Irish Women in Colonial Australia [Paperback]

Trevor McClaughlin (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 229 pages
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1864487151
• ISBN-13: 978-1864487152
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,496,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Courage of Irish Women, May 21, 2005

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Philip Caudill (The Woodlands, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Irish Women in Colonial Australia (Paperback)

Irish Women in Colonial Australia is a historical anthology of nine essays covering Irish women's migration to Australia from the days of the penal colony to the late 19th century. Edited by Trevor McClaughlin, a senior lecturer in history at Macquarie University in Sydney, the book claims to be the only one published to date (1998) devoted exclusively to the experiences of Irish women migrants to Australia. The essays are presented to the reader in an inexact chronological order, thereby providing useful context for these independently produced works. All nine contributions are written from research of public records in Australia and Ireland and to a lesser degree, from input of family historians. The 229-page book includes brief profiles of each contributor, an introduction explaining his/her research method, a list of figures and tables, a section of notes supporting each essay and an index.

The essays in Irish Women in Colonial Australia begin by exploring the plight of Irish women convicts sentenced to "transportation" to Australia's penal colonies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The story of Ellen Curly, one of 17 Irish women murderers sent to Van Diemen's Land - the original name for Tasmania, so called by the British in honor of Anthony van Diemen, a governor-general of the Dutch East India Company - describes the destiny awaiting most of these women. Curly was a 21-year-old married laundress living in County Cork in the 1850s when she became pregnant in an extramarital liaison with soldier Amos Brooks. Author Richard Davis in "Irish Murderesses as Colonists" says Curly delivered a baby girl, then was arrested and confessed to murder after burying her alive.

Curly's death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. She arrived at Van Diemen's Land aboard the Martin Luther on Sept. 1, 1852. Instead of a dreadful existence in a cell behind bars, the partially literate Curly found herself assigned to work for a local doctor. A year later, colonial authorities deemed her divorced by distance, permitting her to marry William Harris, a prisoner from Bristol who had been transported for a stabbing. Ellen was granted her release in 1856 and received a conditional pardon in 1863. She and William had several children and apparently lived peaceful, productive lives until he died in 1900; Ellen died in 1913. They leave many descendents in modern day Tasmania.

This pattern of new beginnings rather than stark endings for convicts sent to the penal colonies of Australia was more often the rule than the exception. It seems confinement on the ship during the long ocean journey to Australia was considered adequate jail time for them. It's true some were convicted of new crimes in Australia, but common outcomes featured prisoners' placements as servants or menial workers who were later released and occasionally pardoned to live respectable lives, usually in poverty. Portia Robinson in her essay, "An Irish-Australian Identity," admits these criminal Irish women were considered the refuse of Irish society. But in Australia, most overcame their poor education and lack of occupational and social skills to lead honest, industrious lives. Ironically, their sentence to Australia's penal colonies permitted many of them to create for themselves lives that were impossible for women of their class to achieve in Ireland.

Robin Haines in her essay, "Bound for Colonial Australia" echoes Robinson's comments on successful Irish women convict emigrants as she tells us about free immigrant Irish women in Australia. Haines uses New South Wales shipping records and parliamentary papers to show how large these groups of free Irish women immigrants to Australia were. Among all government-assisted arrivals in Australia from the U.K. between 1848 and 1860, 63 percent arriving in New South Wales, 51 percent arriving in Victoria and 59 percent arriving in South Australia were single women. A one colony, one year focus reveals 2,440 or 77 percent of 3,151 government-assisted arrivals in Victoria in 1859 were female. Many were remarkably successful in terms of their material, economic and emotional lives.

Haines refers to the work of David Fitzgerald, editor of Oceans of Consolation and a contributor to this anthology as the author of "Reading the Letters of Emigrant Irish Women" to give readers a sense of what life was like for these free Irish women immigrants from their points of view. Haines cites letters written in the early 1880s by Biddy Burke in Brisbane to her family in County Galway in which Biddy wrote (sic), "I am sorrow that I hadent come 5 years before I did come I would have a lot of money now...I am sending you three pounds for to drink my health and once more." Lamenting the separation from her parents, Biddy nonetheless closed the door on her return to Ireland: "But I don't supose I could live there now."

Haines admits the psychic, physical and socio-economic costs of emigration for many Irish women emigrants were far greater than the compensations. However, she refers to colonial records that testify to the resilience shown by many who fought for their rights, won divorces from dead-end marriages, sought and received licenses for businesses on their own account. She shows how courageous Irish women emigrants to Australia - certainly not all, but many fell in this category - traded the dramatic costs of migration for adventure, excitement and a life free of starvation, misery and lack of opportunity. In other words, many Irish women found hope in Australia.

Richard Reid interprets census data to discuss the demographic scope of Irish women immigrants to Australia in his essay, "Irish Female Assisted Immigration." Reid reports that 31,018 women were among the 62,943 persons of Irish birth in New South Wales' total population of 503,981 residents in 1871. The majority of these Irish arrived between 1848 and 1870 as government-assisted immigrants. Reid enlivens his subject by drilling into the profiles of the emigrants who arrived in Sydney aboard the good ship Caroline in October, 1854. Of the 258 immigrants on board, 254 were Irish and 188 were female. Eighty-six of the women - 47 percent - were from two counties in Ireland: Claire and Tipperary. Reid says nearly a third of all Irish arriving in Sydney between 1848 and 1870 hailed from there. My great grandparents were two of them.

Mary Rynn, my great grandmother, arrived in Sydney in 1869 at age 17 from Ennis in County Clare. She joined her sister, Margaret, who had arrived two years earlier. The Rynn sisters shared an identical reason for leaving Ireland. Their parents had arranged a marriage for Margaret to a local lad in whom she had not the slightest interest, no doubt upsetting her parents by choosing to emigrate rather than tie the knot. Obviously enamored of the young man, the parents tried the same match again with Mary, but with the same result. Not only did Mary say no, she said her goodbyes, traveled to Cork and boarded a ship for Australia with her brother, John, to join Margaret in Sydney.

The Rynn sisters found work together as domestics in a Catholic parish rectory until 1882 when Mary wed my great grandfather, Philip Patrick Hassett. The same age as Mary, both born in 1852, Philip Patrick had emigrated from his family's farm outside Nenagh in County Tipperary about the same time Mary Rynn left Ennis. He chose Australia after a friend who had recently returned from America told him in no uncertain terms to avoid the United States and head for Australia. Mary and Phil Hassett raised five children with Margaret's help; she was one of many Irish women immigrants to Australia who never married. Great grandfather Philip Patrick died in 1910; Auntie Maggie Rynn died in 1932; and my great grandmother Mary Hassett died in 1935.

Reid focuses on Caroline passenger 19-year-old Dora MacDonagh from Limerick to turn his essay from a dry statistical analysis into an interesting story. Dora was fully literate, able both to read and write; one-third of her female shipmates were illiterate. She signed an indenture binding her to seek employment in New South Wales and repay within two years the £13 the colony paid for her ticket of passage. Seventy-three percent of the women on the Caroline sailed to Australia under the provisions of the Assisted Immigration Act. Dora was a Catholic, as were 79 percent of the other 187 women immigrants on the ship. She listed her occupation as milliner, a maker of hats. She married Patrick McMahon from County Clare at St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney on Sept 26, 1857. Dora and Patrick had nine children together before Dora died on Feb. 24, 1908, two years before Patrick. Reid says qualitative research now under way should give clearer pictures of these lives that began in poor, dark Irish rooms and cabins and lived out their days under the bright Australian sun.

Three essays in the book delve deeper in a geographic sense into stories of Irish immigrant women in the colonies of South Australia, Queensland and Victoria. "Irish Women in Colonial South Australia" by Eric Richards and Ann Herraman reveals demand for labor of all sorts was required in and around Adelaide and how the Colonial Secretary reported back to London, domestics "cannot be introduced too plentifully." In "Resistance, Respectability and Ruin," Libby Connors and Bernadette Turner tell us about 4,000-plus Irish Famine orphan girls sent from the workhouses of Ireland to Queensland between 1848 and 1850. One marvels at stories like Mary Moriarity's who arrived in Australia from an Irish workhouse in 1850 at the age of 16. She married ex-convict and illiterate Samuel Brassington two years later and by 1870, the two owned several businesses and had become one of the largest landowners Queensland. Pauline Rule writes... Read more ›