Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

2. Roots and Rhizomes in Irish-Australian Ancestral Memory

24 2 Roots and Rhizomes in Irish-Australian Ancestral Memory CH A D H A BE L The terrain of Irish memory in Australia is diverse and uneven, but Australian authors have done much to map this territory in the past few decades, beginning with Vincent Buckley’s Memory Ireland and reaching a new height in the 1990s in the work of authors like Thomas Keneally and Christopher Koch. For these authors, memories of Ireland are maintained and promulgated through ancestry, which, as both a personal and communal phenomenon , is a definitive manifestation of cultural memory. Indeed, ancestry can be seen as an example of a lieu de memoire, in Pierre Nora’s terminology, because of the coexistence of the three aspects of embodied memory—material , symbolic, and functional—“created by the interaction between memory and history” (1989, 14). Australia has strong Irish origins; during the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all immigrants were Irish (Connolly 1998, 31). While many were originally transported to Australia as convicts, many also came as “free” settlers, often with the assistance of governmental or philanthropic organizations . In Wherever Green Is Worn (2002), his study of the worldwide Irish diaspora, Tim Pat Coogan describes Irish-Australia’s shift from rebellion to respectability and the sharp rise in popularity of all things Irish during the 1990s. Indeed, this trend had become so strong that in 1996, the former prime minister, Bill Hayden, could write that “Australian culture, too, resonates with the unmistakable Irish influences, a rebelliousness, a suspicion of authority, a touchy cockiness, a testy combativeness, a self-deprecating humour . . . we take from the Irish their penchant for admiring noble heroes Roots and Rhizomes in Irish-Australian Ancestral Memory 25 who sacrifice themselves to lost causes. . . . This is central to the Irish psyche” (1996, 18). This ongoing construction of an oppositionalist Australian nationalism is solidly based in the memory of Ireland’s past and its contribution to Australia. One crucial influence on this tradition is Ned Kelly, the bushranger born of Irish parents known for his opposition to British dominance among the Victorian police force. Another is the Eureka Stockade, a rebellion against oppressive conditions on the Victorian gold fields led by the Irish, most notably Peter Lalor, brother of Irish nationalist writer James Fintan Lalor. These figures of Irish-Australian cultural memory have been a crucial part of a nationalist, republican ideology of Irish influence on Australia. However, this memory-based oppositionalist strand is only one part of the story: it draws on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as an “arborescent” model of cultural identity (1987), reliant on metaphors of treelike structures with roots, trunk, and branches. Arborescence thus emphasizes linearity, hierarchy, and purity. Rhizomes, on the other hand— grasslike structures—emphasize lateral connections, networks, and exteriority rather than deep internal structures. Nick Mansfield identifies the dominance of arborescence in constructions of ancestry, arguing that [f]amily relationships, however, could be more fully modeled as rhizomatic. Patterns of intermarriage and birth expand infinitely from any one point. Your birth connects you to two families via your parents; through them to four families via their parents and so on. The complexity of the picture is intensified by the lines of flight conjoining you to siblings, cousins, their children, their partners, their partners’ families, and so on to infinity. Yet the genealogies pored over and celebrated by family historians tend to ignore this complexity, and “overcode” it, in Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, by a simple tracing of inheritance along a single dimension. (2000, 146) The complexity allowed for by a rhizomatic approach to ancestry allows us to reconsider the metaphors we employ when considering cultural memory and identity, and, indeed, Irish-Australian fiction embodies a shift from an arborescent approach to a rhizomatic one. In the mid-1980s, Vincent Buckley explored ways in which Ireland serves as a background presence in Australian cultural life. A highly regarded 26 Memory and the Irish Diaspora poet who claimed seven out of eight great-grandparents as Irish, Buckley examined both Irish and Irish-Australian cultural memory in Memory Ireland (1985), which quickly became a seminal example of a turn to the ancestral homeland and set a trend culminating in Keneally and Koch’s works of the 1990s. Written from the perspective of an outsider who is nevertheless familiar with and enamored of Ireland, Memory Ireland argues that personal memory is much stronger...