25 October 2023. Hugh Myers speaking on Richard Madden, an Irish Catholic surgeon who served as colonial secretary to Western Australia (Swan River colony) in 1848-49, later becoming a prominent historian and biographer of the 1798 movement. During his time in Australia, Madden advocated for the position of indigenous people, insisting they be paid for their work. He had previously worked as a magistrate in the West Indies during the 1830s in the aftermath of the emancipation of the slaves.
5 October - 5 November 2023. In cinemas and online. Celebrate all things community and culture with our carefully selected program of movies and documentaries that reflect a new Ireland in 2023, whilst sharing stories from our past that deserve to be heard. Enjoy some of the finest Irish stories on screen never seen before in Australia that will move you in the way only Irish stories can. Whether you’re watching at one of our exciting cinema events in person, soaking up the stories on screen with family and friends at home or immersing yourself in our online offerings from your phone, there’s something for everyone.
12 September 2023. Limerick lace veils were used in ceremonies designed to introduce Sisters of Mercy to often-suspicious Australian communities while Perth-based Sisters wrote back to Ireland requesting coloured eyeglasses be sent to enable them to maintain their health and therefore their work. Across the world, women religious swapped tips and materials to help them to sustain their emerging communities. In turn, the Irish diaspora used the built environment to encourage a sense of belonging abroad. Looking at these religious and ethnic communities through a material culture lens allows for greater insight into the tools that women across the Irish diaspora, especially women religious, used to establish and crucially, to sustain, communities during the nineteenth century. In this paper Dr Sophie Cooper will use material culture to explore connections between women, and particularly women religious, across the Irish diaspora.
25-27 September 2023. Registrations open for the Tenth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies which will be in person at the Woolley Building, The University of Sydney, and also online.
5 September 2023. Recording of a lecture by contemporary Irish poet, Vona Groarke, on the 18th century poem, Lament for Art O'Leary (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire). The poem is an Irish keen composed extempore by O'Leary's wife Eibhlin Dubh Ní Chonaill after his murder on 4 May 1773 at Carraig an Ime, County Cork.
22 August 2023. In 2018 the Board of the Queensland Irish Association appointed Rodney and Robin Sullivan as Honorary Historians, and commissioned a history to mark its 125th anniversary in 2023. When they asked President Jeff Spender what sort of book he had in mind he replied, ‘a comprehensive history, warts and all.’ They endeavoured to fulfill this request without incurring legal consequences, investigating themes that threaded their way through the history of the Club and Irish Queensland. These included sectarianism, commemoration, and gender. Club premises were a further preoccupation. This paper surveys their presence in A Hundred Thousand Welcomes, and the vistas they offer on Irish Queensland.
25 July 2023. The period between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw the Australian-Catholic middle classes grow in both size and confidence. Those developments were aided in part by the temporal progress of élite Jesuit schools in Sydney and Melbourne. This paper will explore these developments, and place them within the wider context of middle-class Catholic identity, and social and sectarian divisions between the 1890s and 1920s.
21 July 2023. The Irish Government has selected Sydney this year as the international venue for the National Famine Commemoration Day. This year's Commemoration will be on Friday 21st July at 2pm, at the Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine, at Hyde Park Barracks. Irish Minister of State Thomas Byrne TD will be in attendance. 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.
15 July 2023. At the Melbourne General Cemetery, a few members of the Celtic Club had the pleasure of touring Melbourne with historian, Val Noone. This event was pioneered by Prof. Ronan McDonald and Fergal Coleman who worked together to bring their idea to fruition. Val’s vast knowledge offers incredible insight into the lives of our fellow Irishman over the last 200 years in Melbourne.
12-14 June 2024, Irish College, Leuven. Irish Literature and the Global Marketplace. Ireland, with a relatively small domestic population and literary market, has constantly looked outward and developed strong ties with marketplaces beyond its borders. By exploring the relationship between Irish literature and the global marketplace, this conference aims to forge a layered understanding of Irish literary production as an industry, intersected by economic concerns, material infrastructure, human labor, consumerist culture, and the neoliberal system.
