The diggers and the IRA: a story of Australian and New Zealand Great-War soldiers involved in Ireland’s war of independence

Abstract

This is a work of creative non-fiction. It is a history wrapped in a family memoir. Utilising the psychoanalytic theory of “transgenerational haunting” it explores the persistence of memory across generations - even when that memory’s content is undisclosed. Its focus is the secret kept by the narrator’s grandfather about the 26 months he was absent without leave in Ireland between August 1917 and October 1919. Using the tropes of “history as performance” and a “journey to the underworld” and sourced in the literature and history of the First World War as well as archival research from Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, the thesis uncovers a number of diasporic WWI soldiers who crossed the Irish Sea and covertly fought for Ireland. Interviews with descendants are interwoven with narratives of soldiers’ experiences and discussion of elements common to all, such as enlistment, PTSD, war, death, family, freedom, colonialism, repatriation and the question of commemoration. It is draws on elements of both classical epic and epic theatre so that each chapter presents different episodes of the thesis building an episodic but wide-ranging narrative; biographical chapters alternate with historical analysis, fact with fiction, and memory with history. The history narrates the experiences of a number of WWI Australian soldiers who became engaged in the Irish War of Independence, where they fought against the Empire for which, Australia’s Anzac narrative insists, they were fighting and dying. In that Empire, the Irish were a colonised people; in Australia its largest ethnic minority. The thesis sees these men as expressions of pressures tearing at the fabric of both the Empire and the Australian nation. This story has never been told, it is new history. This secret was just as jealously guarded by the Australian authorities as it was by the men fought for Ireland and then returned. The thesis drags this story from the Unspeakable and, in its light, seeks to gain a fresh understanding of Australia’s experience of WWI, reconnecting the Anzac narrative with unacknowledged, radical parts of its history.