Bit cynical but I spent Australia Day celebrating my Irish roots. Sick of the annual angst-fest. I get it but thought this year I’d disengage.

Why not? Some 40 per cent of Aussies have Irish roots. Lot didn’t want to come here, a lot were treated like shite. Discrimination, poverty, religious persecution, refused work … all the usual complaints of unwanted immigrants.

But the wild, lovely paddies have turned that negativity around. Their humour, generosity, hard work, music, arts, pubs and general irreverence have insinuated them deeply into Aussie culture. They’re a solid part of Australia worth celebrating.

So this 26 Jan, I switched up a swag of Irish music, belted along on fiddle as best I could. I attacked some Guinness cans, some Flann O’Brien stories, even a bit of Ulysses and revisited the film On the Nose. Eventually nodded off with a Jameson and an artbook on Irish faeries.

A day well spent. Didn’t offend anyone. Grinning idiotically mostly. Must repeat it soon.

Shortly after, my daughter posted birthday photos not from her London home but Dublin’s Guinness factory. Attagirl, I thought.

Same day, I was at Sovereign Hill with a mate delighting kids, and horrifying mums, singing the Irish schoolyard song Weela Weela Wayla about a deranged mother who “… stuck a penknife in the baby’s head, the more she stabbed, the more it bled”.

Brutal but nothing new. The plague’s “Ringa Ringa Rosie, pocket full of posies” had everyone “ah tishoo, we all fall down”, like flies, in Dublin’s rare old times.

There’s a dark intrigue to the Irish.

Music captures it with The Banshee Wail Over the Mangle Pit, The Flogging, I Buried My Wife and Danced on her Grave, among others.

Folklore is all malevolent pookas, sprites and faeries itching to steal you, your kids. Halloween’s jack-o-lantern was originally a spooky Irish turnip. Halloween dress-ups disguised you against roaming spirits. Kids received middle names to keep faeries at bay.

The Irish hallmark, though, is their irreverence. On the Nose is about an Aboriginal warrior’s head in a jar in Dublin. It moves in the sun and Robbie Coltrane, who’s scribbled numbers around it, bets on horses depending where the poor bloke’s nose points.

Robbie’s desperate for cash to send his kid to uni as a repatriation agent arrives with the Grand Steeplechase looming. Silly, funny stuff. I was alerted to it by an Irish Aussie with an Aboriginal daughter-in-law.

Like I say, irreverent. And about as Australian as more of us need to be.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 6 February 2024.