The Vanished Kingdoms of Patrick O’Farrell: Religion, Memory and Migration in Religious History

Abstract

This article considers the place of religion and memory in the history of religious immigration to Australia. It begins with a discussion of the work of Patrick O’Farrell and his family memoir, Vanished Kingdoms and its evocation of family, place, and religion in New Zealand and Australia. It reviews recent writing on collective memory by the religious sociologist Danièle Hervieu‐Léger, theologian Paul Ricoeur, and the Australian historian Peter Read, raising possibilities for the analysis of sources relating to the memory cultures of migrants to Australia in the nineteenth century. This article takes a small sample of testimonies from the letters of Irish migrants, including those edited by Patrick O’Farrell, and the speeches and correspondence of some members of the higher clergy and concludes with some speculation about the way in which migrants to Australia forged the chains of memory that constitute their religious communities.