Michael D. Higgins Uachtarán Na Héireann, President of Ireland
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Michael D. Higgins Uachtarán na hÉireann, President of Ireland "Sharing the Tasks of Ethical Remembering - Ireland and Australia" University of New South Wales, Sydney 19th October, 2017 A Leas-Sheansailéir, a mhic léinn agus a chairde Gael, Vice Chancellor, students, friends, I would first like to acknowledge that we meet today on the traditional lands of the Bedegal people, and to pay my respect to their Elders both past and present. Ar an gcéad dul síos, is mian liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leatsa, a Leas-Sheansailéir, as d'fhocail deasa réamhráiteacha. [May I thank you, Vice Chancellor, for your kind introduction to me this evening]. It is a great honour for me to be here to address you in this University, whose foundation in 1949 represented such an important egalitarian moment in the expansion of university education in Australia and New South Wales. Your on-going success is a tribute to the enduring wisdom of that decision. It is also a pleasure to address a University that has contributed so much to writing the history of the Irish experience in Australia, from the seminal scholarship of the late Professor Patrick O'Farrell to the establishment of the Australian Ireland Fund Chair in Modern Irish Studies and the John Hume Institute in Global Irish Studies. Through its partnership with its namesake, the John Hume Institute in University College Dublin, the Institute is an expression of the closeness of the relationship between Ireland and Australia, and provides an example of the kind of scholarly co-operation across national borders that we need now, in these difficult times, more than ever. Its distinguished history of Irish studies makes this University such an appropriate place for me, as President of Ireland, to make my reflection on the depth, the heterogeneity, and the complexity of the Irish contribution to the making and shaping of this country, and of engaging with the challenge of the appropriate remembering and reconstructing of that history. I am conscious that to mention 'the Irish contribution' brings to mind a certain historiographical tradition. This is a trope evident in the decades before Federation in particular, which Professor Robert Reece has termed 'contribution history', that celebrates the accomplishment of political and economic success as the apotheosis of the Irish achievement in Australia. This tradition has had its moments and played an important polemical role in its time and with various intent: James Francis Hogan's The Irish in Australia, published in 1887, emphasised the facility with which the Irish in Australia had adopted themselves to legislative affairs in the self- governing colonies of the Antipodes, and thus offered a shrewd rebuke to those who wished to deny Home Rule to Ireland. Cardinal Patrick Moran's History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (1895) recast the Irish convicts as martyrs for religious freedom, virtuous forbearers of a Catholic civilisation being constructed between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. P.S. Cleary's Australia's Debt to Irish Nation-Builders, published a decade and a half after the bruising conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, called up the names of no less than twenty- three Irish-Australian State premiers for the purpose of exemplifying the patriotic bone fides of the Irish and to emphasise their contribution in Australia. This 'historiography of the contribution', which articulates the historical experience of a particular cultural or ethnic group, however narrowly or widely defined, as a succession of individual contributions to a singular, but shared, series of national achievements, was aimed at integrating what had been perceived at times as a specifically Irish-Catholic 'Other' into colonial Australian society. It would not be possible for me today, even if I desired, to simply recapitulate this approach. It always was insufficient as historiographical method and, in that insufficiency, tendentious. It requires the elision of too much of that which has passed - for example the nature of the arrival experience from the perspective of those arriving, and the response from the perspective of the first occupants. Then too the operation of 'the System', that immense apparatus of imperial crime and punishment - and it ignores too, the differing nuanced forms and consequences of settler capitalism, a venture which displaced so many, and which serves as obfuscation of too much of that which still abides. It is a relatively recent historiography that attempts to deal with the collision of those projects of 'discovery', 'place of banishment', 'settlement', 'domination' and above all the subject of the treatment of the first occupants, for, let us never forget, Australia was never, except in the ideological hubris of imperialism, a terra nullius. The problem of historiography is a moral one as well as one of adequacy of scholarship. This should not surprise us, as such a historiography is likely to be influenced by the dominant popular historical narrative of the time, which was often, in the times under consideration, narrowly national in its scope, limited in its inclusivity, and increasingly, being used to provide material for the tracts of polemicists rather than historians, whether professional or dedicated amateurs. We have moved on and we are very fortunate that much new historical work has been carried out on the experience of the Irish in Australia, particularly since the 1980s, by Irish and Australian historians, many with Irish ancestry. Many working too from the Centres for Irish Studies established in the past twenty years, here at the University of New South Wales, at Murdoch University in Perth and at the University of Melbourne. We are all surely indebted to this recent generation of scholars who have given us such carefully researched and well-presented volumes. These include Thomas Kenneally's The Great Shame, The Playmaker, and The Commonwealth of Thieves; Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore; Stuart Macintyre's Concise History of Australia, which has a relatively recent edition, and a number of specialist studies such as Mark Tedeschi's Murder at Myall Creek and Claire Dunne's People Under the Skin. This scholarship provides a richer and ever more inclusive basis on which to reflect on the Irish experience in Australia. As I address the challenge of interpreting history as it affected the Irish who came to Australia, I have an impulse, above all, to reflect on the experience of my own ancestor, my grandfather's brother, Patrick Higgins, born only a few years before the Great Famine - An Gorta Mór - which would leave a million dead and two million fleeing Ireland between 1845 and 1852. Patrick Higgins and his sister, Mary Ann, arrived in Moreton Bay in 1862 aboard the Montmorency, one of the first ships chartered by land and emigration commissioner of the government of Queensland. They ultimately established themselves in Warwick, one hundred and sixty kilometres south-west of Brisbane. Patrick was a ploughman, atypical in that he had undertaken a year of study in the Royal Agricultural Society in Dublin. In Queensland, he would become a ploughman, manager of a farm, and a landholder. Both he and Mary Ann, who was a laundress, would go on to find spouses and both made a living from the land. Only months before their arrival, the 'Erin-go-bragh' and 'Chatsworth' had dropped anchor off Moreton Bay, carrying with them the first Irish colonists recruited by the Queensland Immigration Society, established by Dr. James Quinn, Bishop of Brisbane for the purpose of carrying and supporting immigrants directly from Ireland. I do not know whether my ancestors were aware of Father Patrick Dunne's promise of a 'tropical, Hibernian paradise', or his boast that 'our people are to be the founders of a great nation', but I imagine that they and many others saw this land as a new world, free of the oppressions, poverty and suffering of the old, in which they might build a new life. Their accounts of their experience was in terms of engaging with a frontier. This immediately provokes questions. When I think of my ancestors' arrival, I cannot help thinking also of those who were there before them and who had a culture that scholars put as old as 65,000 years. The words of that great poet and champion of the rights of her people, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), and her description of the desolation and loss engendered by expanding European influence over what would become the colony of Queensland come to mind. Her words on what was an ancient but now broken symmetry with nature: 'The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going.' What was the character of the Ireland my ancestors' left? Those fleeing from conditions of Famine, lucky to survive, anxious to escape, who had been offered a new life were nevertheless entering the lands of people who could foresee their own dispossession. What was the nature of the land to which they journeyed, if it could be so dramatically experienced that it was not a terra nullius? These are profound, complex and troubling questions, captured by Judith Wright's description of walking the beach at Lake Cooloolah: And walking on clean sand among the prints of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather, must quiet a heart accused of its own fear. Affecting an amnesia towards this period of history, avoiding contradictions upon which I must reflect is not an option. It would be insufficient for me to simply re-iterate a historiography of the Irish contribution to Australia.