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Irish Poets in Colonial Brisbane: Mary Eva O'Doherty and Cornelius Moynihan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
Extract
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.
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References
Notes
1 For the Irish presence in the military and the convicts/emancipists, see Jennifer Harrison, ‘Governors, gaolers and guards: the Irish soldiers at Moreton Bay, 1824–42’, in Irish-Australian Studies: Papers Delivered at the Seventh Irish-Australian Conference, July 1993, ed Pelan, Rebecca et al. (Sydney: Crossing Press, 1994), 300–310. For the dominant Scottish presence, see John Mackenzie-Smith, Moreton Bay Scots, 1841–59 (Brisbane: Church Archivists Press, 2000).Google Scholar
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6 Kellow, H.A., The Queensland Poets (London: Harrap, 1930) mentions O'Doherty, Connolly and Moynihan; Cecil Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers (St Lucia: University of Queensland, 1959) only O'Doherty; and Stable, J.J. and Kirwood, A.E.M., eds, A Book of Queensland Verse (Brisbane: Qld Book Depot, 1924), includes only O'Doherty and Connolly.Google Scholar
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