Authors: Kay Moloney Caball
1
Sydney Morning Herald
(NSW 1842–1954), 3 July 1850, p. 1, viewed 8 November, 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page1511976.
2
Ibid.
3
South Australian Register
, 23 October 1848, p. 2.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/archaeology/department/publications/
staniforth/2002e.pdf
.
7
Moreton Bay Courier
(Brisbane, Qld. : 1846 - 1861), 4 August 1849, p. 2, viewed 26 September, 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page
2.
8
Christopher O’Mahony,
Poverty to Promise
, (Darlinghurst NSW 2010), p. 147.
9
National Archives of Ireland,
http://www.nationalarchives.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ireland-Australia-transportation.pdf
., accessed 24 October 2013.
10
South Australian Register
(Adelaide, SA: 1839 –1900), 12 September 1849, p. 2, viewed 15 November, 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4148214.
11
http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/estate-show.jsp?id=1823
accessed 20 September 2013.
12
‘[No heading]’,
South Australian Register
(Adelaide, SA: 1839–1900), 15 September 1849, p. 4, viewed 21 September 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4148157.
13
1849 Elgin, Diane Cummings,
http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/fh/
passengerlists/1849elgin.htm
, accessed 20 September 2013.
14
‘Criminal Jurisdiction’,
South Australian Register
(Adelaide, SA 1839 –1900), 20 October 1849, p. 3, viewed 21 September, 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50247064.
15
Ibid.
16
‘Police Court’,
South Australian
(Adelaide, SA 1844–1851), 26 August 1850, p. 3, viewed 21 September 2013.
17
Ibid.
18
Strutt, Journal, p. 76.
19
Ibid., p. 73.
20
Ibid., p. 74.
21
Ibid., p. 74.
22
Ibid., p. 74.
23
Ibid., p. 75.
24
Ibid., p. 75.
25
Ibid., p. 75.
26
Ibid., p. 78.
27
Ibid., p. 78.
28
Ibid., p. 78.
29
Ibid., p. 80.
30
Ibid., p. 80.
31
Ibid., p. 90.
32
Ibid., p. 90.
33
Sydney Morning Herald
(NSW 1842–1954), Thursday 19 September 1850, p. 3.
34
Dr Allen interviewed in his 93rd year in
Peeps into the Past, Pioneering Days on the Mannin
g.
35
http://www.australianhistory.org/goldfield-life
, accessed 9 November 2013.
36
Christopher O’Mahony, Valerie Thompson,
Poverty to Promise
(Darlinghurst NSW 2010), p. 22.
37
S.M. Ingram,
Enterprising Migrants – An Irish Family in Australia
(Melbourne 1975), p. 148.
38
TrevorMcClaughlin,
www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume8/issue4
/features/?id=245
accessed 18 March 2013.
39
Bruce Mitchell,
The Australian Story & Its Background
, (Melbourne 1967), p. 89.
40
Ibid., p. 91.
W
ERE
T
HESE
I
RISH
orphan girls pawns in a political struggle between Imperial and Colonial interests? Or were they ‘useless trollops’ with low moral standards, as accused by the Australian newspapers of the day?
Queen Victoria’s Empire was at the height of its power. The colonies in Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Van Diemen’s Land were agitating for self-government which was granted by Earl Grey, in his capacity as Colonial Secretary, in 1852. Australia was a valuable resource of wheat, gold and wool to the British Empire. On the other hand their ‘Irish Colony’ was troublesome and financially draining. In the forty years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in 1844, ‘a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world’.
1
Cecil Woodham-Smith records that between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and sixty-one special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland and that:
without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low.
2
We can understand how seeing a neat political fix to a situation appealed to Earl Grey and his civil servants in the Colonial Office. Supplying females who would initially fill some of the vacancies that the colonists were desperate for, leading on to marriage with the male surplus, and emptying the workhouses in Ireland of the same females who were costing the ratepayers vast and seemingly unending amounts of money, seemed a no-brainer.
There is no doubt that the girls ‘selected’ from the workhouses were not qualified or experienced in any way for going ‘into service’ either for the matrons of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide or their compatriots in the outback and the bush. The girls had come in the main from very disadvantaged backgrounds. They would have had absolutely no knowledge of housekeeping and only very little experience of farm work. At home or in the workhouse, they would not have grown crops, fed and cared for cows, sheep or pigs. Prior to their selection and departure, a year or two years living in the workhouse would not have qualified anyone for a life of service in the outside world. Added to these difficulties was their lack of education. We know that the majority of the girls arriving could ‘not read or write’ according to their arrival records. This may have meant ‘could not read or write
English
’ as Irish was their first, and in the case of the Dingle and some of the Kenmare girls their only, language. In any, case their English reading and writing would have been poor. It was too soon for the recently established National Schools, set up in 1838 in Ireland to have imparted these skills to this particular set of girls.
An upwardly mobile Australian middle class, particularly in the cities, were now looking for trained staff, those who had previous experience in upper-class homes as housekeepers, cooks, dealing with visitors, educating children and other domestic duties that would pertain in a great house. These girls were also expected to ‘know their place’, and that was one thing they didn’t know – they had spirit, fire and strong personalities, seen as insolence and impertinence by their employers.
Taking into account the disadvantages of their level of service experience, was the furore aroused in the Australian newspapers justified or were there a deeper political agenda at work in which the girls were unwitting pawns?
Mary (Maria) Conway, Listowel
Mary Conway’s address on the Minutes of the Listowel Board of Guardians on 11 September 1849 was Dromkeen, Causeway. She had a sad life from her initial accident, through the death of four of her children to her eventual death at the age of 44.
Patricia McGill, great-granddaughter of Mary, tells us her tragic story:
Mary Conway arrived on the
Thomas Arbuthnot
and in February 1850. She was one of a group of girls under the charge of Dr Strutt the Surgeon General on the ship, who were travelling inland for the purpose of being placed in service in the Yass-Gundagai area of New South Wales. When they were passing through the village of Camden west of Sydney, Mary and another girl, Mary Brandon were involved in an accident.
The two girls were unable to travel any further and after receiving treatment for their injuries, were left in the care of a Catholic priest. Following recovery, Mary returned to Sydney and on 1 August 1851, she married Benjamin Castle at St Mary’s Church in Sydney. For a period of time after the marriage the couple lived in Castlereagh Street Sydney. Benjamin was an English convict who had been transported in 1837 for housebreaking. He received his ticket of leave in 1844 and Conditional Pardon in 1847. As far as can be ascertained through official records, Mary and Benjamin had six children but only two survived until adulthood.
Between 1858 and 1859, the family was living in Glebe, an inner west suburb of Sydney. In 1860, at the time of Anastasia’s death, the family had moved west of Sydney to Picton, a small village. In 1862, when Joseph was born, the family was living at the Old Goulburn township which is further west of Picton.
Nothing further is known of their place of residence until 1876 when it has been established that the family was living in the vicinity of Wagga Wagga in the Riverina district of New South Wales where Benjamin held a farming lease on the Eunonyhareenyma pastoral run.
Mary died in a cart accident on 24 June 1876. She was a passenger in a horse-drawn spring cart driven by her husband Benjamin Castle. They were returning home to Eunonyhareenyma. Approximately five miles from Wagga Wagga the cart overturned and Mary was killed.
At the time of her death, Mary had two surviving children, James and Benjamin. Both of these children reached adulthood. James died on 23 September 1930, aged 76 years and is buried in Rookwood cemetery in Sydney. Benjamin was fatally wounded in a horse and sulky accident in October, 1935 near West Wyalong and is buried in the West Wyalong cemetery. Mary’s husband Benjamin died in 1892 and is buried in the Wagga Wagga cemetery.
I am a descendant of Mary’s son, Benjamin through my mother, Amy who was his 3rd daughter from his second marriage. She was a granddaughter of Mary Conway.
It seems that Mary’s life had its sad parts with the loss of so many of her children and meeting an untimely death herself. However, her descendants are many and her existence is commemorated on the Memorial which has been erected at the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. When I look back over the distance of time, I imagine her to be a strong, courageous young woman who was prepared to face the unknown in this distant, foreign place and make the very best of the conditions for herself and her family. I am very proud to be her descendant.
The negative press and comments started almost immediately after the arrival of the first of the Irish orphans. On Wednesday 13 March 1850, a month before the arrival of the Kenmare girls on the
John Knox
, both an editorial and a series of reports were carried in the
South Australian Register
quoting from other newspapers in the colony –
Sydney Morning Herald
,
Melbourne Morning Herald,
Goulbourn Herald
and
Melboure Argus
– all containing negative and inflammatory comments on the Irish orphans.
3
The editorial prefaced its comments by saying that it had not stopped to enquire whether the immigration of the orphans was the work of Caroline Chisholm ‘as Dr. Lang alleges’, and went on to print in heavy ink:
We feel sure that we are expressing the universal voice of the public in declaring the present system of Irish female orphan immigration a serious injury to the community, and a wonton abuse of the funds intended by the colonists to procure the immigration of virtuous and reputable parties.
4
Then, over the rest of the page, it quoted similar articles in other Australian newspapers. The initial paragraphs were stories of unsatisfactory apprentices. In all cases the girls accused of the various misdemeanours denied the accusations. A Mrs Kennedy of Paramatta accused ‘Frances Tearnan, an Irish Orphan girl’ of being ‘impudent in the extreme, and had informed her [Mrs Kennedy] that she would not stand at the wash tub unless she was allowed to wear patent leather shoes’.
Another lady, a Mrs Bennett of Sydney, was quoted before a magistrate as accusing her apprentice of being ‘insolent, idle, used bad language, kept bad company and beat the children’ and she asked for her indenture to be cancelled. The report went on from there to describe in the most negative terms the structure of the scheme and worked up to a diatribe against Catholicism and its dangers:
We fear that time will prove that these girls are about the worst class of emigrants that could be sent to the colony … A gentleman of our acquaintance went yesterday to the Immigrant Barracks to engage an Irish Orphan, at the usual rate of wages, but not one of the whole lot could he procure, because he lived at Brighton [then an outlying country area outside Melbourne]. These girls seem to have got it into their heads that they have come here for the sole purpose of getting married, and that Melbourne consequently holds out greater inducements in that respect than Brighton. Really, we trust that the Government will interfere and bring these young ladies to their senses.
In a more sardonic tone ‘There is a kind of liberality which is very profitable – it is making a free gift to others of what has become burdensome to ourselves. England is very prodigal of such presents, her bounty scarcely knows a limit’. The article goes on to say of the Imperial Government: ‘If the colonies could only be brought to accept it, she would shift from her own shoulders the entire bulk of her convict and pauper population, and deposit them on the shores of New South Wales.’
But the longest and last contribution is devoted to religion and the perceived problems that will arise from the orphan scheme. The
Melbourne Argus
, always the most negative, states that the time has come to stop this type of emigration before it is ‘productive of very serious results’.