Imperial Spaces: Placing the Irish and Scots in Colonial Australia by Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Dianne P. Hall (review)

Imperial Spaces traces the emergence of settler identities in nineteenth-century Australia, arguing that these developed out of individuals’ experiences in encountering new places and peoples, as inflected by colonial legacies, social memories, and diverse cultural traditions. This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of colonial experience and to the ways in which a European presence became materially imprinted and imaginatively authorized. It will find a place even in a crowded field of historical studies of colonialism and imperialism, specifically with regard to the so-called Anglo-world of British/Irish settlement, and its resultant “Anglobalization,” topics that have attracted much interest of late. Imperial Spaces will be doubly useful insofar as it represents an ambitious and up-to-date reflection on the analysis of white settlement and so-called ethnic identities in colonial and postcolonial studies. The key refrain here is the argument that individual settlers repeatedly performed local, place-based, ethnic identities that were at once always emergent, proleptically endorsed by hope and hype, but also based upon the immediate requirement to stitch together metropolitan past and colonial present. The resulting sense of place was “complex, contingent and changing, and continuously reframed by the discursive ebbs and flows of memory and empire” (73). For non-specialists, particularly those interested in synoptic, cultural perspectives on imperialism, this is probably the key message of the book. Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Dianne P. Hall take this opportunity to remind us that, at heart, settler colonialism was grounded in the local, quotidian experiences of individuals who cannot be reduced to the effects of discourse or the bearers of primordial characteristics. Principally using correspondence, diaries, and journals—all the while acknowledging the difficulties involved—they are able to give a real and affecting sense of the diversity of settler experiences, and the complex ways in which individuals linked past, present, and future in intensely localized narratives of identity. They are able to show how these “subjective” and “imaginative” interpretations were negotiated via cultural inscriptions enacted at particular locales—on the crossing over, for instance, in claiming land, in the pastoral landscape, in the colonial city, and in church and chapel (51).

Proudfoot and Hall are particularly keen to argue against the assumption that these “ethnic” identities—most especially Irish ones—can be understood as more or less readily translated, univocal, and static. They insist throughout on critiquing such views, putting in place a much richer account of the diversity and hybridity of these identities, specifically those of Australian settlers hailing from Ireland and Scotland. This is the second notable argument of Imperial Spaces, and it is of particular relevance for historians of imperialism and colonialism. Readers will be left in no doubt that the essentialist reading of Irish settler identities as predominantly or hegemonically Catholic and nationalist is a bad thing. Here, Proudfoot and Hall want to intervene in debates within Irish studies (they make the point that in the revisionism and post-revisionism debates, there has been a signal failure to properly connect analysis of English/British colonialism in Ireland with the Irish experience of emigration, colonialism, and postcolonialism) and in countries such as Australia (whose own “History Wars” problematically position the Irish vis-à-vis indigenous Australians). I have much sympathy with this view, recalling from a long while back Homi Bhabha’s lazy invocation of “the natives of Ireland” in a whole list of subalterns (The Location of Culture [Routledge, 1994], 240). It is at least salutary to be reminded of the different traditions in the island of Ireland, the complexity of subaltern relationships in general, and the characteristic incapacity of the victimized to identify with each other. Nevertheless, while Proudfoot and Hall can reasonably argue that “no one reading of Ireland’s place within the Empire is possible,” this flattening of ethnic consciousness into fine-grained and dynamic plurality...