David Fitzpatrick:
Oceans of Consolation:
Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia
Review by Frances Devlin Glass

Not only is Oceans of Consolation a work of exemplary scholarship - meticulous, well-argued, wide-ranging, open about its scholarly methods - it is also an engrossing read which systematically challenges most of the assumptions about migration which a reader like myself has had orally transmitted through several generations. This work forced me to acknowledge that my own tribal (part-Irish) family culture which threw up many a heart-broken nationalist and sang much stage-Irish American-generated material about woebegone Kathleens and sunsets on the Claddagh might not be representative. To read it was also to understand that ideas about migration have been deeply conditioned by a literary culture almost invariably middle-class in complexion, replete with its own tropes and tragic codes, and vastly more self-conscious than the texts of Fitzpatrick's unlettered scribes. Fitzpatrick's unprepossessing collection of 111 often semi-literate letters is in no sense encumbered by that kind of literariness.

What most astonished me about these letters by working-class writers, and the dazzling analysis which accompanies and frames them, is their intensely utilitarian and pragmatic nature, their concern with the personal and the financial, and their relative freedom from nationalist, political and sectarian concerns. There is much food for thought for historians of a nationalist bent here as the common man (usually) dismisses 'Smith O Brine [sic]' as 'mad as ever' and ' a Don Quixet [sic] When he went to fight the wind mill' (p.287), or Gavan Duffy as a 'venomous 'ruffin" ' (p. 274), and fails to identify with Ned Kelly and Bold Jack Donohue (p.607). As if to refute tomes written on the subject of interdenominational rivalry in Australia, the letters are remarkable for their lack of sectarian animosity (p.606), and for the insight they offer into the sectarian fluidity of the Protestant population. It may be that Fitzpatrick's refocussing of the microscope on texts by lower class scribes which rarely survive the deaths of their writers and which were not intended for the public domain, has given us radically different ways of re-construing migration history.

The letters constitute fourteen reciprocated sequences of variable length. Dated 1843-1906, they focus most heavily on the 1850s and 1860s, the peak period for migration from Ireland after the Famine, or the 'failure' as these emigrants tended to term it. Fitzpatrick argues that individual interests were systematically subordinated to the collective good, and that both parties (those who stayed and those who went) recognised that families produced surpluses in bodies (roughly half of each generation) which could not be supported. This helps to account for his claim that emigration was embraced with eagerness and reluctance in roughly equal measure (p.517), and that recriminations by the rejected and relinquished were not part of this sample of emigrant discourses (pp. 533-4). Certainly, the letters of the Australian Irish settlers breathe a spirit of extraordinarily resilient pragmatism, even contentment, the more remarkable because their destination rarely exceeded expectations, and frequently only just met or disappointed them. Equally, the letters of those who stayed in Ireland demonstrate that, despite the sense of longing and loss, they too tended to report increasing levels of contentment as the worst social and economic effects of the famine were weathered in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And neither group expressed much that could be called nationalistic zeal: the immigrants did not express anxieties about becoming Australian, and those at home were not excessively conscious of pressing the claims of Ireland. Tribe and money were more urgent concerns.

Without Fitzpatrick's framing, the letters at the heart of the book would be a plain and unexciting read, being so functional. It is in the framing narratives that Fitzpatrick demonstrates his word-smithing skills, and his novelistic flair, as he has a sharp eye for the dramatic and pointed detail, for the social circumstances which do not need to be named because they are so familiar to each correspondent, and for the artistic shape of a life which would never have been construed as such by its owner. However, with the assistance he offers, many of the letters become incandescent precisely because of their simplicity. They are given the opportunity to act as eloquent testimony to the finality of the choice to migrate in the nineteenth century. Easy and relatively cheap air travel in the twentieth century must have revolutionised the meaning and fact of migration. Very few of the writers of these letters returned to Ireland, though the option to do so was often entertained as a future possibility, or as a sign of emotional and sentimental solidarity with those remaining.

Although a little tedious and repetitive at points, the book is superbly organised. Before presenting the letter sequences, David Fitzpatrick offers a statistical overview derived from the official records of migration into Australia and America, information about the proportions coming from each county, and generalisations about the codes and conventions operating in such discourses. His main contention is that the letters served the purposes of consolation, of maintaining bonds between the emigrants and those at home, and that they were instrumental in migration chains, whereby the communities of the old world were partially reconstituted in the new, a point which is made tenuous by his claim in Chapter 1 about the Irish tendency to disperse into the population and not settle in ghettoes (p.16). Believing that the letters 'cannot be interpreted from textual analysis alone' (p.23), he prefaces each sequence of letters with a commentary based on a wide range of genealogical and local sources relating to both countries. It is in these framing exercises that the rhetorical skill of Fitzpatrick is most eloquently attested: they are invariably more artfully written, more shaped and crafted, and more analytic than the plain prose of his artless writers, and the commentary sets up a powerful dialogue with the letters. The effect is not unlike an experimental novel of the variety often called 'faction' these days, whereby the author becomes a fallible omniscient narrator. It becomes possible to identify with Isabella Wyly, the courageous orphaned middle-class daughter forced into servitude but able to become genteel again through marriage to her employer, or with Michael Hogan who never alluded in his letters to the blot on his career - a 7-year sentence for maiming. Equally, one can be drawn into the narratives of the lovable grief-stricken William Fife, or that of the Doorley family who were stranded in the hideous industrial town of Bolton, England, never making it to the promised land of Brisbane. A compassionate, well-informed commentator, Fitzpatrick has the ability to listen for the silences which are often more telling than the words. He is also fully alive to the perils of his own hermeneutic - new information can invalidate an interpretation. His touch is less sure in analytical chapters, which might have been more systematically pruned because of therepetition of material established earlier in his text. However, his account of the slippages and ambiguities of the word 'home' in the final chapter was an aesthetically apt way to bring his text to a climax.

The metaphor he uses of his method is that of a 'sub-postmistress - one who is conversant with background and career, alert to gossip, but often shaky on detail' (p. 27). Although apt in some ways, his metaphor demeans his enterprise which is to confer on these simple writers a degree of dignity, intelligence and resilience, and to give his readers a sense of the courage required to leave a known culture and build a new one on alien soil.

Frances Devlin Glass
School of Literary and Communication Studies,
Burwood Campus, Deakin University,
221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Vic. 3125,
Australia

This review first appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies, no. 46, September 1995, pp. 89-91, and is reproduced here with the permission of Dr. Frances Devlin Glass.