School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe Irish conceit: Ireland and the new Australian nationalism(Crossing Press, 2000)Michael’s narrative provides an example of the deployment of Ireland in the new narratives of nation generated by Australia’s new nationalist movements, especially as characterised in the One Nation Party of Pauline Hanson. In the various versions of this narrative I have recorded, we find similar structural elements. Firstly, a claim is made on Irish ancestry. Secondly, a story is told of a lost farm and the attempt to retrieve this farm through a land claim made on the Irish government. Thirdly, the narrative arrives at its denouement by condensing the Aboriginal history of dispossession and subsequent attempts to reclaim land within the greater history of Irish suffering, dispossession and the tragic impossibility of any form of redress for the Australian victims of the Irish diaspora. The mythologised history of Ireland, heavy with emotive and dramatic character, but deprived of any real historical actuality, is drawn into analogy with a compressed narrative of Aboriginal dispossession, colonisation and genocide drained of both historical and emotional content and registering only as a sub-plot, an ancillary tale of lesser suffering. The Irish narrative subsumes that of the ‘lesser’ story of Aboriginal dispossession, reforging a new narrative in which Irish dispossession assumes many of the features of Aboriginal dispossession. The Irish subjects of this narrative suffer the aggression of a British colonisation coloured by landmark features of Aboriginal dispossession. Real historical elements such as the taking of Aboriginal children from their families by the white Australian state, for example, enter the story as the experience of Irish Australians. Irish children, not Aboriginal children, are stolen and institutionalised by the British ‘so that they can lose their Irish accent’. The two narratives are condensed and reframed in order to resituate the Irish Australian as the victim of colonisation. In this process, a series of inversions occur. In the Irish-Australian narrative suffering is brought into the present. Massacres happen in living memory, and are witnessed by and perpetrated on the narrator’s immediate family. In the Aboriginal narrative a disembodied suffering occurs at the limit of Australian history, outside human memory and human experience. In the Irish-Australian narrative suffering is perpetrated on the innocent victims of British aggression; in the Aboriginal narrative such acts are the result of the indigence, violence and barbarity of the Aborigines. Michael’s narrative is actually very unusual in that he names both his father and his father’s mates as responsible for the taking of children, but this act floats out of real time in its ‘all the time’ location.
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Item'The first white man born': contesting the 'stolen generations' narrative in Australia(Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004)The Australian political landscape from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was periodically dominated by issues relating to contested versions of its colonial past in conjunction with a discussion on the legal and human rights of indigenous communities within the nation-state. Key moments within this discourse included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (established in 1987), the Bicentennial “celebrations” of 1988, the High Court’s Mabo land rights decision of 1992 (and subsequent Native Title amendments), and the reception of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which was the published outcome of a HREOC inquiry into the history of removing indigenous children from their families and communities during the twentieth century.
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ItemReturning to country(Scribe Publications, 2001)As this history began - with journeys - so it will end. In February 2001 Tony Birch, writer, historian and former senior curator with Museum Victoria, rode into Melbourne from the north west. His tram wound along a route once familiar to Wurundjeri people travelling to Mt William - traversing the plain just to the east of the Moonee Ponds Creek and Coonan’s Hill, before veering away towards the central city. Along the way, in Royal Park, still stand a few eucalypts old enough to bear witness to all these comings and goings.