Abstract
Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of
Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent
Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers
how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes
of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into
Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation
that he seeks to remedy in himself, not least through many extended
visits to Ireland, his ‘source country’ or ‘imagination’s home’. Yet in
Memory Ireland (1985) and other essays, he offers a scarifying
analysis of contemporary Irish society also marked by a loss of memory,
which he ascribes in this case to the post-colonial torpor and
imaginative enervation of independent Ireland. So Buckley seeks to
reveal the scotomisation, or mental blind spots, that characterise both
Irish-Australia and modern Ireland. Drawing mainly on prose works,
including archives and unpublished sources, this essay seeks to bring to
the fore the question of colonialism in Buckley’s reflections on
Irishness, attentive to some of his own blind spots. It considers his
deep debt to Yeats, but also the impossibility for Buckley, as he saw
it, to follow Yeats’s example in creating a national imaginary that
unified settler and native. This impacts Buckley’s sense of how an
artist achieves success in the international literary field, but also
maps back onto the question of setter-colonialism in Australia. I argue
that Indigenous Australia shadows his thinking about Irish colonialism,
sometimes explicitly, as in the poem ‘Gaeltacht’ from The Pattern
(1979), but in a more fraught and culpable way than simply through
assertions of shared victimhood. If the conquest and dispossession of
Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that
of Indigenous Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth, it also
deflects, redirects and sublimates it for an Australian poet.The Irish
have certainly been historical victims of British colonialism, but they
have also been beneficiaries of settler-colonialism in Australia, as his
poem ‘Dick Donnelly’, the Irish-named Aboriginal man, ‘the last songman
of his people’, poignantly attests.