Abstract

The Central Highlands of Tasmania is an unlikely antipodes of Irish writing, but it is a region that has complex representations by exiled and immigrant Irish writers. The picturesque landscape of the Highlands in the Young Irelander John Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1856) is well known; less well known is the writing of William Moore Ferrar, born in Dublin in 1823 and who emigrated to New South Wales, then Van Diemen’s Land, as a free settler in 1843. His novel Artabanzanus: The Demon of the Great Lake: An Allegorical Romance of Tasmania: Arranged from the Diary of the Late Oliver Ubertus (1896) represents a vision of an ideal surface world and a hellish underground. Dedicated to Arthur James Balfour, and dramatising the issue of Irish home rule, Ferrar’s novel is an eccentric but multi-faceted instance of the Irish-Tasmanian imaginary. Â

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