This chapter demonstrates how many Irish migrants in nineteenth-century colonial Australia met with overt discrimination, underpinned by a widespread circulation of racialized stereotypes of Irishness in popular culture, including in images in the mainstream media as well as in fiction. These racialized images of Irishness depended on widespread cultural knowledge of Irish stereotypes, such as stereotypes of Irish speech patterns, facial characteristics, and dress. At the same time, stereotypes of First Nations people and Chinese were also circulating in popular culture, often in the same frame or act as Irish stereotypes. While today many Australians of Irish descent pride themselves on the fact that their ancestors were less culpable in the racist policies and practices of colonisation in Australia, the reality is more complex as Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, recognised this is one of his first speeches on an official tour of Australia in 2017. This chapter analyses one element of that complexity by examining how Irish Australians have been represented in popular media and culture when in the same frame as two other racialized groups, First Nations people and Chinese Australians.

This chapter introduces the essays of this book and historicizes why a book on race in Irish literature and culture is of special significance at this contemporary moment in the twenty-first century. The editors signal the ubiquity of the concept of race in Irish letters and the changing iterations of that concept, especially since the Celtic Revival. Irishness has been compared and even equated to blackness to serve both colonial and nationalist agendas. However, in Revivalist and post-Celtic Tiger discourses, the racial imaginary surrounding Irishness has also been silenced in telling ways. This essay connects the dots between these divergent histories to narrativize a critical position that aids a decolonial framing of the subject of race, Irish literature, and Irish culture. Such a decolonial endeavor is especially urgent at a time when fascist nationalisms and white supremacy are becoming key geopolitical registers. It is also a time when Irish whiteness is being scrutinized and when Black Irishness is gaining recognition. This is a unique moment in the history of Ireland, and it is partly because of the growing crescendo of cultural identification by a biracial population within Ireland.

In Australia, Irish and Catholic are virtually synonymous. In the eastern states, Irish Catholics often comprised nearly a third of the population and rarely less than a quarter. Irish nuns, priests, bishops, and laity shaped the country almost from the beginning. This chapter traces the development of Irish, and Irish Catholic, Australia across the continent from the early 1800s to Federation and beyond.