O’Farrell remarked in his preface that, ‘I have found the Irish a vastly entertaining, perplexing and inexhaustible subject, for which capacities to amuse – in the best sense – I am deeply grateful.’ Malcolm and Hall, on the other hand, do not participate at this level. They add balance by strenuously standing apart from the community they describe. They don’t like Irish jokes either, noting that their persistence into contemporary times is a sign of the ongoing marginalisation of the Irish. They have a point, but it is amusing to come across a history of the Irish with so little sense of craic. To be fair, the book makes brilliant use of cartoons from various periods of history, pointing out the bias that may come from cartoonists trained in England. This is a welcome change from O’Farrell, whose book includes no fewer than six pictures of Daniel Mannix, six times as many as any other figure. Mannix does not really appear in this new book until near the end. For once he has to wait his turn.

Irish immigrants leaving for Australia (photograph via State Library Victoria)

Malcolm and Hall have an enormous amount of ground to cover and always tread warily. But there are omissions. They do not deal much with the contribution of the Irish to the development of a vernacular Australian spirituality, one of the most significant aspects of the history of the Irish in Australia. Inextricably linked to this is the impact of the Irish in establishing the sexual mores of parts of the Australian community, with which this book does engage, especially in fine chapters on sexual relations between Chinese and Irish and also Indigenous Australians and the Irish. Religion in this book is mostly a political phenomenon. There is much commentary on the vexed issue of government aid for Catholic schools, regarded for generations as political poison. The authors note the irony whereby it was finally Robert Menzies, ‘a man not noted for his Irish or Catholic sympathies’, who finally came to the party in the early 1960s; he was from a side of politics that Irish political interests had usually regarded with suspicion, even hostility. Menzies needed votes at the time, and Catholic votes were as good as any.

Beneath the structure of schooling there was and remains a debate about the inner purpose of education. Of course, not all Irish were Catholic, but many of them were. There is no mention in this book of the Christian Brothers, who arrived from Ireland to stay in 1868 and built a network of schools that continues to educate about 40,000 young Australians. Sure, the brothers had a political project, to improve the lot of their constituents and get them off the bottom rung of society. And sure, their history has been painfully dark, an issue this book does not address. But the brothers also wanted to convey a sense of God, morality, life’s ultimate purpose, and the best use to make of a boxing ring. The Irish Sisters of Mercy were likewise engaged in education, as were the Brigidines and Presentation sisters. Indeed, even Mary MacKillop, from Scottish stock, brought many sisters from Ireland to work in her schools. At their best, these figures, with limited resources, created a folksy and colourful spirituality, full of warmth and eccentricity. There were many nuns who prayed as though God were a bold boy who needed telling off. The famous green Catechism was green for a reason. It gave one-line answers to such tricky questions as ‘who is God?’ and ‘why did God make the world?’ Religion as part of daily housekeeping established a unique style in which sermons were marginal and authority a veneer. Monsignor Hartigan’s comic poetry, which teases his Irish community mercilessly, would surely be as much worth a mention as the stodgy Rolf Boldrewood.

There are moments when the authors do get close to these issues. One of the best chapters in the book, ‘Madness and the Irish’, asks many questions about the high rates of incarceration of the Irish in secure mental facilities. To their credit, here as everywhere, the authors are crystal clear when they pose questions to which they can find no objectively verifiable answers. They are scrupulous in acknowledging the work of fellow historians, often describing the challenges they have dealt with in their attempts to create clear pictures. So we don’t know why the mental health of so many Irish was deemed a threat to the community; some may well have been more of an inconvenience than a danger. Others were mystifying to non-Irish medical staff. There is a portrait of a woman locked up with her rosary beads and prayers, prone to trafficking with fairies. It is hard to believe she was really sick, just imaginative. Likewise, there are moments when the sense of alienation inherent in Irish Celtic spirituality finds kinship with Indigenous experience. The remarkable Daisy Bates, herself Irish, told the journalist Ernestine Hill in 1832 that her ethnicity explained ‘her lifetime loyalty to the lost cause of a lost people with all their sins and sorrows in her always loving heart and mind’.

Malcolm and Hall argue strenuously against a belief that persisted in post-settlement Australia that the Irish were a kind of lesser brand of European. It would have been interesting for the book to have considered the views of Thomas Keneally and others that Islam in Australia has inherited the stigma associated a century ago with Catholicism. Maybe that is beyond its remit. Again and again, they point out that there were Irish on every side of every social divide. Writing about the horrendous Myall Creek massacre of 1838, for example, they note that ‘in addition to the Irish among the perpetrators, Irish men were also to the fore among the police, magistrates, lawyers and judges who captured and prosecuted them’. It is much harder to write history without stereotypes. But, as this book shows, it is far more stimulating.