This article analyses gendered violence both in the testimonies of English Protestant settlers displaced during the 1641 Irish rebellion and in the pamphlets written shortly afterwards. It argues that, given the settlers’ anxiety to highlight their vulnerability and innocence in the face of perceived native Irish barbarism, sexual violence with its suggestions of possible female acquiescence or complicity had an insecure place in their testimonies. Yet contemporary pamphlet writers described the rape of Protestant women as widespread and indiscriminate, using such narratives to question the masculinity of Catholic Irish men. By investigating personal testimonies of the sexual violence suffered by women, as well as the subsequent use of such information in narratives sensationalising the ordeal of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, the complex meanings attached to sexual violence during the mid‐seventeenth century can be better appreciated.

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During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English‐speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely‐reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an “alien” race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English‐speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous “white” settler society.

The Orange Order was never as prominent in the Australian colonies as its own publicity asserted and its arguments against the power of Rome in Australian politics and society were more shrill than accurate. However, it held a clearly defined position as a vector of anti‐Catholicism and ultra‐Protestantism in many parts of colonial Australia, and its parades and social gatherings were important spaces for the formation of Australian Protestant identities imbued with varying levels of Irishness. The use of public space meant that the Loyal Orange Institution had a wider impact than their often small numbers might otherwise suggest. With their parades, sermons, public meetings, and demonstrations many Orangemen and women attempted to claim colonial public space not only as Protestant, but as a particularly Irish inflected anti‐Catholicism.

L i n d s a y P r o u d f o o t a n d D i a n n e H a l l Summary: This paper considers aspects of the local geographies of Australian emigration created in southwest Ulster by the New South Wales governmentsponsored remittance emigration scheme between 1858 and 1884. The scheme mobilized the financial resources of settlers in New South Wales to part-fund the passage of friends and relatives from Britain and Ireland. The paper utilizes the comprehensive socioeconomic and demographic archive generated by the scheme, to explore the response of rural communities in thirteen civil parishes in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to this opportunity to emigrate. It concludes that although the emigrant sample's demographic profile accorded with conventional models of Irish assisted emigration, it was also marked by pronounced over-representation of Protestants and under-representation of Catholics. Possible explanations for this are considered in terms of the positionality and human capital of the three major denominations and the efficiency of their social networks in negotiating the bureaucratic process in Australia. I N T R O D U C T I O N Academic paradigms change, but scholarly interest in international migration remains as strong as ever. Recent synoptic literature has reviewed the diverse tropes through which scholars in a range of disciplines have viewed the causes, practices, and consequences of European emigration during the nineteenth century. The cultural grounding for their engagement is hardly to be doubted. Over 40 million emigrants are estimated to have left à The authors wish to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Leverhulme Trust for the research on which this paper is based. They also acknowledge the National Library of Australia and the State Records Authority of New South Wales for permission to use material held in their care.