The letters of Irish emigrants in Australia (featured in the ‘sources’ section of HI Winter 1994), steeped in local idiom and nuance, deserve to be heard as well as seen. A ninety-minute cassette, based on a series of radio programmes produced by Cathal Póirtéir, has been released in conjunction with David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork University Press) [to be reviewed in the next issue of HI]. RTE actors read letters to and from six different counties, accompanied by Davy Spillane’s music for didgeridoo and uilleann pipes. The cassette (£5.95) may be ordered through bookshops (ISBN 1-85908-075-2) or collected from Dept. of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin 2.
