Continuing from the previous two posts; with some of my writing/jottings from the late 1980s.
I’ve found two other texts. One piece is handwritten with the date 1987 appearing on the very first page. Maybe it was preparation for a lecture that was never delivered? (Or more likely, my memory is shot.) At this early stage of my researches, i was trying to pull together what i knew, or wanted to know, about the Irish orphan “girls”. Here are some of the questions i was asking .
Irish orphan “girls”
What was their [the ‘Earl Grey’ orphans] experience of the Famine?
What was it like to be female and living in a workhouse? Did they remember wearing workhouse clothes, doing workhouse chores, their lives regulated and disciplined in an unattractive way?
On board ship, and in Australia, did their Irish working-class morality and values clash with English, Victorian middle-class ones?
How well did they cope in their new and distant land, without family and friends? Where did they settle? Who among them were casualties? How upwardly mobile were they?
Given the fact that they were relatively inarticulate, less literate, for example, than other female migrants, how are we to come close to these young women? How do we come to know them on their own terms?
We’ve all been there before, I’m sure, you in your family history, me in my preface to Barefoot…, or different places in this blog. Yet the big picture, as well as the microcosmic one, is bound to change the more research is done by different people… As indeed it should.
Female migrants and the Ireland they came from.
Gender Balance
My second text is typewritten, and buried in it, i see the heading, “Female migrants and the Ireland they came from“. Again, I surmise this was an early attempt in the late 1980s at gathering information, a means of clarifying my thoughts, and with this one, trying to fit the Earl Grey orphans into the ‘big picture’, whatever that ‘big picture’ might be.
Common to both these texts is an awareness of something i noted in my previous blogpost, viz.
“Women’s participation in the flight from Ireland in the nineteenth century has not always been appreciated, or given the attention it deserves”.
Is that still the case? Maybe others have written about this since then?
Yet I’m still left stunned when told that during the period of white settlement of Australia there is a gender balance of Irish immigrants. That is, nearly as many women, as men, left Ireland for Australia. Surely that turns conventional wisdom about emigration on its head, does it not? (I’m thinking, shorter distance first, males first, family later. No doubt there will be other kinds of ‘conventional wisdom’.)
In the handwritten text mentioned above, I did indeed draw attention to the ‘astonishing’ fact of gender balance. To quote,
“One of the remarkable features of the Irish diaspora in the 19th and 20th centuries is the high proportion of women who took part. Between 1850 and 1950, for example, the proportion of females migrating from European countries other than Ireland hovers around the 33% mark. In the Irish case, the figure is closer to 50%”.
The ‘fact’ also raises all sorts of questions. What conditions in Ireland influenced their decision? Is there more to it than Famine? What part did mothers and their daughters play in a family’s decision to emigrate? Were families prepared to first send a brother and a sister as a means of testing the waters, believing they would, and could, support one another? How important was a Government-Assisted passage? Basically, how are we to explain the male-female ‘balance’ of Irish migrants to Australia? Where does it come from?
The pre-1850 period
Let’s come at this by putting together the women who came to Australia during the earlier, pre-1850 period; (1) female Irish convicts; (2) the women, some from charitable institutions, arriving in the 1830s; (3) the women who came to New South Wales (Eastern Australia) during the 1839-42 exodus, and (4) the 1848-50 Earl Grey orphans. Then we may have a better idea of the origin of that Irish gender balance ‘tradition’.
Let me clarify by expanding briefly on these examples. I’ll use the two rediscovered texts where appropriate.
Irish Female convicts
“With never enough prison space in Ireland for female criminals, it was always easier for the Irish government to send its convicts half way across the globe to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Recent work suggests that approximately 33 percent of all female convicts came directly from Ireland, although perhaps another 10 percent, tried elsewhere, were of Irish extraction. Nor was their arrival spread evenly over the convict period. Almost 55 percent of convict women arriving between 1815 and 1821 were from Ireland. And in Van Diemen’s Land between 1841 and 1853, 46 percent of them were…Not all of them made good in their new Australian home but a substantial number did so, a fact that was not lost on the relatives they left behind.” (from the 2nd, typescript text, written in the late 1980s.) The question here is, what part did the convict connection play in attracting Irish women to Australia?
Family historians are very much aware of the riches of convict records in both Ireland and Australia. Here, in Irish records, is the memorial of Rose Hughes from Cavan asking for clemency.
And here is another example, from Tasmanian Conduct Records (Con 41/16) of
Margaret Graham or Coleman who arrived from Ireland by the John Calvin 18 May 1848. She was convicted at Antrim assizes of burglary, 26/10/1847, and sentenced to 10 years in Van Diemen’s Land. She was a 40 y.o. Protestant, native of Antrim, who could both read and write, yet was only 5′.1/2″ tall. She had been convicted five times before, once for stealing a coat (one month sentence), once for a shirt (4 mths). She was a widow, and had one child. In 1850 she spent 5 days in the cells for being drunk. In 1852 she got her Ticket of leave, and in May 1854 her conditional Pardon was approved. Her petition for Family was approved as early as March 1850. (that is, the chance for convicts to reunite with their families left behind. See Perry McIntyre’s Free Passage, Irish Academic Press, 2011.)
1830s women, some from Charitable institutions
In my very first blogpost, https://wordpress.com/post/earlgreysfamineorphans.wordpress.com/3 about the origins of the Earl Grey scheme, i wrote
“An important precedent was set during the 1830s when young women, many of them from both Irish and English Foundling Hospitals, Houses of Industry and other charitable institutions, were brought into New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.” And referred readers to an important article by A. J. Hammerton that appeared in [Australian]Historical studies in October 1975 .
Since then, i am very happy to report, our knowledge of the 1830s Irish female immigrants has grown enormously, thanks especially to Dr Liz Rushen in Melbourne. Please take a look at Liz’s website,
The book based on Liz’s doctoral thesis, Single and Free; female migration to Australia, 1833-1837 shows that the majority of the 1830s immigrants came not from charitable institutions but as free enterprising women. I’m not exactly sure how many of the latter were Irish.
To give you an idea of the value of Liz’s work, see Fair Game: Australia’s first immigrant women, Anchor Books, Sydney, 2010, a book she co-authored with Dr Perry McIntyre. In addition to a clear description of how Government and others organised the migration of women by the Red Rover from Cork, and the Princess Royal from London, the authors’ research tentatively uncovers what became of many of the young women. For example,
“Mary Leahy was an 18 year-old servant employed by Mr Bas In George Street for an annual wage of ten guineas, When the colonial authorities reported to Ireland on the fate of the Red Rover women in 1834 she ‘had gone to the East Indies with a family’. (p.195)
I haven’t added up the number of single Irish women who arrived in the 1830s. Maybe Liz , or Perry can tell us. From the vessels carrying those from Dublin and Cork Foundling Hospitals, Duchess of Northumberland (2 trips), James Pattison, Lady McNaughten, including the 1832 Red Rover, and a wild guess at a number for free enterprising women, may i suggest only 1000-1500? Is that too small, or too large a number Liz, Perry?
The 1839-42 Exodus
BY contrast, the number of Irish women who came to Eastern Australia between 1839 and 1842 is much greater. The total number of Irish who arrived in these years is a startling 23,705. Here is a table, for the period January 1841 to June 1842, from NSW parliamentary papers , first reproduced in my Shamrock to Wattle , (1985), p.62.
This influx of arrivals meant that during the early 1840s, there was a large number of Irish women looking for food, shelter and employment. It was in this period that Caroline Chisholm gained her reputation as ‘The Emigrant’s Friend‘. (see my first blogpost on the origins of the ‘Earl Grey scheme’ at the link above, near 1830s women.)
I wonder is there an in-depth study of these 1839-42 Irish immigrants? Eric Richards made a guess one time that the number of females was the same as the number of males. But it was a guess. So large an intake may be crucially important to the origins of our so-called ‘tradition’.
‘God help you, child…If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers’. Claire Keegan, Foster, p.27.
The Earl Grey Workhouse orphans, 1848-50
Add the 4-4150 “Earl Grey” famine orphans to the mix, and you will have a better idea of the ‘tradition’ I’m talking about. And that is before any mention of individual vessels carrying single female Irish immigrants, such as the Beulah and Calcutta to Hobart, the Palestine, Travencore, Sabrina and Clare to Freemantle, as well as a number of others. Or the circa five thousand single females who arrived in Port Adelaide in the mid 1850s. Or the very large number of female Irish government-assisted migrants coming to Port Phillip and Port Jackson during the 1850s.
I’ve skirted around this topic before, afraid to tango…, in the preface to my Barefoot & Pregnant?…(1991), in different places in this blog, and in a talk i gave in 2013, https://tintean.org.au/2014/03/06/irish-famine-women-a-challenge-or-three/
I’ve called this the tradition of Irish female immigration to Australia. Is that the best way to describe it? I’m also interested in putting the ‘Earl Grey orphan scheme’ into context, position it on a bigger canvas. And of course, to pay attention to women’s flight from Ireland to Australia, during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Too many eggs in the basket?
The question i want to leave you with is this, and i must be careful how i phrase it,
why did so many women leave Ireland to come to Australia during the ‘long nineteenth century’, between 1791 and 1920? You may even wish to extend the end date.
Any suggestions? Do tell me what you think. Noli timere, to quote Seamus Heaney.
Let me finish with something for your delight, from the National Library of Ireland, celebrating the centenary of W.B.Yeats’ Nobel prize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p4Gsl8-t1Y
Can you recite any of these from memory?
and finally, my thanks to www.tintean.org.au for reissuing a story about one of the Belfast girls, Mary McConnell.
P.S. I used AI for the auto-generated excerpt, thanks to WordPress.
trevo's Irish famine orphans 
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