Heroic Horizons: Diasporas of Celtic immigrants to Australia | Brigid the Bard Festival [30 Jan - 1 Feb 2026]

Lineup

• More details about Linda Adair

  Linda Adair

  ARTIST STATEMENT: Since the rejection of The Voice referendum, my writing has considered notions of belonging, connection to place, the silencing of mother tongues, the trauma and shame of dispossession, as well as the impact of the loss of first languages on the subjectivity of both my colonising ancestors and the colonised Aboriginal people. Some 213 years have passed since the open-air prison of Port Jackson began to transform into the sandstone grandeur of Macquarie’s Sydney town, and the invaders used ridgeline paths trodden by Aboriginal people for some 60,000 years to drive thousands of sheep and cattle over the Blue Mountains and onto Wiradjuri country, trampling native grasslands, food sources and ecosystems in the process. Less than a decade after the Wiradjuri Wars of Resistance ended, free women were shipped like livestock to the colonies on the Red Rover (from Cork to Port Jackson) and the Princess Royal (from London to Hobart). Despite bringing desperately needed work skills and their value as marriage partners, these women on the Red Rover met intense bigotry and abuse from an Anglo Protestant Press and were publicly shamed for being poor, Irish, and Roman Catholic. Such discrimination was not isolated, and shame was imprinted on generations of Irish women well into the 20th century for having an Irish name, accent, or having been in a workhouse. My own great great grandparents came from Eire: one couple was young and healthy enough to be offered, in 1839, an Assisted Passage to Port Jackson, having left Roscommon in the hope of finding work in the industrial hub of Liverpool; whereas two great great great grandfathers were sent in chains, one from Cork to Port Jackson; later in 1849 two great-great grandmothers arrived on ships as part of the Earl Grey Scheme in the wake of An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger). ‘Decent’ or conforming women are usually only found on shipping manifests, or in records of births, deaths or marriages, and rarely in probate announcements on Trove. Oral and family histories or tales of folklore are often all that remain to convey quiet diasporic domestic lives in a time of brutal colonisation. Just as the British forbade the Irish to speak in their native tongue Gaeilge, so too were Aboriginal languages forbidden by the powers that be. To emphasise this systematic silencing of linguistic diversity, I include traces of both the Irish and Wiradjuri languages –- with respect and attribution — to reflect the experience of the diaspora and the impact on the people dispossessed under colonisation. BIO STATEMENT: Adair’s debut book The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering launched on Zoom during Covid, but was reviewed to acclaim in Text, Cordite, Compulsive Reader, and ABR book talk. Several poems have been anthologised and many published both here and overseas. She enjoys performing and featured at La Mama Poetica, Melbourne; Reading the River, Brooklyn, NSW; Live Poets at Don Banks; Cuplet; Poetry at the Pub; The Dickerson Gallery, Woollahra; The 5 Islands Press 1st Anniversary Reading, Footscray; Kedumba Gallery readings. In Ireland she featured at Poetry Plus in County Tipperary and Culture Night in Charlie Byrne’s, Galway. She was honoured to be a guest poet at the Glasgow launch of She’s Some Woman by The Wanderlust Collective. Photograph: Linda Adair at a Glasgow Reading (2025).

• More details about Anne Casey

  Anne Casey

  ARTIST STATEMENT:  Hailed by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins as “an important contribution to a vital conversation on migration, hunger and displacement”, Anne Casey’s ‘Seang (Hungering)’ reclaims the lost history of a group of rebel daughters of Irish Famine refugees to Australia. ‘Seang’ strives to restore voice to these girls and women who were silenced over and over, suffering destitution, discrimination, and intergenerational incarceration and hardships largely driven by colonial policies, attitudes and actions in Ireland and in Australia. Incorporating award-winning historical research and poetry, ‘Seang’ interweaves snippets from handwritten archived testimonies, recrafts Celtic mythos, pens an imagined immigrant letter and speaks to previously undocumented experiences of political violence experienced by the author’s family in the latter days of British rule in the west of Ireland. Drawing present-day parallels, ‘Seang’ seeks to answer how poetry can bear witness and meet the purpose of resistance. BIO STATEMENT: Originally from Ireland and living in Australia for three decades, Anne Casey is the author of six poetry collections. Her latest book, ‘Seang (Hungering)’, was commended by President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins as “an important contribution to a vital conversation on hunger, migration and displacement”. Anne’s work is widely published and awarded internationally, ranking in The Irish Times’ Most Read. Her awards include the American Writers Review Prize, AAALS Poetry Prize and Henry Lawson Poetry Prize. She holds a PhD in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing. anne-casey.com @1annecasey

• More details about Annemaree Dalziel

  Annemaree Dalziel

  ARTIST STATEMENT: In her Imperial Stockings, Annemaree Dalziel uses the humble craft of knitting towards art as a social act. Taking stock of an ambiguous and paradoxical history of social change in Gaelic Scotland, the Highland Clearances, her literary re-knitting materialises one of Australia’s forgotten stories of settler origin in weird-shaped socks. Loop stacks on interconnected loop, rows chained together, like generations, she unpacks Gaelic cultural grief, and complicity in knotting new nets of colonial displacement, loss and grief. People step into their history (socks), and walk with her, seeking embodied traces of forebears’ cultural grief . Discussing their relations to history, place, and one another, they enact rituals of remembrance. A reflective workshop asking who we are, where do we come from, how might we belong? becomes ceremony, a joyful wake tending unhealed wounds of grief, guilt, and amnesia. BIO STATEMENT: Annemaree Dalziel is an interdisciplinary collaborative artist, activist, performance-maker and creative producer, living and working on Gundungurra/Tharawal country in Mittagong, Australia. Her exquisite costumes, sensory installations and minimal sets investigate locations of power, connection to place and people, and the visibility and concerns of marginalised and displaced communities. In 2020, she founded the Sybil Disobedients, to draw quiet attention and radical hope to the existential threats of climate change, environmental destruction and social injustice. Her doctoral research (2017-2025) investigating embodied memory, connection to place and Gaelic cultural grief, uses native grasses, knitted textiles, walks, dialogues and installation to prompt and celebrate memory, compassion, conversation and connection. Its rituals of remembrance culminated in a joyous wake, a ceremony of mourning.

• More details about Melita Rowstown

  Melita Rowstown

  ARTIST STATEMENT: In 1831, Irish female convict radicals led 600 women to protest the dehumanising punishment of head shaving at the Parramatta Female Factory. However, this unruly vociferous riot is strikingly absent from Australia’s mainstream history. With little archival evidence that captures the voices of Irish female convict culture, these structural silences privilege certain truths whilst erasing others. My play The Incorrigibles/Mná Dosmachtaithe utilises historiography and feminist deep mapping to examine how oral tradition, repertoire, song (caoineadh [keening]), and language (Gaeilge [Irish], Irish English and convict slang) can creatively confront archival gaps to disrupt dominant histories. Utilising the female playwright’s embodied, non-cognitive experience of listening to place, my praxis enables settler artists to ethically interrogate postcolonial landscapes to create subjective presence from historical absence. BIO STATEMENT: Melita Rowston is an award-winning playwright, director, painter, and performer. A graduate of UTS (MA-Writing), NIDA (Directing), VCA (BFA-Painting), she’s currently a PhD Candidate (Theatre) at UNE. She is the recipient of an RTP Scholarship, a HASSE fieldwork scholarship, Keith & Dorothy Travelling Scholarship, Geoffrey Milne Bursary and Veronica Kelly Prize. Melita has written 14 produced plays including ‘Cockroach’ (international tour), ‘Between the Streetlight and the Moon’ (published Australian Plays Transform, shortlisted STC Patrick White Award), ‘Ljubicica – Wild Violet’ (winner Sydney Fringe), and ‘Crushed’ (shortlisted Griffin Award, published Playlab Indie). Her one-woman show ‘6 Degrees of Ned Kelly’ was adapted for ABC Radio National. She was twice resident playwright at Griffin Theatre and has performed her poetry internationally. melitarowston.com