Rodney Sullivan and Robin Sullivan, ‘The Queensland Irish Association, 1898–1928: Heroes and Memorials, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 15 (2015), pp. 13–34. THE QUEENSLAND IRISH ASSOCIATION, 1898–1928: HEROES AND MEMORIALS Rodney Sullivan and Robin Sullivan Introduction Between 1898 and 1928 influential members of the Queensland Irish Association 1 (QIA) constituted a ‘first generation of memory’. They participated in a series of collective memory endeavours or, in Jay Winter ’s more precise definition, ‘practices of collective remembrances’. 2 These included balls and concerts, lectures and debates which emphasised Irish literature and history and one of the most notable events on Brisbane’s social calendar, the St Patrick’s Eve banquet, instituted in 1905. Such banquets were especially potent memory sites, allowing images of the past to be preserved and transmitted through ritual performances. 3 The QIA also pursued another efficacious means of performative identification: memorialisation, the erection of monuments to concretise particular interpretations of the past. 4 In the first three decades of the twentieth century the QIA was intimately involved in the construction of Brisbane’s monumental history. Its members enriched the cultural landscape of their capital city by materialising, in various ways, diasporic cultural memory. This was a manifestation of the ‘memory boom’, so evident in Europe and elsewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that era, marked by accelerating social and economic change, and an international environment of increasing competition and conflict, memory was deployed to construct or strengthen national and other identities. 5 The past was mined for evidence that could shore up communities in a process that has attracted the attention of leading scholars and expanded the historical lexicon with evocative and contestable terms. These include collective memory, sites of memory, imagined communities, invented traditions and statuemania, the term coined by French historian Maurice Agulhon to describe the proliferation of statues in public space in France during the nineteenth century. 6 Brisbane escaped statuemania until the erection, in 1902, at a major city intersection, of a public statue to Thomas Joseph Byrnes, a foundation member and posthumous hero of the QIA. This began a process in which Irish Australians—as memorialisers or memorialised—claimed a disproportionate share of inner Brisbane’s cultural landscape, preserving memory and historical evidence in material form. Their monuments—two public statues, a funerary memorial and a building—were intimately connected with the history of the QIA and the wider Irish community. These practices of collective remembrances forged a material narrative of the Association which compensates for the paucity of primary source