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LOOKING FOR HOME IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES: NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUSTRALIAN-IRISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROBLEM OF HOME-MAKING By Mary A.Burston Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy by major thesis. School of Communication, Culture and Language, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development, Victoria University, Melbourne, 2009. I STUDENT DECLARATION I, Mary A. Burston declare that the PhD thesis, Looking for Home in all the Wrong Places: Nineteenth Century Australian-Irish Women Writers and the Problem of Home-Making, is no more than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, figures and appendices, references and footnotes. The thesis contains no material that has been submitted previously, in whole or in part, for the award of any other academic degree or diploma. Except where otherwise indicated, this thesis is my own work. Signed Name: Mary A. Burston. Date ....... :Z.?. ~ .-9-~- ... ~P.~ .................... 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I deeply appreciate the support, encouragement and the critical intellectual work of my principal supervisor, Associate Professor Michele Grossman of Victoria University, Melbourne. I owe Associate Professor Michele Grossman my deepest respect and gratitude. Professor Brian Matthews and Dr. Paul Adams were important mentors at the earlier stages in the writing of the thesis. Emeritus Professor John McLaren of Victoria University, Melbourne provided invaluable assistance at the later stages of writing. His extensive knowledge about Australian literary history has been critical to developing my understanding of Australian national and literary culture. This thesis would not have been written had it not been for the award of the National Australia Bank-Trinity College Dublin Scholarship through the Europe-Australia Centre at Victoria University, Melbourne. The scholarship made it possible for me to undertake research in Ireland for twelve months. Siobhan O'Cuiv made a home for me at Finglas and made welcome a returning Irish emigre from Australia. Critical to the writing of this thesis is a network of librarians, research information sources and institutional support from Trinity College, Dublin, National Archives oflreland, Public Records of Northern Ireland, Cork University, Queen's University, Belfast, University of Galway, Victoria University, Melbourne, State Libraries of New South Wales and Victoria, Australian National Library, Canberra, Monash University Rare Books, Clayton, Centre of Gippsland Studies, Monash University, Gippsland, Traralgon and Sale libraries. The helpfulness oflibrarians and their staff to search out information and provide resources was deeply appreciated. The administrative staff at Victoria University, Melbourne deserves recognition for ensuring my enrolment details were current. Special thanks to Jane Trewin. I could not have undertaken this journey alone. My deepest gratitude is extended to Chris Burston. Friends provided constant support and encouragement. Robyn Cooke, Rev. Dr. Robyn Schaefer, Dr. Susan Yell, Alison Hart and Victoria Reynolds shared this voyage of discovery and will celebrate its completion. Since the task of writing a thesis takes up a large part of one's life, unfortunately some friends have not seen it finished. Thanks Sue for inspiring me and showing me that anything is possible. To Mrs. M. Dunbar, late of 'Fernhill', Traralgon, your memories of Mary Grant Bruce were not forgotten. To Sean, Patrick, and, Jeremy Burston, 'live for today, dream of tomorrow, learn from yesterday'. 111 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the writing of Irish identity in Australia to explore how nineteenth-century Australian-born women writers negotiated their Irish emigrant heritage. A gap in knowledge about Irish women's emigrant experiences and those of their descendants provides an opportunity to investigate the translation of the Irish emigrant experience from the perspectives of first-born Australian daughters. A critical analysis of the writing histories of Mary Eliza Fullerton, Mary Grant Bruce and Marie Pitt (McKeown) will demonstrate the fragility of national identity in terms of the cultural and symbolic language used to define Irish emigrant and Australian settler culture identity between the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth centuries. The thesis provides an alternative reading of national cultures and histories to show how each writer used images of Irish national culture to clarify and elaborate notions of home in their Australian writing. IV THESIS CHAPTERS INTRODUCTION Beginnings 1 CHAPTER ONE 15 Fragile connections to home CHAPTER TWO 35 Across the water CHAPTER THREE 54 Theory frameworks CHAPTER FOUR 68 Mapping the pathways to home CHAPTER FIVE 92 Trespassers prosecuted CHAPTER SIX 124 Home estates CHAPTER SEVEN 155 Patriot games CHAPTER EIGHT 173 Not such an endearing charm: Life in the 'Bog' cottage CHAPTER NINE 198 Ave Australia! A boarder or home at last? CONCLUSION 221 And in the end? v BIBLIOGRAPHY 235 ARCHIVAL RESOURCES 284 ABBREVIATIONS 287 Vl INTRODUCTION Beginnings To begin life in a new country, or as a writer seeking to find the right type of language to express one's writing skills, involves a journey of self-discovery that has implications for the ways that the emigrant and the writer tell their respective stories. 1 In drawing from Edward Said's views concerning the nature of writing, beginnings are critical because they represent a state of suspense or a crisis point where a writer has to decide which means of representation are to be used to intervene in a particular field of knowledge in order to produce a new or different narrative. Beginnings involve tasks of 'rewriting and re-righting' - these tasks are constitutively subjective because these necessitate a re-crafting of identity through processes of self-reflection and self awareness, self-scrutiny and self-criticism. In theoretical terms, these processes require the subject-as-the-writer to rewrite and re-right their language, and by inference, their identity. Beginnings have a significant bearing on the emigrant experience. Emigrants also rewrite and re-right their identities when attempting to relocate cultural and social spaces for self-representation and self-expression in national narratives. According to Avtar Brah, emigration has a significant impact on consciousness in terms of the relocation of identity. The emigrant experience literally means having to contest and contend with a 'confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced and reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re memory' .2 When reflecting on the significance of beginnings as a way to interpret the narration of Irish and Australian identity, I am able to refer to the ways that my emigrant history and identity status of Irish woman in Australia have been shaped by cultural, historical, political and social narratives. The personal experience of emigration meant being challenged by historical and cultural meanings of Irish identity in Australia and 1Edward. W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, Granta Books, London, 1998, xxi-xxii, p. 372. 2 A vtar Brah, 'Thinking through the concept of diaspora', in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, p. 444. 1 particularly, identity references of Irish women.3 In tum, how Irish identity has been written about, has broadened my interest in the writing of national cultures as well as investigating images of Irish women in Australian historical, literary and cultural discourses. I wanted to know how earlier generations of women of Irish emigrant descent in Australia negotiated their identity through writing. In focusing on the writing journeys of a group of late nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century women writers, I wanted to explore the means of self-representation they used when rewriting and re-righting their identity as Australian-born daughters of Irish emigrant heritage. My analysis sits between the fields of Irish-Australian emigration, Australian literary history and discourse and diaspora theories. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller help to illustrate how those fields link theoretically and conceptually in literary, cultural and historical contexts. Emigrant identity is continually shaped by 'uprootings I regroundings' which are analogous to having to metaphorically and culturally move house. 4 Such movements are synonymous with having to 're-write and re-right' meanings of home, place and the self.5 Home therefore represents a contested reference point for identity. In further qualifying the thesis topic, Ahmed et al. illustrate the type of identity and subjective work needed to make one feel at home: The affective qualities of home, and the work of memory in their making cannot be divorced ... Homing, then, depends on the reclaiming and reprocessing of habits, objects, names and histories that have been uprooted - in migration, displacement or colonization ... Making home is about creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present. ... both uprooting and regrounding can entail forms of mourning, nostalgia, and remembrance as well as physical sickness and experiences of trauma. 6 Meanings of home occupy different hierarchies of experience, memory, identity, of place, and, realms of self-representation. In illustrating why the concept of home is a 3Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler, Governing Codes: Gender,