Online, Tuesday 21 November 2023, 6.30pm AEDT
Join Anna Johnston for this online seminar in the Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar Series. The talk is entitled ‘“Songs of an Exile”: Sentiment and Violence in Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s Irish and Australian Elegies, 1838–63’. This paper focuses on the Irish and Australian poetry of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796–1880), who emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 from Coleraine in what is now Northern Ireland. Dunlop’s best known (and highly controversial) poem, “The Aboriginal Mother”, was written in response to the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre, one of the only massacres of First Nations people by settlers that led to prosecutions in the colonial Australian courts. More conventionally, Dunlop’s sentimental elegies mourned Irish family members and members of colonial society.