Category: Events

29 July 2026. State Library Victoria houses a range of important Irish works that document the history of printing in Latin, Irish and English. This viewing will explore a range of unusual historical, linguistic and literary works, the debates they generated, and their representation of continuing literary traditions. Featured will be texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century by authors such as Roderic O’Flaherty (1629-1718) and Thomas Carve (1590-1672), the Paris works of Hugh MacCurtin (1680-1755) and James Joyce, through to the migrant fiction of Mary Ann Sadlier and literary texts of the Celtic Revival.

21 June 2026. Bloomsday in Melbourne has been celebrating 16th June for more than thirty years with staged productions of his work. This year they bring a brand new play to the stage, Between The Lines: The James Joyce/Groucho Marx Letters. A young female academic makes the find of a lifetime - and has to negotiate her way through the patriarchal world of academe in the mid-1980s. Bloomsday in Melbourne is also presenting their annual Bloomsday Seminar and Lunch on Sunday 21st June at The Wild Geese in Brunswick, where a panel will discuss, among other things, the repercussions of Helen Garner's 1995 book The First Stone.

5 March 2026. As the third Irish Home Rule crisis grew more threatening from 1911 onwards, Ulster Unionists began searching for allies across the British Empire, including in Australia. This research highlights the role and influence of the Australian anti-Home Rule movement from 1911 to 1914, investigating why the Loyal Orange Institution in Australia published resolutions sympathetic to the Unionist cause. The research also investigates who the supporters were, who donated thousands of pounds in aid, or who enlisted in an Australian Ulster volunteer contingent. Most importantly, it considers how widespread and organised these Ulster sympathisers were, particularly by 1914 when they produced an anti-Home Rule petition, which reached up to 250,000 signatures.

3 February 2026. ​Historian Perry McIntyre explores the immigration scheme to bring young destitute single women to Australia during the years 1848–50. Destitute families found refuge in workhouses in Ireland before the Great Famine of 1845. Australia offered young single women with little prospect of employment in Ireland a totally free passage to Sydney, Port Phillip and Adelaide. Who devised this scheme and why? Who were the key players and what were the outcomes for these young women and the colonies? Hear about a project that untangles the lives of the 4114 girls who participated in this immigration scheme.