This chapter examines eighteenth-century textual records about the Australian colonies, from the early British press reports of the establishment of the penal colony at Port Jackson to the accounts of religious personnel such as the first colonial chaplain Richard Johnson. It reveals how convicts and Indigenous people were represented in texts designed for metropolitan audiences. The isolated voices of evangelical reformers provided rich accounts of the problems and failures of the penal colony. They questioned the morality of the military governance of the penal colony and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Evangelical accounts from New South Wales became part of a global knowledge economy and a thriving print culture; they provided evidence that thickened, and at times contradicted, official accounts that circulated in the British media.

With reference to current developments in memory studies, this chapter examines the role and status of Irish theatre in relation to debates about history, memory, and protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Reading the plays of Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Richard Johnson and Máiréad ní Ghráda, the chapter argues that memory performed a crucial function in response to the particular social and cultural transitions in these decades. In the light of the culture of commemoration that emerged in and around 1966, writers confronted the difficulties of responding artistically to the violent history of the island of Ireland. Although different methods are adopted in these plays – Friel’s realism, Kilroy’s experimentalism, Leonard’s satire – they are unified by a common concern with memory, and the ways in which the past becomes material for present-day agendas. Beyond this probing of the historical record, there is an exposure of contemporary Ireland, with dramas staging a scathing view of the current moment. Murphy and Friel’s plays express the dissatisfactions of the young male generation with the possibilities for freedom in the Irish Republic, whereas ní Ghráda and Johnson critique the impact of Ireland’s oppressive social rules on women and children.