Cirrus@Austlit

'Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), famously deal with the Irish denizens of Sydney’s Surry Hills slums in the 1940s. This essay seeks to explore the implications of Irishness in these novels, and in the later prequel Missus (1985). The Harp in the South, almost exclusively populated by Irish migrants, stands also as a ‘classic Australian novel’. The characterology draws on transnational tropes of Irishness with a long genealogy that find a new context in the Australian imaginary. The essay explores the ambivalence between hereditarian and cultural notions of Irishness, the way Irish ‘blood’ is foregrounded and resisted, and its tension with Irish ‘names’.  The merging of Irish and Australian that the novel promises can only be achieved through omissions and lacunae, especially around questions of colonisation and Indigenous dispossession. Blood and names, we argue, become ways of both evacuating history and summoning it, of opening up allegiances and shutting them down, of appealing to essences and origins, and troubling them at the same time. Ultimately though, whether Irish or Indigenous, blood and names are haunted by the ghosts of ancestors from both near and far.'  (Publication abstract)