Chapter Eight: Crow-hunting in Tasmania
This chapter draws primarily on Mark Cocker’s account of ‘The British in Tasmania’ from his exceptional work Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, first published in 1998, so the quotations are from this book unless otherwise specified.
1 Robert Hughes recounts a bushranger called Carrot … (from The Fatal Shore).
2 There is ongoing debate about whether or not Truganini was ‘the last pure Tasmanian’ and also the status of a mixed community of Aboriginal women who had been living with European sealers on the Bass Strait islands, and who did survive. At Cape Barren these numbered thirty-two adults and fifty-two children. And their descendents have grown. By 1976, 2,942 declared themselves Aboriginal, and by the 1990s, this figure had increased further to over 8,500.
Chapter Nine: The British Famine – ‘Slaughters done in Ireland by mere official red tape’
1 Many of the famine statistics on this page, and other data and material in this chapter, have been taken from the definitive publication of the event – The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, edited by William J. Smyth, John Crowley and Mike Murphy, (Cork Univeristy Press/New York University Press, 2012).
2 ‘in a matter of 72 to 96 hours, the better part of the 1846 crop was obliterated …’ from The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, by John Kelly, 2012.
3 ‘Russell, Wood and Trevelyan were highly conscientious men …’ I found this quotation of A. J. P. Taylor’s in The Great Irish Potato Famine by James Donnelly, 2001.
4 ‘Trevelyan sent his subordinates to Ireland equipped with Adam Smith’s writings …’ from The Economist, 12 December 2012 – a review of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly.
5 The information on the Gregory clause and the resulting land clearances is taken from the work of Peter Gray, Colm Tóibín, Canon John O’ Rourke and James Donnelly.
As well as Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, Michael de Nie (The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press) and Edward Lengel (The Irish Through British Eyes) have also looked in detail at how British racism towards the Irish laid the foundations for the lack of intervention during the Famine.
6 ‘Her work is readable – something which later historians of the Famine have tried hard not to be …’ Colm Tóibín’s assessment of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–49 appears in The Irish Famine: A Documentary (Tóibín and Ferriter).
7 In 1995, Cathal Póirtéir published Famine Echoes about the work of the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s and 1940s – the majority of the accounts of the Famine in this book are oral histories recounted by children and grandchildren of Famine survivors, some gathered by the IFC in 1935, some from a questionnaire sent out by the IFC in 1945; but virtually all of these testimonies were from people born in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s – i.e. the children and grandchildren of those who actually experienced the Famine directly – so we still have this challenge of being distanced from the event itself, by one or two generations.
8 With regard to the Famine, there are some curious gaps in some of the greatest modern Irish writers’ work – Joyce wrote almost nothing about it, Yeats only attempted fragments, for instance these lines, in his verse play The Countess Cathleen, put into the mouth of Teig, a fourteen-year-old boy:
They say now that the land is famine struck
The graves are walking …
Two nights ago, at Carrick-orus
A herdsman met a man who had no mouth,
Nor eyes, nor ears; his face a wall of flesh;
He saw him plainly by the light of the moon,
What is the good of praying?
9 In response to Colm Tóibín’s ‘Erasures’, David Craig made this important contribution, in a letter to the LRB, 20 August 1998:
As I read Colm Tóibín’s enthralling piece about the history of the Great Hunger in Ireland (LRB, 30 July), and noted his wish for the ‘living, speaking voice’ and ‘the perspective of those who were not administrators or politicians or landlords’, I began to think that at any moment he would make use of Thomas Gallagher’s Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846–47, which teems with such material. Gallagher, an American writer whose father had emigrated from County Roscommon, was able to get close to the Famine itself and the ways in which people suffered, retaliated and escaped, because he used, in addition to a great many contemporary newspapers and official records, the 2600 pages of transcribed interviews, conducted in 1955, with people ‘old enough to remember their parents’ stories of the famine’. These are stored in the Irish Folklore Department at University College, Dublin. From them, via Gallagher, we can learn how the first smell of the potato rot, like ‘the bilge water of a ship’, stole over the countryside and made the dogs howl. (I heard on Barra how the same thing happened in the same year in the Scottish Hebrides.) The fog that was common during that damp July is still called the ‘potato fog’. Starvation soon followed, people began to fight for turnip cuttings, pick up fish offal with their toes in fish markets, and gather nettles from graveyards to make broth. They died exhausted, their ‘entire alimentary canals, from mouth to anus … completely empty’, or their intestines destroyed by gangrene so that their ‘stools would resemble water in which raw meat had been washed’ … Gallagher’s work should be seen as central to the history of the Hunger.’
10 The Communist Manifesto, which was first published in London on 21 February 1848 … It was printed by Jacob Burghard of Bishopsgate, owner of a print shop at 46 Liverpool Street, on behalf of the German Workers’ Educational Association – and the initial print run was set at a very modest 1,000 copies. The first English translation was made by Helen Macfarlane, and published, in four sections, in the Chartist journal The Red Republican in November 1850.
11 I explore the specific type of behaviour which Trevelyan exhibits on his visit to Dublin – the inability to face the human beings affected by his policies – in much greater detail in Book Four: ‘How People in Organisations Kill: Looking Away or Not Seeing in the First Place’.
12 ‘Remoteness from the suffering, he once stated, kept his judgement more acute than that of his administrators actually working among the people affected.’ This quotation about Trevelyan is taken from The History Place website.
13 My point about changing the language from ‘the Irish Famine’ to ‘the British Famine’ is not restricted to one of semantics, or even historical accuracy. It goes to the heart of British identity, and how utterly selective we have been in the creation of our national narrative. You could ask a hundred people on the streets of any city in Britain (with the possible exceptions of Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester), and perhaps less than half a dozen would know about the Famine, and Britain’s central role in creating it. This is hardly surprising as, again, you will struggle to find a single mention of the Famine in any British history school syllabus. Hundreds of books have been written about how the history of the Famine has been represented in Ireland over the last 170 years, but I’ve not read a single article about how the Famine is represented in British history, and in our wider culture. It is simply not part of our national narrative. And such a gaping omission is shameful.