Irishness as a Literary Condition: Australia and its Irish Reading and Writing Community

Abstract

This paper documents the literary origins of the notion of Irishness; why it mattered, and why it persists as a significant discourse running through Australian writing. Existing from the beginnings of creative output in Australia, the multi-faceted Irish condition is present as a literary trope from the start of white settlement and has never permanently left Australian writing. The reasons for this are many and complex. This paper presents a broad survey of the key texts in this process, examining how the nineteenth-century Irish community with both its ethnic and denominationally diasporic cultural outlook, positioned itself within Australia’s rapidly evolving literary consumer culture, and how the notion of Irishness was creatively sustained into the present century. Conclusions reached suggest that while important social and economic factors constrained the development of a sustained, locally produced Irish-Australian writing, persistent cultural and ethnic conditions fostered its on-going presence and later more overt emergence in the twentieth century as a persistent strain in Australian literary production, one that is likely to remain into the future.