did not persist beyond the mid-century. As historians have noted, the composition of the Irish population changed considerably from around 1840 when free settlers began arriving in huge numbers.⁴⁸ Between 1851 and 1861, for example, over 100,000 migrants arrived from Ireland, and the majority were far from the stereotypical Irish migrant of the famine years: an illiterate peasant. Most were literate, though unskilled, and as Patrick O'Farrell has stated, ‘particularly in the early forties, there was a leavening of the lower middle class and Irishmen of skill and attainment’.⁴⁹ These new migrants tended to be less integrationist and more assertive about Irish affairs than their predecessors. Australia might be a land of opportunity, and most would later integrate successfully, but they did seek to establish Ireland as an issue in colonial affairs. Daniel O'Connell was their hero, and Repeal of the Union their goal.

Newspapers sympathetic to Irish issues were launched: the Freeman's Journal (Sydney) in 1850, the Catholic Tribune (Melbourne) in 1853, the Advocate (Melbourne) in 1868 and Irish Harp (Adelaide) in 1869. Consequently, opportunities for publishing, and audiences for reading, poems with Irish themes increased. Whatever the subject of the poems, and they ranged from St Patrick's Day to the horrors of the famine to the death of O'Connell, images and motifs which owed a debt to Moore's Irish Melodies continually recur. Lines are filled with words and phrases such as ‘Erin's isle’, ‘song of the harp’, ‘chains’, ‘brave chieftains’, ‘sighs’, ‘woes’, ‘light of liberty’; and those haunting cadences, so effectively used by Moore to emphasise a tone of lament, are frequently adopted. ‘Lines on hearing of the death of O'Connell’ is a typical example:

As Hibernia the woes of her sons sat bewailing,
Her heart steep'd in sadness, her eyes founts of tears,
On an emerald car thro' the air there came sailing
An angel, whose sad looks but heightened her fears …
As the voice of the tempest his words now resounded,
Till around Erin's isle the fell tidings had spread.
And the voices of millions in anguish resounded,
‘Our Chieftain is gone—our O'Connell is dead’.(50)

One image, illustrated above, was prominent in these poems. Ireland was represented as woman, specifically as cherished mother with her children in these distant colonies distressed at her plight. The personification was hardly original in the 1840s, since Moore had popularised it in such lyrics as “Remember thee” (1818), but it did promote a sentimental attachment to Ireland. Poets could share with their audiences an anxiety for a mother, perpetually sad having been deceived by a masculine and perfidious Albion. Erin, they protested, was long-suffering and worthy of unswerving loyalty from her children here in Australia who could still assist her in this hour of need. Although they were separated from their loving mother, affection and especially charity would increase, not diminish.⁵¹

Moore himself became identified with the image in the following poem written in Brisbane in 1879:

True bard of our land, shall we ever forget
The bright wreath on the brow of our mother thou'st set?
In her chains and her grief she was dear to thy heart
And thy glory shall still of her fame be a part.
Farewell gentle minstrel! though far o'er the sea,
From the land of thy love her true children are we;
And as long as our race are brave, grateful and pure,
Shall be honour and praise to the memory of Moore.(52)

Moore is proudly acknowledged as dutiful son paying respect to his grieving mother, a respect which enhances his reputation amongst Irish Australians who, the poet notes, still retain their attachment to Ireland.

The appeal of such verses, however, remained limited to Irish migrants or to those of Irish descent. As the century developed, all literature that owed its origins to migrant homelands had to compete with a movement to concentrate on indigenous subjects. An article in the Australian Monthly, for example, adopted a strongly nationalist line:—‘a young and new nation … should in literature fling off the trammels of the systems elsewhere adopted, and give to its actions and thinking a style. And in poetry this must be done by at once flinging aside recollections of other scenery, and selecting both imagery and subjects from our own climate, natural objects and population.’⁵³ Irish subject matter was clearly of the ‘recollections’ type, although, interestingly, some Irish issues could develop an Australian dimension. The pursuit of liberty was one such issue, taken up, for instance, by Charles Harpur.

Harpur, one of the major poets of the colonial period in Australia,⁵⁴ is never considered in an Irish context, despite the fact that his father, an Irish convict, was also his teacher and an influence on his republican politics.⁵⁵ Nor has any association been made between the nationalist element in his politics and his reading of Moore. Yet the second in a series of ‘Rhymed Criticisms’ was addressed to Moore, and opened with a flourish of praise:

Bright, sparkling Moore! when first I heard him sing,
How daring seemed his Muse! how sweetly wildering!
Gods! what strong ecstasy my soul did seize
When first I read his matchless Melodies!(56)

Echoes of the Irish Melodies can be found in Harpur's work, especially in poems evoking places and friends from youth, but he did here admit that early enthusiasm waned when he judged that Moore's muse was more ‘Of rhetoric than of true poetic lore’. Nevertheless, the poem concluded with an emotive endorsement of Moore's ‘high and spirited praise of Liberty’. Commitment to liberty became the focus of Harpur's own political credo. Occasionally, he too declaimed on liberty for Ireland: his poem on Robert Emmet is presented as a riposte to ‘Oh breathe not his name’, the first stanza of which appears as an epigraph. Characteristically, Harpur is for thunderous protest:

Oh, why should the cold chain of silence be thrown
Round a name that must ever to glory belong?
Give me rather a war-trumpet's challenging tone
To enrap with that word the big feeling of wrong!(57)

Liberty, he believed, could be achieved only through action, not what he saw as acquiescence. Perhaps, he had not recalled the second stanza of Moore's lyric where Emmet's memory is believed to be quietly keeping the revolutionary spirit alive. More likely, he was predisposed towards action; another poem on the Repeal movement speaks of ‘crushed Ireland’ summoning up ‘retributive thunder’.⁵⁸

The Emmet poem concluded with the claim that ‘Liberty's tree shall find root in the blood of her martyrs’, and this image of liberty as a tree was one that recurred in Harpur's major Australian poems. It seemed as appropriate for Australia as Moore's ‘light of liberty’ did for Ireland. For Moore, the ‘light’ might break through the gloom of oppression; for Harpur, the ‘tree’ would be planted and flourish in a new land. In one often quoted poem, ‘The Tree of Liberty’, he explored his belief that liberty was ever a rarity in the old world, its ‘fruits’ only for the few, but here in Australia the ‘tree’ would flourish and produce ‘The fruit that blooms for all’.⁵⁹

Harpur preferred to concentrate on this promise of the new world rather than on the oppression of the old. He was optimistic about Australia's social and political future, and at times aggressively presented his nationalist vision which did make him enemies in conservative circles.⁶⁰ But he was undaunted, and continually lauded Australia as the only land where equality for all would prevail. In ‘The Emigrant's Vision’, for example, he focused on an exile, presumably from Ireland, receiving a vision while on board ship. As in the Gaelic aisling tradition, the vision is a goddess, but representing Australia, not Ireland; she is beckoning the dispossessed or downtrodden to settle in this new land where Liberty can be found, and where settlers can find material Plenty, ‘wedded to honest Endeavour’. When the dreamer awakes, he determines, ‘Be the home of my hope then Australia’.⁶¹ Unlike the exile in ‘As slow our ship’, he looks forward expectantly, not back.

Increasingly in the latter half of the century, Irish migrants adopted the decision of the dreamer in this poem. Looking forward meant getting a decent house, a steady job or piece of land, education and possible entry into the professions for the children, and taking an interest in local affairs. Funding of Catholic schools was an issue that linked many Irish to a common cause, but there were no distinct Irish communities, or ghettoes in cities, or Irish electorates.⁶² Despite complaints from some quarters about Irish exclusiveness, integration was achieved remarkably quickly.⁶³ And with integration, active involvement in Irish issues was difficult to sustain, despite visits by Home Rule politicians and others in the final years of the century. Of course, migrants continued to look back. For a time, there was even a kind of dual allegiance in evidence, an attractive condition to many, including William Carleton jun., son of the novelist, who proclaimed it in a poem, ‘The New Land and the Old’:

When Fortune's smile hath found us
          And banished care and fear,
When happy homes surround us
          And those we love are near,
The young shall pause and listen
          To hear the story told
How they should love the new land
          But doubly love the old.(64)

Carleton was investing a natural stage in the integration of an Irish migrant with a romantic aura. He proudly displayed the achievement of material well-being, followed by domestic bliss, and time to relax from ‘getting on’, time to ensure that the young in particular did not lose touch with their cultural origins.

For Irish Australians looking back was characterised by sentimentality. And what better way to satisfy that nostalgia for the old country than by singing Moore's melodies. Evergreen favourites such as “Oft in the Stilly Night” and “'Tis the last rose of summer” captured that mood which the migrant wanted to enjoy in reflective moments. These airs summoned up a moment of stillness, a moment for a wave of memories of childhood, of family forgotten or friendships decayed by long absence, to sweep over the listener. The elegaic tone was so captivating to many for whom Ireland was ever fixed in the mind as a place of happy childhood, soft evening light and sweet birds singing. Like the narrator, an individual could temporarily adopt a pose of loneliness and wistfulness before returning to the hurly-burly of daily life. Just such a migrant was Danny DeLacy, the central character in Miles Franklin's novel All That Swagger. A pioneer in the outback and eventually a patriarch of a large Australian family, he turns maudlin in his old age, and at any festivity breaks into singing Moore songs, especially “Those Evening Bells”:

… this song suddenly struck a deep chord in his being, and filled him with wistfulness. He was startled to find that the glow of life, in which he had walked as in dawn light, had stealthily slipped behind him, and that he had to look over his shoulder to behold it as he went on into the night.⁶⁵

That emotional jolt bringing with it an awareness of mortality was no doubt the experience of many Irish as they momentarily stepped outside their colonial lives to listen to Moore's lyrics.

Although no Irish occasion, especially St Patrick's day concerts,⁶⁶ was complete without the rendition of Moore's melodies, there was one local poet, firmly in his tradition, who achieved a measure of popularity. She was Eva Mary O'Doherty, or ‘Eva of the Nation’ as she was known, the wife of Kevin Izod O'Doherty, a transported 1848 rebel who later became a highly regarded surgeon and public figure in Brisbane.⁶⁷ She was long renowned for her patriotic achievements—her stirring political contributions to the Nation had earned her the sobriquet long before she came to Queensland—and her highly publicised marriage to a hero of the 1848 rebellion stimulated interest in her poetry. An acquaintance, Spencer Browne, wrote in his memoirs that her work was ‘viewed through glasses violet-hued by sympathy, and that tenderness coming from the old assessment of the world's love for lovers’.⁶⁸ Perhaps. Whatever the reason, her patriotic songs, exile lyrics and love poems according to one literary historian ‘had an exceptional vogue during her lifetime’.⁶⁹

A Queensland poet, George Vowles, in a paean to his native Brisbane paused to pay homage to Eva and her contribution to Queensland verse:

Long may my country such high honour know!
          And long may Eva live to tune her lyre
And sing of Shannon's banks and Erin's woe,
          A credit to her island and her sire.(70)

Vowles alluded to two separate aspects of Eva's verse: ‘Shannon's banks’ and ‘Erin's woe’. Her thoughts on ‘Erin's woe’ had often produced poems of defiance against British oppression, poems with titles such as ‘The Felon’, ‘The Men in Gaol for Ireland’, ‘National March’,⁷¹ which in strident tones called on the men and women of Ireland to cast off slavery and develop national self-esteem. But a more reflective mood was evident in ‘The Fallen Queen’, for instance, which in a style reminiscent of Moore, centred on a personification of Ireland as queen, once proud but now signified by ruin and decay. These poems were mainly written in Ireland, but those on ‘Shannon's banks’ date from her years in Australia. In these she concentrated on intensely-realised memories of Irish scenes, where glad times in childhood spent beside burbling streams were recalled and contrasted with migrant weariness:

Still is the blackbird singing
          The live-long day.
Still are the waters ringing
          This golden May.
But ah! not for me that singing,
Nor the stream with its silver ringing,
Though my heart to that spot is clinging
          Far, far away!(72)

Such flourishes of emotionalism may strike a modern reader as overdone or even false, but one hundred years ago they were not so considered. On the contrary, that heart-rending rhetoric that pervades these verses partly accounted for her popularity amongst Irish Australians. Her recollections of Irish scenes with Moore-like fresh breezes, mellow light and summer evenings were often combined with an appealing sensuous element: ‘We taste a beauty which is almost pain’, for example. On occasion, she even indulged in a train of thought in which Ireland was enchanted, paradisal, almost a vision of Heaven itself. For Eva, the land possessed:

The choral strain of living waters,
          Pervading all the earth and air;
Mysterious music still that utters
Eternal thoughts of praise and prayer!(73)

In her best-known poem, ‘Queensland’, she turned to her adopted land but could not avoid implying a contrast between its barrenness and Irish richness. It was not just the harshness of the landscape, something that Eliza Hamilton complained of, but that the country was bereft of culture and history. Like other migrants, she could praise the bright, blue sky and benevolent climate, but essentially Australia was a terra nullius in terms of history and associations attached to place:

No poet-fancies o'er thy skies
Spread tints that hallow, live for ever;
No old tradition's magic lies
On mountain, vale and river.
There is no heart within thy breast,
No classic charms of memories hoary,
No footprint hath old time imprest
On thee of song or story.(74)

Few migrants shared Eliza Hamilton's interest in Aboriginal societies, and such thoughts as Eva's must have occurred to many. She was indeed repeating the views of Barron Field fifty years earlier: Australia lacked the stuff of poetry. Specifically however, she was tapping a wellspring of Irish feeling. With all the opportunities for material success accepted, the new country had not accrued those personal or cultural associations which were important for the Irish in signifying a particular location as ‘home’.⁷⁵ That heritage extolled by Eva and by Moore was therefore attractive not just because it was Irish, but also because the Irish psyche could not for some time construct anything local to compare with it.

But this situation could not continue indefinitely. In Patrick White's Voss, a character comments, ‘A pity that you huddle … your country is of great subtlety’.⁷⁶ Eva O'Doherty and others who indulged in the sentimental backward look were, metaphorically, huddling, refusing to consider the creative potential of the new land. In the final decades of the century, Australia forced itself on the consciousness of writers. The novelist Marcus Clarke developed those nationalist sentiments expressed in the Australian Monthly by requesting poets not to dwell on ‘sunsets by some ruined chapel on the margin of an Irish lake’ but to attend to the local:

… this our native or adopted land has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us. Do we need a poet to interpret Nature's teachings, we must look into our own hearts, if perchance we may find a poet there.⁷⁷

Such advice was not ignored by Irish Australian poets, and as the interpreters of integration established themselves, the influence of Moore waned. For popular consumption, the ballad tradition, once associated with protest, took on more benign themes focusing especially on the trials and vagaries of life in the outback. John O'Brien's songs in Around the Boree Log, for example, with their humorous and quintessentially Australian evocations of Irish small settlers, in time became as widely performed as those of Moore.⁷⁸ More literary poets such as Victor Daley and Roderic Quinn⁷⁹ drew on contemporary Irish styles and motifs and gave them a local colouring. To these poets around the turn of the century, Moore was truly in the distant past, someone with no influence on an Australia asserting its identity.

However, this evolution in Australian poetry did not mean that the Irish Melodies ceased to find an audience among Irish Australians. On the contrary, popular admiration for Moore increased in the final decades of the century. Even those songs of liberty such as “Let Erin remember” and “The minstrel boy”, which in earlier generations were unacceptable in colonial society, were now taken up not only by those asserting their Irish heritage but by many who supported liberty for Australia and a weakening of imperial ties.⁸⁰ It is possible to measure the acclaim accorded to Moore by comparing the centenary celebrations for his birth with those for another Irishman, Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell may have been a hero to the migrants of the mid-century, but his political methods had little influence on Irish Australia. At best he was a hero of the past, someone to place beside Emmet and Tone. At worst, his aggressive nationalism was seen as irrelevant for an Irish community that wished quietly to integrate into the evolving Australian society.⁸¹ His centenary celebrations in 1875 were distinctly Irish and Catholic. J. T. Reilly's record of the O'Connell festival held in Perth is characteristic: ‘Faith and Fatherland were pleasingly represented’; ‘hundreds of patriotic individuals (attended) in honour of Ireland's great patriot’, and so forth.⁸² There was no mention of Australia. Very different, and much more successful, were the celebrations for Moore four years later. At concerts throughout the land, thousands of Irish people, together with English, Scottish and native-born Australians, gathered to listen to speeches eulogising a great lyric poet, and to hear once more a selection of those melodies.⁸³ Politicians, clergymen and people of all ranks were keen to pay homage to a poet whom everyone could praise. No one would deny that these were Irish occasions, another opportunity to grow nostalgic about the old country while listening to “Tho' the last glimpse of Erin”, for example; an opportunity too for local poets to reflect the general mood by composing verses in honour of Moore and attachment to Ireland. But the Irish could approve the Australian dimension to these celebrations. The melodies with their nostalgia for places far away and their muted demands for liberty had found a general audience. Indeed, it could be claimed they were even smoothing the passage of the Irish into these British colonies. Toasts to Moore and to Ireland were followed by ‘The Land we live in’ and ‘Queen Victoria’; and ‘God Save the Queen’ concluded the evening's proceedings without a hint of incongruity. A speaker in Adelaide summed up the national approbation: ‘We honour him … because we English, Irish, Scotch, Colonials, one and all uniting here beneath the Southern Cross, … are willing and proud to recognize genius, though it shines upon us rarely’.⁸⁴

During his visit to Australia in 1885, the dramatist, Dion Boucicault, was fulsome in his praise for the achievements of Irish Australia: ‘They were poor and unappreciated at home; but they came here, and what is the result? They prove themselves to be most valuable citizens—good, loyal, hard-working members of your great progressive communities’.⁸⁵ Words indeed that the Irish were delighted to hear, a confirmation that integration had been accomplished. Few Irish now felt themselves on the margins of this society, or concentrated their minds solely on the intricacies of Irish affairs. In those years of dual allegiance, most were Australian first and Irish second. Yet inevitably images of a green and pleasant land would continue to surface, especially when the Irish, on their own or with other migrants, paused to recall their past. Coming together for concerts in town halls or social ‘occasions’ in the outback meant singing, and singing meant Moore's Melodies. Moore was ever the poet of the public occasion. Local imitators such as Edward O'Shaughnessy, Eliza Hamilton, Eva O'Doherty and a host of anonymous poets might for a time reflect a sentimental longing, but their literary efforts could never replace the primacy accorded to Moore. And in time they were replaced by poets who would follow Harpur and focus on indigenous subject matter. But the wistful, nostalgic tones of Moore were not forgotten. Well into the twentieth century, Australians continued to be captivated by lyrics about a land most had never seen. Certainly, many would have applauded the claim of Kevin O'Doherty, speaking at the Brisbane centenary in 1879, that ‘in the drawing rooms of the rich and the humble homes of the poor, the story of Ireland (would) be told and sung in Moore's glowing language to untold generations’.⁸⁶

Notes

1. Ulysses, The Corrected Text, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 133.

2. For Joyce's admiration for Moore see Thérèse Tessier, The bard of Erin: a study of Thomas Moore's ‘Irish Melodies’ (1808-1934), Institut Für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Salzburg, 1981, pp. 147-52; Terence De Vere White, Tom Moore: the Irish poet, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977, pp. 75-6. It is revealing of Joyce's knowledge of Moore that the first line from every song in the Irish Melodies is incorporated into Finnegans Wake.

3. See White, Tom Moore, pp. xi-xiii.

4. Information provided to the present writer by the Ballarat Library and Ballarat Historical Society, 4 October 1991. This was not the only statue outside Ireland; a bust of the poet was unveiled in Central Park, New York in 1880. See Tessier, Bard of Erin, p. 136.

5. The citizens of Ballarat later decided to erect a statue to Queen Victoria instead of one to Shakespeare. The positioning of the statues on Sturt Street has led to wry comments in recent years, especially among literary theorists who see special signification in Victoria facing Burns but with her back to Moore!

6. In a letter written from Cove Harbour in 1824, Captain Rock declared, ‘For myself, I am grown old in the service—repose has at length become welcome, if not esential to me; and when all that a man wishes is to be able to say, “inveni Portum”, Port Jackson [Sydney] perhaps will do as well as any other’ (Memoirs of Captain Rock: the celebrated Irish chieftain, Longmans, London, 1874, p. 373). Clearly, Captain Rock, and perhaps his creator, knew little about the penal colony at Port Jackson; ‘repose’ is a word few would have used. For a study of this work see Patrick O'Sullivan, ‘A literary difficulty in explaining Ireland: Tom Moore and Captain Rock, 1824’ in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939, Pinter, London, 1989, pp. 239ff.

7. See Douglas Pike (ed.), Australian dictionary of biography, Vol. 5, 1851-90, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 364-66. O'Loghlen was a member of the Victorian parliament for many years and premier from 1881 to 1883.

8. Report in the Ballarat Star, 4 December 1889, p. 4.

9. Ballarat Star, p. 4

10. Ballarat Star, p. 4. At a concert held in the Academy of Music, Ballarat, on 3 December, an ‘Ode to Tom Moore’ by Denis Florence McCarthy was recited.

11. Sydney Gazette, 9 December 1820, p. 4.

12. George Howe worked on The Times before being transported in 1799. He was the first government printer in New South Wales and editor of the Gazette from its founding in 1803 until his death in 1821. In 1819 he published the first book of poetry in Australia, First fruits of Australian Poetry, by Barron Field.

13. For further information on the early history of Australia see C. M. H. Clark, A history of Australia, Vol 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962; Robert Hughes, The fatal shore, Pan Books, London, 1987, especially pp. 323-67; for a contemporary account of the society see W. C. Wentworth, A statistical, historical and political description of the colony of New South Wales and its dependent settlements in Van Diemen's Land, 1819, Griffin Press, Adelaide, 1978.

14. Reprinted in Irish Melodies, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1852, p. 153. All subsequent references in the chapter are from this edition. (The quotation in the chapter title is from ‘Oh! blame not the bard’, p. 29.)

15. Two years in New South Wales, 1827, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1966, p. 34. Visitors tended to criticise the quality of cultural life in particular. In the 1840s Louisa Meredith could still complain: ‘… not a question is heard relative to English literature or art; far less a remark on any political event, of however important a nature:- not a syllable that betrays thought’ (Notes and sketches of New South Wales during residence of that colony from 1839-1844, 1844, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1973, pp. 49-50.

16. See Con Costello, ‘The convicts: transportation from Ireland’ in Colm Kiernan (ed.), Ireland and Australia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984, pp. 12-22; Patrick, O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 1987, pp. 22-53; Robert Hughes, The fatal shore, pp. 187-94.

17. For details of this census see M. R. Sainty, and K. A. Johnson (eds), Census of New South Wales, November 1828, Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1980. The vast majority of Irish convicts were sent to New South Wales; the Irish element in Van Diemen's Land was less than 10 per cent. See O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, p. 36.

18. See Patrick O'Farrell, Vanished kingdoms: Irish in Australia and New Zealand, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 1990, pp. 1-21.

19. See P. Butterss, ‘“Convicted by laws of England's hostile crown”: popular convict verse’ in Oliver MacDonagh and W. F. Mandle, Irish Australian Studies, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 19. The following description of seventeenth-century tories is particularly apt for Australian bushrangers two hundred years later: ‘The tories were outlaws whose natural taste for robbery was strengthened by resentment against the new settlers and the regime that supported them. In spite of their depredations, they acquired something of a patriotic character among the native Irish’ (J. C. Beckett, The making of modern Ireland 1603-1923, Faber, London, 1966, p. 105.

20. Two years in New South Wales, p. 282.

21. A belief that ‘Bold Jack Donahoe’ was banned has long been held, but the evidence is now thought to be suspect. There may have been an unofficial suppression, but as Phil Butterss has indicated, the Historical records of Australia, Series 1, Vol. XV, p. 906, do not clearly specify that the ballad was banned (Letter to the present writer, 11 November 1991).

22. The first quotation is from ‘Bold Jack Donohoe’, in D. Stewart and N. Keesing, Old bush songs and rhymes of colonial times, Angus and Robertson, 1957, p. 36; the second is from ‘Labouring with the hoe’, in John Meredith and Rex Whalan, Frank the poet, Red Rooster Press, Melbourne, 1979, p. 39. Frank the poet contains a biography of this, the best-known Irish writer of convict ballads.

23. From ‘Jack Donahue and gang’, in Old bush songs, p. 37. A comment on this ballad suggests it was composed by Donahue himself. Another version, entitled ‘Old Ireland lies groaning’, is printed in Old bush songs, pp. 38-9.

24. The version printed is from Irish Melodies, pp. 83-4. The plagiarised version in the Sydney Gazette substituted ‘pendant’ for ‘pennant’ (line 3), ‘those’ for ‘all’ (line 5) and ‘when'er’ for ‘as on’ (line 7).

25. Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1987, p. 3; p. 13.

26. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 1923, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1950, p. 306.

27. Barron Field, ‘On reading the controversy between Lord Byron and Mr Bowles’, 1819, reprinted in Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell, Bards in the wilderness: Australian colonial poetry to 1920, Nelson, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 18-19.

28. The number of newspapers, and the number of original poems published in them, greatly increased from the mid-1820s. See E. Webby, Early Australian poetry: an annotated bibliography, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982.

29. See Douglas Pike. (ed.), Australian dictionary of biography, Vol. 2, 1788-1850, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 304-5.

30. Edward O'Shaughnessy, ‘Stanzas to———’, Sydney Gazette, 6 January 1829, p. 4.

31. O'Shaughnessy was very limited in his subject matter and after a few years ceased writing verse.

32. See Margaret DeSalis, Two early colonials, n. p., Sydney, 1967.

33. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's poems are available in manuscript, Mitchell Library, Sydney. A number of the early poems were published in Sydney newspapers.

34. ‘Morning on Rostrevor Mountain’, The Atlas (Sydney), 26 April 1845, p. 257.

35. Irish Melodies, p. 9.

36. See, for example, ‘Farewell! but whenever you welcome the hour’ (pp. 64-5), ‘As slow our ship’ (pp. 83-4); ‘Come o'er the sea’ (pp. 68-70); ‘Sail on, sail on’ (pp. 96-7).

37. ‘Songs of an exile, No 7’, The Australian, 11 April 1840, p. 4.

38. See Pike, Australian dictionary of Biography, Vol. 2, pp. 279-80.

39. See DeSalis, Two early colonials, p. 109.

40. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 1842, p. 3. Following Eliza Hamilton's request, the Herald published the words of the song.

41. Her interest in the plight of the Aborigines was aroused soon after her arrival in the colony by the publicity surrounding a massacre of natives at Myall Creek. She published what has become her best-known poem on this massacre, ‘The Aboriginal mother’, but at the time it was condemned in a patronising manner. Further poems on Aboriginal culture were also poorly received. See DeSalis, Two early colonials, pp. 102-8.

42. See L. E. Threlkeld, Reminiscences, cited in DeSalis, Two early colonials, pp. 106-8. Mrs Dunlop spent much of her time learning the language of the Aborigines in the district where she lived.

43. Webby, Early Australian poetry, passim.

44. The Australian, 8 September 1825, p. 3.

45. See Douglas Pike, Australian dictionary of biography, Vol. 1, 1788-1850, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966, pp. 459-60.

46. ‘Letter on music’, Irish Melodies, p. 153.

47. Chief proponent of an anti-Catholic/anti-Irish policy was Samuel Marsden, an influential evangelical clergyman. See A. T. Yarwood, Samuel Marsden: the great survivor, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 70-2, 78-9, 98-100.

48. See O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, pp. 54-114; J. O'Brien and P. Travers (eds), The Irish emigrant experience in Australia, Poolbeg, Dublin, 1991; C. McConville, Croppies, Celts and Catholics: the Irish in Australia, Edward Arnold, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 29-61.

49. O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, p. 59.

50. Written by ‘Celt’, published in The Sydney Chronicle, 18 September 1847, p. 4.

51. A number of poems in the 1840s were pleas for assistance for the victims of the Famine.

52. Written by ‘Thomasine’ (Hope Connolly), published in the Brisbane Courier, 29 May 1879, p. 3.

53. Cited in E. Webby, ‘Before the Bulletin: nineteenth-century literary journalism’ in Bruce Bennett (ed.) Cross currents: magazines and newspapers in Australian literature, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981, p. 24.

54. Judith Wright said of Harpur: he ‘was undoubtedly Australia's first poet of sustained significance, and in important respects he was also our most interesting nineteenth century poet’. See Charles Harpur, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1977, p. 3.

55. For Harpur's life see J. Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur: an Australian, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962.

56. ‘Moore’ in E. Perkins, (ed.) The poetical works of Charles Harpur, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984, pp. 815-17.

57. Perkins (ed.), Poetical works, p. 770.

58. First published in The Sydney Chronicle, 23 December 1847, p. 4. A later version of the poem, included in Perkins (ed.), Poetical works, p. 422, substitutes Poland for Ireland. The original version is reprinted in M. Ackland (ed.) Charles Harpur: selected poetry and prose, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1986, p. 73.

59. Perkins (ed.), Poetical works, pp. 9-10. On Harpur's use of the tree motif see M. Ackland, ‘Charles Harpur's Republicanism’, Westerly, Vol. 29, No. 3, October 1984, pp. 75-88.

60. See Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur, pp. 194-218.

61. Perkins (ed.), Poetical works, pp. 448-9.

62. Anthony Trollope provoked outrage amongst Irish Australians when he claimed there was an Irish quarter in Melbourne. See Australia and New Zealand, 1873, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1967, p. 375. For the Irish response see J. F. Hogan, The Irish in Australia, Ward and Downey, London, 1888, pp. 36-7. Hogan accused Trollope of ‘lying and unblushing effrontery’.

63. See Hogan, The Irish in Australia, passim; O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, pp. 247-8.

64. Advocate (Melbourne), 10 September 1870, p. 12. For information on Carleton see Hogan, The Irish in Australia, p. 337.

65. All that swagger, 1936, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984, p. 214.

66. See Oliver MacDonagh, ‘St Patrick's Day in Australia 1888’ in Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandle, P. Travers (eds), Irish culture and nationalism translated 1750-1950, Macmillan, London, 1983, pp. 76-80.

67. See Ross and Heather Patrick, Exiles undaunted: the Irish rebels Kevin and Eva O'Doherty, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989. Mary Anne Kelly, later O'Doherty, is so thoroughly known to history as ‘Eva’ that I have decided that it would be pedantic to call her anything else in this Chapter.

68. A journalist's memories, Read Press, Brisbane, 1927, p. 109.

69. Morris Miller, Australian literature 1795-1938, Vol. 1, 1940, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1973, p. 171.

70. ‘A sketch’, quoted by Henry Kellow, Queensland Poets, George G. Harrap, London, 1930, p. 102.

71. There were two published collections of Eva O'Doherty's poems, the first by Thomas, San Francisco, 1877; the second by M. H. Gill, Dublin 1909. Page references in this chapter are from the Dublin edition.

72. ‘Glenmaloe’, Poems, pp. 17-18.

73. ‘A flight across the sea’, Poems, pp. 63-4.

74. Poems, pp. 92-3, reprinted in Richard Jordan and Peter Pierce (eds), The poets' discovery: nineteenth-century Australia in verse, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 201-2.

75. See O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, p. 197: ‘Irish immigrants came from a country in which primary loyalties had been to family, then clan, then town, region, of at widest, county’.

76. Patrick White, Voss, 1957, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1960, p. 11. This novel is set in nineteenth-century Australia with Voss based on the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.

77. Preface to Gordon's Poems, 1876, reprinted in John Barnes (ed.) The writer in Australia: a collection of literary documents 1856 to 1964, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 33-7.

78. See F. Mecham, ‘John O'Brien’ and the Boree Log, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1981. Around the Boree Log was first published in 1921 and ran to many editions in Australia and later in North America.

79. For brief biographical information on these two poets see William H. Wilde et al, The Oxford companion to Australian literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p. 201 and p. 574.

80. See, for example, the following from the popular magazine, the Bulletin: ‘The policy of freedom is a policy which gives to a people … the direct government of its own land. Poland for the Poles, Egypt for the Egyptians, Ireland for the Irish and Australia for the Australians!’ Cited in S. Lawson, The Archibald paradox, Allen Lane, Ringwood Vic, 1983, p. 129.

81. See Patrick O'Farrell, ‘The image of O'Connell in Australia' in Donal McCartney (ed.), The world of Daniel O'Connell, Mercier Press, Dublin and Cork, 1980, pp. 112-24.

82. Reminiscences of fifty years in Western Australia, Sands and McDougall, Perth, 1903, pp. 138-9.

83. See reports in the Brisbane Courier, 29 May 1879, p. 5; The Argus, 29 May 1879, p. 6; The Age, 29 May 1879, p. 5; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1879, p. 6; Hobart Mercury, 29 May 1879, p. 2; South Australian Advertiser, 14 June 1879, p. 11.

84. South Australian Advertiser, p. 11.

85. Quoted in Hogan, Irish in Australia, p. 342.

86. Report in Brishane Courier, p. 5.