2025 Winner of AJIS/ISAANZ postgraduate essay prize is Ciara Maloney (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) for her essay titled "Haunting in The Beauty Queen of Leeane and The Lonesome West". The editors received a wide field of excellent essays and wish to thank all those who entered the competition.
16 August 2025. The Great Irish Famine Commemoration will be on Saturday 16 August at 11:00am at Hyde Park Barracks. On this day we remember all those who left Ireland during the Great Irish Famine, on the long journey to Australia and other parts of the world.
9 July 2025. From his first ‘pars’ (short contributions) for the Bulletin, Joseph Furphy's curiosity about Aboriginal ethnology and languages is continuous and subtly counter-cultural. Joseph Furphy’s The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (1948) stages the meeting in Echuca between the urban authoress and the bushmen and their talk is a reminder of a frontier which by the early twentieth century was increasingly in retreat, vicious, secretive and remote.
Applications are open for the 2026 O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies at St Mary's Newman Academic Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia. The O’Donnell Fellowship is available for the period Monday 5 January – Sunday 15 February 2026. The Fellowship, which is non-stipendary, offers: college living quarters and all meals; access to the Academic Centre building and collections; research space in the Gerry Higgins Room; access to the University of Melbourne library; $2000 for travel and other expenses. The application deadline is Friday 11 July 2025..
11-22 June 2025. Bloomsday in Melbourne proudly invites you to Circe’s Carnival of Vice, a brand new play set in Monto, Dublin's infamous brothel district, razed by the Free State exactly a century ago. Do you dare join us to descend into James Joyce’s fevered dreamscape?
28 May 2025. The Ballymurphy Massacre is the name given to the killing of eleven civilians by the British Army on 9-11 August 1971 in Belfast, during the early years of the Troubles conflict. This presentation examines the relationship of the contemporary family led campaign to Springhill Community House’s decades old legacy as a participatory, community-based organisation in Ballymurphy.
7 May 2025. Special screening of the silent film "Ireland Will Be Free" at The Wild Geese. Historian and author Dr Val Noone will also speak about the significance of the film. Ireland Will Be Free is an amazing silent film of St Patrick’s Day 1920 in Melbourne. It was filmed by the famous Bert Cross and sponsored by Archbishop Daniel Mannix and entrepreneur John Wren.
22 April 2025. Special bilingual poetry reading with prize winning author Áine Ní Ghlinn in the Celtic Club's Members Bar at the Wild Geese Hotel, Brunswick. Áine Ní Ghlinn is a lecturer, children’s writer, poet and journalist. Born in County Tipperary, she was Laureate na nÓg/Children’s Poet Laureate, 2020-2023, the first to write exclusively in Irish. She has written 39 books, including eight collections of poetry for adults and 23 for teenagers and young readers.
16 April 2025. During 2020-2023 An Bosca Leabharlainne (The Library Box) delivered over 70,000 specially selected books to 1831 primary schools throughout Ireland, South and North. This was the flagship project of Áine Ní Ghlinn while she was Laureate na nÓg/Children’s Poet Laureate. Áine Ní Ghlinn will discuss the challenges involved in this effort to find readers in a minority language – for many pupils Irish is a subject they have to do – and she will report on the success of this campaign.
31 July 2025. Submissions are invited for ISAANZ 27 Health, Wellness and Care. As the emergency measures of the pandemic fade into memory, but the virus transitions into an endemic part of our medical landscape, we invite scholars and community members to use the vantage point of this new ecosystem – viral, social, political, economic, environmental – to consider what health, wellness and care mean for Ireland and Irish communities worldwide.
