Australia and Irish settlement: after the Famine

A strong Irish network existed in Melbourne before 1850 and indeed the meeting place of the first Parliament of Victoria was St Patrick’s Hall.[1] Bounty immigration swelled Irish numbers before 1850, but major waves of migration commenced only after the discovery of gold in Victoria and during the reconstruction of Irish agriculture in the period after the 1840s famine.[2] As a result, while the vast bulk of Irish settlers in Melbourne were drawn from rural Ireland and most likely from the small land-holding class, a steady stream of Irish professional men arrived in the 1850s, especially lawyers and doctors, who made an early and long-lasting mark on Melbourne life. The new University of Melbourne was shaped by its association with Trinity College, Dublin, most notably through the Irish political economist and one of the four foundation professors at Melbourne, W.E. Hearn. The first chancellor of the university, Redmond Barry, had also graduated from Trinity and emigrated in 1839. He founded the Melbourne Mechanics Institute, sat on the Supreme Court bench and played a central role in the creation and expansion of the State Library of Victoria.[3] Another Trinity graduate, Richard Ireland, born in Galway in 1816, was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1816 and arrived in Melbourne in 1852, where he defended the Eureka rebels before becoming a minister in governments headed by Irishmen Charles Gavan Duffy and John O’Shanassy.[4]

Bourke Street, Melbourne c1890

In Melbourne, the Irish settled most densely in the inner city. For a time some of the poorer lanes of the central city sustained conspicuous Irish populations. Yet the Irish-born were never a numerical majority in any local government area or city ward, even though they may have controlled local political and cultural life. In the city itself, Bourke, Gipps and Lonsdale wards had populations which were more than 20 per cent Irish in 1871, the peak year for the city’s Irish-born population. Irish women, who most typically worked in domestic service, moved from these concentrations to wealthy suburbs such as St Kilda and Kew. For most of the nineteenth century the inner municipality of Hotham (North and West Melbourne) was the most Irish locality, largely because of its position near the unskilled labour markets in the railway yards, warehouses and wharves and in carting at the western end of the central city.

Ulster Protestants gradually established a place in the skilled trades of Melbourne and also dominated some civil service departments by the end of the 1860s. Catholic Irishmen were typically unskilled workers or small shopkeepers. They too sought to cement networks in government employment, filling many positions in the ‘uniformed working-class’ such as the railways, post office and customs services. From its formation, the Victoria Police was structured along the same lines as the Royal Irish Constabulary and the typical constable was likely to have been born in Ireland, as were many of those he arrested.

‘Canvas Town’: South Melbourne in the 1850s showing temporary accommodation during the Gold Rush

There had been surprisingly little movement during the Famine and the heaviest influx was delayed until the 1860s. While the 1850s remained the most significant decade for Irish migration to Victoria, perhaps more important single years of emigration were 1864, 1879 and 1884, peaks associated with crises in Irish agriculture. The last great Irish immigration occurred between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s when immigration to the United States was less attractive because of depression in its economy. Australia was only ever the destination of choice for Irish immigrants when recession elsewhere made foreign labour markets unattractive for immigrants. The same applied when Australia experienced depression as it did in 1867, 1878-1879 and 1885-1886 when Irish immigration slackened. Colonial demand for immigrant labour and a willingness to provide assisted passage was greatest when there was significant economic growth in the absence of a large settled population. Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania offered little assistance after the 1860s while Queensland invested heavily in immigration during the 1879s and 1880s. NSW stopped providing assistance between the late 1880s and 1910. Since most Irish immigration depended on some form of state or private assistance, this resulted in settlers in different colonies coming largely from different generational cohorts. The most significant county of origin remained Clare but comparatively rich farming regions such as Meath, Tipperary and Armagh were more highly represented than the poorer western counties of Kerry, Galway and Mayo. Extended chain migration allowed these regional concentrations to persist until the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1864.

Although Victoria proved a magnet for immigration in the 1850s, the other colonies continued to receive Irish immigrants. The 1859 census for Western Australia records 2,406 Irish-born representing 16 per cent of the total non-Aboriginal population. This had risen to 3,569 by 1870 and 9,862 during the gold rush of the 1890s though many of these came from the eastern states rather than directly from Ireland. The Irish made up about a tenth of the convicts sent to the colony between 1850 and 1868.[5] NSW also saw an increase in immigration in the 1850s partly as a result of gold but also because of the continuing distress in Ireland. Most assisted immigrants between 1848 and 1870 were Catholic but about a fifth was Protestant. Apart from higher levels of literacy, there was no real difference between the two religious groups: men tended to be labourers and women farm or domestic servants. In the 1850s, for example, there was much distress in rural Donegal.[6] Under the British landlord system, the native inhabitants had to pay rents and were liable to be evicted if they could not keep up the payments.[7] After 1855, some of these emigrants took advantage of the NSW assisted immigration scheme. Under this, residents of NSW could pay a contribution to the government in Sydney to bring out a relative or friend from Britain or Ireland with the government subsidising the cost of the passage. As the immigrants of 1855 became established in NSW, many sent sums of money ranging from £5 to £50 back to Donegal to help their relatives to survive or to emigrate. By 1858, there was mounting concern in Australia about news that landlords were squeezing Donegal people off the land to make way for more profitable farming procedures such as large-scale sheep-raising, using Scottish shepherds.

In May 1858, Archdeacon John McEncroe, a Catholic clergyman from County Tipperary, convened a public meeting in Sydney to form a Donegal Relief Fund. McEncroe had been in NSW since 1832 and was the founder of a periodical newspaper, the Sydney Freeman’s Journal. He sought to make systematic use of the government’s assisted immigration scheme and took a deputation from the Donegal Relief Fund to interview government officials in July 1858. He gave the government a deposit of £900 pounds that then issued a certificate providing passages for 225 people. This special fare to Australia was £5 per male and £3 per female. McEncroe made subsequent deposits, bringing the total for 1858 to £3,800 and the government issued further certificates for passage. The first batch of Donegal Relief Fund migrants arrived in Sydney from Liverpool on the Sapphire in May 1859 after a voyage of 15 weeks. The vessel landed 286 passengers though not all sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund. The sexes were evenly balanced with 138 males and 133 females over 12 years including 42 married couples, plus eight boys and seven girls under 12 years. The arrival of each the subsequent four Donegal Relief Fund ships was reported in the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, which recommended the passengers to prospective employers as farm labourers or domestic servants. The NSW government encouraged the immigrants, especially the men, to go to ‘immigrant depots’ in country centres such as Maitland, Newcastle and Bathurst, from where they would be hired by landholders. The Donegal Relief Fund enormously boosted the number of Irish migrants to NSW in 1859. According to parliamentary reports, 3,723 immigrants entered NSW that year from all sources under government’s assistance scheme. Of these, the Irish accounted for 2,544, more than 68 per cent of the total, of which about a third came under the Donegal Relief Fund scheme.

Only two per cent of those who left Ireland in the nineteenth century came to Australia and the majority of these came through assisted passage. This seems to have been more likely the case for women since British and colonial authorities maintained assisted female emigration over longer periods and at lower rates. Irish women made up between 50 and 60 per cent of assisted female migrants during the 1850s and 1860s and in NSW they made up to 80 per cent. The peak periods of female immigration coincided with years of heaviest assistance. There was a boost to early Irish female immigration to the colony with government-sponsored ‘bride ships’ of the 1850s containing poor, predominantly Catholic Irish women.[8] Many of these girls went into the country as servants and sometimes married Protestants but more often men from the bond class. They represented a small if important part of the large-scale process of female migration to Australia that gathered momentum in the 1850s and 1860s. Some 1,700 single British and Irish women came to Western Australia but substantially more came on colonial-sponsored schemes to NSW (18,000), Victoria (13,000), South Australia (9,100), Queensland (46,000) and Tasmania (1,600).[9] The reason why many of these women migrated may have been to seek a spouse[10], but the attitude of colonial society was more ambiguous and bidders at the immigration depot included middle-class women seeking domestic servants of whom there was a major shortage as well as single men.

Over half of Irish women, even in the 1880s and 1890s entered domestic service and they appear to have not sought alternative avenues of employment though their daughters frequently entered factory work. There were several reasons why a higher proportion of Irish women than any other nationality entered domestic service. First, they came from a largely rural background and had no familiarity with factory work. Secondly, domestic work provided food and lodgings as well as wages and allowed women to save money easily to send back home to pay debts, to buy land or acquire a few luxuries. Finally, domestic service was a job that did not compete with the male labour market and work was available even during economic depression.

The Irish in Australia in the nineteenth century were simplistically seen as either Catholic, nationalist and republican or Protestant, empire loyalists, Orangemen or members of Masonic lodges. Irish Protestants made up a small proportion of the total Irish migration and comprised about five per cent of the total Australian population in the nineteenth century. Despite this, they played a disproportionately important role in the development of the country.[11] They can be divided into the Anglo-Irish who originated in the Irish gentry and who emigrated to Australia from the 1820s and Ulster Protestants representing a cross-section of Ulster society. The Anglo-Irish, dependent on their British connection, became the main stay of colonial administration, followed traditional routes into the law, the church or the military or entered the professions. The Trinity College link proved important and by 1880, for example, four of the five judges on the Supreme Court of Victoria were Irish Protestants.

The Australian Irish, like the American Irish, came from a variety of destinations and had emigrated for a variety of reasons. Many were born in Ireland but others arrived only after perhaps years in some British city or in the eastern and then western United States and who came with other ‘diggers’ in search of wealth on the goldfields. Yet while Irish descendants in America have retained pride in their ancestral culture, this is less the case in Australia. [12] The nineteenth-century Irish represented the major discordant element in what were strongly Anglicised colonies. Their role as loyal opposition, niggling and ridiculing the dominant English colonial culture was however a defining element in the shaping of Australian society and the Australian character. Their identity was Australian first and Irish second.

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[1] Strauss, Valda, ‘Irish influences in early Melbourne’, Mallow Field Club Journal, Vol. 14, (1996), pp. 149-153.

[2] Davison, Graeme, ‘Gold-rush Melbourne’, in McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold: forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 52-66 and The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, (Melbourne University Press), 1978.

[3] Phillips, John H., ‘A Black-Letter Lawyer’, La Trobe Journal, Vol. 73, (2004), pp. 23-28, and Ryan, Peter, ‘Sir Redmond Barry, (1813-1880)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 108-111, provide contrasting succinct studies of Barry. Neither Galbally, Ann, Redmond Barry, An Anglo-Irish Australian, (Melbourne University Press), 1995 nor Ryan, Peter, Redmond Barry, A Colonial Life, (Melbourne University Press), 1980, are enthusiastic about Barry’s judicial qualities.

[4] Ingham, M., ‘Sir John O’Shanassy (1818-1883)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 378-382.

[5] Oriesen, I.H. van den, ‘Convicts and migrants in Western Australia, 1850-1868: their number, nature and ethnic origins’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 72, (1986-1987), pp. 40-58.

[6] McClintock, May, ‘Donegal Orphan girls’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 53, (2001), pp. 59-65 considers Donegal orphans sent to Australia 1848-1850. Conaghan, Pat, The great famine in south-west Donegal, 1845-1850, (Bygones Enterprises), 1997 examines the impact of famine.

[7] See O’Donnell, Martina, ‘Government intervention in land improvement in county Donegal, 1846-1880’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 48, (1996), pp. 158-192.

[8] Erickson, Rica, The bride ships: experiences of immigrants arriving in Western Australia 1849-1889, (Hesperian Press), 1992.

[9] Gothard, Jan, ‘Wives or workers? Single British female migration to colonial Australia’, in Sharpe, Pamela, Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and global perspectives, (Routledge), 2001, pp. 145-162.

[10] Britain had a ‘surplus women’ problem: in 1851 there were 1042 women to every 1000 men and by 1901 this had risen to 1068. Assisted emigration was a possible solution to this problem for Britain by reducing the number of women and for the colonies by reducing their imbalanced sex-ratios.

[11] Forth, Gordon, ‘”No petty people”: the Anglo-Irish identity in colonial Australia’, in O’Sullivan, Patrick, (ed.), The Irish world wide: history, heritage, identity, Vol. 2: the Irish in the new communities, (Leicester University Press), 1992, pp. 128-142.

[12] Ibid, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, pp. 5-21 considers the contentious issue of Irish Australian identity. Campbell, Malcolm, ‘Irish nationalism and immigrant assimilation: comparing the United States and Australia’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 15, (2), (1996), pp. 24-43 provides comparison.

Australia and Irish settlement: Gold

Word that gold had been found in Australia in mid-1851 spread quickly as it had done in California three years earlier. The result was a massive movement of people from Britain, Europe, China and America but also within Australia and Victoria’s ports bustled with new arrivals. In just four months in 1852, 619 ships arrived in Hobson’s Bay carrying 55,057 passengers; 1853 saw the arrival of 2,594 ships. In March 1851, Victoria’s population was 80,000, not including its indigenous population; by 1854, it had tripled to 237,000 and doubled again to 540,000 by 1861. [1] The population of the Victorian gold fields was 20,000 in 1851; 34,000 the following year; 100,000 in 1855 peaking at 150,000 in 1858. The majority of migrants came from the United Kingdom; [2] between 1852 and 1860, 290,000 people came to Victoria from the British Isles. Of the other migrants, less than 15,000 came from other European countries and 6,000 including some Irish Americans migrated from America. In December 1851, E.E. Griggs wrote from Sacramento City, California to the Rev. J. Orr in Portaferry

It appears that her majesty’s dominions are not destitute of gold; and if the reports from Australia are true, a great rush will be the result; in fact many have already left this [California], for that land of promise.[3]

The NSW gold fields were poorer but the state’s population increased from 200,000 in 1851 to 357,000 ten years later. By 1861, 29% of the population was Australian born, 60% were from the United Kingdom and 11% were from other parts of the world. [4]

Irish immigration increased with the discovery of gold. Between 1851 and 1860 roughly 101,540 of them had arrived in Australia with the vast majority finding their way to the goldfields.[5] John Sherer, commenting on the inhabitants of the goldfields, observed that

...many of these were the offspring of the teeming soil of Ireland, which seems to throw off its population with the same degree of prolific spontaneity that it shoots forth the riches of its vegetation.[6]

Unlike their Welsh, Scottish and English neighbours, most of the Irish lacked mining skills. Initially this was not a problem since alluvial mining required little expertise. However, as surface deposits of gold were exhausted and alluvial mining gave way to deep, shaft mining, mining skills became essential. Lacking these, the numerous Irish on the goldfields became a ready source of unskilled labour for large-scale mining. A few miners did strike it rich on the goldfields but for most, their experience was similar to that of Hugh Maguire of Strabane, Co. Tyrone

As far as my own success upon the diggings I must candidly say that up to the present time it has fell far short of what I expected. I was fourteen months in the diggings … yet I have been only able to come to Melbourne with about sixty-five pounds sterling.[7]

For the vast majority a short, fruitless stint as a miner soon gave way to more profitable occupations as grocers, publicans, cartage operators, brewers, domestic workers, policemen and general labourers and the wealth of available work meant that many of the Irish enjoyed a standard of living far exceeding their experience in Ireland. The abundance of available work, fuelled by the needs of the diggers, meant that many of the Irish enjoyed a standard of living well beyond that they had left behind in Ireland. Reporting on the Daisy Hill diggings near Castlemaine, the Cork Examiner informed readers that

Young Irish Orphan girls who scarcely knew the luxury of a shoe until they put their feet on the soil of Victoria lavish money on white satin at 10/- or 12/- a yard for their bridal dresses and flout out of the shop slamming the door because the unfortunate shop keeper does not have the real shawls at ten guineas a piece.

The Irish had a large impact on the goldfields communities that sprang up quickly earning a reputation for their colour and flamboyance on the diggings. The rapid rise in population caused by the influx of gold seekers and their followers was still insufficient to populate the vast ranges of Australia, which still had a dearth of general and domestic labour. Miners were too preoccupied with digging for gold, and besides, they were mostly male, exacerbating the gender imbalance

Women are the only scarce people that is here, in a city of some 10,000 Inhabitants, you will not see more than twelve or twenty women in a day there are only about 300 in the whole city.[8]

The familiar Irish brogue could be heard issuing forth from hotels with iconic names such as Brian Boru, Harp of Erin and Shamrock. The legacy of the Irish immigrants who came to the Victorian goldfields is diverse ranging from the leading role they played in the Catholic institutions of the major gold rush towns to the iconic Queensland beer, XXXX, originally brewed by two Irish brothers in the early days of the Castlemaine diggings. However, a perception persists that few of the Irish had the skills or inclination, or would risk their money by setting up manufacturing plants.[9] In fact, immigrants from practically every Irish county and culture established a wide range of manufacturing businesses in Victoria during the nineteenth century. Although not all were successful, many Irish-owned businesses not only survived, but prospered. The number of Irish-born manufacturers was not proportional to the Irish population in Victoria, but the individual and collective contribution and legacy of these industrial pioneers to the colony’s social, civic, and industrial life deserve recognition.

Nonetheless, political discontent was never far from the surface and of the diggers that took part in the 1854 Eureka rebellion,[10] one witness at the Gold Fields Commission claimed that, ‘quite half of them were Irishmen’.[11] Withers stated:

There were among the insurgents men who hated British rule with a hereditary hatred. There were Irishman who felt that feeling, and there were foreigners who had no special sympathy, if any at all, with British Government’ and reported that one of the Eureka leaders later said ‘Most of our men were Irishmen. [12]

It was estimated by one witness, Mr G. C. Levey, that about 863 men had actually taken up arms and that about half of them were Irish. [13] H. R. Nicholls stated, regarding the Stockade on the morning of the day before the battle that ‘the movement at that time seemed to have become almost an Irish one’. [14] There is, however, no evidence that the Irish diggers had a republican design; they may have used the rhetoric of rebellion but they produced no republican political statement. In 1940, H.V. Evatt claimed ‘A democracy was born at Eureka’, and credited the Irish with fathering it. The initially reluctant leader of the Eureka protest was Peter Lalor, the brother of James Fintan Lalor, the Irish patriot and the list of the dead featured a great many Irish names.[15]

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[1] Knott, J. W., ‘Arrival and Settlement 1851-1880’, in ibid, Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, pp. 367-370; Broome, R., The Victorians: arriving, (Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates), 1984, and Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, (Allen & Unwin), 1994. See also, ibid, Brown, Richard, Three Rebellions, pp. 346-363.

[2] Jupp, James, The English in Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 2004, pp. 52-86, especially pp. 71-74.

[3] Ulster American Folk Park, serial no: 9701195, copyright John McCleery, Belfast.

[4] Beever, A., ‘From a Place of “Horrible Destitution” to a Paradise of the Working class: The Transformation of British Working class Attitudes to Australia 1841-1851’, Labour History, no. 40, (1981), pp. 1-15, examines how and why Australia became the place where British workers wanted to emigrate.

[5] Coughlan, Neil, ‘The Coming of the Irish to Victoria’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 12, (1965), pp. 64-86, MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘The Irish in Victoria, 1851-91: a demographic essay’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 8, (1971), pp. 67-92 and McConville, C., ’The Victorian Irish: emigrants and families 1851-91’, in Grimshaw, P. et al. (eds.), Families in Colonial Australia, (Allen & Unwin), 1985, pp. 3-7.

[6] Sherer, John, The Gold-finder of Australia: how he went, how he fared, how he made his fortune, (Clarke, Beeton), 1853, p. 254.

[7] Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D1420/2.

[8] Ulster American Folk Park, serial no: 9701190, copyright John McCleery, Belfast.

[9] Pescod, K., The Emerald Strand: Nineteenth-century Irish-born Manufacturers in Victoria, (Australian Scholarly Publications), 2007.

[10] Of the many studies of Eureka, Gold, Geoffrey, (ed.), Eureka: Rebellion beneath the Southern Cross, (Rigby Limited), 1977 and Molony, John, Eureka, (Melbourne University Press), 1984, 2^nd ed., 2001, are the most useful. Of the earlier studies, Turner, Henry Gyles, Our Own Little Rebellion: The Story of the Eureka Stockade, Melbourne, (Whitcombe & Tombs Limited), 1913, retains its vigour. Ibid, Brown, Richard, Three Rebellions examines the rebellion, its causes and consequences in detail.

[11] Anderson, Hugh, (ed.), Report from the Commission appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Goldfields, first published 1855, (Red Rooster Press), 1978, p. 45.

[12] Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat from the First Pastoral Settlement to the Present Time, 1^st ed., Ballarat, 1870, 2^nd ed., Ballarat, 1887, p. 159.

[13] Ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, p. 109.

[14] Nicholls, H. R., ‘Reminiscences of the Eureka Stockade’, The Centennial Magazine: An Australian Monthly, (May 1890), in an annual compilation, Vol. II: August, 1889 to July, 1890, p. 749.

[15] Turner, Ian, ‘Peter Lalor (1827-1889)’, ADB, Vol. 5, 1974, pp. 50-54 provides a concise biography. Berry, A., From tent to parliament: The life of Peter Lalor and his coadjutors: history of the Eureka Stockade, (Berry, Anderson & Co), 1934; Turnbull, Clive, Eureka: The Story of Peter Lalor, (The Hawthorn Press), 1946, and Blake, Les, Peter Lalor: The Man From Eureka, (Neptune Press), 1979, are more detailed. See also, Currey, C. H., The Irish at Eureka, (Angus and Robertson), 1954.

Australia and Irish settlement: women and the Famine years

One of the biggest problems facing the guardians was how to cope with ‘the permanent dead-weight’, a phrase applied to those young people who were likely to remain in the workhouse for a long time. Normally designated orphans, many still had one, and sometimes both, parents still alive, but once they entered the workhouse they were regarded as the wards of the Poor Law guardians, to be disposed of as the guardians saw fit. The result was an Orphan Emigration Scheme.[1]

Early in 1848 the Colonial Office under Earl Grey began its carefully organised emigration of young females from Irish workhouses. Irish Poor Law Commissioners circularized the Boards of Guardians of Irish Poor Law Unions asking if there were any young women ‘between the ages of fourteen and eighteen’ in their workhouses willing and eligible for a passage to Australia. By May 1848, 68 unions had provided the Poor Law Commissioners with lists of children suitable for emigration. 4,175 female orphans and 967 males had been nominated. However, in order to prevent people from entering the workhouse for the sole purpose of obtaining assisted migration, the offer was limited to those who had previously been resident in the workhouse for at least one year. Young female orphans were considered the most suitable candidates for emigration to Australia. [2] They would help redress the gender imbalance and, in the long term, normalise the social composition of the populace. In the short term, they would fulfil the need for domestic servants.

Medical examinations were arranged and the chosen young women were inspected on behalf of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners in London by Lieutenant Henry, a semi-retired Royal Navy officer. In return the CLEC chartered ships to carry ‘our’ Irish famine orphans to Australia, arranged their berth, the food they ate and their supervision by a government appointed Surgeon Superintendent. The first vessels the Earl Grey and the Roman Emperor with young women chosen from workhouses in Ulster left Portsmouth in June and July 1848. Isabella McDougall, aged 16, sailed on the first orphan ship, landing at Sydney in 1848. Transferred to the Maitland depot, she found work as a nursery maid until she married ex-convict Edward Spicer in 1849 and had 13 children. Fifteen year old Mary Kenny sailed from Plymouth on the Lismoyne, landing at Sydney in November 1849. Both her parents were dead at the time she left County Kilkenny. Quick to find work in the colony, she married Hornby Lighthouse keeper Henry Johnson in 1852 and lived at South Head.

Gender balance was a defining characteristic of Irish migration to Australia throughout the nineteenth century and Irish women made a major contribution to Australian society.[3] About one third of convict women were Irish. For example, on 20 January 1849, Lord Auckland arrived at Hobart from Dublin with 211 female convicts. More than 1,000 young women came to Sydney and Hobart in the 1830s from Foundling Hospitals in Dublin and Cork. Approximately 18-19,000 Irish bounty and government assisted migrants arrived in Melbourne and Sydney between 1839 and 1842 of whom about half were female. In 1855-1856 over 4,000 single Irish women arrived in Adelaide. Such infusions of Irish female blood had a powerful influence on the development of colonial society. The ‘Earl Grey’ female orphans sit within that tradition. Most workhouse girls found positions within a few weeks and disappeared into colonial life. Others were sent to makeshift depots in outlying settlements, where servants and wives were in more demand. The difference is that these ‘orphans’ stand as symbolic refugees from Famine and came from among the genuinely destitute sections of Irish society.

Although the young girls from the workhouses were sent out to take up domestic service, very few had any experience of the work. This did not please the Australians: they had been led to believe they were getting proficient labour cheaply, not realising that the profession ascribed to each girl was what the guardians considered her fit for, and not for any previously acquired skill. This led to problems and the Irish orphan ‘girls’ were soon maligned in the Australian metropolitan press as immoral dregs of the workhouse, ignorant of the skills required of domestic servants. Although all the workhouse girls from the first three ships to arrive in Australia had been hired almost as soon as they came ashore, a report to the Children’s Apprenticeship Board claimed that in Adelaide in 1849 ‘there are 21 of the Irish Orphans upon the Streets’ and ‘indeed there appears to be a greater number of orphans than any other class of females’.[4] While some of the ‘girls’ were neither as young nor as innocent as was inferred, it was also the case that many of the employers came from humble backgrounds themselves and often had no idea of how to treat or train a servant. Nor did the training the girls received in the workhouse prove useful in a domestic setting. When the immigrant girl failed to provide the level of service expected, she was frequently returned to the depot, or turned out of doors and left to her own devices. Having no other means of support, some of the discarded servants turned to prostitution. As protests grew more vocal, and as the famine in Ireland appeared to have abated, the British Government agreed to the scheme being terminated. The final group of Irish workhouse orphans left for Australia in April 1850. Altogether, 4,175 girls were sent overseas during this period; 2,253 to Sydney, 1,255 to Port Phillip, 606 to Adelaide and the remaining 61 went to the Cape of Good Hope.

Colonial government sanctioned free immigration to Australia at the end of the 1820s, having relied on British convict labour until labour supply constraints made it difficult to exploit the European boom for wool exports, created in part by declining transport costs between pastoral source and industrial market. About half of the 19^th century mass migration to Australia and New Zealand of almost three-quarters of a million individuals was achieved by subsidy. The share subsidised was even greater during the transition decades between 1832 and 1851 when three-quarters of the immigrants to NSW and South Australia were assisted, but a little lower for Victoria. For the assisted migrants, subsidies were essential not only for the steerage cost, but also

...money was needed to get to the port of embarkation and to the ultimate destination after arrival in Australia; money was required for clothes for the journey...and [there was] the loss of earnings in transit.[5]

Australia was simply an impossible destination for the unassisted poor. Even though the cheapest fare had fallen dramatically from £30 to £18 in the eight years up to 1836, £18 in 1836 still amounted to about 60 percent of the male farm labourer’s annual earnings in England and was well beyond his means. If that worker wanted to leave England, the options were to take the cheaper route to North America (one sixth the cost of the fare to Australia), successfully apply for a government subsidy for the Australian move, or stay. The problem would have been greater for Irish male labourers since their wages were half their English counterpart and the Irish were about half of the assisted Australian immigrants in 1839-1851.[6]

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[1] McClaughlin, Trevor, ‘Barefoot and Pregnant? Female Orphans who emigrated from Irish Workhouses to Australia, 1848-1850’, Familia, Vol.2, (3), (1987), pp. 31-36; see also McClaughlin, Trevor, Barefoot & Pregnant? Irish Famine orphans in Australia, 2 Vols. (Genealogical Society of Victoria), 1991, 2001 and Strauss, Valda, ‘Irish famine orphans in Australia’, Mallow Field Club Journal, Vol. 11, (1993), pp. 132-157.

[2] ‘Young’ was a very elastic term when applied to single females.

[3] See, McLaughlin, Trevor, (ed.), Irish Women in Colonial Australia, (Allen & Unwin), 1998, pp. 64-81, 105-122.

[4] Cit, Report to the children’s apprenticeship board, Poor Law Commission Office, Dublin, 27 November 1850.

[5] Richards, Eric, ‘How Did Poor People Emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the Nineteenth Century?’ Journal of British Studies, Vol. 32, (1993), pp. 250-279, at p. 253

[6] Ibid, Madgwick, R.B., Immigration into Eastern Australia 1788-1851, p. 234. Moran, Gerard. ‘‘Shovelling out the poor’: assisted emigration from Ireland from the great famine to the fall of Parnell’, in ibid, Duffy, Patrick J. and Moran, Gerard, (eds.), To and from Ireland: planned migration schemes c.1600-2000, pp. 137-154.

Dah, dah, di, dah: yes I know the tune.

There is a very old educational joke that begins with a teacher dealing with times tables in her classroom.  ‘We’ll do the five times table today.’ The lesson begins and the class begins the tables…one five is five, two fives are ten, three fives are fifteen, four fives are twenty…  She then stops the pupils.  ‘George, what are you saying….you’re only saying dah, dah, di, dah.’  ‘Yes, miss’.  ‘Why?’  ‘Well I know the tune, I just haven’t got the words yet.’  Today, the Education Secretary, Nikki Morgan, announced that pupils should know up to the twelve times table by age 11, that they should have lessons on punctuation and grammar and teach ‘British values’, whatever they really are.  The problem with each of these initiatives is that you really can’t disagree with them: by aged 11 pupils should know their times tables, be able to punctuate and write in grammatically correct ways and have some understanding of the values that underpin our society.

This is motivated, in large part, to the desire of the educational establishment to push Britain up the international league tables.  The problem is that league tables, whether domestic or global, are inherently biased tools through which to measure educational performance.  It all depends on what is being measured—what is being left in and what is excluded.  So the Pisa tests showed the UK as a middle-ranking education performer, overtaken by high-achieving systems in Chinese cities such as Shanghai and ambitious, hungry improvers such as Poland and Vietnam, an unimpressive performance that provided proof of the need for radical improvement.  However, the latest international league table, published by Pearson and compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, places the UK in sixth place overall and  only beaten by Finland in Europe.  The Pearson tables includes university-level information as well as school-level tests - and to get really specific, it measures entry to a type of academic university path which is likely to boost the UK's position rather than some other countries. There are shorter, vocational higher education courses--more popular in some other countries--that are not included in these rankings.  So which is a more accurate reflection? Pisa has more international status, but the Pearson rankings use a wider range of indicators. 

The problem is that there is no one agreed test for determining how a successful education system should be measured.  In many respects it’s a case of smoke and mirrors. Some things can be easily measured such as whether students are better or worse at solving mathematical problems or whether an individual has reached a particular level of reading or not.  The Pisa tests, for instance, measure reading, but not writing. It's much harder to measure the handling of ideas rather than numbers. How would you compare written analytical skills across so many different cultures and languages? How would you compare creativity or innovation?  The same problem applies to measuring a sense of individual or collective well-being or really anything concerned with socialisation.  The issue is how these tests are used and that comes down to political priorities: not surprisingly teacher unions have jumped on the Pearson tests to show that teaching is doing quite well while the government highlighted the inadequacies illuminated (or not) by the Pisa tests.  Remember the phrase allegedly coined by Benjamin Disraeli, though it first appeared after his death and is not found in any of his writings: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’ 

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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.