'Irish Australia, Irish Music: A Valediction To Vision'
John O’Carroll
University of Western Sydney
In the late 1990s, it is common in academic circles to speak of an Anglo-Celtic hegemony when speaking of the controlling cultural logics of this country. But the hyphenation itself reminds us that in the colonial past Anglo and Celtic were racialising categories within a hierarchy of wider subordination. In this respect, the history of Anglo-Celtic relations offers profound insights into ongoing structural questions about Australia’s relationship to its history of migrancy, of colonisation ,and of cultural construction.

In this paper, these questions are explored through the aperture of Irish music. For in Australia, Irish culture has always shimmered with signifiers: jigs and reels evoked a bush past, ballads are now understood as “folk.” Using the Irish ballad revival of the 1950s and 60s to focus the inquiry, this paper argues the transactional character of migrancy, its characteristic double vision. Taking a lead from Salman Rushdie, it could be that the most typical “Mr Ireland” lives in a provincial Australian town, and that the “big men” of Irish history (de Valera, Collins et al.) performed for us: after all, the Irish-Irish are outnumbered by those who left, and their offspring. In the songs are to be found the protocols of performance, of audition, and of character portrayal. This paper takes its departure from the traditions of Michael Moran on the one hand and Thomas Moore on the other; it then looks at the mythologisation of character (especially the gunman), and then (using McLuhan and Ong) the “secondary orality” of Irish music-narrative. These explorations are then developed into a series of searching questions about postcoloniality and the future.

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