Pre-famine Irish transportation: New South Wales

John Dunmore Lang noted that the Irish were sent almost exclusively to NSW. He went on to observe that no less than one-third of the total population of the colony of NSW in 1837 was composed of Irish Catholics, of whom nineteen-twentieths were convicts or emancipated convicts.[1] One observer noted the difference between national groups: Scottish convicts were considered the worst and Irish the best in VDL and NSW. He thought that this was because English law was more severe for minor crimes: ‘A man is vanished from Scotland for a great crime, from England for a small on, and from Ireland, for hardly no crime at all.’ [2]

The first ship to sail directly from Ireland carrying convicts under sentence of transportation was the Queen that arrived in Port Jackson on 26 September 1791.[3] From 1791 to 1798, most offenders were petty criminals from Dublin and Cork but with some representatives of ‘Defenders’, a largely Catholic movement in the rural counties bordering Ulster.[4] 200-300 Defenders landed in Port Jackson in the pre-Rebellion period and comprised at least half of all Irish political prisoners who arrived in NSW before 1806. [5] After the 1798 and 1803 rebellions, many of the 500-800 individuals transported were political prisoners, members or supporters of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen. In 1801, Governor King described the Irish political prisoners who arrived on the Anne and those that had preceded them and ‘desperate and diabolical’[6] and a year later he asked the British government not to send any more Irishmen there and

...as few as possible of those convicted of sedition and republican practices, otherways, in a very short time this colony will be composed of a few other characters, which must necessarily draw on anarchy and confusion...[7]

His concern was borne out two years later when Irish convicts, many transported for their part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, played a leading role in the Castle Hill Rebellion.[8]

From 1803 until the 1820s, there was a return to the predominantly urban emphasis of the early phase. From the late 1820s to the onset of famine migration many of those transported were rural offenders, some members of agrarian organisations such as the Whiteboys and ‘Terry Alts’.[9] Robert Holmes, a farm servant, for example was transported for life in 1819 for attacking and robbing the house of Pat Roche of Kilmallock, County Limerick. In 1829, Peter Gray, a twenty-seven year old ploughman was transported for life at Sligo for administering unlawful oaths. The following year he was hanged at Bathurst for bush-ranging and participating in an uprising in the town.[10] Between 1821 and 1840, 636 people from County Clare were transported to NSW, principally for petty crime, stealing bread, butter, clothing, killing sheep for meat, done largely in the name of survival. More serious crimes, including the stealing of cattle, earned life sentences. These convicts sent home word about the superior kind of life available in the colonies setting the pattern for subsequent emigration especially from Tipperary, Clare and South East Galway. [11]

Many of the early convicts eventually became established members of their communities. John Grant is a good example of Irish success in NSW.[12] Born in 1792 in Moyne, County Tipperary, in August 1810 he was sentenced to transportation to Australia at Clonmel for the attempted shooting of his landlord’s son. The man had apparently seduced, with her apparent consent, John’s sister Mary, and he, perhaps falsely, claimed that John had tried to shoot him. Apparently the courting couple heard that John and his brother Jeremiah were after them, and fearing the consequences, decided on a plot to remove John and Jeremiah. The landlord’s son fabricated a story that John had fired a loaded gun at him on 22 March 1810 and had missed. However, their sister had a change of heart and murdered her lover, as he was the only man who could testify against John. So the ‘justice of mercy’ was dispensed. The sister was hanged in the Spring Assizes, John was sentenced to life transportation to Australia and Jeremiah got away with 12 months in prison.

John left Falmouth on 21 January 1811 on the Providence, arriving in Sydney on 2 July. He had the good fortune to be assigned immediately to William Redfern[13], an emancipated assistant surgeon and worked on his farm at Campbelltown, rising to the position of overseer by 1817. Soon afterwards he petitioned Governor Macquarie for ‘mitigation of his sentence’ stressing that he was a family man and a trusted servant of Redfern. His petition was successful, he was granted his ticket of leave, and on 31 January 1820 was granted a pardon conditional that he stayed in Australia. He seems to have been accepted by the community, as he was appointed constable of Campbelltown within three months of becoming a free man. Twice in 1821, there are references to the government paying him to do work; for example he was paid £75 for tree felling and burning off. But like many of his contemporaries he looked west to the Blue Mountains for fame and fortune. Macquarie promised him 50 acres and in March 1821 he settled on land at the foot of Mount Victoria naming his property Moyne Farm, after his home in Ireland. The government assigned him a considerable number of convicts to clear the land. He is found selling wheat to a government store in Hartley in 1823. Over the years he acquired land to the west, and the 1828 census shows him occupying 150 acres (25 cleared, 11 cultivated) at Hartley where he also had 10 horses, 370 cattle and 2,440 sheep. In addition at Belabula, near Bathurst he had 5,500 sheep on 4,000 acres under an annual licence with 56 convicts and ticket of leave men working for him. Over the next thirty years, he acquired a considerable quantity of land. In 1853 his eldest son John married Julia Finn of Hartley and he gave them Moyne Farm plus 160 acres as a wedding present. He lived on his estates at Merriganowry on the Lachlan River where he owned several thousand acres. He died on 13 December 1866, aged 74, after several years of illness leaving an estate worth £3,000

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[1] Lang, John Dunmore, Transportation and Colonization; or The Causes of the Comparative Failure of the Transportation System, (Bell and Bradfute), 1837, pp. iv-v, 471. Sir Richard Bourke to Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 December 1833, cit, Burton, William Westbrooke, The State of Religion and Education in New South Wales, London, 1840, Appendix X, pp. lx-lxi, thought the figure was ‘a fifth’.

[2] Henderson, John, Observations on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Calcutta, 1833, p. 9.

[3] Ibid, Reece, Bob, Irish convicts: the origins of convicts transported to New South Wales, pp. 231-273 considers Irish transportation to 1795. For the early transportees, see, Donohoe, James Hugh, Convicts and exiles transported from Ireland, 1791-1820, (J.S. North Pub.), 1997 and The Catholics of New South Wales, 1788-1820 and their families, (Archives Authority of New South Wales), 1988.

[4] On radical Irish politics in the 1790s see, McDowell, R.B., Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760-1801, (Oxford University Press), 1979, Smyth, Jim, The Men of no property: Irish Radicals and popular politics in the Late Eighteenth Century, (Macmillan), 1998, Dickson, David, Keogh, Daire and Whelan, Kevin, (eds.), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, (Lilliput Press), 1992 and  Elliott, M., Partners in Revolution: the United Irishmen and France, (Yale University Press), 1982. Pakenham, Thomas, The Year of Liberty; the great Irish Rebellion of 1798, (Hodder & Stoughton), 1969 and O’Donnell, Ruán, Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803, (Irish Academic Press), 2003 provide accounts of the two rebellions.

[5] 519 male prisoners were disembarked from the four ships carrying Defenders to NSW between 1793 and 1797.  Kiernan, T.J., The Irish Exiles in Australia, (Clonmore & Reynolds), 1954, p. 9. See, http://members.tip.net.au/~ppmay/defenders.htm: O’Donnell, Ruán, ‘‘Desperate and Diabolical’: Defender and United Irishmen in early NSW’.

[6] King to Portland, 10 March 1801, HRNSW, Vol. 4, p. 319.

[7] King to Portland, 21 May 1802, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 764-766.

[8] Silver, Lynette Ramsay, The Battle of Vinegar Hill: Australia’s Irish Rebellion, (Doubleday), 1989, revised ed., (Watermark Press), 2002; the 1804 Rebellion is often called by Australian historians an Irish rebellion or ‘Australia’s Irish rebellion’. This is misleading as the group of rebels on Vinegar Hill included convicts and free men of many nationalities. Of the leaders hanged, several were English convicts. It is true, however, that the Irish convicts were punished more heavily for the rebellion than the English convicts. See below, pp. 495-526.

[9] Peter Mayberry’s database on Irish Convicts to NSW 1791-1835 identifies 754 individuals transported for agrarian unrest after 1816.

[10] He was evidently part of the Ribbon Gang that took part in an insurrection in late 1830. It was not widespread despite the wild rumours that circulated at the time nor was it popular with convict servants in general. The number of the gang (twelve in total) was exaggerated and reports of convict uprisings in other places all proved unfounded. It might correctly be called a rebellion because the main object of the insurgents was to wreak revenge for past injustices, not to seek personal freedom.

[11] Curley, S., ‘Clare Convicts before and after the Famine’, in Rees, Bob, (ed.), Irish Convicts: The Origins of Convicts Transported to Australia, (University College Dublin), 1989, pp. 81-112.

[12] For genealogical information on the Grant family and their emigration to Canada and Australia, see, http://www.grantonline.com/index.htm

[13] William Redfern was a leading surgeon in early colonial NSW and had been transported in 1801 four years after the Spithead naval mutiny; Ford, Edward, ‘Redfern, William (1774-1833)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 368-371.

Australia: Pre-famine Irish emigration

The First Fleet settled at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 and NSW became a British penal colony. Convicts greatly outnumbered free settlers and most prisoners were transported for terms of 7 or 14 years, but some went for life. [1] The new colony was a curious hybrid: a military colony that was run by naval officers but with a civil justice system largely because this was the system under which convicts had been sentenced. Initially settlement was confined to the new colony of NSW. VDL was settled in 1803 as a military outpost of the Sydney prison colony largely to limit French interest in NSW’s southern approaches. [2] Between 1788 and the termination of the system in 1868, Australia received over 160,000 convicts, approximately 40,000 of whom sailed from Ireland. A sense of belonging to a new nation was encouraged in 1817 when Macquarie recommended adopting the name ‘Australia’ for the entire continent instead of New Holland. Continued colonial expansion[3] resulted in the separation of VDL from NSW in 1825 followed, four years later in 1829 with the addition of Western Australia. There was further subdivision of NSW to create South Australia in 1836[4], the genesis of the Port Phillip district from 1835 into Victoria in 1851[5] and in 1859 the northern parts of NSW became Queensland.[6]

The history of Irish settlement in Australia has been called ‘ambiguous’ and ‘often shadowy’. Because of the distance involved and the logistics and cost of the journey, Australian emigration did not develop as a mass movement until the 1820s. Unlike the United States after independence in 1776, some travelled to the southern hemisphere as convicts but the transportation system was progressively withdrawn from 1840 onwards. There were government-assisted schemes such as the emigration of workhouse inmates to Australia. Emigrants who arranged their own travel to Australia were generally better off than those who emigrated from Ireland to North America and Australia attracted a larger proportion of emigrants who had the resources to purchase land or set themselves up in business.[7]

Legislation permitting transportation from Britain to NSW was passed in 1784 and the Irish Act followed two years later. The Irish Statute provided for ‘removal to some of His Majesty’s plantations in America, or to such place out of Europe’ while the British legislation did not name the destination, merely saying ‘beyond the sea, either within His Majesty’s dominions or elsewhere outside His Majesty’s Dominion’s’. This difference appears to have allowed transportation to Australia from England to start in 1787, while there were problems with the Irish Act. Further legislation passed in 1790, designed ‘to render the transportation of such felons and vagabonds more easy and effectual’ and this resolved matters.

When a transportation sentence was handed down, the prisoner was normally returned to the local gaol. Southern prisoners were housed in the city gaol at Cork while those brought to Dublin were mostly placed in Newgate and Kilmainham gaols. The removal of the male convicts to hulks in 1822 meant that conditions at the Cork depot improved considerably.[8] From 1817, a holding prison was provided in Cork to house the convicts and in 1836 a depot was provided in Dublin for female convicts, who had previously not been segregated. Temporary depots were opened, prior to the opening of Mountjoy Convict Prison, at Smithfield (Dublin) and Spike Island in Cork Harbour, for male convicts. Convicts often had to wait up to two years before they were actually transported to Australia.

As soon as a ship arrived in Australia, it notified the port if there were male or female convicts on board. The port authorities inspected the ship and the convicts. The convicts were brought up on deck and inspected by the colonial secretary. Within a few days they were interviewed and asked about their qualifications and previous work history. The convicts were usually assigned soon after this and there was a demand for farm workers and mechanics. The more dangerous prisoners were usually sent to road gangs of up to 300 men guarded by the military. The assignment system had many critics who felt it was corrupt, and too severe. However, convicts from Ireland, especially if they were labourers, were often better clothed and fed than the poor back home. [9]

Convicts only accounted for 12 per cent of the Irish to settle in Australia in the nineteenth century but their influence in shaping subsequent migration from Ireland to Australia far outweighed their numbers. During the 62 years of transportation from Ireland to eastern Australia and VDL, O’Farrell suggests that approximately 40,000 Irish men and women (29,466 men and 9,104 women) were transported to Australia and many more followed their loved ones as free settlers to a new life in the colony. Of those sent from England, estimates suggest that about 8,000 were Irish born and perhaps a similar number of Irish descent. For example, Thomas Wade wrote to his wife in 1826 encouraging her to come to NSW as a free settler and stated that he has permission for her to join him.[10] In 1839, James Stewart was transported for fourteen years for burglary while his father was convicted of receiving stolen goods. His mother, Mary Stewart, residing in Omagh, County Tyrone, requested a free passage to NSW.[11] Peter Cunningham commented in the late-1820s

The Irish convicts are more happy and contented with their situation on board than the English, although more loth to leave their country, even improved as the situation is for a great body of them is by being thus removed...while the burden of another was ‘Many a Mac in your town, if he only knew what the situation of a convict was, would not be long in following my example!...I was never better off in my life...’[12]

O’Farrell estimates about 1.5% of these were unambiguously sent out as political offenders or participants in rebellion or conspiracy, with the great bulk of these coming in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion. [13] If crimes of agrarian discontent and social disaffection are included under the heading of ‘political crimes’, then the proportion of Irish political transportees rises to about 20%. The great majority of Irish convicts were, therefore, sent to Australia largely for petty crimes. John Ahern, for example, was tried at Limerick in April 1849 and sentenced to 15 years transportation for cow stealing[14] while earlier that year Pat Ahern was tried at Cork was transported for 7 years for stealing a cloak.[15] Certainly United Irishmen, Young Ireland and Fenian leaders were transported, but both in Ireland and Australia the myth that many, if not most convicts were sentenced for political offences is unfounded.

Transportation from Ireland to Australia effectively came to an end in 1853. The last ship to carry convicts directly from Ireland to Australia was the Phoebe Dunbar that sailed from Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) near Dublin and arrived in Western Australia on 30 August 1853 and as far as is known, nobody convicted of a crime committed in Ireland was transported to Australia between 1853 and 1868. The sentence of transportation was abolished in July 1857 under an Act of that year, but the Act allowed for convicts sentenced to penal servitude to be sent ‘beyond the seas’. By this means, transportation continued from England until 1868. In 1868, 63 Irish Fenians who had been convicted in Ireland but imprisoned in England were transported from England. They arrived in Western Australia on 9 January 1868 on board the Hougoumont, the last convict transport ship to sail from England to Australia.[16]

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[1] Keneally, Thomas, The Commonwealth of Thieves: the story of the founding of Australia, (Chatto and Windus), 2006. See also, Bernard, Michel, La colonisation penitentiaire en Australie 1788-1868, (Harmattan), 1999.

[2] Foster, Colin, France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony, (Melbourne University Press), 1996, considers French interest in Australian settlement and its influence on the development of their own penal policy. Giblin, W. R., The Early History of Tasmania, Vol. 2, 1804-1828, (Melbourne University Press), 1939, Shaw, A.G.L., (ed.), and West, John, The History of Tasmania, (Angus & Robertson), 1971, ibid, Robson, Lloyd, A History of Tasmania: Vol. I, Van Diemen’s Land from the Earliest Times to 1855, pp. 137-315 and Boyce, James Van Diemen’s Land, (Black Inc.), 2008, pp. 63-250 provides material on VDL’s development.

[3] For discussion of this territorial expansion, see, ibid, Brown, Richard, Three Rebellions, pp. 120-136.

[4] South Australia never accepted convicts directly from England but accepted ex-convicts from other colonies. In the early days of settlement, South Australia was plagued with problems attributed to ‘bolters’ or escaped convicts from the penal settlements in the east of the continent. A significant, but unknown number of ex-convicts also chose to settle in South Australia.

[5] Ibid, Shaw A.G.L., A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation, is an excellent study of the period to 1851.

[6] Evans, Raymond A History of Queensland, (Cambridge University Press), 2007, pp. 51-77, considers the creation of Queensland in 1859.

[7] On the Irish in Australia, see Hogan, J.F., The Irish in Australia, (Ward & Downey), 1887, reprinted (Echo Library), 2006, McConville, Chris, Croppies, Celts & Catholics. The Irish in Australia, (Edward Arnold), 1987, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, (University of New South Wales Press), 1987, 1993, 2000, Ronayne, Jarlath, The Irish in Australia: rogues and reformers, First Fleet to Federation, (Viking Press), 2002 and Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian People: an Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 443-486.

[8] Elizabeth Fry inspected the state of Irish gaols in 1826; see comments in Fry, Elizabeth and Gurney, Joseph John, Report addressed to the Marquess Wellesley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, respecting their late visit to that country, London, 1827, pp. 21-22. She was not convinced, however, of the need for such depots, and seemed more in favour of the English method of bringing the convicts straight from the county and city gaols to the transport ships for embarkation.

[9] Ibid, Shaw, Alan, Convicts and the colonies and Robson, L.L., The Convict Settlers of Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1976, examine the process and the participants. Costello, Con, Botany bay: the story of the convicts transported from Ireland to Australia 1791-1853, (Mercier Press), 1988 generally considers Irish transportation while Robson, Lloyd, ‘The origins of the women convicts sent to Australia 1787-1852’, Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 11, (1963), pp. 43-53 and Robinson, Portia, ‘From Colleen to Matilda’, in Costello, Con, (ed.), Ireland and Australia: Bicentenary Essays 1788-1988, (Gill & Macmillan), 1986, pp. 96-110 look at the role of women.

^[10] National Archives of Ireland: PPC 3030, letter dated 8 February 1824.

[11] National Archives of Ireland: FS 1840 18.

[12] Cunningham, Peter, Two Years in New South Wales, 2 Vols. London, 1827, Vol. II, p. 235. Peter Miller Cunningham (1789-1864) was a Scottish naval surgeon who made four voyages to NSW after 1817 as surgeon-superintendent on convict ships without of loss of any of the 600 convicts. See also a favourable review in the Quarterly Review, January 1828, pp. 1-32 and Fitzhardinge, L. F., ‘Cunningham, Peter Miller (1789-1864)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 267-268.

[13] Ibid, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, pp. 23-24.

[14] National Archives of Ireland: TR 9, P 107.

[15] National Archives of Ireland: TR 8, P 38.

[16] Pickering, Paul, ‘Loyalty and Rebellion in Colonial Politics: The Campaign Against Convict Transportation in Australia’, in Buckner, Phillip A. and Francis, R. D., (eds.), Rediscovering the British world, (University of Calgary Press), 2005, pp. 87-107 is a recent discussion of the end of transportation.