This thesis examines the writing of Irish identity in Australia to explore how nineteenth-century
Australian-born women writers negotiated their Irish emigrant heritage. A gap in knowledge
about Irish women's emigrant experiences and those of their descendants provides an opportunity
to investigate the translation of the Irish emigrant experience from the perspectives of first-born
Australian daughters. A critical analysis of the writing histories of Mary Eliza Fullerton, Mary
Grant Bruce and Marie Pitt (McKeown) will demonstrate the fragility of national identity in terms
of the cultural and symbolic language used to define Irish emigrant and Australian settler culture
identity between the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth centuries. The thesis provides an alternative
reading of national cultures and histories to show how each writer used images of Irish national
culture to clarify and elaborate notions of home in their Australian writing.