The Wandering Rocks: Truth and purity in the Australian Irish diaspora

Irish-Jewish Australian Kate Bloomfeld has had a horrible year. Her girlfriend has left her for a woman who grows her own root vegetables; she works as a junior editor in a romance publishing house, and is running out of tasteful euphemisms for genetalia; worst of all, her sister has joined an embarrassing Celtic folk band and talks about it in public. But when her Irish mother, Gail, is called from Melbourne to Dublin for a funeral and disappears en route, Kate learns that deeper traumas threaten her family. In her search for Gail, Kate confronts the silences and secrets kept by the previous generation - secrets designed to protect, but which hold the keys to the family's Irish and Jewish heritages. 'The Wandering Rocks' is the creative half of a project exploring trauma, silence, myth making and female agency in the Irish-Australian diaspora. 'Truth and Purity in the Australian Irish Diaspora' explores the theory behind the project: diaspora theory, feminisms, queer theory, and the importance of the works of James Joyce and Flann O'Brien in the diaspora, imbued with what Sudesh Mishra describes as 'milieu effects' - artefacts of cultural significance beyond their lexical content.

Sarah Flattley, PhD: Studied creative writing, diaspora theory, Marxist feminisms, queer theory, and the Irish-Australian diaspora at Deakin University. Sarah teaches fiction, literary theory, film theory and professional writing subjects at Deakin University, Melbourne.