Blood and Names: Spectres of Irishness in Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South Trilogy

Irishness is a pervasive and yet spectral force driving Ruth Park’s most famous novel, The Harp in the South (1948).¹ It is in the title – the harp being an ancient symbol of Ireland – and in the resonant first line that establishes a bird’s eye view of the scene: ‘The Hills are full of Irish people’ (1). Park’s depictions of Irishness and the characterology she deploys are not sui generis; rather, they draw from a circulating transnational store of imagery and associations with a long genealogy. Representations and images of the Irish as variously barbaric, childlike, effeminate, wild, spiritual, poetic, and emotional date back to Geraldus of Wales, the Norman historian of the twelfth century. The promulgation of Irish people and custom as irrational and uncivilised undergirded the violent English plantations of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as cognate tropes and binaries would later justify the expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In more benign forms, such representations fed into nineteenth-century discourses of Celticism, as advanced by Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, by which the Celtic character or temperament is highly gendered, and the spiritual and emotional Celt softens the solid, practical, and masculine Anglo-Saxon character.² Yet, if Ireland was, as Engels famously put it in an 1856 letter to Marx, the ‘earliest English colony’, Irish people were also at the centre of the British imperial project, serving as colonial administrators, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries (Marx 49).

The spread of the Irish diaspora, especially after the Great Famine in the 1840s and the development of mass-produced print technology around the British empire, led to Irish images, tropes and stereotypes spreading to all corners, just like the Irish themselves. These could be negative – the notorious simian Irish in Punch magazine, the buffoonish stage Irishman – or more flattering, sentimental, winsome and nostalgic images even consumed by the Irish themselves.³ The Irish abroad often maintained a sense of cohesion and identity through oral culture, through tales of rebellion and romance, and above all through songs and balladry.

This dual portrayal of the Irish is evident in The Harp trilogy and many aspects of the inhabitants of Surry Hills are often explicitly or implicitly ascribed to their Irishness: their passion and emotional intensity, their verbal facility and imaginative excess, their fondness for alcohol, nostalgia and nationalism – though whether these are hereditarian or enculturated, blood or community, is a moot question. Often these attributes mingle and merge with points of difference, even conflict. Consider, for instance, the character of Jer in Missus (1985), the third book in Park’s Harp trilogy. This physically impaired but mentally agile boy has a supposedly Irish-inherited gift for storytelling, a proclivity for Thomas Moore’s Irish melodies and William Balfe’s operatic arias – staples of Anglophone diasporic Irishness. Jer is ‘a come-ye-all, a storyteller’, a florid inventor of his own past and hence a highly Irish-ised character (11). But he is also racially different – ‘a dark elvish thing with its feet back to front’ – who inspires a furious suspicion in his father such that he accuses his wife of ‘fathering a cuckoo on him’ (5). As we will see, racial alterity is also a motif in the earlier novels in relation to Charlie, a character in whom Irishness and Aboriginality coalesce.

The Irish characters in these novels – many of them first or second generation – are not presented as, and nor do they see themselves as, immigrants or outsiders, even as they see themselves as Irish. This ambivalence in terms of their national allegiances is not experienced as such. Indeed, they are quick to talk derisively about ‘foreigners’ when first encountering other immigrants, like Jimmy Lick, the Chinese grocer who moves next door, or the Dutch sailors who will assault Roie and cause her miscarriage, though this xenophobia does not run deep. If the Irish underclass who populate the Hills in The Harp are somehow other, it is an internal otherness, a sub-species of an emerging Australianness that is simultaneously merging into it, even if it occasionally erupts into ethnic self-assertion. From its earliest reception, moreover, this novel came to be understood as a mirror to urban Australian life, a text of national definition. Paul Genoni’s investigation of the composition and reception history of The Harp illustrates that the controversy that it generated at that time was largely due to how it reflected on Australia, or how Australia was projected onto the world. It is curious that what would come to be known as an Australian classic could be so tightly focused on a close-knit Irish-Australian community. It begs questions about how understandings of Australianness and Irishness intersected with or influenced each other, and gestures towards the role of Irishness in the development of not only an Australian literary tradition, but also of a post-war Australian imaginary.

The Harp was published in 1948, its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange, the following year and the much later prequel, Missus, was published in 1985. The first novel follows the Darcy family – Hughie, the hard-drinking father, Mumma, his long-suffering and religiously devout wife, and their two daughters, Roie and Dolour. We never meet their brother, Thady, who had disappeared at the age of six, but his presence haunts the novel, ‘like a ghost who is not dead’ (3). The Darcys share their home at Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street with two lodgers, Mr Patrick Diamond, a fiery Ulster Protestant, and Miss Sheily who lives with her severely disabled son, Johnny, who dies early in the novel, after being hit by a truck on Plymouth Street. This family unit therefore is both deficient and superfluous, perforated in ways that trouble its integrity and self-identity. The novel concludes with the marriage of Roie Darcy and Charlie Rothe, a man of Indigenous heritage with an unknown past.

Poor Man’s Orange continues the story of the Darcy family and takes a darker turn. Mr Diamond takes his own life early in the novel. Roie, who gives birth to her and Charlie’s child, Moira, at the end of The Harp, dies in childbirth with Michael, their second child, becoming another spectral presence. Under Hughie’s influence, Charlie turns to alcohol in his grief and the child, Moira, becomes increasingly uncontrollable. Hughie’s bereavement leads to him finding what little solace he can with a young Italian prostitute – Florentina. Dolour, despite being smart and ambitious, is forced to leave school due to an eye disease that is never properly treated. The novel closes with Dolour and Charlie falling in love and hoping for a better future outside the slum.

Missus, as previously mentioned, was not published until 1985, and is a prequel to The Harp in the South. It takes us away from the Surry Hill slums to rural New South Wales, telling the family’s backstory and tracing the fortunes of the Darcys and the Kilkers. It reveals the unhappy marriage of Hughie’s parents and his unbreakable loyalty to his crippled, dark-skinned brother, Jer. We meet a younger version of Mumma’s mother, Ina, and her husband, John, and discover the tortuous path by which Hughie and Margaret find each other and move to Sydney. If The Harp in the South asserts the Irishness of Surry Hills, then Missus, published nearly 40 years later, registers changing politics of recognition around Australian identity, beginning with a strong acknowledgement of the British imperialist underpinnings of the settler-colonial state. Hugh Darcy and Margaret Kilker are both born in the fictional NSW town of Trafalgar, settled by a veteran of that battle, whose militarism and imperialism take on a horrific insouciance around Aboriginal lives:

The natives were a trouble at first, believing the sheep to belong to everyone, and much more easily speared than kangaroos. But the master of Trafalgar made short work of them, by inviting them to hang around waiting for white man’s titbits, and then feeding them with flour cakes primed with strychnine. (1)

This more explicit assertion of the dispossession underlying settler Australia, at least initially in this novel, also brings into relief an ideological function of Irishness that was always present in the trilogy: Irish settlers are themselves part of the British imperial project but, crucially, are also politically subjugated victims of brutal wars of conquest at the hands of the British, whose military resistance is romanticised in song and story. In all three of the novels, the Irish roots of the characters are emphasised: both those who are Irish born, like Grandma – a refugee from the Irish potato famine – and those who are first and second generation Australian. What this Irishness means is often embroidered in stereotype and a sort of primitivism or vitalism that reproduces well-worn tropes about fiery Irish eloquence. Irishness is conceived both in hereditarian and in culturalist terms, an ambivalence to which we will return. By the opening pages of Poor Man’s Orange, it becomes something that is pervasive but unconscious, both ancestral and spectral, as evidenced in the following:

The Irish in these people was like an old song, remembered only by the blood that ran deep and melancholy in veins for two generations Australian .... The great music that had clanged across the world, of lion voice of missionary, of sword and stylus; the music that spoke aloud in the insurrection in the holds where the emigrants sweltered in vermin and hunger – this music was heard in Plymouth Street, Surry Hills, and was unrecognised. (7)

And how could Mumma, flapping about the house in her old slippers, turning the mattresses and exclaiming at the clouds of dust in old, apt, unique phrases that came to her tongue unbidden as birds, know that those same phrases had been used for centuries, rising out of the brilliant logic of the Irish? (8)

Only in the little girl, Dolour, lying on her stomach and picking her face before a yellow corner of looking-glass, was the fierce positivity of the Celt, a surging energy that made her long for the world she did not know, for thoughts she could not yet comprehend, for experience she could not yet encompass. In her was the infinite delicacy of feeling of the Irish, the very halt of the raindrop before it rolls down the stem, the spin of light on the knife blade, the tremble of the wind harp’s string as the blown air touches. (8)

Despite the ostensibly residual Irish qualities of these figures, however, the characters in The Harp are also decidedly Australian. Indeed, one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of these novels is their role in articulating an emerging Australian imaginary. And while the Irish in Australia had been subject to snobbery and anti-Catholic sectarianism – especially during the First World War, when their loyalty to Empire became suspect – The Harp and Poor Man’s Orange are set post-Second World War, at a time when Irish migration had slowed, and sectarian unrest was beginning to fade in the face of an imminent influx of European migrants. The novel, then, is set at a time when ‘who belongs’ is fluid and unstable, and the question of primacy, of firstness and secondness, as Monique Rooney argues, is pressingly relevant (Rooney).

In considering the way the novels fold Irishness into an emergent Australianness, it is also worth noting what aspects of Irish diasporic experience are excluded. There is scant anti-Irish sectarianism depicted in the novels, though we know that sectarian tension and anti-Catholicism was a major force in the history of British Australia until the 1970s (O’Farrell; Malcolm and Hall). Instead, in this rather insulated community, sectarian strife is defanged and shown in comical mode, when the Orangeman, Mr Diamond, drunkenly lambasts the Papists on St Patrick’s Day, and returns to being best buddies with Hughie the day after. At the end of The Harp, in comic reversal, he converts to Catholicism himself. There is also almost no depiction of the Irish involvement in political issues: in the union movement, in Labour or even in church politics, or in political causes in Ireland, and there is little exploration of Irish political affiliation beyond sentimental balladry. During the raucous new year celebrations, which sees multi-ethnic, working-class Surry Hills face off against the forces of law and order, Grandma tries to throw a potato at the police – a resonant weapon in Irish terms – until she is disarmed by Mumma. ‘Grandma was bereaved, for she came from a long line of wild boys and girls who had specialised in potting King’s Men from behind hedges, in the insurrections’ (82). While there are plenty of such nostalgic and winsome ancestral forms of Irish identification in the trilogy, there is no serious engagement with republicanism – or Irish political separatism.

Similarly, the novels seem uninterested in the political/structural causes of what they describe – they do not dwell on questions of labour or working conditions. Instead, the tedium of the working day and the conditions in which the characters earn their bread are only glimpsed elliptically. It is the days off – the afternoons at the fair, the school trip to the beach, the honeymoon – that afford the most vivid scenes. This is partly a question of genre: domestic social realism tends to foreground the individual actors and their family life, obscuring the structural and systemic forces that underpin social organisation – but it is also a means through which Irishness can be more romantic and ghostly than explicitly political, which may allow it to better constitute an ideological form of white Australianness distinct from Englishness.

Turning more specifically to the ways in which Irishness is manifested in Park’s trilogy, blood and names are the two dominant signifiers. Both allude to the presence of ancestors – the dead that continue to influence the living. The importance of names is obvious from the very first page of The Harp, which opens onto an Irish diasporic community in the slums of Surry Hills where ‘every second name is an Irish one’ (1). The other – related – way Irishness is signified is through repeated references to blood. This is introduced with the character of Mr Diamond, who is framed explicitly in relation to both his blood and his name, but in decidedly ambiguous terms that signal the ambivalences to follow: blood here signifies religion, and names can be mistakenly bequeathed:

Mr Diamond was a real Irishman, born in Ireland, an Orangeman who was friendly with Hughie and liked all the Darcys except on St Patrick's Day, when his Orange blood boiled up, and he called them all pope-worshippers and mummers ... He had been christened Patrick in error by a gin-bemused neighbour, and all his life it had been a cross to him and a confusion to his friends. But his pride and his stubbornness forbade his changing it to William or James, much as he would have liked to (3).

Blood and names function in multiple ways in these texts that are not necessarily isomorphic with biological difference but always carry the ghostly presence of ancestors. Curiously, the recourse to blood seems anachronistic, a pre-modern appeal to identity and difference, more aligned to humoral theory than modern understandings of either blood or race (see Coles et al). Park’s use of blood also resonates with, but differs from, the role it played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relation to the emergence of nationhood, and in particular, Henry Parkes’ famous reference to the ‘crimson thread of kinship’, the rallying cry of federationists before 1901. While Parkes’ ‘crimson thread’ was a distinctly British nationalist union, Britishness is all but absent in Park’s novels, so focused are they around Irish migrants and their descendants, less a metaphorical national family than an actual one.

In The Harp trilogy, blood designates kinship and loyalty, as well as residual, periodically manifesting characteristics that are inherited from ancestors. Rather than denoting or appealing to shared values, blood is used to explain eruptions of the past into the present, and to cement these ancestral traits that may well be as cultural as they are biological. The novels take seriously the forces of ancestry and inheritance as a source of kinship, whether recognised by the characters or not.

Surnames are also identifiers of Irishness, but given they are traced from father to son, in a patronymic system, they only address patrilineality. Where names signify ancestry, women become vessels for the transmission of male names, as evidenced in two of the most important characters in the novels, who are only called Grandma and Mumma. In Of Irish Descent (2008), Catherine Nash analyses the contemporary phenomenon of Irish Americans seeking out their Irish ancestry through family history and commercial DNA testing, and the meanings attributed to Irishness by those reconnecting with their Irish roots. Nash reminds us of ‘the inescapably political dimensions of all accounts of origins and ancestors’ (22). For Nash, appeals to origins can be regressive or progressive, restrictive or expansive, but they are never innocent. In Park’s trilogy, the political dimensions are partly about who belongs in multi-ethnic settler societies, and how such belonging takes place in transnational and intergenerational diasporic communities of non-British settlers in a British settler colony. This concern with belonging appeals to ancestry – both blood and names – and reveals a complex interplay between historical and cultural narratives of inheritance, and the formation of both personal and national identity.

Although the Irish dominate the slums of Surry Hills, everyone in this community brings their ancestors with them, whether the Chinese neighbour Jimmy Lick – surely a hero with the happiest ending of all – or the Jewish Tommy Mendel. Sometimes, appeals to blood operate at the expense of complexity, offering simple and reassuring ideas of diasporic identities in a new context that draws upon longstanding myths of Celtic difference – such as when Roie caresses a shawl that she wants to buy at the markets and a ‘thousand Irish girls who had bequeathed to her their blood and manner of thinking guided her fingers’ (23).

At other times, though, the meanings attributed to blood are unpredictable and multiple, such as when Grandma moves in with the Darcy family in Plymouth Street:

It was a strange thing how her advent changed the personalities and outlook of those already in the house. Old as she was, grandma had some exciting element in her; the courage and restlessness which had driven her forth at eighteen to emigrate to the new colony had not left her. Soon Mumma found herself unconsciously giving her speech an Irish twist, and even the girls, brought up as they had been to the quick Irish idiom and wit, discovered that their voices had a new softness and purl. It was as though the real Celticism, not only of blood, but of memory and association, was catching, and the Australian blood, if there was such a thing, were vanishing before the red flood of the Irish. (54–5)

Irish-born Grandma brings with her a force and authenticity that animates and rejuvenates her Irish-Australian children and grandchildren but, for all the hoary aspects of that ‘real Celticism’, there is something more complex happening in this passage. Blood, with its links to ancestral identity, interfuses with memory and association, experience and environment. Culture, like biology, can be transmitted mysteriously as if by contagion, or mimesis. That is indeed ‘a strange thing’.

And what of this vanishing Australian blood? Is there such a thing, the novel asks, and if so, what is it and where does it come from? This passage suggests not only the political question of who counts as Irish, but also gestures towards the process by which an Irish underclass becomes Australian in a British colony that only legislated its own national citizenship in the same year the novel was published. It also, of course, both evokes and elides Aboriginal Australian blood that was at the time being forcibly ‘absorbed’ through aggressive state-sponsored policy. The novels thus explore a tension or disjuncture between the Australian and the Irish elements, such as after the birth of Moira, Charlie and Roie’s daughter:

Hughie had found in his nature strange depths of love for the little mite, for although he was Irish, and sentimental, he was also Australian, and thought the exhibition of it effeminate. (Harp 223)

Or, even more explicitly, when Dolour is trying to understand what Irishness means for her:

To Dolour Ireland was inconceivably far away. It seemed strange and enchanting that her own Grandma had come from that land; it was almost as though Grandma were an old fairy woman from another and more fantastic world. Dolour’s own half-digested reading about it had been reinforced by the loyal Irish nuns at St Brandan’s, who were Australian-born to a woman, and yet kept the memory of their surnames vivid in their hearts. Phelans and Flanagans and Dunnes and MacBrides there were at the convent, and old Sister Beatrix had been a Mullins born. And then there was Father Cooley, with a honey of an accent, and yet Australian too, as though he wore a buckled shoe on one foot and an Australian ‘laughin’-side’ on the other. They had all helped to make Ireland very real to Dolour, even though it was so fantastic a place. (126)

Irishness for Dolour operates as a child-like enchantment, a matter of fairy tales and libidinal allure. It is mediated by the Irish-born nuns, who paradoxically hold on to the signifiers of family and national belonging even as their names are relinquished in service of the Church. Their nuns’ attachment to their Irishness is itself a form of fantasy, a nostalgia for a lost origin, sepia-tinted and fantastical, for all the reality their direct experience brings to Dolour’s. It is another example of the braiding of cultural and natural accounts of origin, through the stories they tell themselves about their ancestry signalled by their original Irish names. The striking image of Father Cooley straddling two worlds might symbolise the harmonious, or even disjunctive, meeting of Ireland and Australia, but it is also just as surely a territorial claim of belonging.

And if ancestry is merely about storytelling, the novel then asks: how are we to ascertain the status of that which is passed down? In one key scene, Sister Beatrix and Sister Theophilus visit the Darcys and the conversation moves quickly from voice to name to place to kin:

‘It’s lovely to hear a real Irish voice again,’ she [Sister Theophilus] said smiling. I haven’t heard the real brogue since my father died.’ ...

‘And what was his name, if I may be so bold as to ask a Sister?’ she [Grandma] inquired, with every confidence of being answered. Sister Theophilus blushed and confessed: ‘Matthew Nolan. He came from Kerry in, let me see… I think 1880.’

‘God be praised,’ exclaimed Grandma, lifting her hands to heaven. ‘If that wasn’t the year I came out meself. Matthew Nolan! ... I once knew some Nolans on a farm. Outside Tralee, it was.’

‘But I had an uncle near Tralee,’ exclaimed Sister Theophilus, delightedly. ‘The farm was called Knock-na-gree.'

‘Glory be!’ marvelled Grandma. ‘So it was. There was one by the name of Michael, I think.’

‘My Uncle Michael!’ Sister Theophilus looked at Grandma with shining eyes. ‘I often heard my dad speak of him. What was he like, Mrs –?’

‘Mrs Kilker. Oh, he was a fine man, with black hair that stood up like a wall. A real, elegant Irish face, and blue eyes like glass marbles.’

‘My father had eyes like that,’ said Sister Theophilus dreamily. ...

‘Now that I am looking at you I can see you’ve got the Nolan chin. ... It’s as plain as the nose on your face that you’re a Nolan, begging your pardon.’ (132)

After the nuns leave, Mumma says to Grandma: ‘There’s no beating the Irish, no mistake. But wasn’t it the strangest thing you knowing her uncle?’.

‘Uncle me foot!’ scoffed Grandma. ... ‘I only used the brain God kindly gave me.’

You mean to say ... you didn’t know him?’ gasped Mumma in horror. ‘You unnatural old liar … You described him as though you’d seen him with yer own eyes, and it was right, too.’

‘Oh, that,’ jeered Grandma. ‘All Irishmen look alike. I just described your Dadda, that’s all, God rest his ashes.’ (133)

Here, the link between names and kin is rent open. Heartfelt genealogical connections turn out to be ‘unnatural lies’, family names are used to fool, and kinship ties are invented, undercutting the hereditarian claims the novel makes at other points. Although at times the novel gets caught up in the enchantment of exilic Irishness, it simultaneously undercuts and demythologises it. But the novels also remind us that we do inherit characteristics from our ancestors, not just down the line but at the point of intersecting bloodlines – that is, at the time of reproduction. The narrator had already wondered if there were such a thing as ‘Australian blood’, and the possibility of it vanishing in the face of Irish blood. These questions become more pointed with the entry of Charlie Rothe, a dark-skinned man with presumed Aboriginal ancestry, who falls in love with and marries Roie with whom he subsequently has two children.

When Roie first meets Charlie Rothe and learns his name, she says:

‘That’s an unusual name.’

‘It’s Irish, just like Murphy.

‘Darcy’s Irish, too’

‘I can see that.’ He smiled at her, and it was as if he acknowledged in that smile the extreme Celticism of her dark blue eyes and milky skin, clouded around the eyes. (168)

When Roie and Charlie decide to marry, the prospective alliance generates some initial racial anxieties for the Darcy parents, haunted by the idea of a ‘sooty grandchild’ (172), a fear that only becomes more resonant in the light of Hughie’s dark-skinned brother Jer that is introduced in Missus, the prequel written almost four decades later. They shake this off, however, with Hughie declaring Aboriginal blood native to Australia: ‘It’s better than Chink. It’s real Australian and no matter how bad that is, there’s none better’ (172). Charlie is thus the novel’s only ‘real’ Australian on the basis of his Aboriginal ancestry – at least until his children are born.

Yet even this is not enough to assuage concerns around miscegenation and Hughie awkwardly confronts Charlie to ask him about the origin of his ‘dark blood’:

‘Well, my grandfather was white, and my grandmother was white, so it must’ve been long before that. It’s funny how it shows long after.’

‘It is that,’ agreed Hughie, baffled. … After a while he tried again: ‘Perhaps I’m rushing things a bit, Charlie, and no offence if I am, but what about the children?’

‘You mean my children’ … ‘What do you think?’ asked Charlie. Hughie didn’t like staring at him, but he did, his own face going red meanwhile. And it seemed to him that Charlie spoke and behaved like a white man, and looked like one too, except to the wise eye of a man such as himself. …

‘I reckon they’d be white,’ [Hughie] declared. (173)

The complexity and significance of the character of Charlie Rothe has generally been overlooked, although Monique Rooney’s recent essay in Australian Literary Studies is a welcome and notable exception. When Roie meets Charlie, he claims to have an Irish name, but Rothe is not a particularly Irish name (it has Jewish associations), and certainly not one of the standard Irish names used throughout the text as signifiers of Irishness. Charlie also speaks and behaves as a ‘white man’ – not an Irish one – and does not know where he, or presumably his name, comes from. So, even though he has ancestry – both blood and name – he is, at the same time, a clean slate and a character without history. He is Irish by name yet with traces of indigeneity – becoming a vehicle for indigenising Irish Australia, and for countering, albeit symbolically, Irish collaboration in the British imperial project in Australia.

We are not the first to suggest that Irish ancestry can be mobilised by some white Australians – or self-identifying Irish-Australians – to reposition themselves less as settler invaders and more as the colonised with a shared experience of oppression with Indigenous Australians at the hands of the British. We are also aware of the seductions of this reframing for Irish-Australians, allowing them to be absolved of complicity in (and guilt for) the colonial project (Rutherford). Having said that, there is a complexity to Park’s vision that incorporates Indigeneity into Irish Australianness, acknowledging the history of Irish-Aboriginal intermarriage and the possibilities of cultural and political solidarity that colonial authorities so feared (McGrath). Indeed, one might argue that the portrayal of Charlie challenged the doomed-race theory that believed Aboriginal people were dying out that was so dominant at the time. But this intersection of blood and names with the marriage of Charlie and Roie is about more than just solidarity. It speaks also to the ghosts of ancestors – those absent presences that the novel repeatedly invokes.

Emma Kowal’s recent study on the production of biological knowledge of difference in Australia, Haunting Biology (2023) draws upon Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology and the ways it has been mobilised both by Avery Gordon as a specific effect of gendered and racialised violence, and in Australia, by scholars such as Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs to understand the haunting effects of the nation’s colonial history on the production of knowledge. For such theorists, ghosts are the ubiquitous effects of repressed experiences that influence the present. For Gelder and Jacobs (1994), in particular, the repression of Australia’s violent colonial past makes contemporary Australia at once homely and unhomely, settled and unsettled, familiar and strange (Gelder and Jacobs). While Kowal is most interested in the ghosts of racial science, her ideas about the haunting possibilities of the past and the consequent uncertainties into the present can be used to think through the ways in which blood and names operate in Park’s trilogy, particularly when it comes to the representation of the character of Charlie. For Kowal, ghosts function ‘to interrupt the usual way of proceeding and raise questions about what is forgotten, erased or disavowed’ (24). The haunting resonances of blood and names in the novels are partly to do with the ways in which they invoke ‘absent presences’ being both biological and cultural, hereditarian and environmental, all held together by modes of story-telling that are themselves both ancestral and of the present.

Charlie Rothe invokes ghosts in a number of ways. Although he is largely assimilated – ‘just like a white man’ he also has the ‘real’ Australian blood of the native, for whom ‘blood is inseparable from land, personhood and spirit’ (Kowal 40). Charlie’s ancestors also remain a presence and a force, just as they are for the Irish characters. For instance, after Roie gives birth and Charlie becomes a father, he senses his affinity with ancestors that he has never known:

It seemed impossible that [Roie] was a mother, that he had possessed her, and implanted his soul and personality upon her. He looked back at his hard and lonely childhood, and beyond that to other ancestors, black and strange, who had felt as he was feeling now, the piteous realization that time is fleeting and flesh is as grass. (221)

Note here that it is Charlie that possesses Roie and not the other way around. In Poor Man’s Orange, moreover, Roie estimates Charlie in terms of biological as well as emotional fecundity that the novel suggests cannot be comprehended by appeals to civilisational forces – the forces of British colonialism perhaps – that both Charlie and Roie reject:

She was married to a man whom she loved in the true way so rarely comprehended by the civilized. He was breadwinner, protector, loved and beloved, and, more than that, he was the giver of children, the fertilizer of what would be without him a fallow field. (26)

Later still, in Poor Man’s Orange, Charlie looks at Moira and sees a historical complexity that belies genealogical attempts to return to a single point of origin, becoming instead a mind-boggling multiplicity, that points to an Indigenous cosmo-ontology that is, as Kowal demonstrates, ‘thick with ghosts’ (10).

She was a ceaseless wonder to him, this little being who had been nowhere, nowhere at all until he had loved Roie. He looked at the perfection of her body, the completeness of her eyelashes and teeth, and marvelled. The number of generations that had gone to make her, the lines of blood and bone and nerve that converged in her – he tried to count them and failed. The great-grandmother who had been black, who had given him golden eyes and long sinewy hands – she was manifest in Motty in the wet polish of her hair that was no more like Roie’s soft, sooty Irish hair than metal was like silk. And her blue eyes, with the dark thumbprints about them, were Irish. (96–7)

In this passage, Charlie recognises and acknowledges his own ancestry while affirming his daughter as a new kind of Australian. Charlie Rothe’s marriage to Roie and the birth of their daughter Moira thus enables a form of non-British settler Australianness that both assimilates the indigene and indigenises the settler.

Kowal’s Haunting Biology outlines a strategy ‘used to repress originary colonial violence and make the psychic life of the settler livable’: ‘to see Indigenous people as really white’ (30). She traces the archaic Caucasian theory, popular among both Australian anthropologists and writers in the 1930s (the time in which the novel is set) that adhered to the idea that ‘Indigenous Australians and Europeans were part of the same racial family. The brutal story of colonization could thus be retold as a family reunion of distant cousins’ (30). Kowal traces the appeal of this idea to forms of heightened anti-British white nationalism in the era that were shifting from a notion of a vanishing Aboriginal race to ‘forms of Australian identity that appropriated and then “assimilated” Indigenous people’ (93), as seen in the works of nationalist writers such as Xavier Herbert and P.R Stephenson. For Kowal, this is less about ‘saving’ lighter-skinned Indigenous children and making them white’ than ‘making a place for whiteness’ (94).

While Park’s trilogy could be read as participating in such forms of racial – and territorial – desire, as we have tried to suggest, the representation of Charlie is perhaps more complex than this formula allows and ultimately the novels cannot help but recognise the truth they both evoke and repress. For the reader knows that Roie has a ‘secret’ that is not revealed to Charlie – a reminder that belonging, even for Irish Australians, is underpinned by the erasure of the past. Just as Charlie was not Roie’s ‘first’ – a past she cannot acknowledge to him – settler Australian belonging also has a secret past: the violent dispossession and conquest of First Nations peoples, of which Charlie conveniently has no memory.

The trilogy suggests that settler Australian belonging requires a secret to be kept – but such secrets always come at a cost. Roie’s secret cannot be repressed without consequence. When Roie dies giving birth to their second child, Michael, in Poor Man’s Orange, the narrative implies that Roie’s fragility was the result of the miscarriage of a child she’d conceived with Tommy Mendel, her first, about which Charlie knows nothing and which Roie has denied to him when he had asked her about her previous sexual experience.

In this reading, the history of Aboriginal dispossession and frontier violence – made explicit in Missus – is spectrally present, but never fully articulated. This could be aligned, structurally, with the spectral absent-presence of Thady Darcy. The Harp references his ghost-like presence at the very beginning and, during the course of the novel, Mumma periodically sees a child who looks like Thady, or at least how she imagines a grown-up Thady would look. At the novel’s conclusion, significantly just after Roie and Charlie are married and Charlie moves in to the Darcy home, Mumma follows a boy, convinced it is Thady, only to have her hopes dashed. Mumma had misidentified her son (one of several misidentifications in the novel, including a farce-tragical one around Hughie’s lottery ticket). The novel closes with Mumma’s intuition that Thady is dead, enabling her to grieve a loss she had not been able to acknowledge.

Thady is thus a lacuna in the novel which is haunted by his disappearance, and seems to catalyse the disappearance of others, such as the bagman, who raised Charlie between the age of seven and 15 – he, too, disappears. Thady’s disappearance also resonates with another vanished child. One might read Charlie as a disappearing child from another story – a familiar and traumatic experience for Indigenous communities that only decades later came to be known as the Stolen Generations. One possible reading of this structural similarity is that Charlie, who moves into the Darcy family home after marrying Roie, functions as a replacement for Thady, a surrogate son that enables the Darcy family to become the ‘real’ Australians they see Charlie as representing. After all, the disappearance of Thady, their only son, signals the end of the Darcy family name. Charlie Rothe offers a new patrilineality, albeit one with an ostensible Irish patronym and Aboriginal blood, that enables the letting go of Thady – a romantic and aesthetic closure to an unresolved political and historical problem. But this resolution, the novel also reminds us, requires collective amnesia – or at least sufficient opacity and uncertainty to allow it to be overwritten. Despite being seven when he loses his parents, Charlie has no memory of them. He is not even sure if they are dead, more absent-presences that haunt the novel. In the same way, Dolour has no memory of Thady, although the knowledge of Roie’s secret shame is lucid, passed on to her via her mother. Poor Man’s Orange culminates with the promise of marriage between Charlie and Dolour, but the secret remains the province of the Irish family, never shared with Charlie.

There is a romantic element to the marriage between Roie and Charlie, and then the promised and more pragmatic alliance between Charlie and Dolour, yet the novels also tacitly acknowledge the precarity of their own wishful thinking. The truth of what came before remains partially hidden and ghosts of the dead, the missing and forgotten haunt the narrative. For all its domestic realism, the unity and self-identity of the family is repeatedly undermined by haunting absences, asymmetries, intrusive excesses, secrets and silence. Despite their empathy towards mutual loss and kinship, the texts contain numerous obliquities that refute narrative closure, and undermine any ostensible resolutions.

Blood and names, we argue, thus become ways of both evacuating history and summoning it, of opening up allegiances and shutting them down, of appealing to essences and origins, and troubling them at the same time. Ultimately though, whether Irish or Indigenous, blood and names are haunted by the ghosts of ancestors from both near and far. At the same time, the Harp trilogy could also be said to find a home for the diasporic Irish in Australia, to build an Australia that can distance itself from Britain, and to incorporate an indigene to mitigate the psychological costs of settler colonial violence and a history of forced assimilation. While the novels do not quite know what to do with the ghosts they call up, perhaps contemporary readers may finally be able to pay attention and respond to the ghosts of this ‘classic Australian novel’, perhaps even learn to live with them with care and respect.