Bob Reece

Emeritus Professor Bob Reece has published widely on Aboriginal history and on New Norcia history in particular. In a brief preface he notes that his paternal grandfather and father were fine cricketers and that he (a poor player) has followed the game from the time of Don Bradman’s Invincibles in the late 1940s. When he learned of the Benedictine Mission’s Aboriginal cricketers who played between 1879 and 1906, the story demanded to be told. Without doubt Reece is the best person to tell it.

In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'

It was inevitable, sooner or later, someone would write a book celebrating the achievements of the Protestant Irish in Australia. Books commemorating the part played by the Catholic Irish culminated in Patrick O’Farrell’s ambit claim that they were responsible for just about everything we like to think of (or used to think of) as being distinctively Australian. Now Professor Jarlath Ronayne has given us his own hyperbolic response in the subtitle of this sumptuous publication. The best way to see the book is as a useful reminder that ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ were not synonyms in colonial Australia. Irish-born Protestants, whether they were members of the Ascendancy élite or, as in most cases, of much more modest origins, identified themselves as Irish. In early Melbourne, they joined with the Catholic Irish to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as their national event. However, their Irish ‘nation’ was the Protestant nation euphorically invoked by the Protestant ‘Patriots’ of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ in the 1780s. And Trinity College, Dublin, was the alma mater of that minority ‘nation’.

This book tells how the Irish government gradually rearranged its methods of convict transportation, from a variety of destinations in North America to a single destination on the far side of the world. The story takes place predominately between 1783 and 1791, from the independence of the United States (which effectively closed American ports to British and Irish transports) to the sailing of the Queen, the first ship to take convicts direct from Ireland to New South Wales. It is a subject that has never been properly examined, mainly because we tend to assume that the Irish point of view – as far as administration goes – was nothing more than a footnote to the British.