Review by Siobhan McHugh who co-wrote the TV documentary 'The Irish Empire'. Her next book, 'Rebels to Rulers', will be an oral history of Irish-Australia.
This book makes you angry about the Famine - and it's right that we should feel such anger, rather than the hopeless shame and stifled sorrow that was its legacy for so long. It's taken 150 years to see a permanent memorial to the victims of the Irish famine erected in Australia, but the 4,114 orphan girls sent here as a direct result of the famine have finally been honoured in Sydney and Melbourne. Jill Blee's great-aunt 'Brigid' was one of them, her traumatic journey reconstructed here in an evocative blend of factual detail and fictionalised history.
The Irish Irish have tended to dismiss the hyphenated-Irish of the diaspora as sentimental wannabes, who should get on with their lives in the new world and be thankful to have escaped the old. Yet we have much to learn - about our history and our nature - from those who left.
Like most Irish-born, I have never looked into my ancestry. I have only scant details on who was born where, what work they did, how they lived, what they believed in. Being from the West, the famine must have affected them, yet until I read 'Brigid', it never occurred to me to wonder how. The Famine was so obliterating, so appalling, the statistics so ingrained and yet so unexamined, it seemed impossible to contemplate it at a personal level. Yet that is the only way to understand it. 'Brigid' forces us to experience the Famine from one family's point of view, bringing the horror to a human scale.
While there is plenty of emotion in the book, Jill Blee also asks some pertinent questions, for instance about the lack of political action by the Catholic Church to stop people needlessly dying. The author's own journey, as a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the land of her forebears, is described with honesty and insight.
With the zeal of the outsider, I've spent years telling Australians about their history. It's only fitting that an Australian should make me reconsider my own.
Review by Frances Devlin Glass.
Jill Blee's second novel, Brigid , is at once a travel story and an historical novel set in modern Ireland, where Jill's first visit to her ancestral homeland is hijacked by the very real presence of her long-dead great aunt, Brigid.While Jill intends to acquaint herself with the country, the people and the history from which her great-grandparents had migrated, Aunt Brigid single-mindedly steers her back to the wind swept cliffs of County Clare, and the high Burren above the village of Ballyvaghan. Brigid has some unfinished business which quickly becomes Jill's main quest, through which she is brought into a much deeper experience of the great famine than her history books could ever give her. As she follows her aunt's story on the west coast and back to Dublin, Jill's own travel story, complete with Lonely Planet Guide, Irish pubs and Norman ruins, is told with an intense imagery which presents Ireland in her beauty and her romance as clearly as could any cinematographer.
Jill Blee is first andforemost an historian, but one who uses fiction to illuminate the past. "What Brigid does best is to cast light on what the experience of the famine in a small community, Ballyvaghan, meant in emotional terms for those experiencing it. This is a compassionate novel, well-researched, a compelling read if one has an interest in what is quite recent history, a history which threatens to repeat itself in the modern world.
Review by Val Noone - Visiting Fellow of the Europe-Australia Institute at Victoria University of Technology and chaiperson of the Melbourne Irish Famine Commemoration Committee.
With its combination of autobiography, history and imagination, Brigid is at the cutting edge of current writing about the global Irish scattering. In clear prose and special forrnat, Jill Blee confides her thoughts and feelings about Irish and Australian entity, past and present.
This reflective story by a respected Australian Irish writer deserves a wide readership and careful discussion.