Irish-Australian attitudes.(Australia)

LIKE ONE OF THOSE planetary alignments that occur from time to time, this year occasions the commemoration of four key dates in the Irish-Australian mental landscape: two events in Australian history, and one in Irish literary culture that also has apparent significance in this country. There is a fourth anniversary that for me is the most important of them all, though as far as I know no one else is aware of its existence, at least not in official Irish-Australian

academic and cultural circles. In any case, this fourth event would sit somewhat awkwardly with the Ireland of the mind that Irish-Australians, and Australians in general, seem to prefer.

Three of the events I have in mind are well known. The bicentenary of the convict uprising at Castle Hill in New South Wales took place on March 5. Bloomsday on 16 June this year marked 100 years since the day on which the events in James Joyce's historical novel Ulysses purport to take place. The sesquicentenary of the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria, is due to be commemorated on December 3.

In addition to these three commemorations is the memory of a brief meeting between a famous Irish writer and a relatively obscure Australian one that took place in London in the English summer of 1904. Almost exactly 100 years ago as I write these words, W.B. Yeats met the playwright Louis Esson. I shall relate what was said on that occasion towards the end of this essay after first considering the three anniversaries that occupy public space.

From an Irish-Australian perspective, there is an irresistible symbolism in the kind of calendarial coincidence I have identified, but there is also an opportunity to consider the true meaning of the Irish-Australian experience. The three public events that I have in mind--Castle Hill, Eureka and Bloomsday--appear in 2004 a lot closer to us than years and physical distance might suggest, and indeed all the intervening decades and miles between seem hardly to matter at all. For those of a certain tribal cast of Irish-Australian mind, such questions of geography and chronology are trifling. Like all such arbitrary cultural rituals, these three dates excite the Irish-Australian imagination even as they describe its limits.

The imaginative consanguinity of the Castle Hill and Eureka rebellions is summed up in an Irish place name--Vinegar Hill. Like Strawberry Fields in the Beatles song, Vinegar Hill is forever. The Irish name that link the two Australian events originates in an earlier uprising that occurred on the other side of the world. Thus unified, the three Vinegar Hills play a significant part in establishing the mythology of the Irish in Australia, a tradition that continues to the present day and shows no sign of waning.

Before describing the relevant events and their afterlife, I shall say a little something about the ideas that support the approach to history that I am taking. There are three main components. One idea is the theory of memes, that is, the units of cultural value that spread through minds in a way that parallels the propagation of genes through reproduction. The person credited with proposing the idea of memes is the Darwinian theorist Richard Dawkins; as you would expect, the field of memetics, as it has become known, has since been entered by other thinkers.