Distance and Proximity in Service to the Empire: Ulster and New Zealand between the Wars

This essay uses the concepts of ‘distance’ and ‘proximity’ to investigate and assess perceptions of community, nation and empire in inter-war New Zealand and Ulster (as well as Ireland and Northern Ireland) within a British imperial context, and explores the extent to which service of the empire (for example in the First World War) promoted both notions of imperial unity and local autonomy. It focuses on how these perceptions were articulated in the inter-war years during visits to Northern Ireland by three New Zealand premiers – Massey, Forbes and Coates – and to New Zealand by the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Lord Craigavon. It discusses the significant ways in which distance from their ‘home base’ and proximity to expatriate communities (in Craigavon's case) and Irish unionists and nationalists (in the case of the New Zealand premiers) inflected public statements during their visits. By examining these inter-war visits and investigating the rhetoric used and the cultural demonstrations associated with them, the factors of both distance and proximity can be used to evaluate similarities and difference across two parts of the empire. Thus, we can throw some light on the nature and dynamics of British imperial identity in the early twentieth century.

‘Ghosts in the Head and Ghost Towns in the Field: Ethnography and the Experience of Presence and Absence’

This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I left – was evacuated from – my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. While Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on with their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from “back home.” Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island, where I had worked from. My route to this modern-day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence, the imagined past and the experienced present. This is understood, in part, by examining the literary work of two other travelers through Montserrat, Henry Coleridge and Pete McCarthy, both of whom have a very different experience of the place and the people.

Young children returning home from care: The birth parents' perspective

While a wide range of literature exists on the experiences of children in foster care or adoption, much less is known about children who return home from care to their birth parents. This paper focuses on the perspectives of a small sample of birth parents of young children who returned home from care. It draws on findings from the Northern Ireland Care Pathways and Outcomes Study that has been following a population (n = 374) of children who were under 5 years and in care in Northern Ireland on the 31st of March 2000. As part of this study, interviews were conducted with the foster parents of 55 children, the adoptive parents of 51 children and the birth parents of nine children who had returned home from care. The paper explores the birth parents’ views on how they coped while their child was in care, how they were coping after the child had returned home and how their child was faring at home. Results revealed that these parents, and their children, were experiencing multiple difficulties and struggled to cope after the children had returned home.