Irish Poets in Colonial Brisbane

Abstract

This paper compares the literary careers of two Irish immigrant-poets who lived and wrote for a significant part of their lives in nineteenth-century Brisbane, using the comparison to explore some of the different ways in which Irish literary tradition could reinvent itself in a new physical and cultural environment. Early Brisbane is not an especially fertile field for the study of Irish-Australian literary writing, perhaps surprisingly, given the strong Irish presence in Brisbane society during the first half of the twentieth century. One explanation may be that whereas the Irish had a strong presence in the military and the labouring classes in the Moreton Bay Colony, the institutions of government, public education and the press — the chief nurseries of Culture in most settler societies — were dominated by the English and Scottish.