COMP CLOSED | Book Giveaway | Southern Celts

Stories from People of Irish and Scottish Descent in Aotearoa

Drawing on her own family experience and insights from her PhD inquiry, Celine Kearney travelled around Aotearoa to interview New Zealanders with Scottish and Irish backgrounds. Southern Celts uses autoethnography and narrative to explore how these New Zealanders live out their cultural connections to their Irish and Scottish backgrounds. Interviews cross hemispheres and generations as well as geographic and cultural communities. They reflect the passage of time which brings constant change.

Southern Celts is a collection of interviews of New Zealanders who reflect on their connections to their Irish and Scottish cultural backgrounds. These narratives of individuals and families cover a range of related issues, including doing business, speaking and teaching Scottish and Irish Gaelic, playing music and singing, writing fiction and poetry, making documentaries, carving and sculpture, spirituality and religion, sport, and holding historical narratives of the Scots and Irish in public institutions.

Narrators also reflect on their understanding of how people with Scots and Irish backgrounds have related to indigenous Māori over the generations in Aotearoa. As we look to teach more of our own New Zealand histories in schools, these personal narratives offer rich insights for the way ahead.

Individuals interviewed in the book include:

• Ann Corry, kiltmaker, Helean Kilts
• Michael Fraser Milne, owner/director of Whisky Galore
• Erin Hogan, proprietor, The Scottish Shop, Dunedin
• Evelyn Entwistle, Scots Gaelic teacher

• Michael Godfrey, Scots Gaelic teacher
• Marianne Hepple, Uilleann piper
• Evey McAuliffe, singer, Irish speaker
• Bain McGregor, Highland piper
• Keri Hulme, writer
• Bernadette Hall, poet
• Michael O’Leary, publisher, novelist
• Laura Mills, journalist
• Coral Atkinson, fiction writer
• Kathleen Gallagher, writer and film maker
• Malcolm Adams, master carver
• Denis O’Connor, ceramicist, sculptor, writer
• John Hunt, Presbyterian minister
• Ann Dooley, religious studies teacher
• Charlie Dunn, boxer
• Stewart McKnight, curler
• Ellen McCormack (née Macmillan), QSM, genealogist, Katikati historian
• Robert Consedine, Treaty of Waitangi educator
• Seán Brosnahan, curator, Toitū Otago Settlers Museum

About the author:

Celine Kearney is the granddaughter of three Irish-born grandparents, and one born to an immigrant Irish family in Central Otago. Born and brought up on the east coast of Otago, she has experience as a journalist and a researcher, and has taught English language to adults with migrant and refugee backgrounds, and international students for over thirty years. This is the second collection of her interviews to be published.

An earlier collection of interviews of New Zealand women about their spirituality, Faces of the Goddess, drew on her own experience and understanding of nature-based Celtic spirituality. She travelled around the country between 2010 and 2013 to interview New Zealanders with Irish and Scottish backgrounds for her narrative inquiry, Southern Celts. Celine lives in Cambridge, Waikato.

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1. 1. You must be a GrownUps member and receive our newsletter to be eligible to win.
   2. Competition closes on the 18th April 2023, winners will be notified via email by 20th April 2023.
   3. It is your responsibility to ensure you correctly enter a New Zealand postal address where the prize can be couriered. GrownUps will not take responsibility for prizes sent to incorrect addresses.
   4. Winners are drawn at random by the GrownUps administration team.
   5. GrownUps employees and family are not eligible to enter.
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   7. One entry per household.
   8. Prize is non transferrable.
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