Lunch Series: Celtic Conversations with John Murphy
This regular lunch series will feature insights and an engaging presentation from a special guest speaker in our community, over a delicious catered set lunch. *Your ticket price includes presentation and insights from our guest speaker and a catered two course set lunch.
This month we welcome John Murphy for a fascinating exploration of ancestry, migration, memory and self-invention across generations of the Irish diaspora.
Ancestors: Tracing an Irish Diaspora
What happens when family history becomes a window into the wider story of Irish migration to Australia?
Historian John Murphy has spent years researching sixteen ancestors who made the journey from Ireland to Australia. Challenged to explain how this was more than “just another family history”, he found a richer story emerging. Fourteen of the sixteen migrants were Irish Catholics, with family roots stretching across counties Carlow, Clare, Galway, Down and Monaghan, in some cases back to the late sixteenth century. Their stories offer insights into land, politics and social change in Ireland, while also challenging some familiar assumptions about the Irish experience in Australia.
Among them were two convicts who may have found unexpected opportunity in 1830s Sydney, alongside migrants who arrived in Melbourne during the 1850s from prosperous farming families and quickly established themselves within the colonial middle class. Their experiences reveal how migration could be as much about reinvention as survival. In a society of strangers, identities could be reshaped, histories forgotten, and new stories told.
About the Speaker
John Murphy is a retired historian and Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on Australian social and political history, including works on the Vietnam War, Australia in the 1950s, Labor leader H.V. Evatt, and the history of social welfare politics since the 1870s. His most recent book, Fathering: An Australian History, was co-authored with Alistair Thomson, Kate Murphy and Johnny Bell.