Oceans of consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia
ISBN: 9780801426063
Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Cornell University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time
Subjects: Australasian/ Oceanian;

This book explores, through the personal letters of Irish emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, the history and cultural influence of migration. Full transcriptions are given of 14 sequences of Irish-Australian letters, which were composed by writers with little education, sent in both directions between 1843 and 1906. These 111 letters have been selected from a thousand or so which survive, out of the millions exchanged between Ireland and Australia. Each sequence has intrinsic interest as personal testimony, and the letters make fascinating reading. Yet they cannot truly 'speak for themselves'. The sources of genealogy, biography and local history have been used to reconstitute 14 personal stories, providing contexts for interpreting the letters. These commentaries invite the reader to overhear more than the words alone.


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