They were described as "hordes of useless trollops, thrust upon an unwilling community", but what was the impact of the arrival of thousands of young, female, Irish "orphans" on colonial Australia?
The waifish Irish girls were judged fit for purpose: aged between 14 and 20, single, “not disabled” - and free of any infectious disease.
On July 25, 170 years ago, Anne and Alicia Keefe, wearing the blue shifts that marked them as Earl Grey Orphans, boarded the transport ship, the William and Mary, at Plymouth in England.
They were escaping an Ireland riven by famine and destitution. In doing so, the parent-less teenagers would journey from one side of the world to the other, leaving behind one life of penury for another potentially as dire.
Packed off with a small chest containing little more than a few items of clothing, a prayer book and a hairbrush, Anne and Alicia were two of more than 4,100 of their countrywomen - girls, really - to arrive in Australia between 1848 and 1850.
While they weren’t convicts, the colony of NSW was bursting with men who once were (as well as others still serving at Her Majesty’s Pleasure). In short supply were domestic servants and marriage prospects.
The initiative of Earl Henry George Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies (and son of the former Prime Minister for whom the tea is said to be named), sought to relieve the “misery, poverty and in likelihood, early death” that came in the wake of the “Great Hunger”. In addition, it would address this gender imbalance.
The destiny of the Keefe sisters was to be among a select few to put down roots in what would become the capital region - where some of their descendants continue to live today.
Robyn Sherd McVey, formerly of Canberra and now tiny Ungarie (central west NSW), is Alicia’s great-granddaughter.
“I’m quite obsessed in relation to all aspects of my courageous, pioneering ancestors,“ she says.
“It was through searching for Alicia I discovered she was an Orphan. What I hadn’t realised until now was how young she may have been.”
The records on this are conflicting. The shipping register states Anne was 16 and her sibling (also listed as Alice) 15, but official certificates indicate Alicia was only 11. Given the minimum age requirement, Alicia’s was perhaps altered to ensure the pair wouldn’t be separated.
Almost on the anniversary of Anne and Alicia’s departure, a play focusing on the short-lived “Potato Orphans” endeavour is to open at The Q in Queanbeyan on August 24 (2019).
“Belfast Girls” focuses on five such women during their four-month long journey. Set in the cramped third-class confines of a crowded ship, it explores the transformational nature of the voyage. With the forging of relationships and bonds, the women’s histories are traced, and their expectations and hopes for their futures are laid bare.
According to playwright, Jaki McKarrick, it was always intended as an allegory, its central quintet an amalgam and embodiment of the thousands of stories. The title is a reference to those less inclined to fulfil another of the stipulations: “obedient.”
“At the time of writing, I think I was more angry at how the populace - and women in particular - were treated during the Famine,” Jaki says.
In 1849, the Emerald Isle was far from the sparkling jewel its poetic appellation suggested. After three years being ravaged by the Great Famine, around a million of its citizens were dead. Another million or so had left its shores. Brought on by a potato blight that destroyed crops throughout Europe, as an Irish staple, the catastrophe was compounded.
Many that remained filled the 130 workhouses built around the country to house the starving and the wretched (another 33 would subsequently be added until the cessation of the system in the early 1920s).
Described as “the most feared and hated institution ever established in Ireland”, it was rudimentary accommodation and a subsistence diet in exchange for mostly menial work, such as rock-breaking - and the giving up of any landholding. Overcrowded, filthy, disease-ridden and devoid of promise, the alternative was to take to a life of crime or prostitution.
Families were separated and large numbers of the inmates - although they weren’t prisons and people were free to leave if they chose - were children. Not always orphans, often they were abandoned by parents no longer able to care for them.
While “emigration of the bone and sinew of the country” was opposed in certain quarters, it offered an appealing solution for a reduction in the burgeoning ranks. And it came at less of a cost to landlords than providing for paupers.
The Earl Grey program was engineered to specifically deal with the “surplus” girls; those with the potential to become “permanent dead-weight”, with little prospect of marriage or gainful employment. Nonetheless, passage out had to be applied for.
It could be a perilous choice either way. Stay, and there was every chance of starvation or a premature end (so inhospitable the conditions, roads leading to the "poor houses" became known as “pathways of the dead”; more than a quarter of those admitted never made it out again). Or, accept the government’s invitation with a chance it may be death at sea.
Research suggests that in 1847 alone, some 40,000 Irish who set sail for a “better life” elsewhere, died en route. The scale of the tragedy of the “coffin ships” was expressed by the US Commissioner for Emigration who wrote: "If crosses and tombs could be erected on water … the whole route of the emigrant vessels … would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery."
The Earl’s scheme was better regulated and while girls did perish in the course of the journey, the percentages were very small in comparison.
As actual orphans - their parents, Michael and Eliza, dead - Anne and Alicia were plucked from Abbeyleix, one of two workhouses for Queen’s County (the girls’ family parish, Ballyroan). Built for 500, it’s suggested up to 800 were living there at one point. None of the original buildings remain and a District Hospital now stands on the site.
Emigration wasn’t guaranteed of being a step up either.
Anti-Irish/Catholic sentiment was strong among an aspirational population trying to shake itself of its criminal origins. Accusations of taking jobs, a lack of physical fortitude, and other unsavoury asides abounded. The local press decried the arrivals as “workhouse sweepings”, and worse, “hordes of useless trollops, thrust upon an unwilling community.”
Dispersed from South Australia to Queensland, their fates varied as dramatically as their backgrounds.
There were those who were abused and taken advantage of: Alice Ball, 14, disembarked in October, 1849. A year later, pregnant to her employer, she threw herself into Melbourne’s Yarra River.
While some achieved material prosperity and middle-class respectability, exploitation, domestic violence and a harsh bush existence were the most common outcomes.
As a result, a goodly proportion allowed themselves and their stories to be swallowed up in the unexplored wilds of this isolated new world. Others sought to reinvent themselves entirely - some even doing this before they set sail, assuming the identity of others (usually those who had died).
Anne and Alicia had a few advantages: they could read and write (apparently another stipulation not always adhered to), and they had each other - familial connections in this situation, a rarity.
Having arrived in Sydney after a four month journey, on November 21, 1849 (less than nine months later the controversial scheme would end), they gained employment relatively close to each other. Anne was hired by W.E. Morriss at the village of Binda, near Crookwell (NSW Southern Tablelands).
An ex-policeman, Morriss owned the Flagstaff Store which in 1865 would be robbed and burnt down by Ben Hall. (When the bushranger entered the premises and was asked if he was Hall, his response: “I am that gentleman”[i].
Alicia went to work for the first landholder on the Limestone Plains (later, Canberra), Lt. J.J. Moore, at his Goulburn property, Baw Baw.
“My maternal ancestry has me as a 7th generation descendant of Moore, a very familiar name in Queanbeyan and Burra area,” comments Robyn.
Less is known about Anne’s fate but on November 5, 1851, she married Thomas Murphy, of Bungendore (a small village on the outskirts of today's capital), in Queanbeyan.
Her great-niece, Robyn, is of the belief their progeny were numerous and that many of the family wound up in Braidwood and Moruya (South Coast).
[NB: Another relative has been in touch since publication of this article;
Ann and Thomas had 2 children, Mary (1852-1867), and Anne Theresa (known as Theresa, 1857-1930). Thomas died in 1874, buried at Bungendore, as is Mary. Ann married a second time, at Bungendore to James O'Sullivan in 1882. James died in 1910 and is buried at Roman Catholic Cemetery Hoskingtown.
At this point, Ann's final fate is still unknown.]
In 1859, the first of seven children was born to Alicia and William Sherd, a Bungendore “confectioner” and later mail contractor.
“When William left England [c1853], he left his wife and two sons,” explains Robyn.
“I’m a novice with genealogy but suspect that Alicia and William may have been in a common law relationship.”
Given what they may have experienced on arriving in the country, Bungendore would have been something of a respite from any prejudice, overt or otherwise - it had a large Irish (generally Catholic) populace. This included figures as prominent as John Dwyer, son of Wicklow Chief, Michael Dwyer, leader of the 1798 Irish rebellion against the English.
Today Sherd is a well-recognised name throughout the area. Bungendore’s main sports ground is named for one of Alicia and William’s great-grandsons, Mick Sherd, for his significant work within the community.
On Alicia’s death in 1896 in the Queanbeyan Hospital, she was buried in an unmarked grave in Bungendore's small cemetery. William would die two years later.
Yet a third local Orphan I've discovered, is Mary Ann Duddy (pronounced, Doody). A 16-year-old from Galway, with her parents, William, a cattle dealer, and Bridget, dead, she too, came out in 1849. Mary Ann travelled to Sydney with 233 other girls aboard the Digby, setting foot on these shores in April.
Unlike the Keefes, Mary Ann was illiterate. Having previously worked as a kitchen maid, she was indentured to a Mrs Elias Pearson Laycock Snr (Grace) at Heathfield, near Liverpool.
[NB: Mrs Laycock’s grazier husband was the grandson of merchant John Connell and his ex-convict wife, Catherine. Connell acquired much of the Kurnell Peninsula (Botany Bay). This included an area encompassing the first land grant there. On his death in 1849, Elias and his brother, John Connell Laycock, inherited their grandfather’s properties. (A grandson of Elias and Grace, James Outram Anderson became an Australian Champion tennis player).]
Within a year, the Roman Catholic Mary Ann married 23-year-old Englishman and auctioneer, Robert Sindel, at St Andrews Presbyterian Church in Sydney.
They’d move briefly to Queensland and, one day short of Mary Ann’s second anniversary of arrival, on April 3, 1851, the couple’s first child, Robert junior, was born.
Thereafter, it was back to NSW where the couple ran a general store at Goulburn. It’s recorded that in 1859, Robert snr was elected to the Municipal Council. This though, must have been earlier as by February of that year, the family was living in a four-roomed cottage in Macquoid Street in Queanbeyan.
Auctioning wares from the Harp of Erin Inn next door to the family home, the Sindels were obviously doing well enough by 1861 to advertise to employ a servant.
In 1865, Robert purchased Manchester House, the former Prince of Wales Hotel turned general store, on the main thoroughfare, Monaro Street.
In addition to Mary Ann helping him run this large establishment, she’d give birth to 11 children over 18 years.
In a sad record of “strange fatality”, three of them would die in bizarrely similar circumstances - each scalded to death.
When Mary Ann herself died - in their store - November 11, 1870, she was only 37 years old. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Wesleyan section of Queanbeyan Riverside Cemetery - listed as Mary Ann Carter Duddy.
Robert had been appointed Warden of the Anglican Christ Church in 1868, though the children attended the Wesleyan Sunday School. A year after Mary Ann’s death, he founded the Sons and Daughters of Temperance Society in Queanbeyan, assisted by civic leader and journalist (and the man who'd be dubbed the ‘Father of Canberra’), John Gale.
The building erected in 1877 for the organisation - which was opposed to alcohol - was unique to the town for its curved roof and that it could cater to as many as 500. While unknown to most, it still exists today, a hidden historic gem sitting behind a large and somewhat unattractive facade.
From 1872, Robert took up farming in the Michelago area, at which time he married again. At some point moving to Braidwood, where he would finish his days in 1891, he also fathered another seven children!
Mary Ann Duddy is noted on the Welcome Wall of the Maritime Museum. Facing outwards to Darling Harbour and Pyrmont Bay, its bronze panels were erected in honour of emigres from all parts of the world.
Another memorial, the Irish Famine Monument at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney - the initial residence (and sometimes place of incarceration) of the Orphans - marks its 20th anniversary on August 25, 2019.
Its glass panels are etched with 420 individuals representing all those so displaced.
“I attended the Famine Commemoration at Hyde Park last year with three of my siblings and it was wonderful to see Alicia noted there,” says Robyn.
According to its artists, “as their names fade on the glass so does the memory of some of these young female immigrants.”
Works such as “Belfast Girls” and those keen to preserve the identities and contributions of their forebears are ensuring they will never truly fade.
“Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”
Under the shelter of each other, people survive.
* Many thanks also to Brigid Whitbread, Local History Librarian at the Queanbeyan-Palerang Library for her initial research.
SOURCES & LINKS:
https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/irish-orphan-girls-hyde-park-barracks
https://breaking-the-fourth-wall.com/2017/02/28/belfast-girls-a-history/
https://irishfaminememorial.org/orphans/database/99/?surName&firstName&nativePlace&parents&age=0&religion&ship=0
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3522
http://irishworkhousecentre.ie/the-workhouse-story/
https://www.sea.museum/2019/03/15/remembering-the-irish-famine-orphans
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Abbeyleix/
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=7xsGVONPs9gC&pg=PT212&lpg=PT212&dq=Abbeyleix+workhouse&source=bl&ots=YL5RlvKOG8&sig=ACfU3U1dZoH7rmof0vqNViRU6uyK5T4auQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiu4tu7ze3jAhUUXHwKHUEuBQU4FBDoATAGegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=Abbeyleix%20workhouse&f=false
http://www.from-ireland.net/history-of-queens-county-laois-ballyroan/
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-kerry-workhouse-girls-who-became-australian-pioneers-1.2018759
https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/lost-children/
https://www.ssec.org.au/our_environment/our_bioregion/kurnell/history/occupation/earliestsettlers.htm
Thanks Robyn and cghindmarsh74 - that's another fascinating story to add to our growing local collection of Orphans. Sad not to know if the sisters ever saw each other again.
Hi Nichole,
Great article on the potato famine orphans. Just wanted to let you know of another local potato famine orphan - Catherine McNamara, my 3xG Grandmother. Catherine & her sister Bridget were from Ennis, County Clare, and arrived on the Thomas Abuthnot in Feb 1850. Both girls could read. From Sydney they traveled to a depot at Yass.
After 14 days at the Yass depot Catherine was employed as a house servant to Mr I McVitey 'Primrose Valley' Molonglo for 1 year. Her sister Bridget was sent to an employer at Boorowa. Some years later Bridget placed an ad in the Goulburn newspaper in search of Catherine but it is not known if they saw each other again.
Catherine…
Thank you Nichole, my courageous Irish ancestry has come to life with your story.