It's often been commented here that it's impossible to remove ITM from it's social context however internationally it has enjoyed popularity as an entity unto itself. This is a question for the "non nationals" as the dailies like to put it: Has the pursuit of ITM lead an interest in non musical aspects of Irish culture like football or hurling, horse racing, poetry, cards and the like ?
I've certainly gotten into Ireland as a whole, the people, the beauty of the environment, and some aspects of the society because of the music. (And I understand rugby better now, thanks to some intensive schooling from Fergus while I was staying with his family).
But I wouldn't say that the music has lead me to read Joyce or Yeats. And I don't get much exposure to hurling...
In ever appreciated Irish Football until I was in Ireland (twice) for the championships. Love the entusiasm, color and the flags.
Food. I do all of our cooking. Herself has a miserable job with Mother Church (don't let them get you going about workers rights- With Mother Church, her lay employees have none. They are Church Chattel). I really have come to appreciate Irish food. particularly their brown bread ( it is hard to make right and the course brown flour is not available in the States-only a fine grind is available). Irish soups are unbelieveably good.
Irish Humor...or maybe the sublte tongue-in-cheek of it.
Oh yeah... brown bread! Good call zippy! One family that I stay with in Ireland bakes brown bread every day, and you have it with every meal. Excellent!
Yes -- and no. In my case I had a great interest in irish literature when I was in my 20s, 30s etc [and still do] and long before there were "celtic studies courses" I manage to track down some profs offering English courses in irish lit here at my University at the time. Later I set up my own independent study of the Irish short story...and later still went to Ireland to immerse myself in Yeats.
It wasn't until many years later -- 20 to be exact -- that a 'celtic' festival introduced me to the idea of Irish culture but through a whole different approach -- ie, music. In some ways [as Lear said?] "The wheel hath come full circle"...and I found myself being drawn into ITM. It was a nice change instead of the 'all mind' approach of literature, critical theory etc...to "just" sitting around learning and playing tunes. It was a whole different approach for me -- not "cerebral" in the sense we most often use the term...more intuitive...less analytical...more instinctual.
The Eurovision Song Contest, with or without Terry Wogan (well, you did say "non-musical aspects"...). Bailey's. Irish Coffee. "Father Ted". Hot poteen with a fried breakfast.
This may suggest that I am a slobby, mindless consumer.
That would be because this is true. Sport was always too strenuous for my liking, and cards and betting too intellectually demanding. I also found them bone-crushingly boring. Mind, I regard sport as a Good Thing - just as long as it isn't me that has to do it.
Getting into the music made me interested in Irish language and how on earth you pronounce the multitude of wierdly written words encountered in the names of the tunes. Luckily I can call upon a person or two to help occasionally but I'm sure I usually butcher the names when I try to say them.
Yes and no.
It's introduced me to a lot of great artists and wonderful storytellers and more access to celtic designs for jewelry and other art. the side stuff, like football and beer -- no. But then, I'm not interested in it on the American side, either, so that's not a surprise.
It won't be much of a surprise to those who grew up within it, but Irish-American culture is always looking for these types of connective attachments. My one grandmother gave me my first Dubliners record on my 10th birthday and my other grandmother gave me a copy of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy" on my 16th. As a sports junkie, I feel in love with hurling on my first visit to Ireland, although it's nearly impossible to follow from so far away now. I saw Offaly play against Meath back in 98 one of the high points of my visit there.
Playing this music is just another branch off the same tree for me.
John Wayne was taken to a hurling match. After a while one of the locals asked him "So. Mr Wayne. would you like to be out there with a stick yerself?" Reply:"Well i sure as heck wouldn't want to be out there WITHOUT one!" Some of the people I met at a session in Ireland were curious as to why I was so amused at the beer mat in font of me advertising the Guinness Hurling Match until I explained that "hurling" in the States is slang for what might happen after a few too many pints of the shtuff! Anyway. learning about the rest of Irish culture should , in my opinion, go hand in hand with learning the music...
I've read Ulysses, I drink Guiness and I married somebody with Irish
roots. Does that count? I suppose the real Ireland is all about karaoke,
hip hop and curry these days anyway ...
Sort of, yes. However, in my case it was first Ireland, then music, then social context around the music. Then my interest in Irish culture waned, I moved to different pastures, but the pleasure from playing the music remained. So now music is the only piece of the puzzle that's left.
Funnily, in my parts the usual way to go for an inquisitive musician who gets interested in Irish music is first to discover Irishy-wishy-washy marine pop-songs or fusion bands, then get engulfed in Irish traditional music, and after few years, when they discover that regardless of how good they are music-wise, they will never be Irish, move on to discovering Polish traditional music. In this respect I must pay my homage to the Irish Traditional music for being a catalyst for popularizing our own traditions.
When I got into ITM in early-to-mid Seventies England the Troubles were on. There was also a lot of left-wing militancy in the air. The first session I attended, whose prominent people were Irish expats, was regularly punctuated by pro-IRA and other bellicose songs, so I got the impression that ITM was joined at the hip with nationalism and class war. I don't know now to what extent this has been true, and am not particularly keen to find out; I did know that I badly wanted to play the tunes (and some of the singing and playing in that session was really good, I must add), and do so at a safe distance from the nationalism and the class war, whose proponents would have found me pretty dispensable had the Revolution come off.
So I started playing ITM with no intention of getting involved in the politics and history that seemed - to me, then - to be tied up with it. It seemed alien and horrific. Nor did I know anything about the peaceful, domestic side of Irish culture and the music's home in that. But I'm reading up on these things as I go along.
Regarding actual study, I did an archaeology & associated topics course in the early 80s which took in early Mediaeval Ireland, including its art. The real Insular manuscripts from Ireland and elsewhere are so much more beautiful than the constipated, stridently-coloured patterns of most modern "Celtic Art". The Vikings broke up the phase of culture that produced this particular art, in Ireland and Britain alike; one wonders how it might have developed further, left alone. The Anglo-Saxons, bar making the odd incursion, largely enjoyed peaceful relations with the Irish. Bede (I think) complained that the Northumbrian youths of his day were too given to making study trips to Ireland and staying there indefinitely. The respectable alternatives to this were doing military service or enrolling in a monastery, which is sufficient to explain why so many opted for Ireland. They are probably still there.
I "discovered" the music in Ireland -- didn't play before I lived there for three months. Anyway, I have always thought the country had a fascinating history and studied that a fair bit. Wrote several major papers and a masters dissertation on it. It is a common thing for students to study aspects of culture and music and write masters' dissertation on that, but for some reason I never have made it down that road and haven't written so much as an academic sentence about Irish music. I always seem to look at the darker sides of history. One paper looked at the suspension of habeas corpus and attempts at martial law by the British government during the Young Ireland and Fenian Risings (which seemed relevant since the US had only recently passed the Patriot Act at the time). My master's dissertation discussed why Ireland had more mental asylums by the end of the nineteenth century than anywhere else in the British Isles or any other British colony (No, these are not really connected. For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR).
"...to jail or Australia" ! "...not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums..." !
In those days, going "to jail" in Australia, would have been tantamount to a death sentence depending on the whims of local gaolers or commandants totally out of sight of any sort of scrutiny.
Australian convict "settlements" and prisons in those colonial days were nothing more than gulags. On Norfolk Island (Australia) men were made to walk on tread mills until they went utterly and screamingly insane - then either left there to do the same or thrown in a sunless solitary stone cell.
General Thomas Meagher, of subsequent U.S. Civil War fame, was an Irish political dissent sentenced to death, but commuted to transportation to Australia, who was an exception to the norm.
The Fenians rescued in the Catalpa raid on Western Australia were more the norm. They were worked in heavy irons until they were psychologically and physically broken. These men were daringly rescued by their American Fenian colleagues, but again, they were the exceptions.
Norfolk Island and Maria Island convict prisons in Australia were places of the utmost horror and cruelty. Large numbers of people did not get off these islands alive once they were sent there, and they knew that would be their fate.
Mental asylums didn't exist in Australia in those days, and hence no need to "cover up dissidence" - people died or where executed before they ever had a chance to get into one !
This is what it was really like, in the observations of some judges:
“Their sunken glazed eyes, deadly pale faces, hollow fleshless cheeks and once manly limbs shriveled and withered up as if by premature old age, created horror among those in court. There was not one of the six who had not undergone from time to time, a thousand lashes each and more. They looked less like human beings than the shadows of gnomes who had risen from their sepulchral abode. What man was or ever could be reclaimed under such a system as this?
Judge Sir Roger Therry - Source: The Essential Guide to Norfolk Island; Peter Clarke)
I have to record the most heart-rending scene that I ever witnessed. The turnkey unlocked the cell door and Ù. Then came fourth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies of the men confined therein. I announced to them who were reprieved from death and which of them were to die. It is a literal fact that each man who heard of his reprieve wept bitterly, and each man who heard his condemnation of death went down on his knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God they were to be delivered from this horrid place. The morning came, they received on their knees the sentence as the will of God. Loosened from their chains, they fell down in the dust, and, in the warmth of their gratitude, kissed the very feet that had brought them peace.”
Everything you needed to know about how convicts were treated in the British colonies in Australia, but were afraid to ask:
Australia per proportion of its population had and still has, I understand, the largest proportion of people of Irish descent outside of Ireland - even large as a proportion than the United States.
I think the almost total absence of an Irish music tradition in the history of Australia is very telling of the way in which that sort of cultural memory seems to have been obliterated for whatever reason and in whatever manner it seems to have occurred. Even today it remains a very small scene in Australia.
“Another tragic figure is Laurence Frayne, a defiant Irishman who left a memoir of his unspeakably gruelling experiences on Norfolk Island. ‘Do you wish to expire under the lash?’ the attending surgeon asked him before one of his many arbitrary and sadistic floggings. ‘I want to get it over with and have done with it’, he replied, and afterwards lay down in his prison cell in a puddle of his own urine to soothe his back, which was ‘literally alive with maggots and vermin.’”
If you don’t want to get really outraged by the treatment handed out to Frayne, don’t read The Fatal Shore by Hughes. Unspeakably horrendous to think that a government can preside over this sort of treatment. It was the British government.
I have read the Fatal Shore, more than once in fact, and I have also visited Sarah Island and Port Arthur. My point was merely that rebels were sent to Australia not local asylums, not that they had nice holidays on a beach.
For your information, Australia did in fact have lunatic asylums. One of the few things nineteenth century jurists, medical professionals, and other people who worked in the penal system agreed on was that lunatics and criminals should be separated. Then, as now, they believed that you were punishing someone's wrongful act AND their wrongful will. If someone were so deranged they did not know the difference between right and wrong, then it was seen as problematic to punish them. Also, lunatics in the jail were viewed as disruptive and jails were not conducive at all to what was generally thought of as effective treatment. Asylums, while they were often repositories for incurable lunatics, were theoretically designed for treatment. While nineteenth century asylums may seen brutal to our eyes, those running them or involved with their management generally thought they were doing the lunatics good. By the nineteenth century, most asylum managers and physicians had a consensus that floggings and chains were anathemic to effective treatment.
Here are some Australian asylums and the dates they were founded:
"For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR). " Silver Spear.
That was very nice of them wasn't it then. Here's what happened to the political dissidents in the Castle Hill Rebellion, Sydney, 1804 (the ones that survived the battle of course.)
Following the end of the rebellion:
• Nine rebels were executed:
First Name Surname Means of death
Phillip Cunningham Executed at Windsor without trial.
William Johnston Executed at Castle Hill and then hung in chains, just outside Parramatta on the road to Prospect.
John Neale Executed at Castle Hill.
George Harrington Executed at Castle Hill.
Samuel Humes Executed at Parramatta and then hung in chains.
Charles Hill Executed at Parramatta.
Jonothan Place Executed at Parramatta.
John Brannan Executed at Sydney.
Timothy Hogan Executed at Sydney.
I don't see too many in that list who were sent to asylums for the purpose of covering up the dissidence, do you? A good number of them were executed or sent to chain gangs and gulags were they could well have died anyway.
No asylum at Castle Hill in 1804 either, not for another 7 years, as you point out, so I guess that put the Brits in a bind too. None on Norfolk Island either.
Transportation to New South Wales had effectively finished by 1842 and all but two of your list of asylums were built after that, but then again, not many convicts or political dissidents were sent to asylums here anyway, were they. Political dissidents were dealt with otherwise than that, you are right, certainly not covered up, as you say.
There were musicians no doubt; just not a lot of Irish music.
So basically you are agreeing with me. You yourself say that people tended to be flogged and/or executed for treason/rebellion rather than be committed to an asylum. Which was exactly my point.
Norfolk Island and Tasmania (Van Dieman's Land if you are going to be pedantic) did not have purpose-built asylums, true, but they had separate wards in the prisons for lunatics. Keep in mind that to get there you usually had to be a repeat offender. If you used an insanity defense at trial or you went through a civil commitment process, you would be sent to the nearest asylum.
What's it to be, Silver? They locked convicts up in asylums or they didn't? You seem to be writing as an expert. "Repeat offenders"? That would be the convicts who were still in the prisons, and got sent on to worse and worse gulags, wouldn't it. "Repeat offenders". I'm not sure you know a lot about this, Silver - a modicum no doubt, but probably not enough.
"For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR). " Silver Spear.
The best propaganda is innocuous propaganda; - or apologist propanda.
The last convict executed in Australia was Ronald Ryan (1969 - from memory), who was hung in Pentridge Gaol, Melbourne, at the order of Sir Henry Bolte. Knight.
Capital punishment was subsequently abolished in Australia, along with the award of knighthoods.
You want black and white answers. Too bad there aren't any. "Criminal lunatics" in Britain and its colonies were incarcerated in asylums if they were found insane at trial or if they were found not fit to stand trial. If there was no asylum available, yes, they may end up in a prison, a hospital, or a poor house, but this wasn't seen as ideal.
I know a bit about this as I am writing a PhD on lunacy and criminal responsibility in the nineteenth century.
"You want black and white answers. Too bad there aren't any."
Silver Spear.
The relativist / revisionist argument again.
There are plenty of black and white answers. They won't look that way if you're wearing rose-coloured glasses (or multi-coloured reflective lenses), now will they.
As a typical American, whose family was not much concerned with the "Old Countries" where the ancestors came from, all I knew of Ireland was what I saw in the movies (perish forbid!). As I became exposed to The Music, and especially to the songs, I became curious, and did some reading about Irish and Scottish history, which helped put the lyrics in context for me, and made the songs more meaningful. And naturally, I was exposed to some of the other cultural things as well as I went to festivals and such. But as llig has said in prior discusions of this sort, the tunes are the tunes, and don't really need a context, other than themselves. They are beautiful in a way that trancends cultures.
Music is but one part of the puzzle
Music is but one part of the puzzle
It's often been commented here that it's impossible to remove ITM from it's social context however internationally it has enjoyed popularity as an entity unto itself. This is a question for the "non nationals" as the dailies like to put it: Has the pursuit of ITM lead an interest in non musical aspects of Irish culture like football or hurling, horse racing, poetry, cards and the like ?
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Patkiwi
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Women with green eyes and long dark hair.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by nicholas
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
I've certainly gotten into Ireland as a whole, the people, the beauty of the environment, and some aspects of the society because of the music. (And I understand rugby better now, thanks to some intensive schooling from Fergus while I was staying with his family).
But I wouldn't say that the music has lead me to read Joyce or Yeats. And I don't get much exposure to hurling...
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Reverend
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Actually. Yes.
In ever appreciated Irish Football until I was in Ireland (twice) for the championships. Love the entusiasm, color and the flags.
Food. I do all of our cooking. Herself has a miserable job with Mother Church (don't let them get you going about workers rights- With Mother Church, her lay employees have none. They are Church Chattel). I really have come to appreciate Irish food. particularly their brown bread ( it is hard to make right and the course brown flour is not available in the States-only a fine grind is available). Irish soups are unbelieveably good.
Irish Humor...or maybe the sublte tongue-in-cheek of it.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by zippydw
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
first line 'I never'
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by zippydw
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Oh yeah... brown bread! Good call zippy! One family that I stay with in Ireland bakes brown bread every day, and you have it with every meal. Excellent!
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Reverend
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
PatK
Yes -- and no.
In my case I had a great interest in irish literature when I was in my 20s, 30s etc [and still do] and long before there were "celtic studies courses" I manage to track down some profs offering English courses in irish lit here at my University at the time. Later I set up my own independent study of the Irish short story...and later still went to Ireland to immerse myself in Yeats.
It wasn't until many years later -- 20 to be exact -- that a 'celtic' festival introduced me to the idea of Irish culture but through a whole different approach -- ie, music. In some ways [as Lear said?] "The wheel hath come full circle"...and I found myself being drawn into ITM. It was a nice change instead of the 'all mind' approach of literature, critical theory etc...to "just" sitting around learning and playing tunes. It was a whole different approach for me -- not "cerebral" in the sense we most often use the term...more intuitive...less analytical...more instinctual.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by mtodd
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
ITM also led me to a deeper understanding and appreciation of a pint of plain. ;)
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by mtodd
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
The 'cards' ~ as in card games (played in Ireland)?
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Random_notes
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Yep, 25 and the like
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Patkiwi
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
25
Ranking:
trump suit
5, Jack, ace of hearts, etc.
non-trump rank:
K,O,J
(non - face cards)
highest in red {10 - A}
lowest in black {A - 10}
5 points per trick.
25 wins.
double stake ~ 5 tricks in 1 hand.
Let's go ~ deal.
I'll learn as we go.
;)
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Random_notes
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
The Eurovision Song Contest, with or without Terry Wogan (well, you did say "non-musical aspects"...). Bailey's. Irish Coffee. "Father Ted". Hot poteen with a fried breakfast.
This may suggest that I am a slobby, mindless consumer.
That would be because this is true. Sport was always too strenuous for my liking, and cards and betting too intellectually demanding. I also found them bone-crushingly boring. Mind, I regard sport as a Good Thing - just as long as it isn't me that has to do it.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by nicholas
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Getting into the music made me interested in Irish language and how on earth you pronounce the multitude of wierdly written words encountered in the names of the tunes. Luckily I can call upon a person or two to help occasionally but I'm sure I usually butcher the names when I try to say them.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Bredna
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Yes and no.
It's introduced me to a lot of great artists and wonderful storytellers and more access to celtic designs for jewelry and other art. the side stuff, like football and beer -- no. But then, I'm not interested in it on the American side, either, so that's not a surprise.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Mandogal
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
It won't be much of a surprise to those who grew up within it, but Irish-American culture is always looking for these types of connective attachments. My one grandmother gave me my first Dubliners record on my 10th birthday and my other grandmother gave me a copy of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy" on my 16th. As a sports junkie, I feel in love with hurling on my first visit to Ireland, although it's nearly impossible to follow from so far away now. I saw Offaly play against Meath back in 98 one of the high points of my visit there.
Playing this music is just another branch off the same tree for me.
# Posted on September 8th 2008 by Jusa Nutter Eejit
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
John Wayne was taken to a hurling match. After a while one of the locals asked him "So. Mr Wayne. would you like to be out there with a stick yerself?" Reply:"Well i sure as heck wouldn't want to be out there WITHOUT one!" Some of the people I met at a session in Ireland were curious as to why I was so amused at the beer mat in font of me advertising the Guinness Hurling Match until I explained that "hurling" in the States is slang for what might happen after a few too many pints of the shtuff! Anyway. learning about the rest of Irish culture should , in my opinion, go hand in hand with learning the music...
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by pipewatcher
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
I've read Ulysses, I drink Guiness and I married somebody with Irish
roots. Does that count? I suppose the real Ireland is all about karaoke,
hip hop and curry these days anyway ...
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Hup
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Sort of, yes. However, in my case it was first Ireland, then music, then social context around the music. Then my interest in Irish culture waned, I moved to different pastures, but the pleasure from playing the music remained. So now music is the only piece of the puzzle that's left.
Funnily, in my parts the usual way to go for an inquisitive musician who gets interested in Irish music is first to discover Irishy-wishy-washy marine pop-songs or fusion bands, then get engulfed in Irish traditional music, and after few years, when they discover that regardless of how good they are music-wise, they will never be Irish, move on to discovering Polish traditional music. In this respect I must pay my homage to the Irish Traditional music for being a catalyst for popularizing our own traditions.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by EastPole
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
When I got into ITM in early-to-mid Seventies England the Troubles were on. There was also a lot of left-wing militancy in the air. The first session I attended, whose prominent people were Irish expats, was regularly punctuated by pro-IRA and other bellicose songs, so I got the impression that ITM was joined at the hip with nationalism and class war. I don't know now to what extent this has been true, and am not particularly keen to find out; I did know that I badly wanted to play the tunes (and some of the singing and playing in that session was really good, I must add), and do so at a safe distance from the nationalism and the class war, whose proponents would have found me pretty dispensable had the Revolution come off.
So I started playing ITM with no intention of getting involved in the politics and history that seemed - to me, then - to be tied up with it. It seemed alien and horrific. Nor did I know anything about the peaceful, domestic side of Irish culture and the music's home in that. But I'm reading up on these things as I go along.
Regarding actual study, I did an archaeology & associated topics course in the early 80s which took in early Mediaeval Ireland, including its art. The real Insular manuscripts from Ireland and elsewhere are so much more beautiful than the constipated, stridently-coloured patterns of most modern "Celtic Art". The Vikings broke up the phase of culture that produced this particular art, in Ireland and Britain alike; one wonders how it might have developed further, left alone. The Anglo-Saxons, bar making the odd incursion, largely enjoyed peaceful relations with the Irish. Bede (I think) complained that the Northumbrian youths of his day were too given to making study trips to Ireland and staying there indefinitely. The respectable alternatives to this were doing military service or enrolling in a monastery, which is sufficient to explain why so many opted for Ireland. They are probably still there.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by nicholas
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
I "discovered" the music in Ireland -- didn't play before I lived there for three months. Anyway, I have always thought the country had a fascinating history and studied that a fair bit. Wrote several major papers and a masters dissertation on it. It is a common thing for students to study aspects of culture and music and write masters' dissertation on that, but for some reason I never have made it down that road and haven't written so much as an academic sentence about Irish music. I always seem to look at the darker sides of history. One paper looked at the suspension of habeas corpus and attempts at martial law by the British government during the Young Ireland and Fenian Risings (which seemed relevant since the US had only recently passed the Patriot Act at the time). My master's dissertation discussed why Ireland had more mental asylums by the end of the nineteenth century than anywhere else in the British Isles or any other British colony (No, these are not really connected. For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR).
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
"...to jail or Australia" ! "...not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums..." !
In those days, going "to jail" in Australia, would have been tantamount to a death sentence depending on the whims of local gaolers or commandants totally out of sight of any sort of scrutiny.
Australian convict "settlements" and prisons in those colonial days were nothing more than gulags. On Norfolk Island (Australia) men were made to walk on tread mills until they went utterly and screamingly insane - then either left there to do the same or thrown in a sunless solitary stone cell.
General Thomas Meagher, of subsequent U.S. Civil War fame, was an Irish political dissent sentenced to death, but commuted to transportation to Australia, who was an exception to the norm.
The Fenians rescued in the Catalpa raid on Western Australia were more the norm. They were worked in heavy irons until they were psychologically and physically broken. These men were daringly rescued by their American Fenian colleagues, but again, they were the exceptions.
Norfolk Island and Maria Island convict prisons in Australia were places of the utmost horror and cruelty. Large numbers of people did not get off these islands alive once they were sent there, and they knew that would be their fate.
Mental asylums didn't exist in Australia in those days, and hence no need to "cover up dissidence" - people died or where executed before they ever had a chance to get into one !
This is what it was really like, in the observations of some judges:
http://www.norfolkisland.com.au/history_and_culture/convict.cfm
Excerpt:
“Their sunken glazed eyes, deadly pale faces, hollow fleshless cheeks and once manly limbs shriveled and withered up as if by premature old age, created horror among those in court. There was not one of the six who had not undergone from time to time, a thousand lashes each and more. They looked less like human beings than the shadows of gnomes who had risen from their sepulchral abode. What man was or ever could be reclaimed under such a system as this?
Judge Sir Roger Therry - Source: The Essential Guide to Norfolk Island; Peter Clarke)
I have to record the most heart-rending scene that I ever witnessed. The turnkey unlocked the cell door and Ù. Then came fourth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies of the men confined therein. I announced to them who were reprieved from death and which of them were to die. It is a literal fact that each man who heard of his reprieve wept bitterly, and each man who heard his condemnation of death went down on his knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God they were to be delivered from this horrid place. The morning came, they received on their knees the sentence as the will of God. Loosened from their chains, they fell down in the dust, and, in the warmth of their gratitude, kissed the very feet that had brought them peace.”
Everything you needed to know about how convicts were treated in the British colonies in Australia, but were afraid to ask:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalpa_rescue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Francis_Meagher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Shore
Australia per proportion of its population had and still has, I understand, the largest proportion of people of Irish descent outside of Ireland - even large as a proportion than the United States.
I think the almost total absence of an Irish music tradition in the history of Australia is very telling of the way in which that sort of cultural memory seems to have been obliterated for whatever reason and in whatever manner it seems to have occurred. Even today it remains a very small scene in Australia.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/hcl136v1
“Another tragic figure is Laurence Frayne, a defiant Irishman who left a memoir of his unspeakably gruelling experiences on Norfolk Island. ‘Do you wish to expire under the lash?’ the attending surgeon asked him before one of his many arbitrary and sadistic floggings. ‘I want to get it over with and have done with it’, he replied, and afterwards lay down in his prison cell in a puddle of his own urine to soothe his back, which was ‘literally alive with maggots and vermin.’”
If you don’t want to get really outraged by the treatment handed out to Frayne, don’t read The Fatal Shore by Hughes. Unspeakably horrendous to think that a government can preside over this sort of treatment. It was the British government.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
I have read the Fatal Shore, more than once in fact, and I have also visited Sarah Island and Port Arthur. My point was merely that rebels were sent to Australia not local asylums, not that they had nice holidays on a beach.
For your information, Australia did in fact have lunatic asylums. One of the few things nineteenth century jurists, medical professionals, and other people who worked in the penal system agreed on was that lunatics and criminals should be separated. Then, as now, they believed that you were punishing someone's wrongful act AND their wrongful will. If someone were so deranged they did not know the difference between right and wrong, then it was seen as problematic to punish them. Also, lunatics in the jail were viewed as disruptive and jails were not conducive at all to what was generally thought of as effective treatment. Asylums, while they were often repositories for incurable lunatics, were theoretically designed for treatment. While nineteenth century asylums may seen brutal to our eyes, those running them or involved with their management generally thought they were doing the lunatics good. By the nineteenth century, most asylum managers and physicians had a consensus that floggings and chains were anathemic to effective treatment.
Here are some Australian asylums and the dates they were founded:
Castle Hill Asylum (Sydney) -- 1811
Parramatta Lunatic Asylum --
Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum (Melbourne) -- 1848
Fremantle Lunatic Asylum (Fremantle) -- 1850s
Woogaroo Asylum (Queensland) -- 1864
Tarban Creek Asylum (NSW) -- 1839
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
The Parramatta Asylum was built in 1848.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Where did they place the musicians?
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Random_notes
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Didn't you read Dujiera Dubh's post? Apparently there weren't any.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
"For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR). " Silver Spear.
That was very nice of them wasn't it then. Here's what happened to the political dissidents in the Castle Hill Rebellion, Sydney, 1804 (the ones that survived the battle of course.)
Following the end of the rebellion:
• Nine rebels were executed:
First Name Surname Means of death
Phillip Cunningham Executed at Windsor without trial.
William Johnston Executed at Castle Hill and then hung in chains, just outside Parramatta on the road to Prospect.
John Neale Executed at Castle Hill.
George Harrington Executed at Castle Hill.
Samuel Humes Executed at Parramatta and then hung in chains.
Charles Hill Executed at Parramatta.
Jonothan Place Executed at Parramatta.
John Brannan Executed at Sydney.
Timothy Hogan Executed at Sydney.
Many of the rest were flogged within an inch of their lives.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Hill_convict_rebellion)
I don't see too many in that list who were sent to asylums for the purpose of covering up the dissidence, do you? A good number of them were executed or sent to chain gangs and gulags were they could well have died anyway.
No asylum at Castle Hill in 1804 either, not for another 7 years, as you point out, so I guess that put the Brits in a bind too. None on Norfolk Island either.
Transportation to New South Wales had effectively finished by 1842 and all but two of your list of asylums were built after that, but then again, not many convicts or political dissidents were sent to asylums here anyway, were they. Political dissidents were dealt with otherwise than that, you are right, certainly not covered up, as you say.
There were musicians no doubt; just not a lot of Irish music.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
"...and I have also visited Sarah Island and Port Arthur."
Silver Spear.
Fantastic. Many have.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
You weren't looking for convicts were you, Silver.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
So basically you are agreeing with me. You yourself say that people tended to be flogged and/or executed for treason/rebellion rather than be committed to an asylum. Which was exactly my point.
Norfolk Island and Tasmania (Van Dieman's Land if you are going to be pedantic) did not have purpose-built asylums, true, but they had separate wards in the prisons for lunatics. Keep in mind that to get there you usually had to be a repeat offender. If you used an insanity defense at trial or you went through a civil commitment process, you would be sent to the nearest asylum.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
What's it to be, Silver? They locked convicts up in asylums or they didn't? You seem to be writing as an expert. "Repeat offenders"? That would be the convicts who were still in the prisons, and got sent on to worse and worse gulags, wouldn't it. "Repeat offenders". I'm not sure you know a lot about this, Silver - a modicum no doubt, but probably not enough.
"For all their faults, the British were happy to send political dissidents to jail or Australia and not cover up dissidence by incarcerating people in mental asylums a la USSR). " Silver Spear.
The best propaganda is innocuous propaganda; - or apologist propanda.
The last convict executed in Australia was Ronald Ryan (1969 - from memory), who was hung in Pentridge Gaol, Melbourne, at the order of Sir Henry Bolte. Knight.
Capital punishment was subsequently abolished in Australia, along with the award of knighthoods.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
You want black and white answers. Too bad there aren't any. "Criminal lunatics" in Britain and its colonies were incarcerated in asylums if they were found insane at trial or if they were found not fit to stand trial. If there was no asylum available, yes, they may end up in a prison, a hospital, or a poor house, but this wasn't seen as ideal.
I know a bit about this as I am writing a PhD on lunacy and criminal responsibility in the nineteenth century.
# Posted on September 9th 2008 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Maybe stick to your PhD topic or do a totally new one on the British penal system in Australian "prisons" at the time.
Worlds apart.
# Posted on September 10th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
"You want black and white answers. Too bad there aren't any."
Silver Spear.
The relativist / revisionist argument again.
There are plenty of black and white answers. They won't look that way if you're wearing rose-coloured glasses (or multi-coloured reflective lenses), now will they.
# Posted on September 10th 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
As a typical American, whose family was not much concerned with the "Old Countries" where the ancestors came from, all I knew of Ireland was what I saw in the movies (perish forbid!). As I became exposed to The Music, and especially to the songs, I became curious, and did some reading about Irish and Scottish history, which helped put the lyrics in context for me, and made the songs more meaningful. And naturally, I was exposed to some of the other cultural things as well as I went to festivals and such. But as llig has said in prior discusions of this sort, the tunes are the tunes, and don't really need a context, other than themselves. They are beautiful in a way that trancends cultures.
# Posted on September 10th 2008 by AlBrown
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
Sorry if I interrupted the political oppression discussion, I just found the original topic more interesting to address than the side topic.
# Posted on September 10th 2008 by AlBrown
Re: Music is but one part of the puzzle
"I just found the original topic more interesting to address than the side topic." AlBrown.
So do I.
# Posted on September 10th 2008 by Duijera Dubh