ABSTRACT
Within the broad historiography of Irish migration history, an influential strand has emphasised the dislocation of movement and settlement abroad. It is a portrayal replicated in fine-grained historical analyses of Irish migration utilising personal letters. As Kerby Miller concludes in his
major study of the Irish in North America, 'Acute homesickness pervaded the letters and journals of most post-Famine emigrants.') In similar fashion, Patrick O'Farrell contends that the Irish in Australia 'brought their kinship mentality to Australia, where it gradually crumbled and fell apart, declining into a residual social atomism marked by separation, isolation, loneliness and eventual alienation of society's individual parts,.2 Studies of New Zealand settler society likewise depict migration as an atomising experience due to inadequate social bonding. Eschewing ethnicity as a governing category for his analysis and focusing instead on the colony's social organisation, Miles Fairburn reckons, 'The scantiness of kinship ties deprived colonists of a base for the development of community ties.'3 Using a range of sources including rates of violence, litigation, and drunkenness, Fairburn claims that this 'deficient framework of association' resulted in extreme loneliness, aggression and intoxication.4 Elements of Fairburn's interpretation have been reiterated in Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald's collection of extracts from the writings of nineteenth-century women in New Zealand. They assert that 'family ties were to be shrugged off, or were no longer there ... It was a place to establish new connections:5 While the loosening of such bonds could be viewed as positive, the editors emphasise the theme of unsettlement, claiming that there was a 'lack of society' and that migration was 'inherently destabilising,.6
