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Walking with the Famine Orphans
To walk from Sydney Cove to St Mary’s Cathedral is to follow in the footsteps
of more than 2200 young Irish immigrant girls who escaped from the Great
Famine in Ireland between 1848 and 1850. Stop at ten sites along the way where
something of their moving and dramatic story is revealed. Imagine what it must
have been like, long ago, to exchange the rain, poverty and hunger of Ireland for
the sunny skies of New South Wales. From 1848 the old convict barracks, Hyde
Park Barracks, was converted to a Female Immigrant Depot. A place they could
be looked after until hired out indentured domestic servants or farm workers. This
walk in the heart of the Central Business District of modern Sydney, points out
some of the historic places of interest relating to emigration and Ireland.
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Stop 1
Bennelong Point
View of Bennelong Point from Milson’s Point
[Photograph by Perry McIntyre, 2014]
Sydney Harbour is one of the world’s great anchorages. Throughout the 19th
century, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants had their first sight of an
Australian city when they arrived somewhere off Bennelong Point where the
Sydney Opera House now stands. On Sunday 3 February 1850 the Thomas
Arbuthnot, 99 days out from Plymouth in England, in the words of her Surgeon
Superintendent, Charles Edward Strutt, - Got inside the Heads, after having taken
our pilot on board, and came to anchor about dusk near Garden Island. The
Arbuthnot’s main human cargo was 194 young Irish orphan girls from
workhouses mainly in the Irish counties of Galway, Clare and Kerry.
‘Sydney Cove - emigrants leaving the ship’, c.1851,
Oswald Brierly, hand coloured engraving, SLNSW DGV1/7.
Among the girls was 17 year old Margaret Hurley from the Gort, Galway. All that
Gort had been able to give her, as she set off for a life on the other side of the
world, was a sea chest full of new clothes and personal items such as a hairbrush
and a Catholic bible. Behind her she left a place where in 1849 more than 8,500
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people depended on free handouts of food simply to stay alive and where,
according to the Gort workhouse doctor, the establishment was one mass of
disease and infection without accommodation, classification, clothing bedding or
proper attendants. Margaret’s sea chest is still in the possession of her
descendants.
Surgeon Strutt was proud his young female charges. He had seen them arrive in
a sad and bedraggled state at Plymouth; he now presented them in good health to
the gentlemen of the Sydney Immigration Board. They, he wrote, were greatly
pleased with the order and regularity of the ship, the fatness of my girls and the
cleanliness of their berths, tables, decks etc. Strutt was not being rude. The girls
had escaped from famine to adequate meals on an Australia bound government
emigrant ship.
Stop 2
Government House
Between 1848 and 1850 the
Governor of New South Wales,
Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy, if
he felt so inclined, could have
seen a spectacular sight from the
front lawn of Government
House - emigrant ships arriving
in New South Wales. After
passing through the Heads, with
doubtless hundreds of English,
Scots, Welsh and Irish lining the
decks hoping to catch their first glimpse of Sydney, they sailed up the harbour
and came to anchor at places like Garden Island or off Bennelong Point at the
entrance to Sydney Cove. The 22,130 kilometre voyage was over.
This portrait of Governor Fitzroy hangs in
Government House, reproduced here with
permission of Government House
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On Sunday 3 February 1850 the Thomas Arbuthnot, with 194 Irish workhouse
orphan girls on board and 99 days out of Plymouth in Devon, came to anchor at
Garden Island in Sydney Harbour. Did Bridget Kent and her shipmate, Bridget
Walsh, both aged 17 from the Loughrea Workhouse in County Galway, cast their
eyes across a short distance across water and notice Government House? Just over
a week later, at the Hyde Park Female Immigrant Depot, someone from
Government House, most likely the Housekeeper, hired Bridget Kent as a kitchen
maid and Bridget Walsh as a house servant. The original dispersal list of orphans
from the Thomas Arbuthnot shows their employer as Sir Charles Fitzroy. At some
point, on or about 14 February 1850, the girls, accompanied by their sea chests
of clothing, made the short walk down Macquarie Street and would have been
shown to beds in the servant’s quarters of Fitzroy’s splendid residence, Sydney’s
premier colonial address.
What was it like working at Government House, indeed working for the
Governor? It is worth looking at Fitzroy’s great portrait in Government House
and wondering if these young Irish Catholic girls ever had occasion to speak to
such an elevated personage or just what kind of cleaning, fetching and carrying
might ever have brought them to the Governor’s attention. Of all the 2200 Irish
Workhouse girls who came to Sydney, few would have started their Australian
lives in such opulent surroundings. It makes one wonder what happened to all the
others.
Stop 3
Justice and Police Museum
corner Albert and Phillip Street
For an insight into Sydney’s murky
criminal past visit the Justice and
Police Museum. The Water Police
Court opened on this site in late
April 1856 to police and administer
justice for Sydney’s waterfront and
harbour. In its very first session the
magistrates dealt with cases of
assault, drunkenness, theft and
murder. The alleged murder was
that of a seaman, Samuel Jackson,
by two of his shipmates aboard the
Chilean ship Manuel Mont. More
prosaically, John Phillamore, Thomas More and Margaret Doyle were all
convicted of being drunk and ordered to pay either a fine or spend a day in gaol.
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The previous location of the
court was on the other side of
Circular Quay in Cadman’s
Cottage [pictured right]. This
was a court well-known to a
small number of the 2,220 Irish
workhouse orphans who arrived
in Sydney between 1848 and
1850. Presiding over the court at
that period was Captain
Hutchinson Hothersall Browne,
J.P. The orphans were brought to the court by their employers for alleged bad
behaviour and to request that the indentures, which they had signed when hiring
the girls, be cancelled. Browne was not a great fan of orphan female immigration
and when Charles Edward Strutt, who had brought out 194 girls as Surgeon
Superintendent on the Thomas Arbuthnot, attended his court on 3 May 1850, he
found that ‘the tone of the Magistrate was against all the girls’.
It is possible that Strutt had gone to the court to hear the case against Thomas
Arbuthnot girl Mary McCarthy from Galway. She was charged by her mistress,
Miss J.A. Rossiter of Fort Street, with disobedience and neglect of her duties.
Browne believed Miss Rossiter, returned Mary to the Female Immigrant Depot,
cancelled her indenture, and ordered that her wages be kept from her until she
behaves better.
Stop 4
Governor Bourke statue
It is possible, probable even, that
the longest personal inscription
on any 19th monument in
Australia is on the pedestal of a
statue outside the old main
entrance to the State Library of
New
South
Wales
on
Shakespeare Place [see transcript
below]. Here, gazing forever on
traffic heading for the M1
freeway is Lieutenant General Sir
Richard
Bourke,
Knight
Commander of the Order of the Bath, Governor of New South Wales 1831-1837.
The inscription, 269 words long, praises him for many things – introducing a
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system of public education, opening a savings bank, establishing a system for
equitable settlement of land disputes, etc. etc. And while doing all of this, and
more, he ‘realized extensive plans for immigration’.
This is a reference to the fact that as the colony headed for greater selfgovernment and the end of convict transportation was in view, Bourke put in
place Australia’s first large scale schemes of government assisted immigration to
deal with the acute shortage of skilled and general labour. In the five years after
Bourke’s departure in 1837 more than 40,000 free assisted immigrants from Great
Britain and Ireland arrived in Sydney and the Port Phillip district of NSW which
became the Colony of Victoria in 1851.
Free immigration changed the image of Australia as a simply a place to send
convicted thieves and even worse rogues. When the Irish orphan girls were
offered a free passage to Australia between 1848 and 1850 they could have been
told, with some justification, that those far away colonies held much opportunity
for ordinary men and women. And that transformation of New South Wales, from
a prison to a free society, owed much to their fellow countryman, Sir Richard
Bourke.
The statue, cast in bronze in London,
was erected in 1842 at the entrance
to the Domain as shown in this 1870
photograph by C.F. Gottieb.
The inscription on the plinth reads:
This statue of Lieutenant-General Sir
Richard Bourke, K.C.B., is erected by the
people of New South Wales, to record his able, honest, and benevolent administration from 1831
to 1837. Selected for the government at a period of singular difficulty, his judgment, urbanity,
and firmness justified the choice. Comprehending at once the vast resources peculiar to this
colony, he applied them, for the first time, systematically to its benefit. He voluntarily divested
himself of the prodigious influence arising from the assignment of penal labour, and enacted
just and salutary laws for the amelioration of penal discipline. He was the first Governor who
published satisfactory accounts of public receipts and expenditure. Without oppression or
detriment to any interest he raised the revenue to a vast amount, and from its surplus realised
extensive plans of immigration. He established religions equality on a just and firm basis, and
sought to provide for all, without distinction of sect, a sound and adequate system of national
education. He constructed various public works of permanent utility. He founded the flourishing
settlement of Port Phillip, and threw open the wilds of Australia to pastoral enterprise. He
established savings banks, and was the patron of the first Mechanics' Institute. He created an
equitable tribunal for determining upon claims to grants of lands. He was the warm friend of the
liberty of the Press. He extended trial by jury after its almost total suspension for many years.
By these, and numerous other measures for the moral, religious and general improvement of all
classes he raised the colony to unexampled prosperity, and retired amid the reverent and
affectionate regret of the people, having won their confidence by his integrity, their gratitude by
his services, their admiration by his public talents, and their esteem by his private worth.
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Stop 5
Caroline Chisholm’s Female Barracks
There was a time when
Australians
noticed
Caroline Chisholm –
when her face was on
the Five Dollar note.
Today
the
many
thousands who daily
make their way up and
down Bent Street in the
heart of the city would
barely notice a small
reminder of Caroline’s
contribution to Australia’s immigration story. Attached to the wall near the
entrance to the Amro Building, on the corner of Bent and Phillip Streets, in
Aurora Place, a plaque recalls that it was on this site, in 1841, that she opened her
‘Female Immigrants’ Home’.
The Home was Chisholm’s response to a crisis. Sydney in 1841 was experiencing
a comparative deluge of government assisted immigrants from Great Britain and
Ireland. They arrived at a moment when the colonial economy was slipping into
depression and many found it difficult to get work. After ten days grace the
immigrants, many single women among them, were cast off the ships to fend for
themselves. Mary Teague, a young Irishwoman, after leaving her ship had no
food and when she collapsed she was accused of being drunk. Unable to pay a
fine, she was exposed in the stocks. Cases like Mary’s moved Caroline Chisholm
and drove her, despite little public assistance at first, to open her Home to give
such impoverished women shelter.
Chisholm’s ‘Home’ was the model for the colonial government’s ‘Female
Immigrant Depot’ opened in Hyde Park Barracks in 1848. She established a
system of drawing fair wages contracts with employers which ensured new
immigrants were not taken advantage of, and records were kept of such
agreements. At a time when government and society took little notice of the
desperate plight of these first ‘economic refugees’ the ‘Female Immigrants’
Home’ was a shining example of personal compassion and public conscience. In
many ways the better care taken of the Irish orphan girls, and other single women,
after 1848, came from the example of Caroline Chisholm, the ‘Emigrants’
Friend’.
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Stop 6
Parliament House
On the way to their first
colonial home at Hyde Park
Barracks, the Irish orphan
girls trudged up Macquarie
Street. Nearing the Barracks
they passed a building where
their impact on the colony
became a matter of public
debate, the Parliament of
New South Wales. Here, on
23 May1858, a vote was taken to allow the appointment of a Select Committee
to investigate and report upon the petition of ‘certain citizens of Sydney’
complaining of statements made by the colony’s Immigration Agent, Captain
Hutchinson Hothersall Browne. The petition, from the Celtic Association, quoted
public statements from the Agent that Irish female immigrants were ‘unsuitable
to the requirements of the Colony’ and that such immigration was therefore
‘distasteful to the majority of the people’.
Imagine, during the remaining months of 1858,
Committee members gathering in some wellappointed Committee Room of the Parliament to
weigh up the qualifications of some Bridget Reilly or
Mary O’Connell to be a Sydney servant girl. They did
not discuss those matters at all but fell to interviewing
witnesses about the behaviour of the orphan girls
rather than ordinary Irish female assisted immigrants,
the ones Browne had been criticising. The Committee
concluded that Browne was wrong but their report on
‘Irish Female Immigrants’ gave a wonderful insight
into the world of the orphan girls.
For example, the Committee heard how Jane Cunningham, from County
Westmeath, aged 16 when she arrived in 1850, neglected the work of her
employer, James Reeves and was returned to the Barracks. From Mrs Capps,
erstwhile Matron of the Barracks, they learnt that she had at one time more than
600 girls there under her care and with no assistant to help her. And Daniel Egan
MP (no prizes for guessing his ancestry) recalled the girls sent down the country:
‘… a gentleman told me that a number of them were sent to Binalong and they
turned out the best servants they had there … the best servants in the whole
district’.
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Stop 7
Hyde Park Barracks
The Hyde Park Barracks at the top
of Macquarie Street, Sydney is
closely associated with the
convict period in New South
Wales’ history. Few know that
between 1848 and the mid-1880s
the building functioned as the
Female Immigrant Depot. Fewer
still are aware that it was
transformed into the depot
because of the expected arrival of
the first shipload of Irish workhouse orphan girls on the Earl Grey in 1848.
Except for a small number of girls all of them, once their ship had arrived, would
have made the journey, most likely in a column on foot, from their landing spot
in Sydney Cove, or thereabouts, through the city to the Depot. Behind them, on
wagons, would be their wooden boxes or sea chests of clothing. It would have
been quite a sight.
In the Depot the girls were under the control of the
Sydney Orphan Immigration Committee, the
Immigration Agent, and the Matron and sub-Matrons of
the Depot staff. The Committee had been set up because
the girls, as orphans and young, were considered almost
wards of the state and responsibility was taken to see that
they were hired out to suitable employers who would,
supposedly, train them in the duties of domestic servants.
Indeed, they were ‘indentured’ rather than ‘hired’, the
indentures spelling out an employer’s responsibilities.
[Image of a woman saying good-bye to her fellow
immigrants from a section of ‘Hiring Immigrants at the
Depot, Hyde Park’, Town and Country Journal, 19 July
1879, p.24].
Life in the Depot was uneventful. At times there were complaints that the girls
made too much noise! Girls about whom their employers complained were often
returned to the Depot and a few, as punishment, were made to pick oakum
(unravelling old tarry ropes so the fibres could be reused). Keeping themselves
and their quarters clean, attending church services, talking to possible employers
– so passed the days of the Depot for most girls. And from there they set out on
their new colonial lives.
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Stop 8
Famine Memorial
Spelt out in stone beside a memorial set into the south wall of the Hyde Park
Barracks are these words – ‘An Gorta Mor i n-Eirinn The Great Irish Famine
1845-1848’. Between 1845 and 1851 one million people in Ireland died of
hunger-related illness, sometimes even of hunger itself, and a further million fled
the country. Population fell from an estimated 8.5 million in 1845 to 6.5 million
in 1851. What happened was simple – for five years from 1845 the potato crop,
upon which a third to a half of the population depended, failed. This occurred in
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which regarded itself as one of
the most advanced countries in the world.
At the time Australia was perhaps the most Irish place in the world outside
Ireland. In the eastern colonies one in four people were Irish-born. One of them,
Peter Reilly, wrote to his mother in Ireland - this is a fine plentiful country –
there is no person starving here – I am sure that the dogs in Sydney destroys more
beef and bread than all the poor in Ireland can afford to eat. Colonial reaction to
the famine saw thousands of pounds collected for Irish relief.
Mullingar Workhouse, County Westmeath is typical of all the workhouses
built in Ireland from 1838 [photo Dr Perry McIntyre, May 2014]
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Another outcome of the Great Famine was that 4114 Irish orphan girls from
workhouses in every county of Ireland chose to leave for Sydney, Melbourne and
Adelaide as government immigrants. This scheme was initiated by the British
Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, when he discovered that there were huge numbers
of female orphan children in Ireland at a time when the Australian colonies were
crying out for females immigrants to balance the surplus of males in the
population and that was why 2253 young Irish Famine orphans arrived in Sydney
between 1848 and 1850 and spent the first days of their new lives in the Hyde
Park Barracks. The names of 400 of these young orphans, symbolising all those
who came to Australia are etched in glass panels of the Memorial.
Stop 9
Queen Victoria Statue
Across the road from the Female
Immigrant Depot (Hyde Park
Barracks) is a statue of Queen
Victoria. For those who may not
know it, this lady was the titular
ruler of the British Empire from
1837 until her death in 1901.
This statue was unveiled in
January 1888 to mark the
opening of New South Wales’
celebrations for the centenary of
the founding of Great Britain’s
new colony in Australia.
It is likely that the statue was seen, as older women, by many of the Irish orphans
who had settled in Sydney. What did they make of
Her Majesty? Did they know, or remember, that
she came to Ireland in August 1849 as many of
them were preparing to leave the country for
good? During her travels there, as the Famine still
raged, the Queen was shown only the bright side
of things and contemporary comment on her short
tour deemed it a great success. She was not taken
to a workhouse where so many of her subjects
languished in fever and semi-starvation but she
had donated money to famine relief.
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Outside Sydney’s Queen Victoria building is a very different statue of Victoria.
This one comes from Ireland and was removed from public view there in 1948
when the country became a republic. It was unveiled in 1908 although the
proposal to erect it came in 1900 just after the Queen’s last visit to the country.
At that time she was also well received but dissenting voices were raised. Maud
Gonne, a prominent Irish nationalist, called Victoria, the ‘Famine Queen’ and
wrote:
Every eviction during sixty-three years [of Victoria’s reign] has been
carried out in Victoria’s name, and if there is a Justice in Heaven the shame
of those poor Irish emigrant girls whose very innocence renders them an
easy prey and who have been overcome in the terrible struggle for existence
on a foreign shore, will fall on this woman …
Now it would be fascinating to know what Sydney’s Irish workhouse orphan
immigrants would have made of that description of their fate in colonial Australia.
Stop 10
St Mary’s Cathedral
Photographs of St Mary’s Cathedral [Dr Perry McIntyre, 2014]
How did the Irish orphan girls get on in the wide world of colonial Sydney? One
place to stand and wonder about that is at the side of St Mary’s Cathedral where
there is the remnant of a stone wall, all that remains of ‘Old’ St Mary’s, the first
Catholic Church on this site which burnt down in 1865. More than fifty orphan
girls were married in old St Mary’s within five years of their arrival in Sydney.
One was Honora Fergus, aged 23, from Loughrea, County Galway, who married
Roland Fawcett at St Mary’s on 14 June 1855. Between then, and her death in
1885, Honora gave birth to 13 children.
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Mary McCarthy, aged 18 from County Galway, had a tragic colonial life. In 1872
she stabbed her second husband, Edward Young, with whom she had 11 children,
to death in a violent argument. She was sent to Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney, for
six months for manslaughter. In 1887, she died from an overdose of chlorodyne,
a pain reliever.
More successful, it seems, was Mary Casey. Her tale was told by an unidentified
orphan girl overheard by Irish Judge Sir Roger Therry on the steps of the old
church where the girls used to gather after Mass. One Sunday he heard a Kilkenny
girl boasting how her friend, Mary Casey, had married a rich publican from the
Brickfield Hill on Monday, on Thursday she hired her sister as a lady’s maid and
on Saturday her cousin as her cook and housekeeper - when would a Limerick girl
do the likes of that … Ah Kilkenny for ever. Back came the response from her
companions – Ah, Kilkenny for ever. Four Mary Caseys came to Australia as
orphan girls; none of them was from Kilkenny.
‘St Mary’s 1828’, Patrick O’Farrell (ed.), St Mary’s
Cathedral, 1821-1971, Devonshire Press, Sydney, 1971.
Researched, written and complied by Dr Richard Reid & Dr Perry McIntyre, for
the Great Irish Famine Commemoration Committee, August 2014.