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Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia

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Oceans of Consolation is a collection of 111 letters written between 1843 and 1906 to and from members of 14 families of Irish immigrants to Australia. The collections were gathered and the book is edited by David Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of Modern History and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.

The letters are augmented by profiles on each of the families written from genealogical, biographical and historiographical sources that give context to the letters and by six themed chapters in which Fitzpatrick analyzes the letters and the general subject of Irish emigration.

The author claims his work is distinguished from similar collections of Irish emigrant correspondence by its focus on "the forgotten vernacular of the steerage classes." In other words, Fitzpatrick aims to give insight into the Australian migration experience of Ireland's lower economic classes.

The book includes a Preface and an introductory first chapter explaining the method of the work. The Introduction is required reading if one is to have a thorough understanding of the many aspects of the author's complicated research method that yields what one well-published Australian historian calls a "showpiece."

The sets of letters penned by members of the 14 families are organized into chapters in four groups: News from Australia with three chapters of letters and associated family profiles; Victorian Voices containing profiles and letters to/from members of five families; News from Home, with letters and profiles of three families; and Ulster Accents with similar content on and by three families.

Six chapters of analysis follow the 14 family profile / letter chapters. Fitzpatrick includes these commentaries to explore "a formidable range of issues in the history of Ireland, Australia and human migration." It is in these 160 pages where Fitzpatrick meets his obligation as an interpreter of history. While the letters are valuable insight into the Irish-Australian migrant experience - they permit the reader to "hear" the idiom of the writers, thus to know them better as individuals - the meat of interpretation and historical value lies in the final six chapters.

A List of Sources and a Thematic Index complete the 649-page book.

Readers should be aware the Index is difficult to use. In a regrettable omission, the author and his editors fail to include page numbers for the key word references. Instead they are identified with a "letters-number-letter" sequence: a two-letter abbreviation of the family name; a number designating the specific piece of correspondence in which the word, phrase or reference is to be found; and an alphabetical letter identifying the pertinent paragraph in the specific letter. If one is to use the Index, this reader-unfriendly method forces one to memorize the abbreviations of the family names, then to plod tediously through the book to find the citation. The effort is often unjustified by the return.

Fitzpatrick's goal is to discover how the written word sustained solidarity among lower-class 19th Century Irish families separated from their emigrant relatives by the mighty ocean distance between Ireland and Australia. He also claims to reveal the differences between Ireland and Australia and what he calls "the very nature of Irishness."

Because of his complex research method and reliance on "letters of the unlettered," there is little doubt this book was difficult to produce. With commendable candor, Fitzpatrick confesses his need for "the courage to complete what sometimes seemed an impossible assignment." He apparently wishes he'd been more disciplined either in defining his scope or pursuing it. Regardless, Oceans of Consolation is a tour de force.

Fitzpatrick consulted an extensive list of sources, both individual and institutional. He expresses his gratitude to descendents of the correspondents whose letters are included in the book. He is equally grateful to numerous institutional sources and individual specialist scholars in Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. His long list of institutional sources included public and university libraries, archives, museums, offices of public records, church registers, Catholic religious orders and Protestant fraternal organizations.

Fitzpatrick discusses the twin challenges of distance and delay that confronted Irish-Australian families in their correspondence written, he says, to "reinforce the emigrant's fading link with `home'." Both had much greater impact on the new Aussie family than on families of Irish émigrés to other lands, notably England and North America.

Four letters written by Michael Hogan between 1853 and 1857 to his brother Mathew, a cooper and publican in County Tipperary, are the subject of Chapter Five and illustrative of the book's content. As in all the letter collections, the editor's impressively researched and well-written family profile precedes them.

Fitzpatrick tells us Michael Hogan, the only convict immigrant featured in the book, arrived at Port Jackson, Australia on the good ship, "Blenheim" from Cork on Nov. 14, 1834 after being convicted of "maiming" at the Cashel Quarter Sessions in January, earlier that year.

Fitzpatrick refers to the Clonmel Herald to describe the charge against him. "Hogan's violent assault on James Kinnealy had been unprovoked and no motive could be assigned for it by the prosecutor. The principal witness in the case was a little girl of about eight or ten years of age, whose testimony was as artless as convincing."

Fitzpatrick uses Blenheim's "printed convict indent," the penal system's answer to a passenger list or cargo manifest, to introduce us to Michael. He is described as "an unmarried, literate, Catholic `farm laborer' aged 27 years, just over 5 feet 6 inches tall; with a `dark ruddy freckled' complexion, brown hair, bluish eyes and `scar top of left side of forehead, top joints of both little fingers crooked.'"

After receiving his "ticket of leave" - his release - a year early in 1840, Michael Hogan married Margaret O'Brien, also formerly of Tipperary, who bore him seven children. Michael worked at several jobs, bought a freehold house (the house plus the land on which it sits) in south Melbourne, sent his brother two checks of £30 each and referred in his letters to the presence in his house of several servants. His self-image revealed in his letters "was that of a man who had made good," writes Fitzpatrick, "and wished this to be recognized." Michael died in 1873, a widowed laborer who had earned the means to have buried his wife and two of his sons in an eight-foot square grave plot in Melbourne's Old Cemetery.

Thus the reader arrives at the actual letters with an appreciation of the background and personality of their writers. Fitzpatrick's well researched and artfully crafted family stories bring life to the letters, thereby enhancing the reader's experience and raising the historical value of the work.

Fitzpatrick suggests lower class Irish-Australian correspondents often seem to have sought help to write their letters. "Help" means reference to letter-writing manuals, plagiarism of friends' letters and dictation of desired messages to more accomplished - maybe even professional - letter writers. Among many common elements, Fitzpatrick cites the frequency of elaborate, identical salutations and Irish-Australian expressions of intimacy resembling "those recommended in manuals for `the juvenile correspondent'."

He says one might presume this style was quintessentially Irish, but he turns to an English manual published in 1856 to verify it conformed closely "to the general base of letter-writing as practiced by uneducated persons." In other words, there's nothing special in this fact; the same characteristic would have been true, for example, of lower class Irish in North America and England. This is the case with many of Fitzpatrick's observations: perhaps pertinent to Irish emigrants in general, but not unique to the history of Irish-Australian migration.

As is the case for economists, political scientists and sociologists, it's important for historians to focus on statistically significant data and avoid wasting effort where the knowledge is less valuable. With this in mind, Fitzpatrick spends too much time in his analyses at the 50th percentile of interpretation. For example, he writes "The letters illustrate eagerness and reluctance to emigrate in roughly equal measure" and "Advice concerning the prospects for future emigrants, when directive, was as often discouraging as encouraging." These letters are obviously not a statistically valid sample of all Irish-Australian migrant correspondence. Nevertheless, it would be preferable for this editor - and all historians, in this reviewer's opinion - to focus on attitudes and feelings shared by at least 75 percent of his sample. It is at the poles of the semantic differential where the most meaningful learning is to be found.

Fitzpatrick wanders frequently from his Irish-Australian thesis in his six commentaries. He writes extensively about the Irish emigrant experience per se, but often fails to drill down into any geographical destination. He spends time on conditions in Ireland, but often doesn't link his topic either to the families of emigrants or emigrants themselves. He occasionally slips away to citations about Irish emigrants to North America without comparing or contrasting the parallels with their Australian cousins.

Perhaps because they are written as summaries, the final two chapters contain several more specific Irish-Australian examples of the emigration experience, important because they support Fitzpatrick's objective. Here are two of many:

* It was the rough life of the outback, bush, homestead, or diggings which engrossed those trying to imagine Australia from Ireland.

* Emigrant letters gave Irish readers graphic accounts of the unfamiliar Australian climate, with its bewildering succession of floods, frosts and fires and above all its summer heat.

History professor Patrick O'Farrell of the University of New South Wales is quoted in "The Sydney Morning Herald" on his reaction to Oceans of Consolation.

"I am humbled by what Professor Fitzpatrick has done so exhaustively and so well . . . It would be hard, if not impossible, to better his treatment of the exercise he has undertaken; this is a showpiece, a master class, in the handling of a certain type of historical source."

Judith Reid of the Library of Congress says the book is definitely "an important acquisition for libraries collecting Irish and Australian history and emigration history."

Professor Fitzpatrick has produced a Herculean contribution to the history of the Irish-Australian emigration experience in Oceans of Consolation. We trust he has enough energy left for other work of equally high value that will add to the body of knowledge on the subject. At the least, we hope he got some rest after this one. He earned it!

Mr Fitzpatrick has researched this topic well, as one would expect, and produced a book which will be of immense help to researchers and family historians.

With an Irish/Australian family background, I found the book very helpful in putting a detailed perspective on the privations of the Irish Immigrants, and those left behind in the homeland.

The book is not a light read. But it is very readable.

PS. I wish the publisher had bound the book as well as the author/editor had written it. Be careful. It will fall apart if opened wide!