The Irish in Australia and the Irish in Croswell Bowen: Guilt, Shame and the Larrikin

The Scarborough of the First Fleet

     I first read Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 when it was published in 1986. I can't remember why I read it. In fact, I didn't remember much of what it said, I just remember thinking it very profound and bound to be influential. On New Years Eve in Sydney, I got to talking about it with Mary Lou Simpson of the South Australian Museum of Adelaide, and she was of the opinion that it is still one of the best books of Australian history. So I picked up a copy, and read it, as though for the first time. (Unexpected consequence of memory loss: everything old is new again.)

     When Hughes began about writing the book in the 1970s, Australians had long been embarrassed by the "convict stain" on the origins of their nation. Free settlers claimed respectabilty as British subjects. They laid it on thickly: plus royalistes que la reine, Hughes says. (I think they still do, with all that cricket and left hand driving.) 

Hughes' approach is what's now called subaltern history: he tried to see the system from below, in documents of the convict's voices. The Fatal Shore is exhaustive in detail, and for all I know, balanced in its analysis.

     One of Hughes' observations is that whatever the convict's crimes, even after completing his or her term of servitude, they and their families were harassed by the agents of "polite society," the police.   The Irish, who had comprised the largest, most cohesive group among the transported convicts, felt the brunt of this. This is the plaint expressed in Ned Kelly's "Jerilderie Letter," that tried to explain and justify his crimes.

     This got me thinking about the connection between guilt, shame and the larrikin figure. Are Irish Catholics, like my father, particularly susceptible to shame and guilt? Is larrikin behavior a manner of playing on or playing out, the shame and guilt at the role one's religion and the British government have given one? It was when he found himself, an Irish Catholic middle-western fish in the stultifying air of an East Coast WASP prep school, that he became self-conscious about his personality "tics." I think shrinks call that reaction formation. 

     A really good site to learn more about convicts in Australia, the History Wars and related topics is Convict Creations.