have been on the coalfields or about race and have rarely had a political motivation’ (p. 31) or thatrecent middle class English migrants ‘do not have regional accents or subcultures and many haveno particular loyalty to or interest in their original British localities’ (p. 200) are, at least,questionable. Recent observation at local football matches and elsewhere in Australia wouldindicate that this middle class reviewer is by no means unique in possessing an English club replicashirt.

Finally, this treatment of the English in Australia effectively ends more than two decades ago,at a point when Australian support for specifically British migrants was replaced e at leastofficially e by more individualised entry criteria and when changes to electoral and citizenshipregulations designated the British in Australia more formally as ‘foreigners’. While this can,indeed, be considered as a watershed, it was by no means the end of the story of the English inAustralia. More English people than ever are arriving in Australia: as tourists, often as VFRs(visiting friends and relatives) and, on occasion, as visa overstayers; as gap year, study abroad andworking holiday young visitors; as family reunion migrants; as the partners/spouses ofAustralians returning from e also increasingly common e periods of residence in England;and, still, as one of the largest national groups of mainstream migrants. Jupp acknowledges theexistence of these groups, but does not see them as capable of any significant social impact. Giventhat they tend to be more mobile, are, on balance, more affluent, and are generally moreknowledgeable about Australia than the English migrant groups that preceded them, this remainsto be seen.

But, notwithstanding the specific reservations made above, this book contains a wealth ofinformation for historical geographers on this significant, long-standing and under-researchedlong distance migration flow.

Roy JonesCurtin University of Technology, Australia

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.07.002

586 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 583e608

Howard Clarke, Jacinta Prunty and Mark Hennessy (Eds), Surveying Ireland’s Past:Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, Dublin, Geography Publications, 2004,802 pages, V60 hardback.

This handsome festschrift amounting to some thirty-one chapters is in honour of Anngret Simms,formerly a professor of geography at University College Dublin (UCD). Her retirement in 2002marked the formal culmination of an academic career that may have begun in Cologne but waslargely centred on the study of Ireland’s rural and urban landscapes. Simms’ impact extended wellbeyond the academy, being notable for her engagement with the public arena through projectssuch as the Dublin Historical Settlement Group founded in 1975 and the Irish Historic TownsAtlas of which she was a founding editor. She was also a leading figure in the Friends of MedievalDublin, the pressure group which, during the 1970s, fought so long and hard e if ultimatelyunsuccessfully e to save Dublin’s Viking and medieval Wood Quay site from the developers. This,

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therefore, was an academic career in the public eye in a way that is perhaps only possible ina small and socially coherent country like Ireland with its relatively restricted media outlets inwhich the debate on the local is frequently also that on the national.

Simms’ geography was (and remains, ‘retirement’ being something of a misnomer in her case)dominated by several themes that were interlinked through their concern with the empiricalmaterial landscape, revealed not only through fieldwork but also by cartographic analysis and,latterly, a thorough investigation of archival sources. She has worked in both urban and ruralenvironments but the themes of settlement morphology, continuity of function over form and thebuilt fabric as an historical source in its own right illuminate all her work, irrespective of itslocation. Simms was concerned, too, with the ‘deep rooted human need to belong to a place’(p. xxvi) but this is not reflected in her published work in a way that would invoke, for example,the conceptualisation of the cultural landscape as representation or text. This points to a morewidely applicable comment on this collection of essays which demonstrate, spatial contiguitynotwithstanding, that Ireland’s historical geography has evolved and is often practiced in verydifferent ways to its British counterpart. While there are occasional resonances of Darbyite pastgeographies, these essays unconsciously perpetuate the very significant French influences on thedevelopment of Irish historical geography, in which Vidalian notions of the landscape asa democratic text recording the history of the undocumented intersect with Pierre Flatres’readings of the settlement patterns, field systems and landlordism of ‘Celtic’ countries, to evolveinto a perspective that echoes the basic tenet of geohistoire e that any social reality must bereferred to the space, place or region within which it existed. Simms’ doctoral thesis on the Assyntregion of north-east Scotland was influenced by Flatres’ work and, fortuitously, the Frenchgeographer also contributed significantly to the evolution of Tom Jones Hughes’ pioneeringgeography of Ireland, forged in the same department at UCD in which Simms spent most of hercareer. Conversely, there is little evidence here to support the editorial claim that Simms‘embraced with enthusiasm’ the downplaying ‘of material culture [in favour of] promoting interestin social structure and process’ (p. xxviii) that characterised British historical geography c.1980.The language and methods of the cultural ‘turn’ of the late 1980s is also conspicuously absent inmost of the contributions, again underlining the very different trajectory of Ireland’s historicalgeography when compared to its British equivalent. One result is that the sub-discipline hasretained its coherence and identity as distinct, arguably, from being subsumed within the broaderrealm of cultural geography.

The book’s subtitle refers to its multidisciplinary nature and geographers, archaeologists,historians and even an architect are numbered among the contributors. Indeed, the interconnectionof geography, archaeology and history at the centre of these essays could be characterised asinterdisciplinary in the sense of shared methodologies and the emphasis accorded field survey andarchival enquiry. Again, there is a common emphasis on the material past as a source in itself, onethat can be employed in both the scholarly reconstruction of landscapes and in creating anempirical, spatial framework for living. Simms’s work embodies the idea that ‘landscape . is notonly a monument of the past in the present, but is also something with which we engage and whichwe create in our own lives and lifetimes’ (p. xxxii). The contributions also emphasise the ways inwhich studies of past Irish landscapes often centre on assumptions of continuity, although this israrely overtly defined or conceptualised. In Simms’ work, the editors claim, continuity of functiontakes precedence over that of form, although the content suggests that the converse is a more

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readily defensible position, the morphological inheritance and the historical built environmentmasking the extent of social, political and cultural change through time.

Simms’ dual German and Irish background lends itself to cross-cultural comparisons andcontrasts and the effective use of analogy is a consistent motif of her own published work.However, while the editors of this volume acknowledge ‘how much Ireland has to contribute toEuropean scholarship when its settlement history is integrated with that of other Europeancountries’ (p. xxix), the individual essays e excepting only O’Flanagan and Walton’s discussion ofthe eighteenth-century Irish community in Cadiz (Chapter 16) e remain firmly rooted withinIreland itself. Their cumulative content lends itself to a chronological arrangement which, asidefrom Barry Raftery’s brief but cogent thoughts on the ‘end of prehistory’ (Chapter 1), is definedby Simms’ own interests that extend from early medieval Hiberno-Norse settlement right throughto twentieth-century urban form. The essays essentially fall into four groups addressingsuccessively: medieval settlement; the mapping, naming and reading of Ireland; eighteenth- andnineteenth-century small town and urban landscapes; and twentieth-century urbanisation,especially that of Dublin. Anne Buttimer’s analysis of geographical knowledge (Chapter 31),which concludes the book, stands rather awkwardly as the solitary chapter addressing broaderconceptual issues within the discipline and thus is at odds with the dominant empirical thrust ofthe collection as a whole. It is testimony to Simms’ influence on a generation of geographers ofIreland that her former doctoral students are well represented among the contributors.

The essays discussing medieval Ireland all embody Simms’ own carefully developedmethodology which integrates the extant archival sources with exacting field observation andmapping. While this can produce richly detailed accounts such as Mark Hennessy’s discussion ofmanorial agriculture and settlement in early fourteenth-century County Tipperary (Chapter 5),the difficulties of the approach are also apparent when the results of micro-studies have to beintegrated into broader contexts of social and economic change and regional variations. Thesomewhat disparate group of essays dealing with the mapping, naming and reading of Irelandrange from John Andrews’ account of classifying early Irish town plans (Chapter 11) to KevinWhelan’s nationalistically self-satisfied attempt to ‘read the ruins’ (Chapter 14). Andrews is a co-editor of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas which many regard as being, perhaps, Simms’ mostsignificant achievement. John Bradley acknowledges its contribution in an essay (Chapter 29)which argues that the individual fascicles of the Atlas constitute sources for urban history in theirown right. Two studies stand out here, however, for the depth of their scholarship and the carefuland intimate unravelling of the relationships between people, place and naming. Willie Smyth’saccount of a cultural geography of first and second names in Ireland (Chapter 12) is a novel andconvincing attempt to use the so-called ‘1659 Census’ and the nineteenth-century Griffithvaluation to map ‘the powerful continuities and their transformations’ (p. 278) revealed by thegeographies of naming systems. Patrick Duffy’s use of minor placenames of fields and landmarks(Chapter 27) is again a markedly original way of integrating the best of the empirical legacy ofcultural landscape studies in Ireland with more widely recognisable perspectives of landscape astext and meaning. The essays dealing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century small town andurban landscapes are predominantly in that empirical vein, by far the best being William Nolan’saccount (Chapter 18) of the ambitious but unsuccessful attempt by Sir Vere Hunt to emulate theindustrial wealth of the West Midlands in New Birmingham, Co. Tipperary. Finally, ourunderstanding of twentieth-century urbanisation in Ireland and of the material and symbolic

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importance of Dublin has been significantly advanced by geographers such as Yvonne WhelanandRuthMcManuswho, as doctoral students,were supervisedbySimms.Both are representedhereby their accounts, respectively, of the iconography of the capital after independence (Chapter 23)and the governance of Irish towns after 1919 (Chapter 24).

In sum, despite the inevitable unevenness of the essays, this is a generous and impressive tributeto one of Ireland’s most publicly recognised geographers. If such a collection seems a luxury in anage of research assessment exercises, it demonstrates too the academic decencies that still survivein Ireland (if not for much longer) but now belong to a bygone age in Britain. The book standsalso as a statement of the marked differences that still demarcate Irish historical and culturalgeography from the prevailing British ethos and the ways in which, despite an obvious lack oftheorisation and sometimes uncritical dependence on the power of the empirical narrative, itremains far more accessible than its British equivalent, one significant reason why Anngret Simms(and others) have been so effective in interconnecting the geographical academy into the widerpublic realm.

Brian GrahamUniversity of Ulster, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.07.003

Patrick Duffy (Ed), To and from Ireland: Planned Migration Schemes c.1600e2000, Dublin,Geography Publications, 2004, 203 pages, V20 paperback.

Migration has been an expected event in the life experience of generations of Irish men andwomen for most of the last two centuries. It has connected Ireland, via complex discursive flows ofinformation as well as people, to a variety of material and ‘imagined’ worlds in Europe, theAmericas, and beyond. Unsurprisingly, Irish migration has generated an extensive literature thathas varied profoundly in focus and perspective (and is usefully summarised by Piaras Mac Einrı inAndrew Bielenberg’s The Irish Diaspora (Longman, 2000)). As Patrick Duffy notes in hisIntroduction to these essays (p. 5), many historical studies of Irish migration have been framed interms of a periodisation of Irish history that has, in his view, served to blur underlying continuitiesin the resource contexts and processes of migration over time and space. By attempting to ‘unpack. the experience of Irish migration within the British Isles from its usual political context of‘invasions’, ‘conquests’, ‘plantations and confiscations’ (p. 10), the book aims to providea broader contextualisation for a phenomenon that it represents in largely social terms. Byfocussing on the planned movement of groups to and from (and within) Ireland at various timesbetween the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the contributors seek to demonstrate that behindthe time/place specificities of individual schemes, lay the continuing agency of the State andits representatives in manipulating population and resources to achieve what were deemed tobe socially desirable ends. It was this element of proactive social engineering which, Duffyclaims, served to distinguish such planned migration from the vastly wider, but individually‘random’ response to the numerous opportunities to emigrate offered by colonial governmentsand others.