AustLit

'There is no more common Irish journey than that made by generations of people ‘across the water’ to Great Britain. A complex set of factors, from the countries’ geographical proximity to the colonial nature of their historical relationship, combine to ensure that Irish migration to Britain ‘comprises a very large, very special case’.  Australia, too, has claims to exceptionalism as a receptor of Irish migrants. Oliver MacDonagh proposes three respects in which the Irish-Australian diaspora differs from its counterparts in Britain and North America: its historically high percentage of the total population of the new country, its very even demographic distribution and the somewhat special status of the Irish as a ‘founding people’, arriving in Australia – mainly as convicts and soldiers – at the beginning of its European colonization, thereby exercising a potentially stronger influence over the shape and destiny of the new nation than the other Irish emigrations could hope to achieve. Although points of commonality co-exist with these markers of difference – particularly for Catholic Irish migrants, who have a shared historical experience of being a denigrated out-group in both countries – any joint examination of the autobiographical writings of the Irish in Britain and Australia must expect the contrasts to eclipse the correspondences. Yet, as this chapter will show, despite being shaped by highly distinctive diasporic histories and sociocultural conditions, these respective literary corpuses reveal certain narrative preoccupations that illuminate the shifting meanings of home and belonging for those whose identities are forged across boundaries and heritages.' (Introduction)

'This thesis argues that an understanding of the emotion of shame can contribute substantially to the literary interpretation of a broad range of Australian autobiographies published between 1960 and 1995. From a detailed analysis of more than a dozen autobiographical texts, I conclude that shame is also a powerful force within Australian culture, although its presence has been largely unrecognised. The introduction to this thesis explains why an understanding of shame is useful in interpreting autobiographical texts, and discusses the relevance of shame to contemporary Australian autobiographies. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical foundations for a study of shame in Australian autobiography, drawing on historical and contemporary critical approaches to shame in a variety of academic disciplines. Chapters 2 to 5 analyse a number of Australian autobiographical texts, under the headings of shame and Australian cultural identity, shame and illegitimacy, shame and race, and shame and the Jewish immigrant experience. Chapter 2 discusses the shaming of Australian culture by the myth of British superiority as represented in Kathleen Fitzpatrick's autobiography, Solid Bluestone Foundations: and Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood 1908 -1928, with reference also to works by Martin Boyd. Chapter 3 considers three autobiographies concerned with shame and illegitimacy, The Boy Adeodatus: Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard by Bernard Smith, A Mother's Disgrace by Robert Dessaix, and Daddy We Hardly Knew You by Germaine Greer. The autobiographies by Aboriginal writers in chapter 4 provide the basis for a close examination of the relationship between shame and racism in Australia. The writers discussed in detail are Ruby Langford Ginibi, Sally Morgan, Charles Perkins, Ella Simon, Margaret Tucker and Glenyse Ward. In chapter 5, autobiographies by three Australians of European Jewish descent, Morris Lurie, Amirah Inglis and Andrew Riemer, illustrate the operation of shame in the immigrant experience, with particular insights into the relationship between shame, anti-Semitism and Holocaust survival.' (Thesis description)