Green demons: Irish-Catholics and Muslims in Australian history

Abstract

The twenty-first century has seen Australia affected by terrorism in an unprecedented way, with attacks specifically targeting its citizens in Indonesia, as well as its involvement in the ‘war on terror’. At the same time, Muslims have been increasing as a proportion of the Australian population, due both to immigration and to local births. Muslim communities in Australia have faced many challenges in relating to older-established Australian society in this context. This article examines current attitudes to Muslims in Anglo-Celtic Australia and traces the historical precedents for ethno-religious hostility. It explores, in particular, the parallels between current attitudes to Muslims and historical Anglo-Protestant attitudes to Irish Catholics and asks what lessons can be learned from this history.

Keywords:

• sectarianism
• Islamophobia
• Catholics
• Muslims
• Australia

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Rachel Woodlock for her research and editorial assistance on this article.

Notes

For example, medieval chronicler Gerald of Wales (d. ca. 1223) described the Irish thus: ‘They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living’ (Giraldus Cambrensis 1982, 101). See also Rich (1610, 18). The various justifications for colonization were brought together and elaborated by Edmund Spenser, the poet and author of The faerie queene. In his book, A view of the state of Ireland, written in 1596, Spenser wrote: ‘Marrie those bee the most barbarous and loathly conditions of any people (I thinke) under heaven: … they doe use all the beastly behaviour that may bee; they oppresse all men, they spoile as well the subject, as the enemy; they steale, they are cruell and bloodie, full of revenge, and delighting in deadly execution, licentious, swearers and blasphemers, common ravishers of woemen, and murtherers of children’ (Spenser 1997, 74).

For references to the Irish slave trade, see Du Bois (1970, 152); Diggs (1983, 80); and Ellis (1975, 149–54).

For an elaboration of this idea, see Hastings (1997, 51, 74); see also Spencer and Wollman (2002, 31).

Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid sent five ships full of food supplies and funds. A monument in the Irish port of Drogheda commemorates this episode of Muslim charity to a Christian people (Aymaz 2007, 46–7).

See Peatling (2006) and Maiden (2006). For comment supporting Vale, see Steyn (2006). For critical responses to these views, see Singer (2006); Everitt-Ashton (2006); Garnaut (2006); and Australian (2006).

Rossiter (2007) charts the history of anti-Irish stereotyping in Britain and notes its decline after the end of the ‘Troubles’.