Irish complexity

NOT just Ned is a sprawling anthology of an exhibition, dealing with the presence in Australia of a remarkable people.

Ned Kelly armour

NOT just Ned is a sprawling anthology of an exhibition, dealing with the presence in Australia of a remarkable people who have contributed in many ways to the formation of this country's character, but who have continued to consider themselves to a certain extent as outsiders, sympathetic to underdogs but correspondingly prone to resentment of authority on the assumption it is always alien.

The very title of the exhibition is simultaneously defiant and apologetic, framing the entire experience in a rather unfortunate manner. Not Just Ned alludes to Ned Kelly, the 19th-century bushranger -- and the main attraction of the show for a mass audience -- implying that he is the most famous of Irish Australians, claiming the story as a kind of heroic myth and yet simultaneously attempting to refute the corollary that Kelly is the archetype of Irish antipodeans.

Of course the Irish are more than Kelly. Originally, they were among the Celtic peoples, of Indo-European descent, who had occupied the British Isles during the middle of the first millennium BC. The British who were conquered by the Romans, like the Gauls, were Celts. After the fall of Rome more than 15 centuries ago, these territories were invaded by various Germanic peoples, also of Indo-European origin: Franks, who gave their name to France; Angles, after whom England is named, and Saxons in Britain.

The Celtic peoples remained unconquered and unassimilated with the new ethnic groups only in the more remote territories, such as Scotland and Ireland; and this is the ethnic basis of a separation that is still felt today, but which would be incomprehensible without an understanding of the history.

The separateness extended to religion. The Irish had been converted to Christianity before the fall the empire, but the new arrivals in Britain were pagan. Cut off by vast distances from the centre of the church in Rome, the Irish Christians developed a separate character. They cut their clerical tonsures in an odd way and began to calculate the date of Easter differently. Perhaps most importantly when we consider the later consequences for Australia, they were too far from the warmth of the Mediterranean and the bright vitality of ancient civilisation to absorb the humanism that inevitably coloured Christianity in Italy. Irish Christianity developed instead a bigoted puritanism, akin to that of the Protestants, likewise bred in the cold north.

One needed to be tough, however, to survive the chaos and violence that followed the fall of Rome. The Irish became extraordinarily active missionaries, travelling as far as central Europe, where, for example, they founded the famous monastery of St Gall near Zurich. They evangelised England too, while missionaries from Rome crossed the channel and started the same process from the other end. Eventually, the Synod of Whitby was held to arbitrate between some of the differences in the two traditions.

There was a point in these early centuries when a few Irish monks were the last men in Western Europe capable of reading Greek. From such a precarious toehold, civilisation began to rebuild in the British Isles. For a time in the eighth century, this was the most advanced intellectual and cultural centre in the West, and when Charlemagne set out on his program of cultural renovatio, he appointed an Englishman, Alcuin, as its director. In the following century, many of the great Irish and English monasteries were destroyed by Viking barbarians.

The Irish church played an important role in these dangerous times but its later influence was less positive. In the Reformation, when the Scots adopted Calvinism, they believed they should study the scriptures for themselves. In a very short time, almost everyone in Scotland could read; the consequences can be seen in the subsequent achievements of the Scottish people.

In Ireland, the church preferred the people to remain illiterate and to have access to the scriptures only through the teaching of the clergy. This led to centuries of backwardness and to the image of the Irish, even when they came to Australia, as poor and uneducated. The only silver lining to this long history of illiteracy was the persistence of an oral culture of folk tales and storytelling that contributed to the vitality and special character of modern Irish writing.

The Irish paid a heavy price, however, exacerbated by the political and economic problems of foreign rule. The mass of the people remained extremely poor. From the early 18th century the population became increasingly reliant on the potato, originally imported from the New World; but when the crop failed in 1845-50 there was a terrible famine. Faced with starvation, a vast number of Irish men and women chose to emigrate. Between the middle and end of the 19th century, the population of Ireland halved. Tens of thousands migrated to Australia, including young women from orphanages, who were assisted with their passage by the British government to alleviate the acute shortage of women in the colonies.

These were not the first Irish to come to Australia, however. There were Irishmen and women among the first convicts, but also another, smaller group of educated and middle-class Irish who had been deported for seditious political activities. The early colony of Sydney needed all the talent and brains it could get and most able and reasonably honest convicts were quickly recycled into the emerging colonial society; although as we saw in discussing last year's Macquarie exhibition, certain influential people disapproved of giving ex-convicts responsible positions. In hindsight, the enlightened magistrates who handed down sentences of transportation in preference to hanging were amply vindicated by the rate of social rehabilitation in the new country.

The Irish who came to Australia were mostly Catholic, although by no means all, and indeed most Catholics in Australia were Irish; as a hangover from the Reformation, and more recently the repression of Protestants in France that began with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Catholics suffered serious legal disabilities in England until Catholic emancipation of 1829. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was obliged to take an oath on his arrival in Australia that he did not believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the transformation of bread into the body of Christ at mass, because that was a tenet of Catholic belief. Consequently, the history of the Irish in Australia is largely co-extensive with the history of Catholicism in this country, at least until the great wave of postwar immigration brought a different kind of Catholicism from Italy. Even so, the first Catholic priests and bishops sent out to minister to the Irish were English. But eventually the Irish came to dominate the church here, and the exhibition is filled with the portraits of various famous and often very determined prelates.

Early Australia was more or less equally divided between four Christian confessions: the Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists, the first three roughly representing the English, Irish and Scots respectively, and the fourth a new industrious and serious-minded middle class arising in the 18th century. This was why the Anglicans could never achieve the hegemony they had in England as the Established Church, and why when the University of Sydney was established in 1850, it was based on a lay core and four church-administered residential colleges.

Of all four groups, the Catholics had the strongest institutional structure: the early Christians, originally a decentralised sect of believers, indeed built what we know as the church by borrowing administrative systems from the Romans and intellectual sophistication from the Greeks, which is why, for all its faults, it remains an august and impressive element of Western civilisation.

The church in Australia was able to use this institutional robustness to undertake ambitious social projects, while relying on the zeal of its flock to raise the necessary funds. The church, and often Irish nuns, was responsible for building some of our most important hospitals. Priests, brothers and nuns set up an enormous network of primary and secondary schools, which today is second only to that of the states in extent. Curiously, they marked their alumni with a kind of vocal stamp, a distinctive pronunciation of the eighth letter of the alphabet.

All of these achievements are illustrated with exhibits relating to various individuals and events. Some are delightfully surprising, such as the orrery -- a model of the solar system, with planets and moons -- used to teach girls about astronomy. It would be fascinating to see it in motion, even though the various celestial bodies are inevitably, for a model of this size, not to scale and the size of the Earth in particular is overstated.

Another surprise is the cast of the Venus de Milo, brought to Melbourne by Redmond Barry, who was the most prominent Irishman in the Melbourne of his day: he was chief justice, chancellor of the newly founded university (1853) and president of the Trustees of Melbourne Public Library. It was for the library that Barry ordered a whole gallery of casts of famous statues, whose original arrangement can be seen in a photograph. Apparently the main thing that is now recalled about this project is that the Melburnians of the day thought all this high culture was over their heads.

Barry was a remarkable and distinguished colonial Australian, but many people remember him today as the judge who condemned Kelly to hang. Of course he had little choice in the matter, as Kelly and his gang had murdered three policemen, also Irishmen, to add to the ironies. There is in fact no straightforward English oppressor in this story, but there is an echo of the more complex realities of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, transplanted to the antipodes.

The centre of the exhibition is devoted to the four suits of homemade armour worn by Kelly, his brother and two friends. Their distinctive shape comes from the fact that they have been made out of ploughshares. There is an undoubted pathos in the empty makeshift metal suits, which protected the wearer from bullets but simultaneously hampered movement and reduced visibility without protecting the vulnerable legs, and which hang there now when the impulsive young men who wore them are long gone.

What has made the story of Kelly memorable is, first, the suggestion that he was the victim of police and judicial harassment, and then the youth of the four men and the hopelessness of the final siege in the hotel at Glenrowan.

A vital element is the fact that Kelly, who had got out, returned to die with his companions; had he escaped with his life, he could never have lived on as a hero. Above all the armour remains in the imagination, menacing yet quixotic, irreducible to and more suggestive than the man himself.

Not Just Ned: The Irish in Australia
National Museum of Australia until July 31