Dr Enda V Murray

In this article I want to look at my experiences of producing Irish Australian documentary content in Australia outside of the academic funding and research space. By this I mean producing documentary in Australia which has Ireland as its subject. As case studies I want to use two documentaries which I produced in the last 18 months – The first is The Songs of the Last Convict Ship (Murray, 2021) - which is a 35 minute radio documentary produced for the ABC on its history strand, History Listens on Radio National. The second example is Áine Tyrrell – Irish Troubadour (Murray, 2021) which is a self-funded, 70 minute television documentary which was produced for the festival circuit.

I wanted to talk about the challenges in making and presenting the work and why I think it’s important to investigate Irish-Australian topics.

Abstract
This paper explores the music that was played on board the voyage of the last convict ship from England to Australia in 1867. The ship was the Hougoumont and it arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia in January 1868. The music was performed by Irish convicts and political prisoners who were being transported to Australia for various crimes. The majority of the musicians were men who were convicted of offences relating to the Fenian Rebellion of 1867.The titles of the songs were recorded by Denis Cashman, formerly a journalist by trade.

The songs are examined according to their origin, subject matter, lyrics, music and their place within the cultural and political milieu of the period.
The songs are also catalogued according to the reasons why they would have been popular with the singers of the day and the reasons why they might have been included in the concerts on board the ship.

This research paper references an open source website, The Irish Australian Song Library (2017) which was created for this project.  The song lyrics, music tabulation and songnotes from this paper are in the process of being added to this site. The website is constructed in such a way that the information is immediately available to the public and the public, in turn, can add their own submissions to the music information.

Keywords: Irish ballads. 19th Century Irish music. History of Irish music. Ethnomusicology of Irish ballads.

This article comprises an oral history from Dr Enda Murray about his involvement in the live music and club scene in Drogheda, a small Irish town in the early '80's. Murray was one of a small group of young people who set up a music cooperative to stage music gigs and clubs in the town. The article also features a detailed and accurate diary of the music and club gigs that took place in Drogheda from 1981 to 1988. The diary features almost all of the major Irish rock bands of that period and is a valuable social record of the local and national music scene in Ireland at the time.

An oral history of a 30 year migration story from Ireland to Sydney via England as recounted by Irish filmmaker and artist Enda Murray.
Murray left Ireland in 1985 and spent 10 years in England living in squats, working on arthouse film and in the underground club scene. He was heavily involved in the protest movements around the 1992 'Criminal Justice Bill' and the junction between politics, protest and art.
Murray moved to Sydney in 1996 where he became a broadcaster and took a doctorate in the creative arts. He has worked extensively across cultures in Sydney mainly as a community artist. He is now a dad and teaches and makes music, art and film in Sydney.

Irish intercultural cinema looks at the development of a cinematic genre which focuses on issues of Irish migrancy but is produced outside of Ireland. The essay has as its focus the cultural landscape of Irish-Australia. The essay uses methodologies of ethnographic and documentary theory plus textual analysis of film and written texts to establish a throughline of Irish intercultural film. The essay begins by contextualising the place of the Irish diaspora within the creation of Irish identity globally. The discussion around migrancy is widened to consider the place of memory and intergenerational tensions within not just the Irish migrant population, but also within the diverse cultures which comprise the contemporary Australian landscape. The historical development of intercultural cinema is then explored internationally within a context of colonial, gender and class struggles in the '70's and '80's. The term intercultural cinema has its origins in the Third Cinema of Argentinians Solanas and Getino in the '70's and covers those films which deal with issues involving two countries or cultures. The term was refined by Laura Marks in 2000 and further developed by Hamid Naficy in 2001 in his discussion of accented cinema which narrows its definition to include the politics of production within its definition. The paper then traces the development of Irish intercultural cinema from its beginnings in England in the '70's with Thaddeus O'Sullivan through to Nicola Bruce and others including Enda Murray in the present day. The essay concludes by bringing these various strands together to see where intercultural film might have a place in today's globalised cultural landscape. Common traits within intercultural film such as the notion of place, autobiographical film and personal identity are explored using examples of intercultural filmmaking from around the globe. These commonalities point to a way forward for the future of a sustainable multicultural film culture.

A personal filmic exploration of contemporary Irish-Australian identity
This thesis consists of two parts: a documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, Secret Family Recipes, explores a personal experience of migration and documents issues of personal identity within broader family, community and intercultural contexts.
The documentary uses the device of cake baking to provide a narrative spine for the journey of exploration. The filmmaker, Enda Murray, journeys from Sydney back to his birthplace in Ireland in 2007 and helps his elderly mother bake her annual Christmas cake. In the course of this journey, he talks to his mother and peers about their memories of growing up and ponders on his own early family life in Ireland. He then returns to Australia and bakes a cake with his two daughters (ages six and four), using this occasion to reflect on his current family situation.
The exegesis provides a background context in Irish-Australian history and culture.  It examines the major influences on the author’s work as an artist and draws on a range of literature to critique the production of Secret family recipes against the context of Irish documentary, Irish migrant documentary, and Irish-Australian accented cinema. The exegesis argues that Secret family recipes uses elements of performative documentary, defined by Bill Nichols as documentary that includes the author as a performing character in the film. It also argues that the documentary uses elements of domestic ethnography, a term coined by Michael Renov to describe filmmaking that explores the complexity of communal or blood ties between the subject and his or her family. This is a form of supplementary autobiographical practice where the subject constructs self knowledge through the familial other.
This research project proposes a new framework of domestic performativity within documentary that combines elements of performative documentary and domestic ethnography. This thesis argues that domestic performativity allows a stylised representation of the subject’s voice and combines elements of documentary and ethnography to produce an enhanced autobiographical product.