Real and Imagined Colonial Race Relations in Australia: Irish and Indigenous Links, by Ciara Smart.

While much work has been done to expose the reality of colonial race relations, we still tend to imagine an overly dichotomous version of Australian colonial history.  It is generally accepted that this dichotomy represents indigenous peoples as overly homogenous.  However it is less understood that it also conceals the ethnic diversity of the non-indigenous cohort and obscures the possibility for nuances in the white-black binary.  My work re-examines the nature of Irish relations with indigenous peoples in the colonies of Australasia and tackles the popular but largely unsubstantiated framing of this relationship as comparatively benevolent.  The romantic vision of the Irish as would-be ‘good colonisers’ has been particularly facilitated by an apparent empathy for non-white indigenous peoples occasionally apparent in the nineteenth-century Irish nationalist press.  The experiences of a handful of Irish nationalists in Australia, including the well-known William Smith O’Brien in Van Diemen’s Land, offer us a lens to test if this transnational sense of righteous co-victimhood survived the leap to real-world application.

Ciara Smart is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania. Her research focuses on the nuances of Australasian-Irish history with a particular focus on colonial race relations.

Jointly sponsored by the State Library and Archive Service of Tasmania and the Professional Historians Association Vic & Tas, the Libraries Tasmania Talks are a series of monthly public lectures held at the Hobart Library. They can be attended free at the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts or viewed online via the Webinar.

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Image: Photograph - Smith, O’Brien - Irish Exile; NS1013/1/577