Attitudes towards Irish Immigration
by Kerry Edwards
MA, Dip.Ed, Dip.Ed.Stud.,Dip.Soc.Sci.
There is an Irish
Australian folksong called “Fare thee well Me Darlin’ Mary
Ann” that contains the
lines:
Our land may be poor but this I’m sure
We’re welcome where ever we roam
So at the break of the day
We’ll be sailing away
To the shores of Austral i ay
In another verse
we are asked to believe that in Kalgoorlie “men get rich, and
there’s plenty of girls, or so I have been told”.
In the words of
another song: It ain’t necessarily so……
In the Australian
experience, the identities of being Irish and being Catholic were
intertwined. Racial and religious
prejudice were doubly compounded by those who knew themselves and their tribe
to be superior to this “other”. The Establishment was English and Anglican, and the Scots
Presbyterians were in the ascendancy.
Below the Irish were the Australian indigenous people and the Chinese.
This view of the
social pecking order tended to exclude those Irish who were definitely not
Catholic, the many Northern Irish of Scots Presbyterian descent, particularly
the Orangemen, and those English and Scots who were always Catholic, and
English people like Caroline Chisholm, a convert to Catholicism, who stands out
in history because she was so unusual.
I will concentrate
on two periods of Australian history:
the convict years and the Gold Rush, and only briefly mention other
events that illustrate the attitudes towards Irish immigration. These two periods have been critical in
shaping Australian society.
Firstly, a quick
look at Ireland at the time of the first settlement at Sydney. The Penal Laws were designed to drive
the indigenous Irish population “into the clay”. Under the Popery Laws, no Catholic
could sit in Parliament, on the bench or in a jury; none could vote, teach or
hold any army commission. The
property laws were written to break up Catholic estates and consolidate
Protestant ones. Protestant
estates could be left intact to eldest sons, but Catholic land had to be split
between all the children. Catholic
landowning families degenerated in sharecropping within a generation or two.[1] In 1788, Catholics in Ireland owned
about 5% of the land. [2]These
laws unified Irish Catholics very effectively and eliminated the question of a
class struggle within Catholic society.
The invader was the common enemy, and Irish political prisoners
transported to Australia came from backgrounds as diverse as the peasantry and
the professions.
The English
politician and writer Edmund Burke remarked in 1792 that Ireland was divided
into two distinct bodies, without common interest,
sympathy or connection.
One…was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the
education, the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf
for them. Are we to be surprised
when by the efforts of so much violence in conquest… we had reduced them
to a mob?
Irish convicts
transported to Australia fall into the following categories:
·
those
convicted in England for crimes committed in England
·
those
convicted in Ireland for criminal offences committed there
·
those
convicted of political crimes.
The first group
were city dwellers, poor and poorly educated and repeat offenders, usually for
theft.
The second group
could be further divided into City or Country dwellers. Those convicts transported from Dublin
and Cork were often similar to their compatriots in London and Manchester ie
recidivist petty thieves. Those
from the country however show different patterns. The theft is more often of food and livestock, without
violence, and they were more likely to plead necessity.
These two groups
constituted approximately 80% of Irish convicts transported to the Australian
colonies. Various academic
authorities[3] have agreed
with John Polding the first Catholic bishop and archbishop in Australia, that
“about four fifths of Irish convicts can be properly described as
ordinary criminals, mostly thieves…”
There were
approximately 30,000 men and 9,000 women transported directly to the Australian
colonies from Ireland. The Australian historian, Professor Alan Shaw has
estimated that less than 600 Irish convicts were specifically politically
prisoners, but he conceded that there was a further group of up to 5000
convicts whose motivation for their crimes could have made them political
rebels. Although the Irish
convicts may not have differed greatly from their British counterparts in their
criminality, in other respects the differences were significant. Their backgrounds were rural rather
than urban, they included a greater proportion of women, and they had long
memories of oppression:
The 19th century
historian and Irish landlord W.E. Lecky wrote that the Irish were
“educated through long generations of oppression into an inveterate
hostility to the law, and were taught to look for redress in illegal violence
and secret combination”[4]
The proportion of
Irish transported to NSW was approximately 25% while it was only 10% to
Tasmania. Writers like Robert
Hughes attribute significant differences to the society of each colony to this
fact, and much emphasis is given to the fact that no convicts, Irish or
otherwise, blotted the foundations of South Australia and Victoria.
One of the first
to publish a severe judgment against the Irish was Captain David Collins,
himself from an Anglo-Irish background, serving in the army, supporting a
political system based on an ascendancy class. He referred to the Irish convicts as:
Defenders, desperate and ripe for any scheme from which danger and
destruction might come. Irish
women were just as bad, they had plotted the preparing of pulverised glass to
mix with the flour of which the sailors were to make their puddings. What an importation!
Collins who was
the Judge Advocate for the new colony , despised the Irish prisoners
“They do not deserve the appellation of men”. This racist attitude,
common enough at the time, did not bode well for the dispensing of justice in
the settlement.
If Collins was
representative of the army, the Reverend Samuel Marsden spoke for the
Established Church. Marsden, also
known as the “Flogging Parson” held great authority in the colony
of NSW, and reacted vigorously to the waves of Irish convicts, particularly
those that arrived as a consequence of the Risings of 1798 and 1803. He died before the Young Irelanders,
Ribbonmen and the last of the United Irishmen and Whiteboys arrived.
His hatred for the
Irish Catholic convicts knew no bounds.
It spilled into his sermons, pervaded his table talk and was set down at
length in a memo to his ecclesiastical superiors in London:
The number of Catholic convicts is very
great…and these in general composed of the lowest class of the Irish
nation, who are the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured
with the light of civilisation, men that have been familiar with every horrid
crime from their infancy.
….As they never appear to reflect upon consequences but to be always alive to rebellion and
mischief, they are very dangerous members of Society. They are extremely superstitious, artful and
treacherous, which renders it impossible for the most watchful and active
government to discover their real intentions…..
Marsden was
particularly suspicious of the Irish because English was not always their first
language, therefore relying on English speaking informers did not always get
him the information he wanted.
Convicts were flogged for speaking Irish, among the legion of
punishments for misdemeanours they daily lived under.
Marsden is
possibly best remembered for his attitude to Irish women. His description of any woman living
with a man to whom she was not married according to the rites of the Anglican
Church as “a concubine” was an insult to Irish womanhood. Several generations of colonists
existed without a Catholic priest to solemnize marriages and baptisms. Most refused to use the Anglican
clergy, professing their commitment to each other, and baptising their children
themselves. Marsden was
instrumental in keeping Catholic clergy out of the colony, arguing that if the
Mass were tolerated “the colony would be lost to the British Empire
within the year.”[5] In 1812 he wrote:
We have now cleared the colony of all the Catholic priests, have
schools established in almost every district so that the rising generation will
be brought up in the principles of the Protestant religion.
Irish convicts
reacted to these moves by keeping their children home, and as the hedgerow
schools had operated in Ireland, developed an alternative form of education, or
let their children grow up illiterate, rather than risk losing the faith or
worse, going the next step of becoming Protestants.
Irish convict
women were doubly insulted.
Jennifer Harrison in her work “The very worst class”:
Irish women convicts at Moreton Bay,[6]
quotes an English writer who was otherwise sympathetic to the convict cause:
I really wish it was in my power to speak well of these women, they
are of the very worst class, their habits the most depraved of all kinds, and
reformation is quite impossible.
Subsequent
academic research has shown that very few women, even amongst the recidivists
sent to Moreton Bay, were “really of the very worst class”.[7]
The administration
of the colony joined in the chorus of prejudice. It was obvious that Governor Brisbane, writing in 1824,
shared the view that the Irish were dangerous. “It is a remarkable fact that every murder or
diabolical crime which has been committed in the colony since my arrival has
been perpetrated by Roman Catholics”.[8]
The Irish were
doubly oppressed by their colonial masters: oppressed as the indigenous people of conquered Ireland, and
further oppressed as convicts in the new colonies.
While the male
members of the Establishment dished out floggings and executions to maintain
discipline, an episode that involved the wife of the Governor, Mrs Elizabeth
Macquarie shows an alternative, and ultimately successful method of
co-existence.
Only a couple of
months after their arrival, when the Governor was away on his first visit to
Parramatta, Mrs Macquarie found herself confronted by the overseer of a band of
convicts. He claimed that his men,
mostly Irish Catholics, had been accustomed to celebrating St Patricks
Day. Mrs Macquarie found her
choice of decision limited. She
could refuse to give her permission and have to deal with 50 possibly resentful
men, or she could agree and risk the celebration turning into an unruly drunken
orgy. She solved the problem with
admirable tact and won the respect and affection of the convicts by treating
them like human beings.
She granted them
some time off work, to be spent “reverently” in the barracks, then
told them to report to Government House in the afternoon. To their amazement the men found
themselves before a feast of Irish stew and pudding. After this meal, the men were in no mood for drunken rioting
and most returned to the barracks to sleep.
Regardless of
anyone’s attitude to Irish settlers, free or convict, the shortage of
labour in the colony meant that there was work for everyone who wanted it. Prospective employers might put
advertisements in the newspaper, Wanted General Servant No Irish Need Apply,
but there were plenty who did not, and plenty of Irish emancipists and free
settlers who would give their countrymen and women an economic lift.
Macquarie’s
approach to governing the colony was to promote family life and dignity through
work. Tickets of leave were handed
out generously to convicts who towed the line. Land grants followed.
James Meehan, the former Irish political prisoner from the 1798 Rising,
was made the Surveyor General, and with Governor Macquarie’s approval,
concentrated Irish emancipists to the south west of Sydney, the fertile fields
of Liverpool and Campbelltown.
Bryants, Burkes, Byrnes,Dwyers, Doyles, Murphys, Sheehans Sullivans and
Ryans among many others re-established Irish family life and prospered. The South West of Sydney has remained
an identifiably Irish stronghold, returning strong Labor candidates, the most
famous and progressive of all being Gough Whitlam, who was Prime Minister
between 1972 and 1975. The current
member for that seat, Mr Mark Latham is an outspoken thorn in the side of the
Establishment, justifying his colourful language by saying that “that is
how people in my electorate express themselves.”
But I am racing ahead.
The legacy of
sectarianism in Australian politics, the sense of a community divided between
English Protestant “haves” and Irish Catholic
“have-nots” began in the convict period and influenced the patterns
of power in Australian life for another 150 years. In NSW the Irish convicts were responsible for the
working-class resentment of authority, its ethos of mateship and a fair-go, and
a mistrust of boss cockies. The
use of satire and ridicule to take the tall poppies down a peg or two, is a
facet of the Irish sense of humour remoulded into the Australian mainstream
culture.
The next great
wave of Irish immigration came with free settlers. Starting as a trickle during the 1840s it became a torrent
after 1851, when gold was discovered in the Bathurst area, west of Sydney and
at Ballarat north of the relatively new settlement of Melbourne. News of previous finds was suppressed
during the convict period. There
is the story of the Reverend Ralph Clarke approaching the Governor at the time
with several gold nuggets.
Governor Gipps is said to have replied:
Put it away Mr Clarke or we shall all have our
throats cut!
By 1851, there
were few convicts still under their original sentence, and after a long
agricultural depression of the 1840s and population losses to the Californian
goldfields after 1849, an influx of immigrants was probably seen as an economic
stimulant.
From 1851 to 1861,
the population of the Australian colonies went from 400,000 to 1,168,000. Half a million emigrants came from
Britain and Ireland, and the rest from all over the globe. The folk song “Dennis
O”Reilly” portrays a common Irish perspective:
When first I left Old Ireland’s shore
The yarns that I was told
How folks in Australia
Could pick up lumps of gold.
How gold dust lay in all the streets
And the miner’s right was free
Hurrah I said, my loving friends,
That’s just the place for me.
But the
miner’s right wasn’t free, and once the alluvial gold was picked up
by the lucky early diggers, earning enough to pay for the licence became quite
onerous. To collect the license
fees and enforce the law generally, police force was recruited especially for
the gold fields. It was claimed
that the officers got their appointments through influence with the Governor
and that the ranks contained plenty of exconvicts and doubtful characters. The diggers came to regard the gold
fields police, known as “the traps” as little better than
bushrangers in uniform. One of their own officers described the traps as
“the most drunken set of men I ever met with.”[9]
One very zealous
police officer, Inspector Armstrong, was nicknamed “The Monster” for good reason. Armstrong carried a riding whip with a
heavy brass knob on the end of the handle, which he used freely against anyone
who got in his way. He was a noted
destroyer of grog tents. One one
occasion he ordered his men to set fire to an Irish widow’s tent, knowing
that her sleeping children were inside.
The wretched woman, whose husband had been killed in an accident
screamed “For God’s sake, sir; spare my tent! Spare my
children!”
The traps, for
once, refused to obey this order, and the furious Armstrong sprang from his
horse and burned the tent himself.
The hysterical woman barely managed to rescue her children, including a
new born baby, and stood by helplessly as all her worldly goods went up in
flames. Armstrong rode away,
followed by his men and the abuse of every digger on that field. What was worse, was that when Armstrong
was finally dismissed from the force when public outrage could not be ignored
he boasted that he had made 15,000 pounds, when his official salary was 400
pounds. He had destroyed the small
sly grog sellers, like our Irish widow, but permitted the bigger players to
stay open in return for a share of their profits.
These incidents,
and many more like them, were not forgotten by the diggers. The mining town of Ballarat became the
flashpoint in the disputes between the diggers and the gold fields traps. The firing of Bentley’s Hotel
came soon after the persecution of Gregorius, the servant of the Catholic
priest Father Smyth. Gregorius had
been arrested for not having a digger’s licence and then convicted of
assaulting a trooper. In fact,
Gregorius didn’t need to hold a licence, as he was not digging for gold,
and he was unlikely to have tried to assault a trooper. He was a cripple.
The Ballarat
Reform League broadened their demands for ending the licencing system and
police corruption. They now wanted
representatives in Parliament, adult male franchise, a new mining
administration and the unlocking of the land held by squatters. At a meeting of 15,000 miners at
Ballarat on 29 November 1854, the new flag of the Southern Cross was raised and
Irishman Peter Lalor led the miners against the authorities at the Eureka
Stockade. When the Governor, Sir
Charles Hotham tried to have the diggers convicted of treason, no jury would
find them guilty. As each man was
acquitted he was carried shoulder high from the courtroom by the cheering
crowds. Almost all of the demands
of the miners were won, and Peter Lalor was elected to Parliament and
eventually became a rather conservative speaker of the House. Lalors still sit in the Victorian
parliament.
The Australian
colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland achieved
self-government in 1856. Universal
male suffrage was still a little way off, but the increase in property values
meant that many immigrants who would never have been able to vote in their
native lands could exercise that right in Australia. Britain was reluctant to enforce colonial executive rule
against the demands for democratic government and risk the loss of the colonies
through an Australian equivalent of the American War of Independence.
The Irish embraced
the opportunities that the new colony offered. There would now be political independence through democracy,
and the ownership of land offered a secure economic foundation. The Irish would not assimilate and
become English, nor would they give up their religion and become
Anglicans. They would become
Australians.
Charles Gavan
Duffy, the Irish rebel who escaped death or transportation after 1848 because
three successive trials acquitted him, summed up the new attitude. Arriving in Melbourne as an immigrant
in 1855, to begin a long political career, he told a predominantly Irish
welcoming banquet that they should accept the liberal 1856 Constitutions:
this was not Ireland, but Australia - Australian,
where no nationality need stand on the defensive, for there was fair play for
all…But let me not be misunderstood, I am not here to repudiate or
apologise for any part of my past life.
I am an Irish rebel to the back bone.[10]
The 1860s saw the
peak of Irish immigration to Australia.
There were sectarian disturbances, riots and virulent attacks on Irish
Catholics in the Protestant and mainstream press. Fears of being over run by an inferior race were expressed
widely. Again the Irish were
portrayed as stupid, ignorant, lying, drunken, superstitious, riotous, seditious,
and with aspirations beyond their station. Newspaper cartoonists portrayed the Irishman as first cousin
to a chimpanzee.
Social observers
like the Englishman Richard Twopeny wrote that “Most of our servants are
Irish, lying and dirty.”
Likewise the novelist Anthony Trollope, writing of his visit to
Australia in 1871, declared that Melbourne had an “Irish quarter”.
The men often clustered in the densest inner city
neighbourhoods near the waterfront and railway yards, in places like
Darlinghurst and West Melbourne, where they earned their living as labourers,
carters and navvies. Like their
countrymen who migrated to English and American cities, they coccupied the
lowest rung on the occupational ladder and some of the most crowded and
dilapidated housing.[11]
In 1887 the
Irish-Australian journalist JF Hogan rejected Trollope’s observation:
There is no such thing as a distinctive Irish
quarter in Melbourne, known and recognised by that contemptuous term. Irishmen and their families are to be
found in all parts of the city and suburbs and everywhere they form a
peaceable, orderly, and industrious element in the general population, not a
“residuum of poverty and filth” as Mr Anthony Trollope insinuates.
In rural areas
too, Irish Catholic settlement grew.
In the 1861 census, which showed an overall Catholic population for NSW
of more than 28 %, people spread from the south western concentration of
Sydney, and the gold fields of NSW and Victoria. Binalong was 35%, Gundagai 36% and Cooma 40%. The town of Boorow, with an Irish Catholic
population of 51% was known as the Tipperary of Australia. The local joke was that if you threw a
stone down the street there, you would hit a Ryan or a Dwyer but only if you
missed a Hurley or a Corcoran first.
Another joke asked: Have
you been to Ireland?” and replied “No, but I’ve been to
Boorowa”. When the Bank of
New South Wales opened there in 1866, among its first customers were ten
Dwyers, ten O’Neils, ten O’Connors and nine O’Briens. The 1872 post office directory listed 46
Ryans in the Boorowa district.[12]
Patterns of Irish
settlement around valleys near Kiama, south of Sydney, have left a landscape
very similar to that of rural Ireland:
stone walls, cottage ruins and green green grass. Similarly the settlement at Port Fairy
- originally known as Belfast - was an obvious Irish landscape in
Victoria: green rolling hills and
whitewashed stone cottages. But
William Rutledge’s attempts to create a settlement of tenant farmers like
those of Ireland had a few subtle differences. Writing in 1884 Rutledge notes:
Pigs and potatoes are here but the spirit of the
people has undergone a change. The
peasant farmer does not touch his hat to me or address me as “your
honour”.
Irish Australians
certainly did not go in for …what was the expression Mark Latham
used? Whatever it was, they
didn’t do it then and they won’t do it now.
I have only
briefly touched the surface of the topic of “Attitudes to Irish
Immigration to Australia”.
Our experience was different from that of the US for example. There were no coffin ships of Irish
escaping the Famine, meeting a very unwelcoming crowd at Boston Harbour. There were no riots and shouts of
“no more Irish”. But
the discrimination was nevertheless there and active. Irish Australians have had to work and fight for political,
social and economic equality. The
ownership of land has been a critical force shaping the lifestyle of city and
country dweller alike. The
exercise of political power, particularly through the Labor Party and its off
shoot the DLP, has been effective in achieving in Australia social reforms and
a liberal democracy to be proud of.
The affluence and safety thus achieved has had the effect of making a
more conservative society, to protect those gains. If Irish Australian have the lost the fire in their belly it
may be because they have heeded the old advice:
Always keep tight hold of nurse,
For fear of meeting something worse!
Australia has had
a fair share of Irish Australian sabre rattling republicans, several fine Prime
Ministers (two whose ancestors came from the same Tipperary village), folk
heroes, valiant Victoria Cross winners and eminent Churchmen.
But always
remember that Irish Australia has produced more nuns and public servants than
bushrangers!
[1] Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore 1987 p. 183
[2] Edmund Campion Australian Catholics 1987 p.6
[3] AGL Shaw and Patrick O”Farrell, quoted in When Irish Eyes were Not Smiling by C. Ryan in AFFHO Newsletter August 2000
[4] Ibid.
[5] Campion, opus cit p. 12
[6] Irish Convict Lives ed. Bob Reece 1993 p.179
[7] Ibid p 194
[8] Campion, opus cit p7
[9] Bill Peach Gold 1983 p.60
[10] Audrey Oldfield The Historical Background p3 State Library of NSW Forum on Republicanism 1999
[11] Quoted in The Irish in Australia History Lecture 8, Monash University September 2001 p.3
[12] Campion opus cit. P.30