Australia and Irish settlement: The Famine years

Unlike the United States and Britain, Australia did not receive a great flood of immigrants following the Great Famine. ‘Fast relief was necessary and Australia’s colonies offered no analgesic to the famine’s distress.’[1] The famine emigration came too early for Australia to benefit. She was too young, too small, and too far away. This did not prevent their arrival proving high contentious, a consequence in part of the depressed nature of the Australian economy from the early 1840s. ‘As a group, Irish migrants to Australia were far from well-off financially, but they were not refugees from the Famine’.[2] In 1846 the second year of the Famine in Ireland, the government of NSW conducted a census that revealed that among the foreign born, virtually all from England, Scotland and Ireland, Irish immigrants were an astonishing 38 per cent. More than half of these colonial Irish were recent arrivals nearly 26,000 reaching Australia between 1839 and 1845 as free immigrants. Never again, for the great ‘gold rush’ immigration was soon to hit eastern Australia, would the Irish form such a high proportion of Australia’s population. NSW had a distinctly Irish character during the years of the Great Famine.[3]

One of the predictable consequences of famines is that they tend to be associated with increased crime. Ireland during the Great Famine was no exception. Using the indictment returns of the Inspector of Prisons, Wilson showed that the number of crimes increased from an annual average of 19,000 between 1842 and 1846 to 31,000 between 1847 and 1850.[4] The outrage returns tell a similar story. Between 1842 and 1845, they averaged 6,700, but between 1846 and 1850, the number increased to more than 13,000. Although a good deal has been written about Irish crime, surprisingly little of it is about how crime changed during the Famine. [5] Hunger-related crimes are thought to have increased in relative importance, as well as disputes over employment and land tenure, increasing the proportion of protest crimes. It also seems possible that the Famine would have pulled into criminal activity many people who would not normally have been involved, such as women and older people. Sixteen ships arrived with convicts from Britain and Ireland in Van Diemen’s Land between 1843 and 1847 but there were thirty between 1848 and 1850.

What happened in Ireland during the terrible years between 1845 and 1850 had a big impact in Australia. Proportionately, the impact was perhaps greater than in North America, although the overall numbers are very small by comparison. Between 1848 and 1850, more than 10,000 Irish immigrants arrived in Sydney, Port Phillip and Moreton Bay directly from scenes in Ireland of starvation, dislocation and widespread emigration. Few of the Irish born who lived in Australia would have been untouched by the first-hand stories from home brought by these new arrivals. Anxiety for relatives at home would have been widespread. This resulted in collections being made throughout Australia for famine relief. The Sydney Herald reported that over one week more than £600 had been collected in Sydney and how much the situation in Ireland was bringing out the best in the city’s inhabitants[6]

However widely they may have differed upon other matters, each one has vied with his neighbour in contributing towards this good object, and the large subscription which has been raised in so short a time redounds much to the honour of the Colony, and will, no doubt, be duly appreciated at home.

Newspapers published long lists of subscribers to public causes and during early October, Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy, Governor of NSW led the donations with a gift of £10, followed by £5 each from the Colonial Secretary, Edward Deas Thomson, married to the daughter of earlier Irish governor, Sir Richard Bourke, and the famous politician and later framer of the NSW constitution of the mid 1850s, Sir William Charles Wentworth of Vaucluse House. William’s father was Darcy Wentworth from County Armagh, given the option of transportation or self exile in 1790 by a London judge for highway robbery. While Irish names are prominent in the lists for donations of between £1 and a few pence, ‘sundry small sums, the Herald called them, there were many others personally moved by Irish distress. Mr Birnstingel, a Jewish jeweller, gave a pound and three pounds was subscribed by the government employees at the Barracks, then still a convict establishment. Other donors were described as ‘A Friend’, ‘A Liberal Protestant’, ‘26 labourers in the blue metal quarry’ and 2 shillings and sixpence from Mundahalay, an Aborigine living in Braidwood.

Sydney’s Catholic paper, The Sydney Chronicle, also reported that a mechanism had been set up to allow local people to remit small sums in safety to their relatives in Ireland. Emigrants who had already settled abroad and managed to save, were able to send home money to enable other members of their family to join them. One local who certainly did this was Peter Reilly, a builder, from South Head Road. In a letter written in September 1846 to his mother and his brother accompanying the money, and later published by Caroline Chisholm in her book Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered,[7] Peter referred to the ‘lamentable news’ from Ireland of ‘starvation’ and ‘sickness’ and of how glad he was that he had left the country

I thank God for leaving it at the time I did...This is a fine plentiful country, there is no person starving here, I am sure the dogs in Sydney destroys more beef and bread than all the poor in Ireland can afford to eat, there is one good thing in Sydney, that the poor man can afford to eat as good beef and mutton as the rich man—we are very comfortable thanks be to God.

Peter’s family had arrived in 1842 with him in Sydney from Ballyhaise in County Cavan on the government immigrant ship Margaret. Lack of money at the time had forced him to leave one very young daughter at home in Ballyhaise with her grandmother. In his letter, which included a much needed £2 for his ‘poor broken-hearted mother’, Peter begged his brother and his mother to send Mary Anne out to them through arrangements being made by Caroline Chisholm[8], ‘The Emigrant’s Friend’ and she arrived in Sydney on the Sir Edward Parry in February 1848. It is worth noting that this ship carried the first group of what might be called Irish ‘famine refugees’ to Australia well before the first ship carrying the now well-known Irish orphan girls, the Earl Grey, anchored in Sydney Cove on 6 October 1848.

During, and for some time after, the famine years, Irish workhouses were severely over-crowded. In 1849, 250,000 people were being accommodated: by June 1850, there were 264,048. Although the death rate in these institutions was, so many destitute people clamoured to be admitted that there was rarely room to spare. A general emigration scheme was introduced in 1849 that allowed Boards of Guardians to help paupers emigrate. People who were judged as able to work and who had been in the workhouse for over a year were eligible. Between 1849 and 1851, 1,592 men, women and children emigrated under the terms of this scheme.

---

[1] Ibid, Campbell, Malcolm, Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815-1922, p. 38.

[2] Akenson, D.H., Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants 1815-1822, (McGill-Queen’s University Press), 1991, p. 60.

[3] Reid, Richard, ‘The great famine: Australian connections’, Ronayne, Jarlath and Noone, Val, (eds.), Australian commemoration of the great Irish famine: proceedings of conferences, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, March 1996, (Victorian University), 1996, pp. 21-30 and O’Farrell, Patrick, ‘Lost in transit: Australian reaction to the Irish and Scots famines, 1845-50’, in ibid, O’Sullivan, Patrick (ed.), The meaning of the famine, pp. 126-139. See also, O’Brien, John B. and Travers, Pauric, (eds.), The Irish emigrant experience in Australia, (Poolbeg), 1991, pp. 6-102.

[4] Wilson, James Moncrieff, ‘Statistics of Crime in Ireland, 1842 to 1856’, Journal of the Dublin Statistical Society, Vol. 2, (10), (1856), pp. 91-122.

[5] Woodward, N.W.C., ‘Transportation Convictions during the Great Irish Famine’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 37, (1), (2006), pp. 59-87.

[6] Sydney Herald, 5 October 1846.

[7] Chisholm, Caroline, Emigration and transportation relatively considered: in a letter dedicated, by permission, to Earl Grey, (John Ollivier), 1847.

[8] Iltis, Judith, ‘Chisholm, Caroline (1808-1877)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 221-223 and Bogle, J., Caroline Chisholm: The Emigrant’s Friend, (Gracewing), 1993, pp. 99-112

Coalitions, zombie parliaments and elections

In 2011, the new coalition government introduced five-year, fixed term parliaments in legislation passed on 15 September.  This ended the incumbent’s advantage of being able to call a general election when it suited the government best as Margaret Thatcher did in 1983 or delaying it until the last minute as John Major did in 1997 and Gordon Brown in 2010. Let’s consider that we’ve had fixed-term parliaments for the last thirty years and what the possible outcomes of elections might have been. 

Would the Conservatives have won the election in 1980?  Probably yes, Callaghan’s government would have found it difficult to come back from the ‘winter of discontent’ and the widespread belief that ‘Labour isn’t working’.  Given the rifts within Labour and the outcome of the Falklands War, a Conservative victory in 1985 was likely but, given the increasing debacle over the community charge and the increasing unpopularity of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives lost in 1990.  With Labour under Neil Kinnock in power, the Conservatives elect Michael Heseltine as leader and he wins the 1995 election after a lack-lustre Labour government floundered.  With the economy improving in the late 1990s, the Conservatives win again in 2000.  Given that the modernisation of the Labour Party had begun while it was in office between 1990 and 1995, it is questionable whether Tony Blair would have risen to prominence in the party.  Either way, Labour wins the 2005 election but falls victim to the global financial crisis in 2010. 

If we had four-year parliaments then the electoral history could have been very different.  The Conservatives again win in 1980 and 1984 and, as the community charge issue had yet to achieving toxic intensity, in 1988 as well.  With John Major as prime minister from 1990, he surprisingly wins in 1992.  With Tony Blair as Labour leader after 1994, Labour wins in 1996, 2000 and 2004.  Gordon Brown takes over as Prime Minister in 2007 and wins the election in 2008.  With his strong global leadership over the financial crisis, Gordon Brown gains in national influence and, though he does not win the 2012 election, Labour is the largest party and, with the support of the Liberal party, forms a coalition government.  David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives since 2006, falls on his sword and Boris Johnson takes over as Conservative leader. 

Although these scenarios are speculative, they do suggest that there is a considerable difference between the possible outcomes of having either four of five year fixed parliaments.  The reason why, I assume, the decision was made to go for five year parliaments was because that was what already existed and had done since 1911.  In reality, five year parliaments and there have only been four since 1945—1945-50, 1959-1964, 1987-1992, 2005-2010—are far from the norm in British politics, four year parliaments are.  Whether, as some have suggested, it means that the final year of a five-year government is a zombie parliament is questionable but it is clear that in the final year of the government, the prospect of an extended general election campaign is almost self-evident.  This might be less the case with four-year parliaments when the incumbent government will presumably still have aspects of its programme to complete.

Pre-famine Irish free settlement and policies

The Whig Government could not disclaim responsibility for the actions of the Emigration Committee but it had no mechanism in place before 1836 through which to exercise control. The services of the London Emigration Committee were dispensed with at the end of 1836 and responsibility for the operation of the government system taken by T. F. Eliot as Agent-General for Emigration. His work coexisted with the bounty scheme devised in 1835 by the Government of NSW, to encourage the immigration of skilled agricultural workers as well as unmarried women and mechanics.[1] The colonial bounty system to aid potential immigrants came into being in 1837 and was revised in 1840. [2] It granted financial aid under certain conditions to persons bringing into New South Wakes from the Britain and Ireland agricultural labourers, shepherds, tradesmen, female domestics and farm servants.

The sum of £38 would be paid as a bounty for any married man, of the above description, and his wife, neither of whose ages on embarkation to exceed 40 years; £5 for each child between 1 and 7 years; £10 for each child between 7 and 15 years and £15 for each above 15 years; £19 would be allowed for every unmarried female domestic or farm servant not below 15 nor above 30 years, coming out under the protection of a married couple as part of a family.

This proved cheaper than the government’s scheme by between 30 and 50 per cent. Although over 13,000 emigrants had been sent to NSW under the government scheme, there were increasing demands for its abolition. In September 1840, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, who had superseded the Agent-General for Emigration earlier in the year, sought to justify the government scheme suggesting that the cost of the bounty scheme would increase but this did little to dampen colonial criticism.

There were two main reasons for colonial complaint that were evident in the colonial press and in the despatches send by Sir George Gipps. First, emigrants were chosen more with the aim of reducing Britain’s pauper population than supplying NSW with able labourers. This argument was reinforced by the close links between the Agent-General and the Poor Law Commission and their close collaboration in the management of assisted emigration. This criticism was especially directed at the Irish who were regarded as being entirely unsuited to the needs of the colonists and the colonial press maintained that the interests of the colony were being ‘thrown overboard to promote the Irish poor laws’.[3] Secondly, the occupations of immigrants were inappropriate for work in the colonies leading to some trades being overcrowded while others, especially in the country districts, were being restricted because of the lack of suitable labourers.

Increased pressure for reform was helped by the appointment of Lord John Russell to the Colonial Office in 1839 and resulted in the creation of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in January 1840 with responsibility for land and emigration across the Empire centralised in one body. This sought, not altogether successfully, to resolve the tensions between Britain’s and Ireland’s desire to reduce its surplus population and supply the colonies with efficient labourers. For the next three years, the bounty system coexisted with the activities of the Land and Emigration Commission but divided control failed to deliver the necessary labour to the colonies and in mid-1842 the NSW government recommended that the bounty system should be abandoned. Faced with a mounting depression from 1842, the NSW Committee on Immigration argued that too many immigrants since 1839 had been artisans and not agricultural labourers who might have reduced the labour scarcity and the consequent high wages.

Slightly over half of all United Kingdom assisted immigrants between 1837 and 1850 came from Ireland and, though small in comparison with the flood to the United States, proved to be of major importance for Australia.[4] By 1846, a quarter of NSW’s population was Irish-born. The Irish already in Australia were very adept at using free or assisted passage schemes to help their siblings and neighbours. In certain areas, whole villages were transplanted from Ireland, or sections of a town or city would be almost exclusively Irish. Although there were tensions between them and immigrants from Britain, Irish immigrants had little difficulty finding employment and were soon merged into the colonial population. They did not avoid agricultural districts. The heaviest concentrations of Irish settlers were found neither in the cities nor the outback, but in relatively populous regions surrounding major towns. As one hostile observer wrote

The Irish do not like going into the interior; but like to hold together like cattle, where they can squat down and gossip about all the ins and outs of the neighbourhood and have their priests and chapel in sight. An Irishman out here for twelve months knows more of the history of the people than an Englishman in seven years.

Until 1850, pastoralism dominated the Australian economy and, though not insignificant, industrial and urban growth lagged behind.[5] The major class realignments that occurred in the industrialising United States were absent but there were important colonial divisions between the ex-convicts or emancipists and the exclusives who had come to the colony as free men. The critical question was one of civil status: should emancipists have the same civil and legal rights as exclusives? The Irish-born came from both sides of this social divide, though more were emancipists than exclusives. The result was a campaign to ensure that emancipists could sit on the newly formed district councils and the defeat of proposals to include civil status in the 1841 census. What characterised this campaign was its bipartisan nature with Catholic and Protestant reformers working together in a common interest.

Religion proved the other major division in colonial life. The Church of England maintained a savage attack on the practice of Roman Catholicism from the early years of penal settlement. However, the its hope for exclusivity was ended by Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and following the removal of civil disabilities on Roman Catholics, two Irish Catholics[6] were appointed to important positions in NSW that coincided with the appointment of Richard Bourke, an Irish liberal Protestant, as governor. In 1836, the Church Act provided state assistance to all religious denominations relative to the number of adherents effectively ending any monopolistic ambitions of the Church of England. Bourke was anxious that the sectarian divisions of Ireland should not be replicated in Australia and the legislation successfully established state disinterest in doctrinal matters that proved resilient throughout the nineteenth century. Even John Dunmore Lang, a Scottish Presbyterianism whose early life instilled antagonism to Irish immigration and the Roman Catholic Church, could defend the civil and religious liberties of Roman Catholics already settled in Australia as British subjects in the 1840s while at the same time agitating strongly against further Irish immigration to the colony. In addition, there was no evangelical movement in Australia that paralleled the strength of the American revival. This is not to say that religion was unimportant and by the end of the 1840s there was a visible increase in religious consciousness through it never generated the same level of religious bigotry as in the United States.[7]

In general, the Irish in Australia were well dispersed and seldom without non-Irish neighbours to gossip about. Even within the cities, Irish ghettoes never developed: as another witness pointed out, ‘Melbourne is far too Irish as a whole to have any special ‘Irish quarter’. The Irish-born were no longer inevitably marked as outsiders but were contained within the colonial mainstream. Unlike in America and Britain, the Irish immigrants shared in the development of the country in ways that they did not in America and on the mainland. Bourke’s religious liberalism meant that the Australian environment was beneficial to many Irish immigrants and there were few divisive issues that set them apart from their fellow colonists.

---

[1] Huntsman, L., ‘Bounty emigrants to Australia’, Clogher Record: Journal of the Clogher Historical Society, Vol. 17, (3), (2002), pp. 801-812; Haines, Robin F. and McDonald, J., ‘Skills, origins and literacy: a comparison of the bounty immigrants into New South Wales in 1841, with the convicts resident in the colony’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 42, (2), (2002), pp. 132-159.

[2] On the operation of the government scheme and the colonial bounty system in the late 1830s, see, ibid, Madgwick, R.B., Immigration into Eastern Australia 1788-1851, pp. 130-168. See also, Haines, R., ‘Nineteenth century government-assisted immigrants from the United Kingdom to Australia: schemes, regulations and arrivals 1831-1900, and some vital statistics 1834-1860’, Flinders Occasional Papers in Economic History, Vol. 3, (1995), pp. 1-171.

[3] Sydney Herald, 17 February 1840.

[4] Table IX, in ibid, Madgwick, R.B., Immigration into Eastern Australia 1788-1851, p. 234.

[5] For a positive view of economic expansion, see, ibid, Brown, Richard, Three Rebellions, pp. 171-175.

[6] Roger Thierry was appointed commissioner of the court of requests in 1829 and John Plunkett as attorney-general three years later.

[7] Campbell, Malcolm, Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815-1922, (University of Wisconsin Press), 2008, pp. 30-36.

Chickens coming home to roost…I think not!

I have read with interest the speech Ed Miliband made today as part of what he sees as ‘the most important election for a generation’…presumably he means since 1997.  Lets deal with the ‘let those who are without sin…’ points first.  He says he is serious about dealing with environmental issues and that climate change would be at the centre of his agenda…well he couldn’t really say I don’t give a damn about climate change could he?  Of course it’s going to be at a heart of his agenda though what that actually means in practice is unclear.  He also said that vocational and academic qualifications would be valued ‘equally’ by his party.  I’ve been hearing this for thirty years by a succession of party leaders, ministers and MPs and the reality for most people is that academic qualifications are still regarded as superior to vocational ones.  I’d like to know how he intended to achieve this. 

Let’s move on to more substantive issues.  The minimum wage would rise to more than £8 an hour under Labour.  It’s currently £6.50 and will rise before the election.  In effect, what he is saying is that by 2020, it will go up by less than £1.50…that’s 30p a year…so much for a ‘living wage’!  As far as immigration is concerned—you know the subject Labour candidates have been advised not to talk about on the doorstep—there’s really little to distinguish Labour from the other parties, UKIP apart.  Immigration, he says, makes the UK ‘stronger, richer and more powerful’ but those who enter the country should ‘play by the rules ‘and ‘contribute before they claim’.  Talk about vacuous generalisation!  He also believes that the A & E crisis would be solved by improving community health services.  So having introduced the GP contract that effectively made it a five day, 9-6 service, Labour is going to do what?  Given that two GPs failed to recognise that my wife had pneumonia—hardly a difficult illness to identify--something A & E picked up immediately, can we really have confidence that GPs can fulfil the same or similar functions as A & E?  Yes too many people go to A & E for trivial reasons or are there because of their own, often drunken, stupidity, but are Labour planning to introduce a 24/7 National Health Service rather than what is in effect a Monday to Friday service?

As for people ‘chocking on their cornflakes’ after David Cameron urged firms to use windfalls from cheaper fuel to fund pay rises, that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable position to take.  Yes, wage increases have either been non-existent or extremely low over the past five years and I’m afraid I don’t think that this was any more than a practical position for those in both public and private sectors to take—though poorly managed when executives were getting high levels of remuneration giving a lie to George Osborne’s ‘we’re all in this together’.  In a recession everyone suffers or should suffer and people are worse off today than they were in 2010 but was there an alternative?  The Ed Balls’ solution would simply have increased borrowing and would have done little for the private sector that would have effectively cut wages to survive.  With their argument about a cost of living crisis shot, Labour now appears to be saying the economic success and a concomitant improvement in wages is an attempt to ‘wipe away five years of failure’.  Well it’s coming up to an election, what else did he expect! 

I’m hardly a supporter of the Conservatives, but is this really the best that Ed can do?

Chickens, dead parrots and political debate

It was hardly a surprise that Prime Minister’s Questions today saw David Cameron and Ed Miliband trading blows over the proposed TV leaders’ debates in April.  Both accused each other of being ‘frit’ with Cameron saying that he would not debate if the Greens are not included while Miliband using the well-worn chicken analogy to explain his resistance to the debates.   Let’s be clear the decision of who should or should not be involved in the debates was not made by politicians.  The result was that UKIP was in, but the Greens were not.  The SMP, Plaid Cymru and the Northern Ireland parties were not included since they are seen a national not UK parties.

Why the broadcasters made its decision is really one of logistics.  Imagine a debate between the leaders of all the political parties in the UK…it wouldn’t be a debate, more a series of statements…so you can understand why they took the decision.  The debates are, or at least should be, a combination of spectacle as well as reasoned debate and simply a series of statements would not be that.  The solution seems to me to be relatively simple.  

• There should be a series of national debates including all of the UK political parties who have members of Parliament.  This would include the Greens and end Cameron’s reluctance to debate.
• There should also be a national debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland involving the leaders of the political parties in each respective country who have members of Parliament.

If you already have a member of Parliament not a political party, then you should be involved in the debates. 

Pre-famine Irish free settler immigration

Despite the emphasis on the early convict settlements, free immigrants had settled in NSW from the earliest days of British Australia. Mass immigration to Australia, however, did not really get underway until around 1820 when the disruption caused by the Napoleonic Wars had eased. Even from that early date, Australian immigration showed marked differences from other migration centres favoured by Irish emigrants. It was more attractive than emigration to America because it was mainly aid-provided. The tyranny of distance meant that the numbers going to Australia compared to North America were much smaller. By 1828, free Irish immigrants only numbered 500 including a liberal sprinkling of Protestants. Australian immigration was also much more controlled and regulation was applied at points of departure in Britain and Ireland and at entry points in Australia. The highly bureaucratic nature of Australian immigration in the colonies may have been a legacy of the bureaucracy of transportation that was geared to handle the regulation and administrative processing of batches of convicts.

While the majority of Irish emigration was paid for out of public funds, usually raised by the sale of land, this does not imply that these immigrants were from a lower class or poorer than, for example, those who went to North America. It has been suggested that it was the middle-classes, who could read, who took advantage of the advertised government schemes. On the other hand, landlords anxious to clear their estates of the poorer classes would have opted for the cheaper passage to the North Americas. Those who travelled without government assistance, less than 1,000 a year before the 1850s, had greater resources than those who left Ireland for North America as the total costs involved were much higher. Australia, therefore, attracted a significant proportion of immigrants with resources to set themselves up either in business or on the land.[1]

From the 1820s, a significant number of free settlers with capital entered Australia. These were usually the younger sons of the gentry or of well-to-do tenant farmers and from merchant and professional classes, who could be given funds by their families to establish themselves in Australia.[2] Some commissioned officers at British Army outposts such as India sold their commissions and for the money purchased ranches in Australia. For £1,000 one could purchase more than 2,000 acres of good land. They needed shepherds, stockmen, ploughmen, artisans and miners who came from among evicted tenants and others as ‘indentured’ labourers, whose passages were mostly paid for. ‘Improving’ landlords such as Col Wyndham, offered free passage to tenants and their families to emigrate to Canada or Australia. Many families took up of the offer when their only alternative was eviction. Emigration from Ireland to South Australia only began in the 1840s and was much encouraged by Charles Bagot, land agent for Bindon Blood and supervisor of the Burren road system. He chartered a boat, the Birman that arrived into Adelaide in 1840. His son discovered copper at Kapunda. Several North Clare families, probably prompted by Bagot, settled in the district: Kerin, Canny, Linnane, Davoren etc and all have descendants. Dr Blood, first medical doctor in Kapunda and first mayor of the town, emigrated from Corofin in 1844. The Clare Valley, the great wine-producing area in South Australia and the town of Clare were named after the County Clare in Ireland.

Before the gold-rush caused a population explosion, Australia was considered vastly under-populated. More people were needed and Australia looked to the British Isles as a provider of labour.[3] Britain had a significant amount of surplus labour yet the Poor Law Guardians in England, who controlled the English workhouses, were initially rather slow to take advantage of the need for servants in Australia.[4] Under the Poor Law Act of 1834, they were permitted to send paupers abroad and pay the cost out of the poor rates.[5] While it was well within the confines of the Act to migrate whole families, the few Poor Law Boards in Britain who took advantage of this proviso, normally did no more than provide outfits and discharge small debts allowing the migrant to take advantage of free passages offered by the Australians. Furthermore, it was the urban based and, notably, the London boards, who initially made the most use of the clause. Daniel O’Connell commented on the problem of surplus population in Ireland during the debates on the poor law in 1834

The apparent surplus population, for it was nothing else, and the bad consequences that followed, proceeded solely from the long-continued misgovernment and misrule under which that country laboured, and he was sorry to see that the present Government seemed as fresh to continue that misrule as if it had never been tried; but, thanks be to God, they would fail of success in this as in everything else.[6]

When the Poor Law Act was extended to Ireland in 1838, the Irish Poor Law Guardians used the emigration clause from the outset sending paupers to Canada. [7] Emigration, as a short-term remedy for Irish poverty, had been recommended in the 1833 report by the poor law commissioners, but this was ignored and the workhouse system instituted instead. Between 1838 and 1843, 112 workhouses were built and a further 18 were under construction.[8] These 130 workhouses were intended to cater for 94,010 paupers and probably would have been adequate had the Irish famine not occurred.

In early 1831, fifty girls from the Foundling Hospital in Cork were given free passage to NSW. This was the only emigration that was assisted by the British Government whose attitude in the early 1830s was dominated by its prohibitive cost. Viscount Goderich, the Colonial Secretary, said that parishes should continue to send their surplus population to Canada or the United States unless they were reimbursed for the greater expense of the voyage to Australia. The critical question was not whether sending surplus labour to beneficial, but who should carry the cost. One possible solution was revenue from the sale of colonial land introduced at the beginning of 1831 replacing the existing system of granting land. However, the Legislative Councils in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land did not support these proposals fearing that they would become the dumping ground for British and Irish paupers. This marked a significant shift in colonial attitudes. During the 1820s, paupers would have been welcomed but there was growing suspicion of any suggestion coming from London and especially from the Colonial Office. The colonies were prepared to accept ‘industrious and well conducted labourers’ but only if they were ‘selected by the colonists, or by friends of the colonists resident in England’.[9] Although Goderich sought to allay colonial fears by arguing that the colonists had an entirely false view of the typical pauper, this attitude persisted with colonists exaggerating the defects of various schemes of assisted emigration in the 1830s and 1840s.

Despite colonial concerns, a system for assisted female emigration to NSW financed from the revenue from land sales in the colonies was introduced in September 1831 and was soon extended to artisans.[10] Both projects were briefly placed under the supervision of the newly appointed Commissioners for Emigration but it was the London Emigration Committee that acted as the official organisation through which emigrants were sent to the colonies between 1832 and 1836. In 1832, Red Rover carried women from Cork and Dublin to NSW; in 1834, the Edward carried thirty women from the Mendicity Society in Dublin.[11] Between 1832 and 1836, sixteen shiploads of emigrants, most of them women, were dispatched from English and Irish ports. Though welcomed by some in Australia, this scheme was not without its critics

The females which have come to us by the present opportunity, are of unusually tender years to be thus launched upon the world. Contrary to the stipulation, many of them are under fifteen; and about thirty, we learn, under twelve or fourteen, will require to be kept like our own orphans, and reared and educated for some years at the public expense, until fit for service. A person of common sense, whether male or female, will naturally ask these urgers of forced emigration—’If it be so fine a thing, how comes it, gentlemen, that you are not gone?’ Example is better than precept—is much better than persuasion based on so rotten grounds. [12]

The emigration of women and artisans in the early 1830s was of little effect on the labour market in NSW because the number who emigrated was so small. By contrast, in Van Diemen’s Land, free immigrants caused problems in what was largely a penal colony. Settlers would not employ convicts when free labour was available and although Governor Arthur was not opposed to assisted emigration, he believed in should only operate when special types of people were required. He maintained that the colony would be better served by the arrival of small farmers and capitalists who could employ the convicts and single women whose arrival might reduce levels of immorality caused by the lack of balance between genders.

---

[1] Parkhill, Trevor, ‘With a little help from their friends: assisted emigration schemes, 1700-1845’, in Duffy, Patrick J. and Moran, Gerard, (eds.), To and from Ireland: planned migration schemes c.1600-2000, (Geography Publications), 2004, pp. 57-78 provides a general overview.

[2] McClelland, Ian, ‘Worlds apart: the Anglo-Irish gentry migrant experience in Australia’, in Walsh, Oonagh, (ed.), Ireland abroad: politics and professions in the nineteenth century, (Four Courts), 2003, pp. 186-201.

[3] See, for example, the debate on waste land in the colonies in 1839: Hansard, HC Deb, 25 June 1839, Vol. 48, cc840-919.

[4] Howells, Gary, ‘”On account of their disreputable characters”: parish-assisted emigration from rural England, 1834-1860’, History, Vol. 88, (2003), pp. 587-605 considers Bedfordshire, Norfolk and Northamptonshire.

[5] Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834: Copy of the Report made in 1834 by the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, (Printed for H.M. Stationery Office by Darling and Son), 1905, Part II: Remedial Measures, Section 4: Emigration.

[6] Hansard, HC Deb, 16 June 1834, Vol. 24, cc446-79, at c476.

[7] Clause 47 on emigration was not without its opponents as can be seen in the debates on the clause on 2 March 1838: Hansard, HC Deb, 2 March 1838, Vol. 41, cc374-85. Nicholls, George, Sir, A history of the Irish Poor Law: in connexion with the condition of the people, (J. Murray), 1856, Burke, Helen, The people and the poor law in 19^th century Ireland, (WEB/Argus), 1987, Gray, Peter The making of the Irish Poor Law 1815-43, (Manchester University Press), 2009 and Crossman, V., The Poor Law in Ireland 1838-1948, (Economic and Social History Society of Ireland), 2006 provide a good summary of developments. See also, MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘The poor law, emigration and the Irish question, 1830-55’, Christus Rex, Vol. 12, (1958), pp. 26-37.

[8] See, O’Brien, Gerard, ‘The establishment of poor-law unions in Ireland, 1838-43’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 23, (1982), pp. 97-120.

[9] Darling to Goderich, No. 19; Arthur to Hay, 11 July 1831, C.O. 280/29, cit, Madgwick, R.B., Immigration into Eastern Australia 1788-1851, (Sydney University Press), 1937, republished, 1969, p. 90.

[10] On female emigration 1832-1836, see, ibid, Madgwick, R.B., Immigration into Eastern Australia 1788-1851, pp. 88-111. The government contributed £8 (about half the cost of passage to NSW and Van Diemen’s Land) as a free and unconditional grant to women; artisans were required to repay the advance of £20 out of their wages.

[11] O’Brien, Margaret, ‘Cork women for Australia: assisted emigration, 1830-40’, Journal of the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society, Vol. 93, (1988), pp. 21-30.

[12] Hobart Town Courier, 12 February 1836, p. 2, cit, Hansard, HC Deb, 11 July 1836, Vol. 35, cc99-100.

Accident & Emergency: a political imponderable

In the past two weeks I have had direct experience of Accident & Emergency…not personally but a member of the family has had a serious bout of pneumonia though she’s now on the mend.  Did the four hour target for getting her on to a ward matter?  Well no.  She needed to be treated in Accident & Emergency before being moved after about five hours to ICU and then to the Coronary Care Unit. The doctors and nurses were brilliant and got her through the initial crisis.  So why is there, in fact is there, a crisis in A & E?

The problem with targets is that that when they are not met, it is seen as a failure with all the concomitant political flak.  The reality is that when there is increased demand for A & E services, it is almost inevitable that targets will not be met.  The NHS is an organisation that is extensively managed but A & E ultimately cannot be managed…it is a service that reacts to immediate demands.  You also have the day-to-day work that hospitals do…appointments, doing operations, providing support etc.….that are planned.  So you have two elements in many hospitals—the ‘normal’ planned operation of the hospital caring for people and A & E where planning is based on ‘predicted’ demand and predictions are always tentative.  Take an emergency patient who needs to be admitted but the only way this can be achieved is that another non-emergency patient is told ‘your operation has been postponed’ or ‘we need your bed, we’re sending you home’.  It’s a matter of priorities…the emergency patient may died if not admitted but the patient whose operation is postponed may be living with some non-life threatening pain.

Does this mean that we need to expand A & E services?  Well we could but whether this would be a good use of constrained resources is questionable.  It isn’t a case of there being insufficient A & E services, it’s the reasons why people use them today.  Until relatively recently, A & E was the last recourse for people…it was an emergency option often accessed through calling 999.  That is no longer the case.  Today people who, in the past, would have gone to their GP turn up at A & E because they can’t get an immediate doctor’s appointment.  Many A & E departments deal with this by having a minor injuries section dealing with triage leaving emergency staff to deal with real emergencies.  The problem is that we no longer have a 24/7 GP service…yes I know we have an emergency call out system operating outside GP working hours but how effective this is in practice is open to question. 

A further and an increasingly important issue is the aging population.  With people living longer because of improvements in medical technology, it is inevitable that the number of older people going to A & E is going to increase.  I was recently in a respiratory unit of 24 beds in which 17 of the patients were over 65 of whom half had been there for over a week.  Care in the community does not provide a solution for these patients…they are seriously ill and need to be in hospital.  This does, however, put pressure on the limited resources hospitals have and puts pressure on A & E, the route most of these patients took to get into hospital in the first place. 

So have we, what many of today’s newspapers call ‘a meltdown’ in A & E?  If the four hour target is taken as the criterion for measuring this, probably yes.  But then that target is an aspiration, not a true reflection of the realities in A & E.  Our obsession—or should I say politicians’ obsession with targets—gets in the way of the superb work done in A & E across the country in often difficult circumstances.  We don’t plan to be an emergency patient but if we are what concerns us is the expertise of those treating us, not whether they hit a spurious target.

Pre-famine Irish transportation: Van Diemen’s Land and elsewhere

Transportation to NSW ended in 1840, by which time a total of 150,000 convicts had been sent to the colonies from Britain and Ireland. Strictly speaking, no convicts were transported directly to the Port Phillip District of NSW. However, convicts did find their way to the District in one of four ways. First, convict labourers were sent down, about 100 at a time, to provide government labour between 1836 and 1842, but most of these men were sent back to Sydney after relatively short terms and there were complaints that more were needed. Secondly, a number of squatters from central NSW brought down some of their ‘assigned servants’ who were convicts. How many is uncertain but there were probably about 550 in the district in 1842 and many of these remained in Port Phillip when their sentences expired. Thirdly, and most importantly, were time-expired prisoners from VDL and NSW. The number is tentative as no records were kept as they were moving within the same colony, though probably they were fewer than those from VDL. These are thought to have numbered over 3,000 in 1846, about 15% of the male population. Probably another 2,000 had arrived by 1848, and after a temporary decline, many more came after the gold discoveries in 1851. Though often described as scoundrels, villains and ruffians, these men provided an important supply of labour to squatters in the 1840s. But they also committed 40% of the district’s crime between 1841 and 1846 and their presence produced strong criticism of the imperial authorities for trying to block the colony’s attempts to stop their arrival. [1]

Finally, between 1844 and 1849, nine ships arrived in the Port Phillip District carrying 1727 ‘exiles’ known as ‘Pentonvillians’ with tickets of leave amongst the passengers.[2] The Royal George arrived on 16 November 1844 carrying 21 convicts and their arrival met with a mixed reception.

It is a resumption of the transportation system, without its discipline, with all its evils, and none of its benefits. We are to have British convicts like the Vandiemonians, but we are not like them to have the balancing advantage of a British Government expenditure of half-a-million annually. We are in short to have cargoes of felons palmed off upon us as genuine immigrants....There exists no law to justify one country pouring out the sweepings of its jails upon another, and when it is attempted we should not be inclined to look to the tedious and expensive delays of the law for a remedy. We should duck the scoundrels if they attempted to set foot in a country of freemen, and send them back as they came to the greater scoundrels who dared send them hither.[3]

Many people saw it as transportation by another name, ‘It will scarcely be believed – and yet such is the fact – that transportation to New South Wales is revived...’.[4] The last of the nine ships, the Eden arrived on 21 February 1849 with 199 convicts. Unlike earlier convicts who were required to work for the government or were hired from penal depots, the ‘Pentonvillians’ were free to work for pay, but could not leave the district to which they were assigned. All of the ‘Pentonvillians’ were male, with an average age of 22 years; the youngest was 11. Nearly all were literate and many came from trade and manufacturing backgrounds. Most of their offences were crimes against property, for which they received sentences of seven years or more. They were given pardons on condition they did not return to Britain until the completion of their sentences.

VDL was first settled in 1804 with a penal settlement established at Sullivan’s Cove, later Hobart and free settlers began to come to the island in 1816. Initially convicts were sent from NSW but from 1817 they were sent there directly from Britain. The Macquarie Harbour penal colony on the West Coast of Tasmania was established in 1820 to exploit the valuable timber Huon Pine growing there for furniture making and shipbuilding. Convicts sent to this settlement had usually re-offended during their sentence of transportation, and were treated very harshly, labouring in cold and wet weather, and subjected to severe corporal punishment for minor infractions. In 1830, the Port Arthur penal settlement was established to replace Macquarie Harbour, as it was easier to maintain regular communications by sea. Although known in popular history as a particularly harsh prison, its management was far more humane than Macquarie Harbour or the outlying stations of NSW. Experimentation with the so called model prison system took place in Port Arthur. Until the late 1830s most convicts were either retained by Government for public works or assigned to private individuals as a form of indentured labour. From the early 1840s the Probation System was employed, where convicts spent an initial period, usually two years, in public works gangs on stations outside of the main settlements, then were freed to work for wages within a set district. Between 1803 and 1853 approximately 75,000 convicts served time in VDL. Of these 67,000 were shipped from British and Irish ports and the remainder were either locally convicted, or transported from other British colonies. This represents about 45 per cent of all convicts landed in Australia. Transportation to VDL ended in 1853.

It has been suggested that the southern colony received the worst of the convicts and therefore its experience was notably different from that of NSW.[5] There appear to be three reasons for this view. First, that in the early years of settlement VDL was used as an unofficial dumping ground for ‘difficult’ convicts by the colonial administration in NSW. Little evidence supports this. Indeed, in numerical terms, VDL benefited considerably from the additional infusion of labour that colonial shipping indents show was largely composed of convict mechanics.[6] Secondly, that following the establishment of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur penal stations, VDL received a disproportionate number of re-transported secondary offenders. This charge has more merit, although the overall numbers were relatively small and were to some extent outweighed by convicts re-transported from VDL to mainland settlements. Thirdly, before 1840 relatively few convicts were transported direct from Ireland, VDL received a disproportionate number of urban convicts from the slums of industrialising mainland Britain. However, there is an alternative way of looking at this. As convicts from Britain were significantly more skilled and literate than those from Ireland, the lack of Irish transportees was an economic advantage not a disadvantage.

The Irish community was small before the 1840s when transportation to NSW ceased. Between 1840 and 1853, 7,248 Irish male and 4,068 Irish female convicts arrived in the island, 20 per cent of all convicts. They committed relatively fewer local offences than others. After release, many convicted during the Famine of 1845-1849 settled in humble occupations or followed the gold rushes on the mainland. Despite mythology, few Irish were transported for purely political offences. Some Irish belonging to secret societies, such as the Whiteboys, were marginally political, and several United Irishmen and Defenders from the insurgency of the 1790s reached VDL.

Richard Dry, a radical Protestant and owner of a cloth factory was one of the more significant Defenders in the Dublin area.[7] He was arrested in county Roscommon in February 1797, was tried at the Cork city assizes in September and sentenced to be transported for life. Dry had spent nine months in Cork city jail when the outbreak of Rebellion in May 1798 further delayed his transportation and he did not reach NSW until 11 January 1800.  After four year in Parramatta, where he remained aloof from United Irish intrigue, Dry accompanied Lieutenant-Colonel William Paterson to the site of Port Dalrymple [Launceston], VDL, in November 1804. Having worked as a storekeeper Dry was pardoned in 1809 and appointed commissariat clerk of the town four years later.⁷⁴  Freedom and business acumen enabled Dry to begin amassing livestock to the number of 7,000 sheep and 300 cattle within a few years, enabling his emergence as one of the island’s most respectable immigrants. By contrast, Michael Rogers’ experience of VDL ultimately proved fatal. He had been sentenced at Meath on 26 February 1844 to transportation for life on a charge relating to ribbonism, was detained at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in March 1844 and transported on the Cadet arriving in VDL in late August. The convict records show his involvement in a sequence of offences escalating from misdemeanour to crime over a period of two years that culminated in the wilful murder of Joseph Howard, a police constable, in February 1848. The Hobart Town Courier reported that Rogers had been bush-ranging with Patrick Lynch and John Riley in the Sorrell district and referred to them as the ‘Fingal bushrangers’.[8] Tried in December 1848, Rogers was executed on 3 January 1849. [9]

The leaders of the failed Young Ireland 1848 Rebellion obtained tickets-of-leave: William Smith O’Brien, John Martin, Kevin O’Doherty, John Mitchel, Thomas Meagher, Patrick O’Donohoe, Terence MacManus. The last four escaped to America, while their colleagues were pardoned and returned to Ireland. W.P. Dowling, a Young Irelander working with Chartists in London, remained in VDL as an artist and photographer.[10] Seven humbler working men, transported after an attack on a police barracks at Cappoquin in 1849, worked their way through the convict system to relative freedom.[11]

In 1829, Western Australia was established initially as a convict-free colony when the Swan River settlement was founded in Perth with the landing of the first settlers at Garden Island and later at Fremantle.[12] However, during the 1840s the lack of skilled and unskilled labour threatening to cripple the colony and there was growing pressure for convicts to provide much needed cheap labour for building the infrastructure necessary to service the colony. Between 1845 and 1847, York Agricultural Society, supported by several merchants lobbied the colony’s Legislative Council to petition the British Government to send convicts.[13] For convicts who were nearing the end of their sentence, a system of ticket of leave was also introduced that helped provide labour for the development and expansion of agriculture. In 1849 by Governor Captain Charles Fitzgerald sent the Colonial Office a set of resolutions from a public meeting held in Perth on 23 February calling for the introduction of transportation. Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies in London accepted this proposal and by Order in Council allowed the Governor to declare the colony ‘a place to which convicts could be sent’. [14] The first shipment of 75 transportees arrived aboard the chartered barque Scindian on 1 June 1850. Early convicts were men selected because they had almost finished their sentences and were therefore less difficult to control. No female convicts were sent to Western Australia. Transportation of convicts from UK to Western Australia (and to Australia) officially ended in 1868 and ‘It is believed that 9,721 convicts stepped onto Western Australian soil alive.’ [15]

There were important differences between Western Australian convicts and those transported to the eastern states.[16] The men sent to Western Australia were more often convicted of more violent crimes: 19 per cent burglary usually with violence; 13 per cent crimes against the person and 9 per cent robbery. The men in the eastern states more frequently came from rural areas, they were older and a there was a larger proportion of agricultural workers. Within the Western Australian system, as well as being convicted of more violent crimes, the men arriving in the later years were more likely than earlier transportees to have come from an urban background. Consequently, they were more artisans than agricultural workers and they tended to be literate and married: 38 per cent were artisans compared to 8 per cent agricultural labourers; 64 per cent were literate or semi-literate; and 24 per cent were married.

---

[1] Serle, pp. 126-127.

[2] Clarke, Keith M., Convicts of the Port Phillip District, (K.M. & G. Clarke), 1999 and Wynd, Ian, The Pentonvillians, (Ian Wynd), 1996.

[3] Port Phillip Patriot, 21 November 1844.

[4] Port Phillip Patriot, 26 December 1844.

[5] See, for example White, C., A history of Australian bushranging, Vol. 1, (Lloyd O’Niel), 1970, p. 2; ibid, Giblin, R.W., The early history of Tasmania, p. 130; and ibid, Robson, L.L., The convict settlers of Australia, p 157

[6] Dyster, B., ‘Public employment and assignment to private masters, 1788-1821’, in ibid, Nicholas, Stephen, (ed.), Convict workers, p. 145

[7] Ibid, O’Donnell, Ruán, ‘‘Desperate and Diabolical’: Defender and United Irishmen in early NSW’.

[8] Hobart Town Courier, 26 February 1848.

[9] http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/kennan.htm Keenan, Mel, ‘The Armagh Five: Irish Ribbonmen in Tasmania 1840-1850’, The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, (1996-1999) contains valuable material on Rogers.

[10] Davis, R. and Petrow, S., (eds.), Ireland & Tasmania 1848, (Crossing Press), 1998

[11] Meredith, David and Oxley, Deborah, ‘Contracting convicts: the convict labour market in Van Diemen’s Land 1840-1857’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 45, (1), (2005), pp. 45-72 examines the problem of declining labour supply.

[12] In 1826, convicts from NSW were sent to King George Sound to establish a settlement and their presence was maintained until 1830 when control of the settlement was transferred to the Swan River Colony. Early in 1839, John Hutt, Governor of Western Australia received a circular from the Colonial Office asking if the colony would be prepared to accept juvenile prisoners who had first been reformed in ‘penitentiaries especially adapted for the purpose of their education and reformation’. After seeking comment from the Western Australian Agricultural Society, Hutt responded that, ‘The Majority of the Community would not object to boys not above 15 years of age....’ but that the labour market could not support more than 30 boys per year. 234 juvenile prisoners were subsequently transported from Parkhurst Prison to Western Australia between 1842 and 1849. These Parkhurst apprentices were then ‘apprenticed’ to local employers. As Western Australia was not a penal colony, contemporary documents scrupulously avoided referring to the apprentices as ‘convicts’. Most historians have maintained this distinction. Gill, Andrew, Convict Assignment in Western Australia 1842–1851, (Blatellae Books), 2004, however, argues that they were convicts and that their apprenticeships constituted convict assignment. See also Stannage, C. T., (ed.), A New History of Western Australia, (University of Western Australia Press), 1981, especially Statham, Pamela, ‘Swan River Colony 1829-1850’, pp. 181-210.

[13] Statham, Pamela, ‘Why Convicts I: an Economic Analysis of the Colonial Attitude to the Introduction of Convicts’ and ‘Why Convicts II: the Decision to Introduce Convicts to Swan River’, in Stannage, C.T., (ed.), Studies in Western Australian History, 4: Convictism in Western Australia, (University of Western Australia Press), 1981, pp. 1-18.

[14] Hasluck, Alexandra, Unwilling Emigrants: a study of the convict period in Western Australia, (Oxford University Press), 1959, pp. 28-29

[15] O’Mara, Gillian, Convict Records of Western Australia, (Friends of Battye Library), 1990, p. 1; see also O’Mara, Gillian and Erickson, Rica, Dictionary of Western Australians, Vol. 9: ‘Convicts in Western Australia 1850-1887’, (University of Western Australia Press), 1994. See also, Reece, Bob, (ed.), Studies in Western Australian History, 20: The Irish in Western Australia, (University of Western Australia Press), 2000.

[16] Taylor, Sandra, ‘Who were the convicts? A statistical analysis of the convicts arriving in Western Australia, 1850-51, 1861-62 and 1866-68’, in ibid, Stannage, C.T., (ed.), Studies in Western Australian History, 4: Convictism in Western Australia, pp. 19-26. See also the papers in Sherriff, Jacqui and Brake, Anne, (eds.), Studies in Western Australian History, 24: Building the Colony: The Convict Legacy, (University of Western Australia Press), 2006.

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

---

[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]

---

[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.