Clan - Shane Howard

"He sounds as though he has drunk deeply
from the same fountain that gave the world
Henry Lawson, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan".

Bruce Elder - Sydney Morning Herald
January 25th, 2007


Shane Howard's 1996 seminal folk album has been a huge influence
both in Australia and Ireland. Mary Black recorded 3 songs from this
album: Don't Say OK, Free As Stone and Give A Little. This album
explored the links between Australia and Ireland and drew parallels
between colonial oppression of the indigenous Irish and indigenous
Australians. A brilliant masterpiece that does something no one
had achieved before or since, its explores the similar places that
two very different people groups can come from and find common
ground.


In 1993 after 8 years in Northern Australia, I returned
home to South West Victoria. My Irish ancestors came to
this area in the 1850's
This is the story of my people, my ancestral clans.
The story of dispossession of land by an overwhelming
force; the story of famine, resistance and uprisings.,
of exile and survival - the struggle of the oppressed;
the burning desire not for revenge but for equality
and justice.


By the 1850's the Irish famine migrants were arriving
into colonial Australia. They arrived into a world the
native people were already more brutally down trodden
than themselves. These were the aboriginal clans of the
Gunditjmara "nation", so cruelly dispossessed, who were
massacred, died fighting to protect their beloved country
or were rounded up onto missions and subjected to more
than a century of neglect by the state.
I wanted to tell the story of my ancestors and their
eventual exile in Australia. I was curious about the
parallel experiences of the Aboriginal peoples of both
Ireland and Australia.

Shane Howard


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