Kerry Girls (24 page)

  
1
  
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/pms/dizzy.html
, accessed 13 March 2012.

  
2
  C. Woodham-Smith.,
The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849
(London 1962), p. 36.

  
3
  
South Australian Register
(Adelaide, SA 1839–1900), 13 March, p. 4, viewed 12 November 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page3932148.

  
4
  
The Argus
(Melbourne, Vic.), Friday 15 March 1850, p. 2.

  
5
  
South Australian Register
(Adelaide, SA 1839–1900), 13 March 1850, p. 4, accessed 26 September 2013,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page3932148.

  
6
  Ibid.

  
7
  Patrick O’Farrell,
The Irish in Australia, 1788 to the Present
(Cork University Press 1966), p. 74.

  
8
  Trevelyan to Clarendon, PROL T.64.367.C/I, 29 January 1848 quoted in Kinealy
, This Great Calamity
(Dublin 2006), p.317.

  
9
  
South Australian Register
article (Adelaide, SA 1839–1900), Friday 6 January 1854, p. 3.

10
  Trevor McClaughlin,
Barefoot & Pregnant?
, Vol. 2, p. 119.

11
  
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/lost-children
, accessed 12 November 2013

12
  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Australia
, accessed 12 November 2013.

W
HEN ONE TAKES
into account the distress, sadness and despair that prevailed in Kerry during the Famine years, the poverty, privation and misery of the majority of the population prior to it and the continuing penury and destitution in the aftermath, there is no doubt that the Earl Grey Scheme was an opportunity for most of the girls who were ‘selected’ in Dingle, Kenmare, Killarney and Listowel.

An ‘opportunity’ is defined as a ‘favourable chance’ and we would have to agree that not all of the girls were capable physically or mentally of taking this ‘favourable chance’ and turning it to their advantage. We have to admire the physical strength of those girls who followed their husbands to the goldfields, trekking through unmade roads and rivers, evading bushrangers and aborigines, later having large families and living to a ripe old age.

There is no doubt from the histories here of a number of the girls, written by their descendants, that they were a brave, resourceful, spirited and gutsy set of women. They took on lives that demanded courage, extreme hard work, resilience in the face of misfortune, and were ‘tough’ in the best sense of the word.

In their lives as pioneering wives and mothers in the interior of New South Wales, in the goldfields and in the newly explored and discovered territory of Queensland, they showed a capacity to resist defeat, a strength of mind and body to take on demanding and dangerous challenges. While I have no evidence that any of the Kerry girls (with the exception of Margaret Raymond) suffered any mental traumas, we know that girls from other workhouses ended their lives in psychiatric institutions in Australia.

The tragedy or sadness and grief that must have been part of their experience would have sprung from the dislocation to such a different way of life. The Kerry girls, in the main, came to Australia from rural areas or the miserable dirty and overcrowded lanes of the towns. When ‘volunteering’ to travel halfway across the world, they had no idea of the way of life that was awaiting them and the displacement from the only life experiences that they knew from home.

In Kerry, they lived in large extended families, close together. Their entire worlds were their own townlands and maybe a few surrounding – as far as they could walk to or, if they were lucky, be taken in a donkey cart. Strangers, with the exception of authority figures, hardly ever ventured into their local territory. Their knowledge or experience of crops were limited to hay, wheat, corn, barley, turnips and potatoes. They were familiar with the domestic animals of dogs and cats, farm animals of pigs and hens, perhaps cows and sheep, and not much more. Their fires which were a constant feature of cottage life were sourced from local bogs. Rain and sunshine came in equal measures, the weather was never extreme. Floods and fires were almost non-existent.

While they lived a pauperised existence even before the Great Hunger, it was not all unhappiness and depression. A happy-go-lucky race, the long dark evening were spent sitting around the fire storytelling, fiddle and accordion playing, singing and dancing. Stories of the Fianna, the adventures of Diarmuid and Gráinne, tales of colossal hurling matches between the Fianna and the Tuatha de Dannan would have been passed on for generations from grandparents to children.

How did they cope with the loneliness of the bush, of the distances separating them not alone from their friends who had travelled with them, but the loss of connection with their extended kith and kin at home?

Irish families would have been deeply superstitious, they believed in the banshee and in fairies and all of the traditions and customs associated with keeping the fairies at bay. There wasn’t a task in the house or at play that didn’t bring a warning of what might happen if the fairies were crossed. It was bad luck to put shoes on a table or chair, place a bed facing the door, bring hawthorn into the house, give a knife as a present, or wear green. And everyone knew that it would bring seven years’ bad luck if they broke a mirror. The banshee and her wailing would definitely foretell a death and the belief was that it followed only some families. Who was there in Australia to listen to and sympathise with such beliefs?

The religious situation in Ireland, was one that could not be taken too earnestly at this time. Religious emancipation was granted in 1829 and it was from this time onwards that the Catholic Church grew its power. A lot of parishes did not have a church in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Religion was generally passed on to the family by the mother or more so by the mother-in-law if she was also living in the home. Men did not overly concern themselves with the rituals. All would have observed the Friday abstinence and Lenten fasts, night prayers would have been said but attendance at Masses was not always possible.
1
It was difficult to travel to Mass in the churches that were scattered throughout the outlying areas. Large families meant that some of the family stayed at home from Mass to mind the younger ones.

The irony of the fear engendered in Australia that the Earl Grey girls would somehow set up a Papist state, now seems in hindsight a ridiculous supposition. In fact many of the girls married outside their faith within a very short time of arrival and they brought their children up as committed Christians in a number of different faiths.

On balance, we would have to say that the opportunity that these 117 girls were offered far outweighed the tragedy aspect.

We will leave the last word to the British Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, the infamous Charles Trevelyan, who stated in a letter in 1846:

The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.
2

We know that these girls were neither ‘selfish’ nor ‘perverse’ but I like to think that they were ‘turbulent’ and remained so, in their new lives!

  
1
  Erin I. Bishop,
The Work of Mary O’Connell 1778–1836
(Dublin 1999)
,
p. 153.

  
2
  Trevelyan, private letter to Col. Jones, 2 December 1846.