Antipodal Ireland and Tasmanian Underworlds: John Mitchel and William Moore Ferrar

This article explores the seemingly chance parallels between the lives of Irish political prisoners sent to Van Diemen’s Land in the mid-nineteenth century, some of whom wrote about their experience in Tasmania, and an instance of the literary re-imagining of the geography and landscape of central Tasmania by the Irish immigrant writer William Moore Ferrar. These originally Irish transplants to Tasmania knew little, if anything, about each other even though they lived in close proximity over several years and in one of the most remote locations of British colonial settlement. This discussion begins with the associative literary links in their writings between both the political contentions of the subjugated Ireland they had experienced, and that they remembered, and the remote locations in which they found themselves sometimes by choice and for life, sometimes for shorter periods of imprisonment and exile. These writers’ literal and literary geographies vary in their calculus…