Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

8. Remembering the Homeland: St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations in New Zealand to 1910

101 Remembering the Homeland St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations in New Zealand to 1910 TA N JA BU E LTM A N N The wearing of the green on St. Patrick’s Day, commented a reporter in the Otago Witness, “shows no sign of wearing out . . . everywhere the colour—green scarves and ties about the neck, green trimmings about the hat, and at the breast a sprig of living green, the three-leaved shamrock for choice, a bit of any wayside hedge if only it were green” (24 Mar. 1909, 4). Not only were such familiar national symbols still valued, they were also necessary, concluded the reporter, to maintain a good spirit among colonists. For the Irish themselves, the “inspiring effect which such memories [of the native land] leave,” were crucial, allowing emigrants to rejoice in their old homeland although they now lived so far from it (New Zealand Tablet, 28 Mar. 1874, 8). Of the emigrants leaving Ireland in the age of mass migration, only a comparatively small proportion went to New Zealand (Phillips and Hearn 2008), a fact that has contributed to the Irish immigrant experience being hidden in the larger narrative of British emigration (Campbell 2006, 28). Research on the Irish in New Zealand has advanced significantly over recent years, however, with D. H. Akenson’s groundbreaking study (1990) serving as the crucial catalyst. While much of the new research initially focused on determining the origins and places of settlement of the Irish in New Zealand (Fraser 1997; Hearn 2000, 2002), scholarship has branched out into social and cultural history (Fraser 2007; McCarthy 2005; Nolan 2006). The point is often made that a distinct Irish identity in New Zealand began 102 Memory and the Irish Diaspora to emerge with the arrival of larger contingents of Irish migrants from the 1860s onward. The Catholic Church, with Catholic schools, secured this distinctiveness for the Catholic faction, setting Irish Catholic identity “slightly apart” from the rest of European New Zealand (Akenson 1990, 159). St. Patrick’s Day provided another vehicle to give voice to this communal identity,1 but it has not yet been systematically studied (but see King 1994). This contribution seeks to fill the existing historical gap, offering a primer on St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in New Zealand to 1910, their purpose and meaning. The year 1910 provides a useful caesura for three reasons. First, the year marks a useful end point in terms of migration patterns of the Irish to New Zealand. Compared to other groups from the British Isles, the arrival of Irish migrants declined significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Phillips and Hearn 2008, 52). Setting 1910 as an end date for this study thus takes account of this significant migration trajectory. Second, 1910 is a significant moment in terms of the social and cultural development of New Zealand and the formation of a New Zealand national identity. As studies of other ethnic groups demonstrate , migrants and their descendants began seeing themselves from this point as New Zealanders (for example, Bueltmann 2011, 209). In the case of the Irish, this process was underpinned, and possibly accelerated, by the growing tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. This point connects directly to the third reason for ending this study in 1910: Irish culture in New Zealand, in response to developments in Ireland itself, became increasingly politicized from the early twentieth century, heralding a new phase of Irish ethnic expression in New Zealand that merits a separate study (see also Davis 1974). A further point worth pausing over at the outset is the representativeness of this study in terms of the experiences of the Irish immigrant community as a whole. As recent studies of New Zealand’s colonial period emphasize, associational activities such as St. Patrick’s Day are crucial in piecing together immigrant community life, offering a central hook for exploring that life in conjunction with developments in the wider host 1. Ethnocultural events or national holidays were quick to develop, too, among other ethnic groups (see Bueltmann 2011). Remembering the Homeland 103 society (see also Horn 2010). This chapter thus considers the relationship between St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and cultural memory, to assess how they served as loci of memory (Nora 1989) in colonial New Zealand. Irish settlers, as others, came to an alien environment where the place of the self was undefined and where new experiences...