NEW LINES – connecting Irish colonial experience to settler invasion and the founding of the Port Phillip District colony

People from Ireland, and people with connections to Ireland, were among the first European invaders encountered by First Peoples of south-eastern Australia. They were colonial administrators, military personnel, retired soldiers, convicts, former convicts, adventurers, and free immigrants. In their very diversity, I argue, they represented the history and genealogy of colonisation, plantation, and colonialism in Ireland. Through them, Ireland’s experience became the new venture’s pre-history, fundamental to the colony’s driving ideology and its administrative and social structuring, and influential in an on-going way in the shaping of its settler colonial reality.