Casey explicitly frames the calculated brutality of British rule during the Great Irish Famine not as a natural disaster but as a colonial crime. Like a visit to the “Scarcity Commission” (p30), the mechanisms of tyranny return like blight to the nation’s rotting potato crops. This is a poetry which witnesses starvation; it witnesses religious and cultural bans, and ultimately, it is witness to the systematic removal of children.
Tag: Australian history
A review of Monash’s Masterpiece by Peter FitzSimons
I’m a military history aficionado, and the amount of information presented within this book is astonishing. I can only guess at how much research went into the preliminaries, and can see similarities to Sir John Monash’s extensive planning before the Battle of Le Hamel. I’m visualising somewhere in Mosman these large white-boards and spreadsheets travelling all around the walls of the FitzSimon’s operations-centre with countless pages of information attached to them.