If you ever happen to find yourself in the quaint seaside community of Glen Innes, New South Wales, there is an outdoor installation you simply must see for yourself – the Australian Standing Stones.

“The Standing Stones are an array of local granite that stand approximately 3.5 meters above the ground,” shares Judi Thomas, chair of the Standing Stones management board via Zoom. There are 38 stones in the main array, 24 stones in a circular shape that represent the hours of the day, with four cardinal points, accurately surveyed in terms of true north and south.”

The Standing Stones are more than just a stunning public art installation and sundial, however – they are a symbol of Australia’s Celtic connections.

“Then there are three central internal stones,” Toms continues, “and the very central stone is known as the Australia Stone, which is sort of like a connecting stone. We describe it as connecting Australian Celts to the site, because it is actually classified by our National Trust as Australia’s national monument to Celtic heritage in Australia’s development. That central Stone also picks up on that connection with Celts around the world to Australia.

“We also see it as a connecting link between ancient Celts and modern Celts. There are stones on either side of that central stone; one of them is known as the Brittonic stone, and the other is known as the Gaelic stone, and they reflect the language sources of the ancient Celts.”

The origin of the Standing Stones goes back to 1988, when Scotland sought to gift a rock cairn to acknowledge the bicentennial of European settlement down under. Many communities campaigned to home the rock, and while that cairn wound up in Sydney, it gave the Celtic Council of Australia an idea how to bring pockets of Celtic communities across the continent together at Glen Innes.

“It got the Celtic Council of Australia thinking that there wasn’t actually any specific acknowledgement of Celts in general in Australia – not specific Celtic lines like Scottish or Irish, but just the generic diaspora,” continues Toms. “So, they then went back to those communities that put in their nomination to see if anyone would be interested in homing another initiative and we were certainly interested.

“There were Cornish with tin mining in the area here, and also Irish with various convict labour throughout here as well, as well and some spattering of Welsh. All of that information was collated and sent off to the Celtic Council of Australia. Glen Innes was then awarded the honour of creating this monument.”

Australia isn’t the first country people associate with the Celtic diaspora, but Celtic peoples have been part of its history since the first ships of the British Empire landed at Port Jackson to establish a penal colony.

“The first boatload of convicts arrived in 1788, and amongst those convicts were people of Celtic background,” explains Pamela O’Neill, president of the Celtic Council of Australia. “It can be quite hard to sort the immigration records to Australia, because very often, the place of origin is elided a little bit. So, a lot of Scots and Welsh, for instance, show up as English in the records.

“That said, there is certainly a recognizable Irish element amongst the convict population. Some of the early governors were Scots. We had a Cornishman – Bligh, the famous one from the mutiny on the Bounty, a Cornish vessel. Then there was the Irish famine and the Scottish clearances, and then in the 1850s, gold was discovered in Australia, and many people from Celtic countries came for the mining. So, we have quite a lot of Celtic influence very early in the colony.”

Australian author Victoria Cox can trace her Celtic lineage back to a case of grand theft bovine.

“My Irish connection goes back to about the mid-19th century,” Knox recounts in a call with Celtic Life International. “Margaret O’Sullivan, who was born in Cork, was convicted of stealing a cow. Now, this is really interesting, because you don’t steal a cow and hope to hide it – so what was the purpose in stealing one? Well, if you remember, that was a terrible time in Ireland as millions died with the potato famine. I believe that Margaret stole a cow because it would give her family something to milk before the cow was found and returned to its rightful owner. But she also knew that she would be arrested, and I think she chose a life on the other side of the world, rather than to die of starvation.

“It would have been the only way to have emigrated for these people as they were poor.” Knox opines. “But the women in our family tree are the most extraordinary people, and Margaret was tough; she was sentenced in Waterford at the court for ten years. She was only about 17 or 18 years old when she go on that ship, which took about six months to arrive in Tasmania, the most southern state in Australia.”

Things worked out as well as they could for Margaret, as Knox tells it; she found a skill in embroidery, which kept her out of prison (which is still standing today in Hobart) for much of her sentence and then married another penal colony colonist before relocating to northern Tasmania, near Launceston, where she remained until her death in 1904.

“What a plucky woman, and what a what a thing to do. She never saw home again. Never saw her siblings or her parents. It was quite extraordinary, these people that came and pioneered the other side of the world.”

Knox has a knack for getting histrionic with history – it’s her bread and butter these days. After careers in both nursing and opera singing, she decided to make a go at becoming an author. Her first book, In Spite of All Terror, was published in 2016, and featured the recurring character Clement Wisdom inserted into real-life historical skullduggery.

“The whole Clement Wisdom series came about from a question on a television program,” Knox reveals. “The question was, ‘who or what were the scallywags?’ Well, they were Churchill’s scallywags. It was, of course, a euphemistic term for a group called the auxiliary units, which were a clandestine group of guerrilla fighters that were set up in the summer of 1940 as a direct response of the fall of France. It was in finding out about the auxiliary units that sparked the first book.  By the time I got to the end of that book, the main character, Clement Wisdom, had really developed legs.”

Since his first adventure, Clement Wisdom has travelled to the north of Scotland, Cambridgeshire, and – most recently – Sydney, Australia.

“The fourth book is called West Wind Clear. I did a huge amount of research for that one as it’s largely about code breaking. I do my own research, and I love finding little historical details that I can hang a story on. I use real characters in the book, from Commander Rupert Long, to Commander Eric Nave especially, who was an Australian code breaker.”

The decision to bring Rev. Wisdom to the southern hemisphere was partially borne from necessity – like the rest of the world, Knox was housebound during the pandemic and couldn’t travel afar for research. So, she stuck close to home.

“I had to write about places I knew, so my upcoming book, Codenamed Sorrow, is set in Sydney, and it builds up to the Japanese invasion of Sydney Harbour in May of 1942.”

It is material like this – the actual history of Celts in Australia – that O’Neill wants to see gain traction amongst down under descendants.

“People come to Celtic from a lot of directions,” O’Neill explains, “and a lot of them have these kind of fantastical ideas about what Celtic is, and half of it is tosh. For me, I aim to gently introduce people to the facts, which are much more exciting and interesting and wonderful than the fantasies that people build up. You can’t just say ‘that’s not the way it was’ – rather, just introduce that material to people in a gentle way and help them to explore it for themselves.

“One of the things that is a threat to Celtic culture is it being replaced by this kind of fantasy that was never there.”

Alongside her role as the president of the Celtic Council of Australia, O’Neill is also a teacher and school administrator. She is the principal of Australian School of Celtic Learning, which she herself founded in 2017. She is also the Sir Warwick Fairfax Lecturer in Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney, where she does her best to share the history, the culture, and the language of the real Celtic peoples of Australia.

“My interest in Celtic things is basically an academic one,” shares O’Neill, who currently tutors a number of students in Gaelic, some of whom commute to class via Zoom, including one as far afield as the Isle of Skye. “I finished my Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Old English and developed a really strong interest in Celtic stuff, particularly early medieval Celtic.

“One of the things that’s interested me in my study of Scottish Gaelic speaking migrants is the vast difference in their experience. On the whole, the culture here doesn’t survive in the same kind of strong pockets like it seems to do elsewhere. One of the factors that is at play here is that when they come to Australia, they get dispersed over massive geographical areas, so any survival of the culture is hard won. It is a campaign of little bits.”

But those little bits, when connected meaningfully, can have a larger effect. That’s why something like the Standing Stones are so important to Celtic identity in Australia – they act like a magnet.

Rhonda Bombell runs the Australian Celtic Festival, which brings Celts from across the country to Glen Innes every year. While no one is excluded, the festival cycles through Celtic nations to highlight in rotation.

“Every three years, we do a cycle of Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales,” Bombell explains. “Then we do the Year of Scotland, then the Year of Ireland and the Isle of Man.”

Bombell notes that the Australian Celtic Festival brings their sleepy town to life, with people from all across this vast nation coming together with one goal; to better understand and appreciate their Celtic heritage.

“When you come to Glen Innes as a visitor, or even if you’re just passing through, you can see the town really embraces the festival – everyone really looks forward to it each year. For me, the best thing about the event is that I get to learn more about Celtic culture.”

“It is growing, and we are finding that people are becoming more interested in their ancestry,” adds Judi Toms, who works closely with Bombell. “A growing interest in DNA ancestry has really made it much easier for people to look at their own identity. And we also see many people at the festival looking for information on their ancestry. In fact, we have a section within the event that is specifically set aside for the Scottish and Irish clans, and the other Celtic societies as well.”

Even O’Neill – who points out that the ancient Celts never actually built standing stone monuments like the Australian Standing Stones – can’t deny the power they have to bring the Celtic Australian Diaspora together.

“I have a troubled relationship with our stone circle because, of course, stone circles are Neolithic, and our first understanding of people that we can identify as Celtic is in the Bronze Age. So, the stone circles were already there. I’ve reconciled myself to it from the perspective that Celts certainly lived amongst stone circles, because they are in the areas that became Celtic.

“But it has kind of grown on me, and there’s no doubt it is a beautiful site. I had the Croft Celtic Cultural Centre and Cafe in a building on site at the stones, and people came because they wanted to get in touch with their Celtic ancestry, or heritage, and they would come in and have really long conversations. It was fantastic, because in amongst making them coffee or cooking them scones, I would be able to talk to them about the origins of their clan, or the language, if they had an interest in that direction. It’s another example of how it doesn’t matter why they come; if they come, they will ask questions about it.

“There’s that fabulous saying, which is possibly from a slightly dubious context in origin,” grins O’Neill. “It doesn’t matter where you work up your appetite as long as you eat at home.”