Volume 16

VOLUME SIXTEEN · 2016
Contents

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Notes On Contributors
Obituary
Sister Veronica Brady (Patricia Mary Brady), IBVM.
Kath Jordan

Articles
Nicholas Michael O’Donnell (1862–1920): A Melbourne Medical Life
Laurence Geary
Abstract: Nicholas Michael O’Donnell (1862–1920) was an influential figure in Irish nationalist politics in Victoria from the late 1880s to the mid-teens of the twentieth century. He was a prominent Gaelic scholar and Celtic revivalist, and an ardent promoter of the Irish language and Irish cultural activities. O’Donnell was a medical graduate of the University of Melbourne and maintained a busy medical practice in North Melbourne throughout his years of political and socio-cultural activism. His public life has attracted scholarly attention in recent years, but his professional life remains unexplored and this essay’s primary focus is on O’Donnell’s schooling, medical education, and career as a general practitioner.

The Easter Rising in Australian History and Memory
Mark Finnane
Abstract: Famously Prime Minister Billy Hughes blamed the Irish Catholic vote and the influence of Archbishop Mannix for the defeat of his first conscription referendum in 1916. Australian historians since the 1960s have cast doubt on this claim. A more subtle effect of the tumultuous events in Dublin at Easter 1916 was suggested by Patrick O’Farrell: the Easter Rising brought to an end the Irish Home Rule movement in Australia, to be replaced not by republicanism but ‘by nothing’. What then might remain of the Easter Rising in Australian history and memory? At the very least, it is suggested here, a long-term effect was its impact in driving Hughes to create new security legislation and a Commonwealth police. Alongside the work of tracing this legacy of the Rising in Australian institutions of law and security, this lecture traces also some contours of its effects in politics and memory.

Tradition, Memory and the Culture of Irish-Australian Identity, 1900–1960
Kevin Molloy
Abstract: Focusing on a selection of Irish-related works from both textual and visual culture, canvassed through the Australian Irish-Catholic newspaper press between 1900 and the late 1950s, this paper will explore some of the uses to which the Irish-Australian world, largely through its Catholic newspaper press, drew upon and reinforced set, fixed images, of an Irish past and its tradition for consolidating and enhancing its religious and cultural cohesion in twentieth-century Australian society. Conclusions reached will show that from independence in the early 1920s to the arrival of post-war Irish migrants in the early 1950s, the realities of Irish social, economic and political life was largely absent from the Australian-Irish community’s print and visual representations of Irish culture. The reasons for this are many and complex, and relate directly to the Irish-Australian community and its own needs.

Juno at the Circa: an O’Casey Play on the New Zealand Stage, May–June
1976
Lisa Marr
Abstract: In Wellington in 1976, newly formed Circa Theatre staged Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Having been involved in an earlier production of the play, Richard Campion enthusiastically offered to direct a four-week season of Juno. The Circa production showcased some of New Zealand’s finest actors, including several with Irish connections, and it ingeniously used the theatre space to involve the audience and underline elements in the setting. The production emphasised aspects of the play which were important to O’Casey: the people, the drama, and the humour; and it pointed out the universality of his dramatic situation and his characters’ experiences. Campion’s programme note reveals that he was mindful of parallels between Dublin in 1922 and Belfast in 1976, and Circa’s Juno played to a New Zealand audience aware of the brutal realities of the civil conflict taking place half the globe away.

Political Gramophonic Gendering in G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion
Susanne S. Cammack
Abstract: In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle’s story essentially begins and ends with her entrance into Professor Higgins’s home where she becomes immediately equated with the gramophone in his study. The conflation of gendered identity and media technology in the early twentieth century was not exclusive to Shaw’s play, also extending to political depictions of Ireland. Eliza’s story mirrors Ireland’s during the Third Home Rule Bill debates. The play depicts a woman struggling for sexual, intellectual and financial autonomy under the bemused tutelage of an unfeeling instructor. Shaw ultimately depicts Eliza’s liberation from the damaging sexualisation of both woman and machine, an overthrow of the machine’s male supervisor and the emergence of an independent female voice. The gramophone in Shaw’s work emerges as a reverberation of the Home Rule debates in the context of the gendered union relationship between England and Ireland.

Gaelic League, Welsh Methods, 1962–1993
Robert Lindsey
Abstract: At various points of time during the twentieth century, perceptions of Wales and the movement for the preservation of the Welsh language significantly influenced language activism in Ireland. One clear example of this was in the transformation of the Conradh na Gaeilge (sometimes called the ‘Gaelic League’ in English) from a conservative organisation closely associated with the Irish government, into a protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The precedent set by Welsh nationalist Saunders Lewis, and the civil disobedience group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the ‘Welsh Language Society’) convinced a new generation of Irish-language advocates that protests and political agitation had the potential to benefit the Irish-speaking community. This article traces this development through the roles played by writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain, civil disobedience group Misneach, the Craobh na Cásca branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, as well as other members of this pre-eminent Irish-language organisation.

ISAANZ Postgraduate Essay Prize 2016

‘Nature the Great Greengrocer’: Legumes, Genetics and Finnegans Wake
Donal Manning
Abstract: The objectives of this paper are to examine allusions to legumes and other vegetables, and to genetics, in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and to analyse common themes suggested by them. Many such allusions and references are identified, including possible allusions to Gregor Mendel, the ‘father’ of genetics. The allusions identified are distributed throughout the four books of Finnegans Wake. They demonstrate the typical Joycean characteristics of recurrent motifs, multiple possible meanings, parody and comic undermining. The paper argues that Joyce uses and combines allusions to vegetables and genetics to address several of his most important themes: his deprecation of usurpation, dispossession, separatism and exclusivity, and his support for racial integration, variation and tolerance. His use of food allusions to these ends exerts a powerful impact in the contemporary setting of post-Famine Ireland. Joyce’s use of allusions to genetics is an example of his exploitation of contemporary advances in science to investigate and illustrate his major themes.

Document
Note on J.J. O’Kelly Papers Newly Lodged in the State Library of Victoria
Val Noone 

Book Reviews

Julianna Grigg, The Philosopher King and the Pictish Nation
Kristen Erskine

David Worthington, British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, c. 1560–1688
Darius Von Güttner-Sporzyński

Graeme Norton and David A. Wilson (eds), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia
Dianne Hall

Mary Louise O’Donnell, Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Modernity c.1770–1880
Denis Collins

Angela McCarthy (ed.), Ireland in the World: Comparative, Transnational,
and Personal Perspectives
Sophie Cooper

Joan Kavanagh and Dianne Snowden, Van Diemen’s Land: A History of Transportation to Tasmania
Laurence Marley

Richard Davis, Travels of William Smith O’Brien in Europe and the Wider
World 1843 to 1864
Sean Farrell

Matthew Lewis, Frank Aiken’s War: The Irish Revolution, 1916–23
Antoine Guillemette

Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück, Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture
of the Easter Rising
Roisín Higgins

Mark McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Rising: Explorations of History-Making, Commemoration & Heritage in Modern Times
Antoine Guillemette

Patrick Deeley, The Hurley Maker’s Son
Trish O’Connor

Aidan Doyle and Kevin Murray (eds), In Dialogue with the Agallamh: Essays
in Honour of Seán Ó Coileáin
Jonathan M. Wooding

Colin Ryan, Teachtaireacht
Miriam Uí Dhonnabháin

Jack Fennell, Irish Science Fiction
Maria-Ana Tupan