Irish History Matters by Brian M. Walker

Author:Brian M. Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Australia

We also find important readjustments in academic and public perceptions of the Irish in Australia: by the early twenty-first century it was estimated that up to a third of the Australian population had some Irish ancestry.27 In 1986 eminent Australian Church historian Patrick O’Farrell published The Irish in Australia, to be followed by a number of major chapters on the Irish in Australia and New Zealand in two volumes of A New History of Ireland.28 This work pays only minor attention to Protestant emigrants in Australia. At the beginning of his chapter on the period 1870–1990 in volume six of A New History of Ireland, for example, he remarks that ‘the usual means of tracing the Irish group is to take advantage of the strong correlation between Irishness and Catholicism’.29 He then proceeds to devote almost the entire chapter to the Irish Catholic community in Australia. In a footnote he refers to ‘the significant (up to 20 per cent) element of Irish in Australia who were Anglo Irish or Ulster Protestant’, but he says very little about them.30

This approach, however, came under challenge from a number of younger Australian historians. In 1990 Gordon Forth protested that ‘until recently most Australian historians … seem to have regarded individual Anglo Irish as English who just happen to have been born in Ireland’.31 In 1994 a major study by David Fitzpatrick appeared, entitled Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia, which looked at correspondence from nineteenth-century emigrants, including Protestant as well as Catholic writers. In his introduction to this volume he stressed that ‘no study of the Irish in Australia should ignore the experience of Protestant settlers including those of humble background whose performance in Australia probably differed little from that of Irish Catholics’.32 His findings showed that in the nineteenth century the Protestant Irish had a very similar identification with their Irish home to the Catholic Irish.

Among the Irish emigrants to Australia it is clear that Catholics were the largest section, but Protestant numbers were still significant. It is reckoned that Protestants made up about 20 per cent of total Irish immigration; we may note that the 1911 census recorded that in that year nearly 30 per cent of Irish-born Australians were Protestant.33 Among the Protestant Irish immigrants, Anglicans were the major single element; many came from Ulster but also from other parts of Ireland. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, a new important, political and religious sense of Irish identity emerged in Australia, which did not include Irish Protestants. Home Rule for Ireland won enthusiastic supporters among the Catholic Irish and a strong Irish Catholic religious community developed, partly in response to the dominant Protestant culture and society in Australia. From the 1920s onwards this Irish Catholic community was identified with the Labour party in Australia. As regards Irish identity in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell has described how the Catholic Australian community of Irish descent that stabilised its character in the late 1920s

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