Ireland

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford, was Colm Tóibín’s birthplace in 1955. His father was a schoolteacher and local historian. Martin Tóibín died young, when Colm was twelve, an early loss explored in Tóibín’s novel Nora Webster (2014), in which the eponymous widow’s son Donal is likewise twelve and a stammerer. In 2009, Tóibín published Brooklyn, which moves between Enniscorthy and New York City. The very modesty of Tóibín’s middle-class settings and characters – their constrained lives, village absorptions, small defeats – could not obscure Tóibín’s subtle artistry or his forensic interest in psychology, especially that of his women, many of whom are so complex, so contradictory, as to make the male characters seem extraneous, unimaginative, stolid.

When amateur historian Catherine Corless wrote in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society (2012) that the bodies of 796 children who had died in Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home between 1925 and 1961 might have been interred in a disused septic tank within the home’s grounds, she supposed her involvement in the search for truth would be at an end. The article, she expected, would prompt academics, politicians, and law enforcement agencies – not to mention the Bon Secours nuns who ran the home – to begin their own inquiries.

Here is a joke that used to do the rounds during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A plane was about to land in Belfast. During its descent, the pilot’s voice came over the announcement system: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Belfast International Airport. Welcome to Ulster. Please set your watches back four hundred years.’

In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’ 

James Joyce’s Ulysses was published 100 years ago by American Sylvia Beach, who ran a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. The early history of the work was marked by controversy and censorship. The centenary is being marked by numerous publications in celebration of the work by writers, academic Joyceans, and even the odd Irish ambassador. John McCourt’s Consuming Joyce: 100 years of Ulysses in Ireland traces the reception of Ulysses in Ireland. As much a book about Ireland as it is about Ulysses, it follows the critical, institutional, and popular reception/consumption of the work through the different phases of Irish history.

Australian universities have long taught early modern (c.1500–1750) English/British and European history, but with Alexandra Walsham’s recent appointment as the first female to occupy a Cambridge history chair, there are now (with Oxford’s Lyndal Roper) two Melbourne-trained early modernist Oxbridge professors ...

Brenda Niall has the knack of lucid multi-focus, a great thing in a biographer. That organisational deftness, an ability to keep the tangled loops of people’s lives spooling freely through her fingers while she projects a rich and dramatic context for them, was evident in her group study of The Boyds (2002), and it is the structural virtue in this new work, The Riddle of Father Hackett.