Introduction

Questions of identity construction, maintenance, and materialization are a persistent thread in historical archaeology. There is a crucial ontological tension, however, between a concept of identity as permanence or fundamental sameness over time—often criticized for being essentialist—and its opposite: identity that is both selected and selective, conditional and constantly contingent; e.g., Parfit (1971). Much debate in archaeology, as elsewhere, therefore revolves around the extent to which identity is a group-generated and collective process as opposed to an individualized experience, a structuring (and therefore often unconscious) principle rather than a consciously adopted strategy, or a public rather than a private phenomenon.

If identity is an ongoing social process of comparison rather than a fixed product, then it is embedded in both conscious and unconscious forms of decision making (Sackett 1984; Wiessner 1984, 1985). Stylistic expressions of identity proclaim both the social group and levels of individual commitment to that group and are as much about imagination as belief (Wobst 1999). Identity construction in this sense is closely linked to “habitus,” or the shared categories of perception and comprehension that anchor a person’s everyday choices in culture, lifestyle, and taste (Bottero 2004:987). Habitus varies according to class position, forms of capital, and the distribution of power, and can be transferred across various domains of practice. It also shifts within an individual’s lifetime and between successive generations, particularly in response to rapid or profound social change (Aarseth et al. 2016; Wacquant 2016). At the same time, it has some degree of inbuilt stability arising from the human tendency to filter new experiences through previous layers of habitus and to act according to shared categories of perception and comprehension. Identity practices are therefore discursive orientations toward sets of emblematic resources, since, when discussing or acting within an identity category, people “point toward” a wide variety of objects that characterize their identities (Blommaert and Varis 2013:4).

In terms of the Irish in colonial settings, historical narratives have tended to paint them in one of two ways. The dominant model from the eastern United States focuses on histories of subordination and maladjustment within mainly urban communities (Kenny 2003; Campbell 2005). In Australia, by contrast, the national narrative emphasizes relatively smooth adjustment despite anti-Irish sentiment and the centrality of “rural life and work” (Campbell 1995:72–74). A core tenet is the “ordinariness” of the Irish, epitomized by their widespread diffusion into and relative invisibility within Australian colonial society; e.g., Fitzpatrick (1980) and Campbell (2002). According to O’Farrell (2000), Irish identity was assimilated with British notions of respectability and, thus, reduced in the Australian context: “[T]o many Irish their Irishness in Australia was confused and erratic, an emotion which fluctuated according to whim and convenience” (O’Farrell 2000:7).

Mirroring the Australian narrative, in South Australia Richards (1991b, 1991c) has contended that the Irish were not obviously marginalized, did not settle in segregated communities, and were largely indistinguishable from their British counterparts except in religious terms (Richards 1991b:92–93, 1991c:232–234). More recent historical scholarship (James 2009; Breen 2013), however, has called this into question. In a detailed regional study focusing on the “most Irish area” (James 2009:15) of South Australia—the county of Stanley in the state’s mid-north (Fig. 1)—James found evidence for distinction being maintained through patterns of networking amongst Irish settlers, deliberate spatial clustering of settlements throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and the sharing of Irish national loyalties between Protestants and Roman Catholics (James 2009:21–22,94–95,208–210,221). However, James (2009:8,211) also noted that, while a clear sense of distinctiveness was maintained until at least the turn of the 20th century, a parallel forgetting took place after 1870 that erased an earlier “strong Irish imprint” in areas such as the Clare Valley. This effectively removed the Irish from local memory.

Fig. 1
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Sites and other places mentioned in the text. (Drawing by Heather Burke, 2017.)

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The contrast between these perspectives—and indeed between Australian and other national narratives—highlights the still hidden nature of “Irishness” both in the past and the present. Irishness here has at least two distinct, though interlocking, meanings. The first refers to the geographic and cultural roots of the collective Irish and how these informed the ways they understood themselves. The second is the construction of Irishness by outsiders, in this case the colonial Australian collectivity (Walter 1995:37). This article investigates the nature of “Irishness” in both senses via three recent historical archaeological studies exploring domestic architecture, land use and farming practices (Arthure 2014, 2015), gravestones and cemetery furniture (McEgan 2017), items of personal adornment (Arthure 2014), and the intersection of gender, colonial, and religious ideologies (De Leiuen 2015, 2016). The sites include the settlement at Baker’s Flat and the associated Catholic church and cemetery of St. John’s, near Kapunda, as well as five other 19th-century cemeteries in or near the towns of Mintaro, Navan, Kapunda, Undalya, and Saddleworth (Fig. 1).

Little archaeological research has been conducted on discrete Irish communities in Australia. Projects at the Rocks in Sydney and Casselden Place/“Little Lon” in Melbourne are perhaps the best known, albeit focusing on urban areas with substantial numbers of working-class Irish residents rather than the Irish as a distinct group, e.g., Godden Mackay Heritage Consultants (1999a, 1999b), Mayne and Murray (1999), and Mayne (2006). Internationally, there are more studies of urban than rural Irish settlements, e.g., Griggs (1999), Brighton (2001, 2004, 2011), Reckner (2001), Jenkins (2005), Trew (2005), Linn (2010), and Rotman (2010, 2012), with exceptions being the Smith (2004) and Hull (2016) studies of the Irish in regional Canada. In Ireland, Orser (1997, 2001, 2010b) and Horning (2004, 2007) have carried out work on 19th-century rural daily life, but their work is rare, not only because it has focused on rural communities, but because it has taken place at all. There is little support in the Irish Republic for archaeological investigations of postmedieval sites, a consequence of independence in the early 20th century, when the “politics of nationhood” in the emergent Irish Republic forged a focus on the “far distant past” (Orser and Donnelly 2008:1329; Orser 2010a:206–207; Horning 2016:114). When it comes to 19th-century Irish Australians the result is that little is known archaeologically about their lives either in the Ireland they left behind or the Australia to which they emigrated. Recent archaeological work in South Australia, then, adds to Australian, Irish, and wider international narratives.

The Irish in South Australia

Unlike the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), South Australia was established in 1836 as a private enterprise in accordance with Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s scheme for “systematic colonization” (Richards 1986:5). This meant that it deliberately excluded transported convicts. The colony essentially transplanted a replica of British societal structures in the form of a gentrified class of capitalists and a lower class of small farmers and laborers (Moore 1991:113). Irish immigration in this context had three distinct, but overlapping, phases. The first, from 1834 to 1845, saw “men of capital” recruited to contribute to the growth of the colony. This first cohort included 300 influential and affluent Anglo-Irish Protestant men (Multicultural SA 2014), many of whom went on to attain government positions. One of these, Captain Robert Torrens, campaigned for controlled Irish emigration to provide a labor force (Moore 1991:104). Many of the colony's residents, however, opposed not only the immigration of those they saw as “poor,” but also the establishment of Catholicism (Richards 1991b:67). This beginning wove a strong Protestant matrix for the colony, which remained overwhelmingly English in outlook and attitudes throughout the 19th century.

The second phase, from around 1845 to 1888, saw thousands of Irish emigrate to South Australia, initially propelled by the Great Famine (Woodham-Smith 1962:32–36). This was enabled by two assisted-passage schemes: the tenant scheme and kinship assistance. The first encouraged landowners to bring tenants to live and work on private rural properties, and the second allowed Irish who were already settled and financially secure to sponsor family members or others from their home county (Richards 1991a:17). A considerable number of male immigrants found work as bullock drivers and mining laborers as a result of these schemes. A shortage of domestic servants in the 1840s and 1850s resulted in 1,620 female Irish orphans receiving assisted passages and 4,000 young, single Irish women sponsored to immigrate (Steiner 2003:58). In contrast, 4,000 new arrivals from the northern Irish province of Ulster settled in the city of Adelaide between 1876 and 1888 (Cummings 2017). The overall numbers of Irish migrants vacillated sharply throughout the 1880s, then persistently declined to fewer than 100 new arrivals annually from 1895 to 1950. This third phase of migration never saw significant numbers of Irish immigrate to South Australia. In 1901, for example, Irish-born residents accounted for only 3.1% of the non-Indigenous population, and, after a small increase in the 1960s, were only 0.2% of the population in 2011 (Multicultural SA 2014).

Each phase was the result of differing “push and pull” factors, bringing individuals from diverse birthplaces and occupations with their own versions of Irishness, a matrix that mirrored the complexity of their country of origin. The varied socioeconomic positions of Irish migrants were then reflected in the colony’s social hierarchy, with, for example, more single and widowed Catholic females living in poverty and/or destitute, and more Protestant men obtaining positions of power and influence (Woodburn 1974:196–197; Dickey 1986:30–31).

The experiences of Irish people in this context were situated within the unfolding development of the colony, although general attitudes were still constructed against the particular background of colonial politics with Britain and the various Anglo-Irish tensions that had repeatedly surfaced from the 17th century onwards. These heightened in the second half of the 19th century as militant republican organizations arose in direct opposition to English rule to contest the dominance of Anglo-Irish land ownership and absentee landlordism, all of which were exacerbated by the devastating social and political consequences of the Famine (Woodham-Smith 1962:54–55,75–77; Litton 1994:22–23,94–99; Gray 1995:46–47,68). This became the catalyst for the Irish National Land League, which advocated land reform and Irish ownership of Irish land, and the Home Rule movement, which took up the cause of Irish self-government.

Campbell (2005:69,76) has argued that Catholic and Protestant populations in Australia became increasingly sectarian throughout the second half of the 19th century, although always on a lesser scale as compared to the UK and the U.S. In South Australia sectarianism was strongest in the early years of the colony and was concentrated in the urban center of Adelaide. In contrast, the Irish were received more positively in country areas where labor was at a premium (James 2009:123–124). Acceptance of the Irish was enhanced after Prime Minister Gladstone committed to granting the Irish home rule in 1885, when immigration anxieties in Australia were transferred from the Irish to other cultural groups seen as outsiders, such as the Chinese (Campbell 2002:87, 2005:76–77). As a result, the rural areas of the mid-north became home to a large number of Irish immigrants. In the county of Light, closest to Adelaide, most arrived in the 1850s and 1860s, with peak emigration to the neighboring county of Stanley taking place in the 1860s. In these areas a strong Irish network developed, centered around limited levels of interaction between denominations and nationalities, and the development of political activism. The strength of this network is particularly evident in the infrequency of exogamous marriage: 98 of 101 marriages in the 1860s were between spouses of the same nationality and religion (James 2009:154). In 1911 the proportion of Catholic-exclusive marriages remained the highest in any state: almost half of those married to Irish immigrants were themselves Irish, and South Australian Irish women were less likely to marry non-Irish men than Irish women in any other state (Fitzpatrick 2005:283). Breen (2013:77) has argued that by the end of the 19th century the South Australian Irish population was differentiated from those in other states by its small size, which made it both less threatening to the Protestant majority and more unified within itself, and the relatively late popularity of the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organization that elsewhere was responsible for promoting considerable anti–Irish Catholic feeling.

Identity in Life

Architecture, Land, and Space

The settlement known as Baker’s Flat began unofficially in 1854, when Irish laborers came to work at the Kapunda copper mine and opportunistically erected houses on an adjacent portion of land. Initially this was rent free and presumably sanctioned, at least tacitly, by the absentee landowners. By 1875, however, their presence was seen as a problem, resulting in the first of a series of public disputes (Northern Argus 1875:2) that suggest the occupants were demonstrating ownership via adverse possession (Burns 2011). Over the following three decades the residents consistently and collaboratively refused to allow access to surveyors, fencers, animal impounders, or other authority figures, e.g., Northern Argus (1880:2), Kapunda Herald (1894:2), and the Register (1902b:4), culminating in an 1892 court case between the residents and the legal owners by title (Supreme Court of South Australia 1892). Attempts to impose or collect rent or evict them as squatters were invariably met with aggressive resistance (Tilbrook 1929:31), including the destruction of fences, physical violence, and verbal abuse (Tilbrook 1929:113–114; Charlton 1971:42–43; Nicol 1983a:15–16). This effected a marked social closure of the settlement to outsiders, and the unwary visitor could easily be met with interference and hostility (Dee 1902:3).

As a result, Baker’s Flat was known locally as a set-apart Irish community. An 1893 survey plan of Baker’s Flat shows approximately 38 structures on the section, although there may have been as many as 170 when the mine was fully operational (Kapunda Herald 1902:3) (Fig. 2). Photographs of the settlement show small houses that conform closely to the Irish vernacular (Fig. 3). Although there were regional variations, the typical Irish rural house of the 19th century was rectangular, one-room deep, single story, and built of stone or earth, with a steeply sloped thatched roof, and rooms that opened one into the next without a central hallway (Ó Danachair 1956:22; Danaher 1978:9,11–12; Gailey 1984:8; O’Reilly 2011:193,203). Chimneys were located along the ridge line, front doors opened directly into the kitchen, and doors and windows were placed on the front or rear walls rather than at the gable ends (Danaher 1978:12). At Baker’s Flat many of the cottages were “dugouts” (Hazel 1975), reflecting the Irish vernacular practice of construction into a slope or hillside (Evans 1940:167–169).

Fig. 2
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Survey plan of Baker’s Flat, 1893. The 13 structures recorded in 2013 cannot be mapped accurately to this plan because of original survey errors that plotted the River Light too far to the north and west (Supreme Court of South Australia 1892).

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Fig. 3
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Houses on Baker’s Flat: (a) Late 19th century (Image courtesy P. Swann, Kapunda) and (b) 1906. (Photo by John Kauffmann, 1906.)

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Outside observers sometimes emphasized the quaintness of these cottages by appealing to a nostalgic sense of the rural picturesque, e.g., Chronicle (1899:18) and News (1953:10), while at other times they saw only “wretched hovels,” e.g., South Australian Register (1860:3, 1877:4, 1884:7) and South Australian Chronicle (1891:23). In many cases what they were describing was poverty, particularly amongst widows and the aged in the later years of the settlement. Baker’s Flat continued to operate as a coherent and distinctive community until at least the 1920s; the last resident there died in 1948 (Kapunda Herald 1948:2). Reasons for the decline of the settlement are unclear, but it was likely influenced by a range of economic and social factors, including movement out of the district as smaller agricultural holdings became available farther north (James 2009:198–199) and the desire to own uncontested land. The site of Baker’s Flat today contains the visible remains of 13 buildings and several surface artifact scatters (Fig. 4). In the 1950s most of the remaining structures were demolished, leaving piles of rubble at the sites of former buildings (Hazel 1975), although one structure at the southern end of the site still retains portions of intact stone walling. A geophysical survey carried out in one area in 2016 (Fig. 5) suggested a cluster of possible structures within a network of linear features that might be boundaries separating smaller garden or crop areas from larger open fields. Understanding the spatial organization of Baker’s Flat was one of the main aims of Susan Arthure’s fieldwork.

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Site plan for Baker’s Flat, including metal-detecting locations, 2013. (Drawing by Heather Burke, 2017.)

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Fig. 5
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Subsurface features identified from geophysical survey at Baker’s Flat, 2016. Anomalies of interest are numbered and highlighted. (Magnetic gradiometer survey and map by Kelsey Lowe, 2016.)

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The settlement pattern, as indicated in the 1893 plan, is one of small, spatially separated clusters of houses with no obvious roads, lanes, or other property demarcations. Tilbrook (1929:31) described the village as “little holdings clustered together haphazard without the slightest attempt at order or regularity,” and other histories (Charlton 1971:18; Nicol 1983a:14) note that families ran their pigs, goats, and poultry in common without restraining fences. Witness testimonies in court and affidavits as part of the Supreme Court of South Australia (1892) case describe the organized communal grazing of stock on vacant land, as well as highlighting the high degree of collectivism operating at the settlement (Kapunda Herald 1902:3; Register 1902a:3). The historical plan (Fig. 2), surface survey (Fig. 4), and geophysical survey (Fig. 5) all show a layout with no obvious grid patterning and small groups of structures scattered across the site. Geophysics also suggested the additional possibility of smaller field enclosures near one cluster. While excavation has so far failed to identify these demarcations, one of the possible structures has proven to be the remains of a dugout that conforms to the Irish vernacular tradition.

Contemporary accounts suggest that many saw these fenceless and trackless arrangements as disordered, reflecting the stereotype of Irish lawlessness encapsulated in the Australo-Irish ballad “The Wild Colonial Boy.” There was, however, an order, albeit one that was indiscernible to the non-Irish. These architectural choices and spatial arrangements conform to two distinctively Irish settlement systems: clachan and rundale. A clachan was a collection of dwellings whose inhabitants were usually related, and it was closely tied to preindustrial and rural ideals (Evans 1977:14; Arthure 2015). Unlike a “standard” village, a clachan lacked services, such as churches, shops, or hotels (Gailey 1984:225; Whelan 2011:86, 2012:453; Symmons and Harkin 2013:23; Ó Síocháin 2015:6–7), and was often without obvious cadastral boundaries. An 1846 account of a clachan at Carramore, county Mayo, for example, described the cottages as built “in a cluster, without the slightest attempt at regularity, and without street or lane” (Foster 1846:202). Although houses in a clachan could have individual vegetable gardens, the majority of land was managed collectively using the shifting open-field farming method of rundale, a cooperative system in which animals were grazed communally on the best available ground (Johnson 1958:555–556; Miller 1985:27–28; Whelan 2012:453; Ó Síocháin 2015:1). Both clachans and the rundale system evolved as responses to farming marginal land (Bell and Watson 2015:34).

Although the date of origin for clachans is uncertain (Evans 1957:23; McCourt 1971; Proudfoot 2007; O’Keeffe et al. 2015:75), their disappearance in Ireland was heavily influenced by the Famine and subsequent death rates, emigration, evictions, and clearances (Proudfoot 2007; Ó Síocháin 2015:9–10). The earliest emigrants to Baker’s Flat arrived immediately after the Famine and would have lived through the social disintegration that it caused. The clachan at Baker’s Flat flourished for at least 40 years before it declined. Reconstructing the familiar clachan life centered around family and mutual support may have helped the residents to reconstitute the social bonds that had dislocated so rapidly and profoundly in Ireland. Rather than rectilinear alignments of walls and lanes, they created order through intangible relationships that rendered a visible grid irrelevant, making the clachan simultaneously a way of being and belonging.

Jewelry, Religion, and Personal Adornment

In addition to settlement pattern, the archaeological work at Baker’s Flat focused on items of personal adornment recovered by a metal detectorist between 2002 and 2012. Interviews with the detectorist revealed that he had removed approximately 1,300 metal items from four general areas (Fig. 4), although it is not possible to tie particular artifacts to specific locations. Comparing the archaeological survey results to the metal-detecting locations, it is clear that Location 2 overlaps with a domestic area containing several buildings. Locations 1, 3, and 4, however, do not contain any building remains, although Location 3 is the site of what is known colloquially as the “dance floor,” supposedly the site for traditional community dances (Maloney 1936:29). The majority of material came from Locations 1, 2, and 3.

The collection consists only of metal objects; data derived from other artifact types, such as ceramics, are the focus of ongoing research. Given the fiercely defended and tightly controlled boundaries of the village, it seems reasonable to assume that personal items, even if lost in communal areas such as the “dance floor,” are most likely to have been the property of the residents of Baker’s Flat. The date range for the collection mirrors the dates for the settlement, clustering between the 1860s and the 1900s. Within the metal collection are 93 pieces of jewelry (more than half of which are brooches, but also cufflinks, hat pins, lockets, pendants, and rings), 40 belt buckles, 39 fancy buttons, and 29 religious items (including rosary pieces, devotional medals, confirmation medals, and crucifixes) (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
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Jewelry, items of personal adornment, and religious artifacts from Baker’s Flat. (Photos by Susan Arthure, 2013.)

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The jewelry is consistent with popular Victorian trends inspired by the romantic (1830s–1850s), arts and crafts (1880s) and art nouveau (1890s) movements, including their many sentimental associations. Of the 40 belt buckles in the collection, 13 are related to sporting pastimes, 12 of which depict cricket (Fig. 6o, p). Four of these have diamond registration marks dating between 1868 and 1883 (National Archives 2014). The religious items cannot be dated with any certainty, but the rosary pieces are consistent with Irish Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary (O’Dwyer 1986:72; Lysaght 1998:25; Davies 2013:97). Three confirmation medals (Fig. 6i) are religious keepsakes traditionally given to Catholic children at their confirmation. Three St. Joseph medals (Fig. 6j) possibly link to the Sisters of St. Joseph, who ran the Catholic school on Baker’s Flat from at least 1873 until 1881 (Foale 1989:227; Irish Harp and Farmers’ Herald 1873:6), although they may also reflect specific devotions, since St. Joseph was the patron saint of workers, fathers, immigrants, and a happy death (Farmer 2004:288–289).

Several trends are noticeable in this material. Firstly, while items such as trouser buttons (Fig. 6n) are typical of 19th-century working-class communities, the more decorative fancy buttons (Fig. 6k–m) indicate a range of fashionable outerwear augmented by a wide range of popular jewelry styles. Taken together, this material demonstrates a willingness to participate in wider patterns of respectable Victorian consumption and spend disposable income on trifles that are both aspirational and suggestive of active personal participation in a burgeoning market economy. This stands in contrast to the closed nature of the physical community at Baker’s Flat.

Given the political changes in Ireland in the second half of the 19th century and the willingness of Irish diasporic communities to support Irish political goals, the lack of designs in this assemblage inspired by the Celtic revival is noticeable. From the 1830s onwards in Ireland, this movement popularized a stock of national symbols, such as the round tower, Celtic cross, shamrock, harp, and wolfhound (Hutchinson 2001:510; Williams 2012:84). Such imagery was more generally co-opted into Victorian fashions toward the end of the 19th century, but only one object at Baker’s Flat possibly tapped into this trend: a buckle with a shamrock (Fig. 6c). Although expressing a Celtic affinity, the shamrock also reflects the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity and so possibly aligns more closely with religious values. While the consumer choices of the residents at Baker’s Flat would necessarily have been limited by the range of goods available in a rural community, as well as by what was for sale in secondhand markets (Crook 2000) and other outlets (such as the “remarkably cheap wares” for sale at the annual Catholic picnic [Kapunda Herald 1878:3]), it is unlikely that Celtic-inspired items were completely unavailable, especially given the reach of mail-order catalogs by the late 19th century.

The cricket buckles recovered (Fig. 6o, p), on the other hand, while ostensibly relating to a quintessentially English game, are in fact tied quite closely to key Irish pastimes. Although in Ireland today cricket is a minority sport, for a period in the 19th century it was the most widely played sport by all classes in the country (Siggins 2005:10–20; Bairner 2007). In South Australian country towns, membership in sporting clubs and winning cricket or football games offered an opportunity for social prestige. Kapunda had clubs for athletics, cricket, football, tennis, croquet, archery, and shooting (Daly 1982:156,166). Whilst tennis and croquet catered to the town professionals and gentry, the team sports of cricket and football cut across class, ethnic-origin, and religious boundaries (Kapunda Herald and Northern Intelligencer 1869:2; Daly 1982:166). The monetary cost of cricket was also low, requiring minimal equipment that could be communally owned (Daly 1982:152; Hunt 2004:28). In the same way that cricket in Ireland offered players from poor socioeconomic backgrounds an opportunity to “earn respectability, display skills and win prestige” (Hunt 2004:28), cricket at Baker’s Flat may have done the same. Cricket may have cut across boundaries, but it was also an area where Irish Australians chose to highlight some degree of Irish affiliation and identity.

The religious items (Fig. 6f–j) connect the community with the post-Famine resurgence in the Catholic church, known as the “devotional revolution” (Larkin 1972), which took place in Ireland between 1850 and 1880 and spread to Australia in the 1860s. It transformed Irish Catholicism to such an extent that it became both highly Romanized—marginalizing folk forms of worship—and grafted onto Irish nationalist identity in significant and lasting ways (Larkin 1972; O’Day 2005). Devotional aids and the accompanying exercises were a key to its success and became central to the reshaping of Catholic practice (Larkin 1972:649–650). While unable to be precisely dated, the religious items from Baker’s Flat signal the presence of a devout Catholic community, a choice that by default would have set them apart from the dominant Protestant community and marked them as Irish. By the second half of the 19th century, the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” had become virtually interchangeable (Larkin 1972:649; O’Day 2005:408–409).

Irishness, Gender, and Class

Related to the items of personal devotion found at Baker’s Flat is the material from the nearby site of St. John’s, a Catholic church, presbytery, and cemetery servicing a scattered but numerous Catholic community, including the residents of Baker’s Flat. St. John’s was established by Irish clergymen in 1849 on 10 ha of glebe land 3 mi. outside Kapunda (Nicol 1983b; De Leiuen 2015, 2016). Opposite the church was a store and post office run by Richard Haimes, originally from county Laois, Ireland, where parishioners could obtain their mail from home, as well as Irish newspapers and whiskey (Kapunda Herald and Northern Intelligencer 1871:2). By the 1860s the parishioners numbered in the hundreds, and it was perhaps the largest rural Catholic community in Australia (Nicol 1983b:11). Costly, imposing, and public, this landscape was constructed to assert a permanent Catholic presence, although its relative lavishness was in stark contrast to the poverty of the parishioners who funded it, many of whom were living at Baker’s Flat (Arthure 2015). It was a focal point for ceremonies and rituals of baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death, and possibly a place where the Irish language was spoken. The institution visibly symbolized the nexus between Irish identity and Catholic identity.

From 1866 St. John’s was also used as a Catholic school, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, although the closure of the Kapunda Mine in 1878 and the relative isolation of St. John’s saw both church and presbytery fall into disrepair by the late 1870s, as there was no resident priest and church services ceased. The school continued on until 1881, after which the site was abandoned for over a decade. In 1897 St. John’s was repurposed as a Catholic girls’ reformatory, also run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, until 1909. By 1899, due to several escape attempts, the girls were divided into two classes, so that “better girls” would not be contaminated by bad behavior. Two internal cells, a sisters’ room, a linen press, an 11 ft. high fence of jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) and iron enclosing all buildings, as well as iron bars on all windows, were added as part of this repurposing (Kapunda Herald 1899:3).

The archaeology from this site reflects both of these phases. According to local oral history, parishioners would congregate at St. John’s after Mass on a Sunday, and the men would often make a competition of trying to lift a heavy boulder located on the roadside (Mary Kent 2014, pers. comm.). Clay pipe stems and bowls excavated from the site were inscribed with “McDougall” and “Glasgow” (Fig. 7), but were otherwise plain; they date to between 1846 and 1891 (Sudbury 2006). Studies, such as Gojak and Stuart (1999), show a nexus between male labor and politics outside the home through the visible act of smoking. The presence of the pipes at St. John’s is reflective of the public and social nature of smoking, and possibly its practice at funerals and wakes (Ó Súilleabháin 1967).

Fig. 7
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Religious and reformatory artifacts from St. John’s. (Photos by Cherrie De Leiuen, 2016.)

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One further point about clay pipes is worth noting. Such objects were a common repository for expressions of Irishness and Irish nationalism. Irish laborers both in Britain and New South Wales used a distinctive short-stemmed type called the “dudeen,” or “cutty,” found at sites such as Cadman’s Cottage in the Rocks district of Sydney (Gojak and Stuart 1999). Hartnett (2004) notes that in Ireland political pipes were an act of colonial resistance, with antecedents stretching back to the 17th century; in Australia and the U.S. they have been strongly associated with working-class Irish laborers in urban contexts (Reckner 2001; Brighton 2004) and 19th-century political movements (Gojak and Stuart 1999:40). These frequently bore the nationalist motifs of the harp and the shamrock, and slogans such as “Home Rule” and “Erin Go Bragh” (popularly translated as “Ireland forever”). The Tigress, a ship wrecked in the Gulf of St. Vincent in 1848, carried 50 boxes of these pipes, manufactured in Edinburgh for the South Australian market; a good proportion bore the Irish harp/thistle design (Gojak and Stuart 1999:43). So far, however, only three pieces of clay pipe stem have been found at Baker’s Flat, despite two field seasons of excavation; their relative absence and the absence of nationalist slogans on the pipes from St. John’s perhaps accords with the different circumstances of rural and mining labor, as opposed to urban construction and transport, and the middle-class aspirations visible in the purchase of respectable personal-adornment items.

Other artifacts reflect the tasks undertaken by the reformatory girls, including gardening; laundering; corset and shirt making for sale in town; sewing, both plain and fancy work; wood chopping; the tending of cattle, horses, and poultry; and a regime of prayer, Mass, choir, lessons, and meticulous cleaning (Fig. 7). A primary, explicit goal of this system was to fit the girls for domestic service; underlying this were broader intersecting ideologies of class, gender, and ethnicity that sought to impose suitable boundaries on their behavior in a number of ways. Having begun its life as a public site built by men for the Irish Catholic community, by the end of the 19th century St. John’s had been transformed into a private, enclosed, and female domain, replete with high iron fences and barred windows to control the movements of and increase surveillance over the young girls that were its inmates. The landscape, architecture, and artifacts at St. John’s are expressions and reflections of the complex relationships of Catholicism, Irishness, class, and gender.

The attendance of children at St. John’s and other Josephite schools, including the one on Baker’s Flat, helped to delineate a separate Irish Catholic identity (O’Brien 1975; Foale 1989). Furthermore, Irish nuns acted to remold the children and the wider community to the goals of the devotional revolution (O’Shea 2012). Once the site became a reformatory, the nuns also became key agents in the imposition of wider middle-class views about appropriate female behavior. Aged between 12 and 18, the majority of girls incarcerated at St. John’s were charged with being uncontrollable, accusations that were almost always couched in terms of real or imagined sexual promiscuity. Barbarlet (1983) observed that, between 1887 and 1892, half of all reformatory girls in the South Australian system were of Irish descent, although the Irish made up only 14% of the total population. The environment of the reformatory system was actively used to produce the desirable outcome of cleaning up the streets, not only because these girls were perceived as “bad,” but also because they were poor, Catholic, Irish, and female.

The site of St. John’s highlights the tendency—despite the fact that both locally and globally more Irish women emigrated (Diner 1983; Nolan 1989)—for Irish Australian identity to be theorized primarily through male experiences. Irishness, Britishness, and also Australianness were highly gendered constructions, and the material experiences of being a woman or man within the Irish community or an Irish woman or an Irish man within Australian society would have been very different. Typically, Irish women in Australia were either constructed as moral and virtuous devotees of Catholicism and the idealization of motherhood, or the rebellious heroine, the “sheila,” whose “forceful, almost terrible vitality” mirrored the stereotypical larrikin image associated with male Irish identity in Australia (Hamilton 1993:89–90). As domestics, Irish women were often represented in the colonial media as incompetent, stupid, and insolent (Hamilton 1993:71), and Anglo-Australians regularly complained about the rebellious and uncooperative “biddy” (a corruption of “Bridget”) (Twopeny 1883:51–52). The Irish girls at St. John’s were doubly victims—subject to the same anti-Catholic/anti-Irish prejudices that shaped dominant views of Irish working-class women, as well as the general Victorian middle-class discourse that divided the working class into respectable or non-respectable based upon the upholding of certain values, such as sobriety, industry, cleanliness, and the rejection of immorality or “unnatural” sexuality. The first was foisted on them by outsiders, the second by the Irish themselves in the form of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Catholic Church, and the middle-class Catholic community. At Baker’s Flat, the “biddies” used physical and verbal force to police their boundaries and keep prying visitors out of the clachan. At the St. John’s Reformatory, the aim was to tame the wild Irish girls, through domestic labor, to become meek reflections of Mary rather than encourage the revolutionary spirit of St. Bridget.

Identity in Death

Janine McEgan’s (2017) research has explored Irish headstones and other grave furniture, dating to between 1850 and 1899, from six cemeteries in South Australia’s mid-north, including the cemetery of St. John’s in which many of the residents of Baker’s Flat were buried. She recorded 200 headstones, along with their accompanying fences and footstones. To determine what suggested “Irishness” as opposed to “Catholicness,” subsamples of Irish Protestant and non-Irish Catholic graves were selected (Table 1). To gauge change across time, the practices of first-generation immigrants and two generations of their descendants were compared. Aspects of memorialization style included the iconography of motifs, the language of inscriptions, and the placement, form, height, material, and color of headstones, fences, and footstones. Although McEgan’s data were only drawn from graves with extant headstones and therefore do not include earlier, or poorer, burials that were not memorialized in stone, and even though her samples were sometimes small, three comparisons proved to be statistically significant: the emotive content of headstones, the use of religious motifs and symbols, and the use of three particular Irish symbols.

Table 1 Numbers of Irish Catholic, non-Irish, and Irish Protestant graves recorded in the counties of Stanley and Light, South Australia
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Firstly, Irish headstones tended to use much more overtly emotive language than those on non-Irish graves (Fig. 8). These harnessed the language of both grief (e.g., “loss,” “sorrowing,” “mourning,” “bereaved,” and “lamented”) and affection (e.g., “beloved,” “dear,” “loved,” and “fond”), such as the epitaph for Sarah Fudge in the St. John’s Catholic cemetery:

Fig. 8
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Use of emotive motifs and language by Irish and non-Irish over time. (Drawing by Janine McEgan, 2016.)

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In Loving Memory Of/SARAH FUDGE,/THE BELOVED WIFE OF EDWARD FUDGE/WHO DIED, APRIL 23, 1897/IN HER 60TH YEAR/'TIS HARD TO PART FROM THOSE WE LOVE/'TIS HARD TO SAY “FAREWELL”/'TIS HARD TO SAY “THY WILL BE DONE”/HOW HARD, NO TONGUE CAN TELL./BUT THOU WILT TAKE US TO OUR FRIENDS/WHEN EARTH'S LONG JOURNEY'S OVER/IN HEAVEN, THY DWELLING PLACE ABOVE/WE'LL MEET TO PART NO MORE.

Similarly, the head- and footstones for the Mullen family in the Christchurch Anglican cemetery were erected

[Headstone] IN/MEMORY OF/MARY/THE BELOVED WIFE OF/JOHN MULLEN/WHO DIED JUNE 18TH 1870/AGED 35 YEARS ALSO/KATHARINE, GEORGE THORNTON AND/CATHERINE/CHILDREN OF THE ABOVE/WHO DIED IN INFANCY ALSO/MARGARET/AGED 15 YEARS/DIED AUGUST 30TH 1876 JOHN MULLEN/HUSBAND & FATHER OF ABOVE/DIED JUNE 29TH 1890/AGED 70 YEARS JEANNIE & LIZZIE/DAUGHTERS OF ABOVE

[Footstone] A.D. 1870 /IHS/As I have/loved you/Love ye also/one-another

As a practice, a general use of emotive language by the Irish increased from the 1860s onward, even though the annual number of new Irish graves remained relatively stable.

Motifs signifying affection and grief proved to have stronger religiously based differences. Expressions of affection using symbols, such as a rose (representing hope), daisy (innocence), wreath, or forget-me-not (both signifying remembrance), distinguished Irish Catholic from Irish Protestant headstones. The same was true for expressions of grief through motifs, such as broken-stemmed lilies and morning glory (loss), or cloth-draped urns, which were also preferentially chosen by Irish Catholics.

Likewise, motifs representing Christ, the cross, and the Mass were significantly associated with Irish Catholic graves, probably adopted as a result of the European influence of the Austrian Jesuits, an order well-established in South Australia by 1851. Catholics also used biblical references and religious phrases more than Protestants, as well as the word “Amen.” Catholic use of religious motifs peaked in the 1860s and religious language in the 1870s, but both subsequently declined throughout the rest of the century.

The Catholic use of two particular symbols—Celtic crosses and shamrocks—on cast-iron grave pickets in the 1870s and 1880s also distinguished them from the Protestants. Both symbols have pre-Christian associations, however, the shamrock gained popularity in Ireland between 1865 and 1914 as a symbol of “faith and nationality,” as well as St. Patrick (Alter 1987:10). In addition, a third symbol—a scroll design reminiscent of the triple spirals from the Neolithic tomb of Newgrange, county Meath, Ireland (O’Kelly 1982)—was found on an 1863 Catholic headstone for the O’Sullivan family in the Navan cemetery (Fig. 9). Triskelion and tetraskelion designs are known from early grave monuments in Ireland, for example in the cemetery of the great monastery of Clonmacnoise (6th–16th centuries) in county Offaly (Stewart Macalister 1899). The O’Sullivan headstone is handmade, and various stylistic elements link it to an earlier example for the Fahey family, dated to 1858, in the same cemetery. There is no indication of who carved either headstone, but their early date and distinctiveness are indicative of the lack of a locally established stonemason industry, allowing the display of an individuality that is not found on later examples.

Fig. 9
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(a) The O’Sullivan and (b) Fahey headstones in Navan cemetery, including a close-up of the O’Sullivan scroll. (Photos by Heather Burke, 2010.)

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These results can be interpreted in a number of ways. The emotive content expressed on Irish, and particularly Irish Catholic, graves through the symbolic language of floral and other motifs draws from the same vein of Victorian sentimentality as the jewelry from Baker’s Flat. That this practice tied both Protestant and Catholic Irish together, however, taps into wider stereotypes of the Irish as wild, emotional, and lyrical, as opposed to the non-Irish Protestant influences of the “good death” and more restrained modes of self-expression that came to dominate funeral expression after the 1870s (Jalland 1996:5). In this way, both the Protestant and Catholic Irish set themselves apart, possibly connected to the Irish funeral tradition of the wake. The wake’s purpose was to provide free rein to the emotions, and its apparent disorder and behavioral excesses (including ritualized violence, games, dancing, and drinking), rather than being antisocial and inappropriate products of the event, were, in fact, central to its purpose (Grainger 1998). The long history of these practices (Ó Súilleabháin 1967) and the fact that wakes seem to have been tolerated in the Australian context (O’Farrell 2000:27–28), make it reasonable to argue that their echoes should be found in cemetery memorialization.

On the surface, the Catholic use of religious language and symbolism conforms to expected practice. Mytum (2013:162) has noted that 19th-century Protestant observances of death concentrated on the judgment of a life lived, rather than improvement in an afterlife, leading them to include very few religious motifs on their headstones; see also Sayer (2011). Catholics, on the contrary, attempted to shorten the path through purgatory by a variety of means, including the use of religious motifs and language on headstones as a form of “indulgence.” Given the strong nonconformist matrix of South Australia, the use of religious and overtly emotive language and symbols would have made Irish Catholics highly distinctive and visible, as well as separating the Irish as a collective from their non-Irish counterparts.

When viewed across time, evidence for active Catholic memorialization peaks in the 1860s and declines in following decades, mirroring the phases of migration and pointing to increased religiosity of post-Famine migrants in the 1860s and 1870s, followed by a social (and generational) shift in the Irish population from the 1880s. This contrasts with the pattern that Larkin (1972:651) developed for the devotional revolution, which argues that those who left Ireland before 1860 were more likely to be part of the pre-Famine generation of largely non-practicing Catholics. Our data suggest the opposite: that the most overt expressions of Catholicism were associated with burials in the earliest two decades—presumably those of the first generation of immigrants—and that these expressions diminished after the 1870s. In particular, Irish Catholic headstones became plainer over time, with nearly 40% lacking any motifs at all in the 1870s. A brief resurgence in motifs occurred in the 1880s before plainness again became dominant in the 1890s. In part, increases in plainness may have been linked to straitened economic circumstances caused by significant droughts in the early 1860s, many insolvencies in the 1870s (James 2009:247), and the closure of the Kapunda Mine.

Finally, the decision to use a shamrock, Celtic cross, or scroll connects to the suite of iconic motifs associated with the Celtic revival, since they all had older pre- and early Christian associations. Such symbols became increasingly co-opted by the Irish nationalist cause from the 1840s onward, and, although the revival itself was primarily associated with the Protestant Irish, its symbols were also well represented within the Catholic population, which used them to espouse a different agenda (Hutchinson 2001:505,510). Celtic crosses, shamrocks, and scrolls were thus powerful symbols, since they aligned with both religious and nationalist appeals to tradition. The use of these symbols in the Australian context also connects to the construction of the “Anglo-Celtic Australian,” a hybrid identity introduced in 19th-century discourses to accommodate both Irish Protestants and Catholics. This semantic switch was subtle, but provided a space in Australian public life where the Irish could become Australian nationalists without automatically being considered British imperialists (Jamrozik 2004:92).

Axes of Irishness: Making and Marking Identity

While a relatively limited sample—architecture and a metal-detectorist’s assemblage from one settlement, one church and reformatory, and headstones from six cemeteries—these data do indicate certain trends in the construction of Irish identity. First, a sense of separateness from non-Irish settlers was maintained through the normative “ways of doing” that were embedded in habitus. The most obvious of these were the distinctive settlement pattern of the clachan and the vernacular architecture of Baker’s Flat, both of which created identity through durable habitus via an accretionary process of daily life lived in relation to others with similar dispositions, beliefs, ideals, and needs. The fact that new immigrants continued to arrive at Baker’s Flat after the 1850s as houses were bought and sold (Kapunda Herald 1902:3), and that it became more visible as a political collective after 1875, also suggests that it was not just an artifact of the earliest immigrants, but a system that continued to work for subsequent generations. Moreover, as this was maintained over time in contradistinction to what lay around it, it grew more distinctive. In fact, its clearest appearance as a collective would have been at a time of increasing economic hardship following the droughts of the 1860s and just before the closure of the Kapunda Mine. This suggests that its collective power to provide continued access to common land may have been one way for the residents to cope with the increasing uncertainty of current income and future prospects.

Headstones also showed elements of Irish habitus via a strong element of emotionality in memorialization. An excess of emotion is in some ways a stereotype of Irishness—the “barbaric, peripheral, lyrical, mythical, and wild” Irish Celt, as opposed to the “purportedly civilized, always properly comported Anglo-Saxon Englishman” (Williams 2012:13,53)—yet in McEgan’s study was, nevertheless, distinctive in terms of a coherent, core, and non-sectarian form of Irish identity. This may reflect a less pronounced tension between a more generic Irishness and specific Catholic or Protestant forms of Irishness in South Australia. In contrast, the Catholic use of Irish nationalist symbols was a more conscious form of identity that suggests some level of political divide within the Irish community. The presence of such symbols on graves, however, contrasts markedly with their absence on the objects of personal adornment from Baker’s Flat or the pipes from St. John’s. The commonplace jewelry and other items instead suggest the construction of a new common habitus of capitalism, as rising working- and middle-class aspirations became moored to mass consumerism through the capitalist ideologies of individualism, respectability, and “improvement” (Orser 2005; Tarlow 2007; Kuijt et al. 2015). Brighton (2011:33) argued similarly, noting that “individuals were not necessarily seeking satisfaction from the products [they] consumed, rather they were buying into the ‘self-illusory experiences’ created by the objects symbolically expressing social aspirations and individuality.” At the same time that choices in housing and settlement form marked them as different, other personal choices connoted an equally active incorporation within a shared British colonial enterprise. Within the social context of the colony of South Australia—deliberately and consciously modeled outside a narrative of convictism, although not without its own prejudices—these choices may have provided the symbolic space in which to navigate and negotiate incorporation into the imaginative social category of Australian settler.

The markers of identity that most clearly signaled conformity to wider ideals (“assimilation”) were those connected to interpersonal interactions and intimate territories: items worn on the body that could only be “read” in close person-to-person exchanges (Fig. 10). Such markers are short term in their visibility (e.g., worn for short periods such as a single day and able to be replaced relatively quickly) and speak to a momentary present. They can signal emotional states that change quickly (daily) and are also highly affordable because of the efficiencies of mass production, making them available to a wider range of people and enabling replacement as circumstances allow. It is important to note that, while mass production constructs similarity on a large scale (global, national, or regional trends), at the intimate scale of day-to-day lived interactions (community or family trends) it actually allows for high degrees of individualization (i.e., there might only be one example of a particular piece of jewelry in a house or within a network of friends and relations). Such mercurial markers signal conformity, but not uniformity.

Fig. 10
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Axes of identity. (Drawing by Heather Burke, 2017.)

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In contrast, those markers that most clearly signaled difference were more monumental: the larger, publicly visible, and stable elements that were readable from a distance within shared, public domains, such as headstones, houses, churches, barred windows, iron fences, and the landscape. Possessing meanings that shift slowly across a longer time period, the emotional states expressed within stone are in contrast to those expressed within personal-identity markers worn on the body. These more durable elements of identity exhibited a higher degree of distinctiveness (“dissimilation”)—both within the Irish community (Catholic vs. Protestant) and between Irish and non-Irish. The paradoxical logic of headstones is that they are oriented toward the future (the memorialization of the dead person amongst the living), even though by definition their content must refer to something that is definitively past. In some cases, such as the O’Sullivan headstone, they appealed to a very distant past that connected both Irish nationalist and religious causes. For the Irish, the deliberately long-term intent and relative stability of gravestones allowed them to speak to the deep habitus of family, kin, and tradition at the same time that they connoted prospects for particular nationalist constructions of the future. In between these two extremes lie the object classes that were not the focus of this research: the household ceramics and glassware that might connote elements of individual, family, and kin identities in domestic household spaces. Brighton (2005:122–139) has highlighted the different patterns of Irishness that become visible depending on which class of artifacts is under analysis, demonstrating patterns of incorporation through ceramics that existed alongside processes of marginalization as revealed through ratios of patent to prescription medicines. Until Arthure’s ongoing work at Baker’s Flat is complete it is not possible to speculate on the nature or scale of Irish identity as expressed via other material means or within the private domains of houses.

Steen (1999:70) made the pertinent observation that the speed at which things change is crucial to understanding the types of social identity they can encode and, therefore, how they are used. In Steen’s analysis, however, it was the mercurial markers—homespun cloth and leather clothing—that enabled people to make strong political statements. Mann and DiPaolo Loren (2001:295–298) also noted the greater potential for identity markers associated with the body, such as dress, hairstyle, and personal adornment, to signal subtle symbolic shifts, compared to more stable markers, which tend to be more conservative (Goodwin 1999). In our results the choice of mobile, mercurial markers achieved this by signaling conformity, while the monumental markers signaled abiding forms of both individual and group difference. Rather than one Irishness, there were various axes of Irishness that were mobilized in different circumstances for different purposes at different times. In other words, Irishness did not just vary across time, but also between material realms and contexts of interaction. This implies that identity will not only differ between communities and elements within communities, but also depending on the archaeological sample that is available. This highlights two facets of the general construction and expression of social identity that are worth mentioning.

Firstly, different symbols of identity rise to the surface and become more visible at different times, negotiating different spaces in people’s lives. The more deeply embedded spheres of habitus appear both more fundamentalist (accretionary “ways of doing”) and conservative (indicating change only slowly), yet at the same time provide a space in which elements of conscious and deliberate choice can be exercised. A certain degree of orientation toward the past is visible in these spheres, in the case of the Irish via the expression of emotion in memorialization practices from the 1860s onwards, overt expressions of Irish nationalism in Catholic burial practices in the 1870s and 1880s, and the social system that operated through the clachan from the 1850s to the 1890s. These material realms contribute to the stability of different versions of corporate identity. Brubaker and Cooper (2000:15) referred to these as categorical modes of identity: indicating membership in a group that shares some qualified attributes and values, even when that group exceeds the individual’s ability to know all its members. These realms and modes underlie the routines and the activities of daily life and respond to longer-term needs.

Closer to the surface lies a mix of things that are more mobile and rapidly changing, and that, therefore, accommodate greater fluidity. The material choices made in this realm encode relational modes of identity—the personal web of kinship, friendship, and other immediate ties that enable people to identify themselves and the others with whom they interact (Brubaker and Cooper 2000:15). In their personal appearance and day-to-day interactions the Irish embraced a broader sense of colonial identity through these modes, connected to the opportunities afforded by the present and their options—both individual and collective—in the imagined future (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016). Ivana’s (2017:59) concept of “imagined social capital” captures the “benefit that is created by participating in imagined or symbolic networks. ... When one constructs themselves as part of an imagined community with a given symbolic capital, this imagined belonging can become a resort for resistance and re-envisioning.” These choices sit inside the more stable boundaries of wider constructions of identity and provide mechanisms for change that are smaller scale and more responsive to fashion, popularity, or short-term identity or emotional needs. In doing so they form the bridge between collective past, present belonging, and future aspirations. Together, both conservative and fluid modes of identity construct the continuity that gives any individual or group meaning. Almost paradoxically, such continuity depends absolutely on the ability to adapt and change, rather than simply persevere (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016:384).

Secondly, the complexity of archaeologically analyzing identity in any form derives from the partial, and in many ways often quite particular, slice that is typically represented by material remains. Trying to grasp complex and fluid social dynamics though limited patterns of static archaeological materials is an entrenched archaeological problem. It not only constrains how much of the process remains to be interpreted, but also the ways we archaeologists think about it. This can, and should, generate a sense of unease, in that the reductionist nature of artifacts combined with archaeology’s deeply empirical roots and a recent history of reading strength and resilience into things that change more slowly lend themselves more readily to essentialist interpretations. As Mullins (2008:104) has argued for the African American archaeological context: “[H]istorical archaeology uneasily negotiates between ... anti-essentialism and the evidence for ... cultural persistence.” Such unease is an asset, since it should encourage us to think more deeply, widely, and adeptly. One way to tackle it is to adopt an approach that encompasses multiple material domains evident across longer timeframes, so that both rapid and gradual changes in various realms of identity can be grasped more fully.

Conclusions

Drawing together the results of multiple studies has enabled explorations of axes of social identity in ways that are not possible within the confines of a single project. This has provided the opportunity to weave complementary strands together in order to compare and contrast the patterning visible at personal (signaled via the more rapidly shifting, mercurial markers of jewelry and personal adornment, as well as the more permanent and stable markers of cemetery headstones and grave furniture) and group levels (through patterns of land use, settlement organization, and changes in cemetery symbolism over time and across space) throughout the second half of the 19th century.

In terms of how the Irish have been presented in the Australian national narrative, the three studies discussed here suggest that previous historical treatments have tended to generalize their experience to such an extent that the nuances of particular communities and choices are lost. In South Australia, while a general pattern of similarity held true in most areas of burial symbolism and personal adornment, archaeological evidence for distinctiveness in land use, architecture, the expression of emotion, and the use of Irish nationalist symbols support James’s (2009) argument for characteristic forms of Irish identity being maintained until at least the turn of the 20th century. Unlike O’Farrell’s (2000:7) generalizing claim that Australian Irishness was “confused and erratic,” fluctuating “according to whim and convenience,” archaeology supports an interpretation that is less haphazard and more constructive (and constructed), although perhaps no less opportunistic. Furthermore, just as Irish identities changed in Ireland over the course of the 19th century (Orser 2004; Horning 2007), so too did they change in South Australia in response to the shifting complexion of the colony and the opportunities it offered. Larkin (1972:651) has argued that the key difference between Irish emigration before and after 1860 was the breaking up of the culture of poverty constructed by the Famine that allowed other values to emerge. Rather than assuming an extant and fully formed identity for all Irish emigrants, it is “not simply a question of being Irish or distancing oneself from an Irish identity but of picking and choosing when one wished to exhibit an Irish identity and the substance of this identity” (O’Day 2005:418). Although O’Day’s position that identity is always and only an active choice cannot be substantiated, the various elements drawn upon in the process of “being Irish” constructed similarity and dissimilarity in different contexts and at different scales simultaneously.

The drawbacks to the work to date are that the data are overwhelmingly Irish Catholic, offering very few glimpses into the materiality of Protestant Irishness. This is compounded by a focus on a particular class: the laborers and small farmers of the working class. Further research, to generate additional archaeological data with better spatial and temporal resolution, and further studies can only contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the shades of Irishness that waxed and waned in South Australia.