Leisure and Culture

St Patrick’s Day in the New Land, 1880. Source: Dictionary of Sydney

Conor Healy ~ Ashley Bentley ~ Denise Murphy

When they departed for the Australian colonies, the Irish brought more than physical luggage. They also transported aspects of their Irish culture and leisure activities. Examples of these included Irish traditional music, Gaelic, hurling, handball, St Patrick’s Day and for many, the Catholic religion.[1] Such cultural and leisure expressions were the attempts by these Irish Australians to define their place in Australia and to create their own distinctive identity there.[2]

As in Ireland and other Irish diasporic destinations such as Britain and America, the Roman Catholic Church was a central presence in the Irish-Australian psyche. As such, it was instrumental both in encouraging and discouraging attempts by Irish immigrants to practice Irish culture and leisure in the Australian colonies.[3] This meant that the Catholic Church, as the ‘arbiter of all things Irish’ in Australia, had a prominent role in the type of Irish-Australian identity created there.[4]

From a stereotypical perspective, the Catholic Church’s cultural influence set a one-dimensional precedent that encouraged the Irish-Australians to endorse quintessentially Irish activities that opposed the process of Anglicisation. While being accurate to an extent, the Church’s impact on Australian culture and leisure activities produced varying results. Therefore, opposition to ‘Englishness’ cannot be universally applied to all Irish cultural and leisure experiences: an analysis of the Church’s influence on different aspects of Irish culture and leisure will demonstrate this.

An examination of Irish cultural pageantry in Sydney shows that the Irish Catholic Church disseminated a pragmatic, assimilatory Irish-Australian identity. This was achieved through the cultivation of an Irish identity based on modified ‘noble’ aspects of Gaelic Ireland rather than on its potentially divisive contemporary politics. A corresponding assimilation-driven Irish identity was seen in relation to hurling in New South Wales and Victoria. Despite its strong Irish cultural association, the Catholic Church in Australia prioritised the preservation of peace and Irish assimilation there. As such, they cautiously attempted to discourage the playing of some matches due to the violent behaviour of spectators. Gambling in rural Queensland and New South Wales was the exception to this theme of assimilation. The endorsement by a Catholic Church official of ‘two-up’ and various card games demonstrates an instance in which the promulgation of a certain ‘illegal’ Irish culture in Australia was used purposely to oppose the Anglicised central authority there. Overall, these perspectives will highlight the complex and varied role played by the Catholic Church in the production of a hybrid form of an Irish-Australian identity from the early nineteenth to early twentieth century.

These arguments will be based on contemporary, primary sources pertaining to the Irish Catholic experience in New South Wales and Victoria; newspapers, photographs, and official documents will provide the focal point for this analysis. Such sources enable an understanding of the Irish emigrant experience in Australia on a more localised, popular level than the dominant historiography provides. Moreover, these materials allow for the detection of discrepancies in the generalised historiographical interpretations of the Irish diaspora’s cultural and leisure experience in Australia.

REFERENCES

[1] See Patrick Bracken, ‘The emergence of hurling in Australia 1877–1917’, Sport in Society, no. 1 (2015), pp 62-73; Anthony James Veal, Rob Lynch and Simon Darcy, Australian leisure (Sydney, 2013); Geoffrey Partington, The Australian nation (New Brunswick, 1997), p. 60.

[2] O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Notre Dame, 2001), p. 197.

[3] David Fitzpatrick, ‘”That beloved country, that no place else resembles”’: connotations of Irishness in Irish-Australian letters, 1841-1915’, Irish Historical Studies, no. 108 (1991), p. 336; Oliver Rafferty, Irish Catholic identities (Manchester, 2013), p. 139.

[4] O’ Farrell, Irish in Australia, p. 178; Gyorgy Borus, ‘Irish Catholicism in Australia: a brief survey up to 1945’, Hungarian Studies in English (1992), p. 119; Fitzpatrick, “That beloved country, that no place else resembles”, p. 336.