TRANSCRIPT: Out of the Port – Irish in Queensland, … · And we’ll do that via at least three...

TRANSCRIPT: Out of the Port: Irish in Queensland of 14 14 March 2012, State Library of Queensland, Auditorium 1

TRANSCRIPT: Out of the Port – Irish in Queensland, their cultural legacy

Event Date – Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Venue – Auditorium 1, State Library of Queensland

Speaker – Dr Jennifer Harrison and Peter Connell

Facilitator – Dr Kate Evans

KATE EVANS: Hello, good afternoon and welcome to this Out of the Port event, here at the State Library of Queensland. The first thing we have to say of course is please make sure you’ve turned off your mobile phones and also bear in mind that this event is being recorded and will be put up on the website, so if you have any problems with that do bear that in mind, and it also means that when we get to the question part of the afternoon please do wait for the microphone to get to you. So this Out of the Port event here is being presented by the State Library obviously, and also the Department of Environment and Resource Management, Cultural Resource Branch. Before we begin I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land both past and present. My name’s Kate Evans and I’m a broadcaster on ABC RN, working on Books and Art Daily, and Books Plus, but my enduring commitment is to history and I have been lucky enough to spend time in the Original Materials collection here at the State Library in the John Oxley library, and this talk today will also lead us towards some of that material, both in the analysis of stories we will hear, but also have an opportunity at the end of the session to see some of the material related to the cultural legacy of the Irish in Queensland. Because that’s what we’re here to talk about today, in the week of Saint Patricks Day. And we’ll do that via at least three groups of Irish people in Queensland, and I’m sure in fact we will hear about more, but the early convicts at Moreton Bay, migrants from the 1860’s onwards, and women who came as nun’s in the 1920’s and 30’s, and other times as well. And of course there are many other stories and perhaps myths, misconceptions, hopes and even some confronting moments that swirl around that history. At least two of those groups had suitcases or trunks or boxes of some kind, and the material culture, the stuff that people brought with them is part of this conversation today too. So I am delighted to say we are joined by a historian and a curator to get us thinking. We’ll begin with historian Dr Jennifer Harrison in the 19th century, and then move into the following century with curator Peter Connell. Each of our speakers will present a talk for us of about 25 minutes each and then I hope to draw out connections and points of difference and implications in a panel discussion. And then we’ll also hear from you with a Q & A question session before we take our new Irish eyes to the Library’s own collection. Dr Jennifer Harrison specialises in biography, convict and immigration history, family history and connections between Ireland and Queensland in particular. She is associated both with the University of Queensland and that central resource for all historians, the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Today she’ll be concentrating on the 19th century, Dr Jennifer Harrison DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Lovely to see you all here today on the week of Saint Patricks Day, and this year, the Irish festival week, and I think I am also able to say to you friends, Irish, Country men, that tomorrow is the Ides of March. Today I’m concentrating on the 19th century people who came here from Ireland and starting with some of the very early ones. I haven’t as yet found and Irishmen in Cooks crew, Flinders, Edwardson or Bingle who were two of the explorers that came into Moreton Bay, but I’ve got no doubt there was one or two amongst that lot, but if anyone has ever found one I’d love to talk to you later. The first one that we usually talk about is Finnigan, who Oxley found at the mouth of the Brisbane River when he first arrived in 1823, but the settlement started in September 1824 and we had a series of commandant’s that were here and you can see that five of them had close connections to Ireland. Even though Patrick Logan was a Scot, he was married in Sligo and his eldest son Robert was born in Galway, baptised at Saint Nicholas. Then Foster Fines was here from


Dublin and Owen Gormand from Kings County, so we’ve only got Cloonia Scott, Major Cotton who was an Englishman who spent most of his time in India and Cravat who was here for just three short months, who – we haven’t yet found Irish connections however I don’t think they’re going to get them now. The period of the convict settlement has quite a lot of Irish here, I prefer to call them larrikins rather than absolute convicts, but some of them weren’t as nice as the people that you usually meet in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. And unfortunately among the women the Irish out numbered all the others that came here, representing about 60%. One of the things that needs to be said right from the beginning is that the Irish came from all over the island, there is no such thing as Northern Ireland in the 19th century it didn’t start until 1922, so you can have the north of Ireland or Ulster, but you can’t have Northern Ireland. We had plenty here from Antrim and Donegal which was part of the old province of Ulster in the 19th century. I also listed there some of the early convicts that we know were Irish and they were here in the early days but they were only the pre-runners of dozens, in fact hundreds. In pre-separation Queensland this is the years of Brisbane and the Moreton Bay district was still part of New South Wales and gradually expanded, getting larger and larger but was still part of New South Wales until 1859. But in those years we had ship after ship of immigrants, this was the first one – the Artemisia which arrived in December 1848, but there were only seven Irish on it, and they had been recruited mainly in Scotland and Liverpool so they weren’t really bought from Ireland they’d already moved once, and this is a characteristic of a lot of the Irish through this time that often where we know them wasn’t their first port of call, some of them went to America, came here via New Zealand, southern colonies before they came. In all, 51 ships came during this time. It’s a period that’s not really looked at a lot but this is the time in the 40’s where we got the Irish orphan girls, 188 of them came up to Queensland eventually, one who had entered through Adelaide. There were whole ships, the Caroline, that had a lot of people on board, a lot of people are very cognoscente of the Emmigrant, terrible name for a ship when you’re trying to tell people they’re immigrants, but the Emmigrant arrived here in the 1850’s, it had been carrying guano, fertiliser in the shipload before and some of these people contracted disease. It is said that an Irish girl bought it aboard but they didn’t really have a good chance and there were a great lot of deaths on board. Even after they got to Moreton Bay they used Dunwich as a quarantine station and to this day you can see these little markers that were put there for the sesqui-centenary of the arrival of the immigrant in 2000. A the same time the doctor on board, Dr James Mitchell, an Antrim man gave his life, and the local doctor here went down to try and assist Dr David Ballow, a Scotsman who’d been here since the convict days, and her also succumbed to this disease. So it wasn’t easy for them. I always get the comment that when I talk about the Irish in Queensland I never show pretty pictures of home, so today I have dotted it with pretty pictures, so I hope you enjoy these. These mainly come from the west of Ireland where Queensland got its biggest numbers of immigrants. So from little villages like Kinvara in County Clara they turned up here and this is the sort of difference that they experienced. How they put up with the climatic and seasonal changes and then these people were expected to work on the land, farming methods were entirely different, the seasons were different. Today we’ve put on some lovely Irish weather for you. In Ireland of course they call it the Emerald Isle. I have to apologise and say that most of Queensland’s just merely mildew. But, these people were coming to a very pioneered area – they were the pioneers coming in to here. There was grass in the streets even in the main streets and it was so different to what they had left, of course once we did separate from NSW at the end of 1859, late December we got our first Governor and George Bowen was an Irishman born in Donegal, he then was serving in the Grecian Islands which is where he met his exotic first wife who came here as our Governor’s first wife in that time and said here until 1868. From then on Queensland had come into existence. No longer were we part of New South Wales and we had to attract our own people here, we had the area, the district, all the land which the Irish desperately wanted, to be able to work on their own land, so we sent an agent general to London and he arrived there in the very first year of our existence on Oct 9th and he set up an office and started attracting what they called muscle and bone to Queensland to work here and you can see that when he started his work in 1861 the census indicated that there was 5500 Irish in this district, but by then end of 1968 after hundreds of immigrant boats we had 20,000 Irish that grew very quickly and you can imagine when there were 5000 you probably knew most of them, but they were stretching out all the time and these people went to districts such as Ipswich, Warwick, Dreyton and going west they went to Maryborough and then they started to go west from those areas. Just to give you an idea of


colonial migration if you take this as a circle the top half represents English, you have 50% her this is by the turn of the 20th century, about 25% of people who came were Irish, about 13% were Scots, and the other 13% were Germans. And really if you still go down columns like our obituaries and things you’ll find this sort of spread except of course we’ve had all the post war migrations, second World War and that’s changed it a bit, so that why you can have soccer teams with such exotic names as ours has. This is the picture of the Agent General, can’t you imagine him storming around London and then giving lectures out in the provinces to try and attract people here to Queensland because we had the land, it was 12 times the size of England and Wales which is an amazing statistic, we had mineral wealth we had, it didn’t matter if they were wanting to be miners or pastoralists or industrialists if we wanted the industry but we didn’t get it, good agricultural land, healthy climate, so they said it didn’t turn out to be quite as good for the Scottish chests, and they just wanted the right stamp, cant you hear those Victorian words as they were publicising this wonderful area. They came in sailing vessels during the 60’s and 70’s such as this Flying Cloud which we used here for the Queensland heritage retrieval project, the image of it the Flying Cloud, but one of the reasons I put this on was to indicate to people if you think you’ve identified the ship your people were on, that they did make more than one voyage, and so you can see all these voyages that was made by the Flying Cloud and sometimes they had more Irish or Scots or English on board according to the way recruitment was going. The wonderful Quetter that sank that we all heard about, that was really returning from its 13th voyage when it came so everyone tells me very proudly they had people on the Quetter, yes for the previous decade we’d had people on the Quetter. This is also the sesqui-centenary 150 years of the arrival of the Quinn immigrants that came between 1862 and 1865, and most of them started off, the first couple of ships from Kings County which is now called Offaly, they’ve gone back to the old Irish name, since 1922, and you can see how this is right in the middle of Ireland, now Irelands really just like the palm of your hand, and so that’s the rather boggy area in the middle, and then the upper lands are more around the ridges and mountains, but Offaly was were they preached the pulpits and then it spread like wild fire, and they all went down to Cork to leave, and Cork’s directly south of there, and right down the bottom there, and you can see how the for many counties its easy to get to Cork and then all the sailing ships in the 60’s and 70’s if they called in at Ireland that’s where they left from. Some of the NSW ones left from Dublin, but most of ours came from Cork into Queensland, but later in the 1870s they no longer included Ireland in their routes so the Irish went to Plymouth and Liverpool, and left from those ports. Most of those original Quinn immigrants came from the particular estate in Kings County which was run by Trench, the local land lord, his son he installed in this was known as Geashill Castle, and we’ll be talking more about this later this year at the museum, but it’s a wonderful incentive that got a lot of people her and a lot of people who couldn’t have afforded to pay their own fares. They were leaving places and churches, like Quinn Abbey, some of you may know this one in County Claire, a beautiful cloister there, and they came and built their own little churches here in Brisbane and I put this one up because last week we had Augustus Pugin who designed this little chapel for St Stephens, his 200th birthday, so do know he was welcomed and celebrated very much and he turned 200 last week, but on Saint Patricks Day in 1889 Harry Clarke the stain glass designer was born in Dublin, and if you go to St Stephens today there is stain glass there by Harry Clarke, so it shows in some ways the world is very small, in other ways it can be very desperate. They often say that that land unites, sea divides as people were travelling, but in my experience with the Irish those who went overseas tended to keep in touch with the family and it was when the land was fractured at home into smaller and smaller blocks, I feel that was more divisive than the travelling. So these are the sort of things that they did, was establish a little church in the community, but we’ve got an expert here who will be talking a lot more on that later on, but its one of the greater contributions, through these that a lot of the culture was passed on. Now the Irish in Queensland in the 80’s just flooded in. By now we had steamships on the route from 1881, the McCara was the first one, often called after places in Afghanistan and Pakistan today because it was the British-India steam ship navigation company that started this route, and you can see they could come through the Mediterranean now because Suez Canal had bee n opened in 1869 and also steam ships didn’t need the winds, which there’s not a lot of wind through the red sea, so the steamers could come in and they could stop for water, in the sailing ships you couldn’t get out of the sailing ships until you got to the port you’d contracted to come to . With the steam ships they were taking on water and coals at different places if they needed them, so it was a lot more flexibility with the route, but as you can see as they came down the coast of Queensland a whole lot of our ports where ports of entry. In every other colony, which they were at this stage, the port was very close to the capital city when you think


about it – Freemantle for Perth, even though in Victoria they went into Portland sometimes, they were still very close to Melbourne. But they came down our coast from Thursday Island, was a great watering stop, then they usually come to Cooktown, Townsville, Cairns was a lot later, Bowen, Mackay, Rockhampton, Maryborough and Brisbane. So this way we populated the whole of the colony, and a lot of these people went west because the railways had started and they were helping build them as well as travelling out there on them. The Irish were prepared to go west and be jackaroos and people like that where as the Germans tended to stay in the fertile river valleys along the coast. So we’re populating a whole colony with these people and by the time we turned into the 20th century Queensland had half rural and half urban population, so there’s quite a contrast there because now days most of our people live between Brisbane and Melbourne, 7/9ths of the populations lived in that strip. So a definite change. They came in at the 1880s to a Queensland that had another Irish governor and actually four out of the five initial Governors of Queensland all were Irish, so this was Governor Arthur Kennedy, he had worked through the famine in County Clare, and he was reputed to have said that if he saw another landlord he’d shoot him. He then had seven governatorial positions around the world, three of which was in Africa, which I wouldn’t have really thought was great fun, but Vancouver island, that was a massive appointment, before it joined with British Colombia, Hong Long, Western Australia at one stage, and then he came back finally from Hong Kong to Brisbane, and on the way home back to Ireland he died in the Red Sea. He had a very fascinating and interesting life but this is the type of Irish man that we were getting here as officials, as well as settlers. Now the 1880’s arrivals to Queensland were pretty sense, you can see that in three years there, there’s over 10,000 came in three years. The immigration act has been changed and we were taking more mechanics, not just farm servants, we were taking always the domestic servants which a lot of the single girls came for. I haven’t found many of the Irish girls came in bride ships, which is one of the lovely family myths. They mainly came to be domestic servants, they taught, the teaching was something that a lot of the Irish did, and I’ve got one listing that something like 70% of the female teachers were Irish girls. As I said they brought their religion with them, and this included Protestant as well as Catholic religion but this is probably one of the biggest symbols in County Mayo today, the statue of Crough Patrick, have any of you been there? They have treks up the hill, I’m not that faithful. I go to the statue I thought that was pretty good, I’ve been there several times but it’s really one of the landmarks of the western coast, and there’s about four mountains in a row reaching over a series of counties, they reckon mid-summer that the sun catches each of them, so maybe we had druids there too. In 1779 on St Patricks Day was the first St Patricks Day parade in New York and this is a very early Queensland one, and you can see if you look carefully in the background, St Stephens, so this probably is the late 1880’s, 1890’s but can you see the banners and the crowds and crowds of people, and their were crowds and crowds last Saturday as well, its traditionally held on the Saturday before St Patricks Day, and as St Patricks Day this year is on a Saturday that why its held last Saturday. They left homes in Dublin, a lot of them left a home like this, but this of course is a traditional Dublin doorway which is always endearing. Its actually a customs department now, so even ordinary people don’t live in these types of houses but they’re certainly very beautiful, and this is showing some of the craft work that some of them were capable of doing with the plaster work, the glass and the panelled doors. But this was a house that was built here based on a house in a suburb of Dublin and the house in Dublin was also called Frascarti, and it became here the home of Kevin Izod O’Doherty, one of the young Icelanders, and his wife who is known as a poet known as Eva of the Nation. Their home was in Anne Street and it’s actually now the driveway to the Anglican Cathedral, which is just a turn around in the years in between. Part of the back of it became part of St Martin’s Hospital. More likely if you were in the bush this is the sort of bush shack that you were living in, but this is (I have to tell you) an advanced one. This has got a couple of rooms, often they were only lean-tos that looked like tents made out of bark, but this one’s beginning to get some of the comforts of home, because they were their for the duration, and you might see these easy chairs that the gentleman sitting in the middle, this is showing a more permanent establishment, but again built out of local materials, and this is how you get all of the vernacular housing around, because they use the local materials. But you notice too that most of them are wearing hats, which is something that became very common in Queensland because of the climate, and they adjusted. Mind you my husbands Grandmother was still wearing a black crinoline in Ayr in North Queensland in the 1950’s, and she’d come in the 1880’s and she’d only ever worn black crinolines with petticoats and she wasn’t changing for anyone. In 1778 on St Patricks


Day the volunteer company started in Belfast, now this is an early photograph of the Queensland offence force which is made up of Irishmen here, and in 1897 when they all resigned because their leader was replaced by someone they didn’t want, that became the beginning of the formation of the Queensland Irish association, which started in 1897 here in Queensland. Those days they were meeting in an hotel in Queens street, but in 1927 they of course built Tara house in Elizabeth Street and this was some of the early photographs that were taken at the time of the opening, and if any of you go into those rooms now you’ll see some of the lovely paster work and stain glass windows again, and the Queensland Irish association has always represented all of Ireland, not just any particular group. Those defence fellows of course went on to become part of the Australian Infantry in 1914 when called to arms, it’s not often that you think sometimes of looking for Immigrants amongst the soldier’s nominal lists, but they’re certainly there, and the Irish were among very high volunteers from Australia who went back to Europe at that stage. Sometimes that was the only trip home or near home that any of them ever had. When they got here they found jobs, as I said on the land but also in the cities. They became publicans and policemen. There were two particular industries that attracted them. The publicans became very central, particularly in country towns because they were just as important for the water they supplied to stock, as for any liquor that they might have supplied to the people driving the stock. Also they rooms were used by commercial travellers to take products out west, and the pub often became the first thing that became the town because initially church services would have been held there, clubs and meetings, they’d have settled up at the raced there, so the hotel became very important. They also were important step because a lot of the widows of publicans could take them over and this became a job that again women could do with the hospitality because most of them had guest accommodation and those sorts of things available as well as the dining rooms. They became very essential places in our growth of Queensland. Policeman of course, started off going to all the country places as well and now they’ve been lawyers and judges aren’t they. So a lot Irish among those. Also part of their culture was the landscape and this was a curator of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens in the 1890’s. Phillip McMahon was originally from Ross common and was trained in Dublin, and if any of you have been to see the lovely gardens he helped with those, he then went with Hawker and those at Kew and was appointed to Hull, and then went to India because he loved all those tropical plants, but couldn’t take the climate and ended up a journalist in Melbourne, where some Queensland politicians found him and found out how interested he was in tropical plants, and appointed him up here in charge of our Botanic gardens. He then went to become a head of the Forestry department here, and he died a few years later up on Fraser island while inspecting, but her was one who urged the railway department for example to use Queensland hard timbers in their railway bridges and all the initial railway bridges were timber bridges. Some of them worked a long way out west and they were seeing things that’d never have seen in Ireland in a blue moon, working with camels and this is another one of those hotels out at Charleville, Hotel Imperial, but I think it’s important to know just how widely spread they were through out the colony and later the state. One of the ways they’ve contributed to our area is the place names they’ve given to us, and these were just a few that I just pulled out of a Refedex when I was looking at it carefully. The last little two that were separated from the rest of them Carey Hill and Slievenamon are names of houses, and they are houses that I’ve used to develop peoples family history, but that was the name of them here in Brisbane. Slievenamon of course is the mountain of the women just outside Clonmal and Carey was named for County Carey were these peoples people had come from. The names and the way they’ve affected us may not always be initially prominent to you but they’re there. Now one of the things that can’t be underestimated is the Irish rhythms, they’re the basis of most of our folk songs, even the well known one Moreton Bay was originally called Yall Harbour, so it’s not just Banjo Paterson but the Celts certainly had lyrics with them. Now the Irish couldn’t travel with huge instruments and things like that so they brought tin whistles that they can keep in their pockets, lawn pipes, small ones they can keep under their arms, but they also developed the rhythms in their poetry. On March 17th, Patrick Bronte was born in Ireland, his surname in those days was Baunty but if you’re writing books and you want it to sell a French name doesn’t do you any harm. These sorts of parodies started, this was one they used to sing to the wearing of the green, and it’s based on the Ned Kelly gang, and it’s also sharing the larrikinism that was here within the people


Oh paddy dear, did you hear the news that going round On the head of old Ned Kelly they’ve placed 2000 pound And on Steve Hart, Jo Burn and Dan, 2000 more they’d give But if they price were doubled boys the Kelly gang would live Because the people were behind them Another thing that came here with the Irish was limericks and these are a couple I found when I was doing a bit of research one time and I thought this wasn’t too bad. And then I found a prayer book written in limericks, and this was in the front of it. Don’t look for culture where you obviously think it will be. It’s all around us, and it’s very exciting journey to follow the Irish in Queensland through these different stages. Thank you KATE EVANS: Thank you Jennifer, and of course there is an awful lot there we’ll be able to talk about and an awful lot of cues to the things that you might want to pursue as researchers, some of which we’ll be able to find here in the John Oxley collection, and as I said there will be a display a bit later on. I was very pleased that Jennifer mentioned, albeit briefly, Quinn and the migration of Irish people in the 1880’s, and the Queensland immigration society, I believe at various points promised that single Irish women coming to Australia would be accompanied by Irish nuns, which gives me my segway into our next speaker because now were going to here from curator Peter Connell who has published articles through the Brisbane Catholic Historical Society and Brisbane history group, has worked in museums and archives for over 15 years, and has been director of the Mercy Heritage Centre at All Hallows Convent for the past decade. There are very strong connections between the Brisbane congregation and Ireland, some of which can be found by looking into a collection of trunks that Peter can tell us about. Peter Connell. PETER CONNELL: Thank you, obviously my talk today is going to focus on the Sisters of Mercy story and as Kate mentioned there is an interesting angle on the Out of the Port theme for today, a lot of the content that I’ll be talking about is around some of the exhibition and collection items and fairly recently when Dr Richard Reid was doing his research for the Irish in Aust exhibition at the National Museum of Australia which some of you may have seen, he said that, in his opinion we had one of the best Irish collections in Aust. That didn’t mean that I lent him terribly many things because I wanted to use them myself for our new exhibitions, but obviously when you see some of the things that we’ve got you get a bit of an idea of how good, how strong our collection is. I thought I’d start of my telling you a bit about the Sisters of Mercy and then lead into the Queensland early stuff, and then particularly focus on the trunk room exhibition, so start at the obvious starting point which is Catherine McAuley. Catherine McAuley established a charity in Dublin in the 1820’s, she became an heiress in her 40’s and because of the social climate at the time was essentially forced into starting a religious order, which was the Sisters of Mercy, which they did their profession of vows in 1831. The goal of Catherine’s works and the other women who joined with her was based around charity and the education and care of women and children. She deliberately built this house of Mercy in a wealth part of town, she didn’t want her charity out in the boondocks somewhere, she wanted it right in the wealthy part of town so that the wealthy people couldn’t ignore the work that she was doing, or the poor Irish people that she was helping, and hopefully the ulterior motive was to attract donations as well, and a lot wealthy family Irish girls joined up with the work that she was doing. I am going to shamelessly plug different exhibitions in the Sisters of Mercy Heritage Centre as I go, so this is a shot from the Catherine McAuley exhibition in the Mercy Heritage Centre. Up on the wall is Catherine’s vows, it says “I Catherine Elizabeth McAuley called in religion Sister Mary Catherine”. Sisters of Mercy when they do their vows they take a religious name that may or may not be the same as their birth name, and after the Vatican in the 1960’s they got the option of taking back their baptismal or birth name, so we have a great deal of trouble trying to track certain Sisters because they have 3 or 4 different aliases. Catherine has the same name as her birth name so that was nice of her, but she was in her 50’s when she did her vows, so she was pretty set with her name I would say. I’ll continue “Do vow perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience and to persevere until the end of my life and the congregation called of the Sisters of Mercy established for the visitation of the sick poor and charitable instruction of poor females.”


It was children as well, but that was the major focus of the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters of Mercy were dearly loved by the Irish people, and are, so Catherine does crop up on a number of different symbols including the postage stamp from 1978, no pictures of Queens on their postage stamp around that time. But the Sisters of Mercy were established in the 1830’s quite a new type of religious order, they were unenclosed which meant that they didn’t sit inside and pray, they went out on the street and helped people. It’s quite a different style of religious congregation for the time, and because of that and their particular focus on education, care, welfare, they were in high demand. Very quickly they spread to the United Kingdom, to the United States and to Aust in 1846. I’ll just show you another way that Catherine’s been honoured by the Irish people, so this is the Irish pound note, and from 2000 it’s been replaced with the Euro now, but in the background here this is the first Mater Hospital in the world which was planned and fund raised, done by Mother Vincent Whitty who later came out and established Brisbane. So she didn’t actually see the opening of it, she was on the way to Brisbane at the time, but the first Mater Hospital in the world was established by Mother Vincent Whitty and that’s in the background there. Again you can pick up on the theme of health and education on the front and back of the pound note there. So that general expansion leads into Queensland. Queensland separated from NSW in 1859, and interestingly Bishop Quinn was appointed as the Bishop of Brisbane in April of that year, so it’s a few months before the letter’s patent was signed so obviously the church knew that something was going to happen. He was actually appointed as the Bishop of Brisbane, NSW and the chalice here was actually from the cathedral of St Stephen collection, was presented to him by his students at the St Laurence O’Toole’s seminary in Dublin. There is quite a lengthy inscription right across the bottom of it, but I just included it to show you the Irish harps on the stem there, and as I said the inscription does say Bishop of Brisbane, NSW. At that point they didn’t know that it was going to be called Queensland, so it does have that different inscription on it. It doesn’t see the light of day too often that chalice, it’s quite special that one, you may have seen it in 2009, around the 150 years and probably last year I would think for the Sisters of Mercy 150 years. Generally it’s very much locked up. So Quinn was appointed the Bishop and he sought out the Sisters of Mercy to come with him to Queensland and start Catholic education. The person in charge of the Brisbane congregation, the group was Mother Vincent Whitty and there was six Sisters in the first group. They departed Liverpool in 1860 to come out to Brisbane and they arrived in Brisbane on the 10th May 1861. This is mural that was painted on the wall of St Stephens Cathedral for many years, done in 1942. It was removed in 1988 and only exists as photos now, but it depicts the arrival of the Sisters, the priests and Bishop. That’s the old St Stephens in the background there. It’s a fairly romanticised view of history, they arrived at 10 o’clock at night, there wasn’t big crowds of people to greet them and of the Sisters, three fully professed Sisters, two Novices and a Postulant so they would have had different habits on as well. Some of those priests had gone ahead and were already here, so they didn’t arrive in a big en masse crowd like that, but it is a nice scene that many people would remember from St Stephens. So I will just hold on this slide for a couple of minutes. I just thought I would tell you a little more about education and the work of the Sisters with the catholic schools. Quinn quickly realised that the Sisters of Mercy couldn’t go and staff every single school in Queensland so he invited the Christian Brothers and Sisters of St Joseph to Queensland. Mary MacKillop and a small band of Sisters of St Joseph arrived on New Years Eve in 1869. They stayed in All Hallows’ for a couple of weeks while they were setting up the first school at South Brisbane, and a number of issues, mainly with the extremely autocratic Bishop Quinn, but also other broader issues like the impact of the Education Act in 1875, which basically the State Government withdrew funding from denominational schools, and led to the withdrawal of the Sisters of St Joseph from Queensland. By the middle of the 1870’s it was fairly obvious they were going to pull out of Queensland and Quinn turned to the Sisters of Mercy and said you have to find some Sisters to staff these schools, because I’m not closing them. One of the Sisters went to Ireland and recruited some heavy recruiting in the 1870’s. There were 60 Sisters of Mercy that were recruited, and brought out to Queensland. By 1880 they had taken over those 10 extra schools and set up one or two of their own in that period as well, however even with that extra number of Sisters, the expansion of the railway west, and the opening up of the north of the State meant there was more pressure again on the Sisters. By 1892 there was 26 Mercy schools in Queensland. By 1962 there were 52. It just gives you an idea of how widespread the Sisters of Mercy were and the network of Mercy schools, which sort of brings me into the trunk room exhibition.


So these recruits were particularly successful during the 1920’s and 30’s and they ensured large numbers of young candidates coming out to Brisbane. In the early years they didn’t have a Novitiate in Ireland, they sort of did an initial period of training in Timoleague, in what was called a Juniorate, and then they came out to Brisbane to do their Novitiate here. This is the trunk room exhibition, it is set up in what was a Sisters bedroom or cell and basically trunk rooms were in a number of locations in All Hallows’ Convent and they were storage rooms for suitcases. This one has been set up in that way but if you can see in this photo the trunks open up and there are little object stories inside each one. This is my little link in to the Out of the Port series, because all things inside ports or trunks. Now there’s a number of different groups that came out and some of them were quite large groups. The first one if you can see the little desk over there, it’s not in a suitcase it’s in a desk this one, a 49ers desk. There was 49 Sisters that came out in 1924. Because it was such a large group they had to build a separate building for them for their Novitiate and they made 49 of these desks, one for each Sister. We thought that was probably best for the story to be inside the 49ers desk. Inside basically we have a collection of objects from one of the Sisters, this was sister Brenda Browne’s 1960, 70’s habit, her little Strepsils tin of miraculous medals and prayer medals and cards and things, and there’s a photo of the arrival – of the Novices waiting the arrival of the Postulant Sisters, the 49 Sisters who were Postulants. Probably should explain, Postulants are the first period of six months of religious training, the Novice is about 18 months after that, then you’re a Junior Professed Sister and you take a black veil over the top, so these couple here are Fully Professed Sisters and these are Novices. Postulants had a slightly different one again. Of the 49 Sisters that came out in 1924 there is still one alive today. She’s 104, and Sister Brenda Browne unfortunately passed away last year, but she was 108. She was quite sharp as well, even in her old age. The 49ers is far and away the biggest group of Sisters that came out in the 1920’s and 30’s. Here’s a few missing from this photos, so this isn’t quite all of them, but I’ll just point out the guy in the middle there. That’s Father Francis Brown and he had an interest in photography. In 1912 he was given a first class ticket on the first leg of the journey, the maiden voyage of the Titanic, and as soon as he arrived at the docks he started taking photos, so if you’ve ever seen any photos of the Titanic in the docks before it sets out, it’s more than likely that Father Brown took those. I’m not sure how he got a first class ticket, but anyway he did have a first class ticket. He took the first leg of the journey then he met a wealthy American family on board and they offered to pay for a ticket for the remainder of the journey. He sent a telegraph to his Provincial, who is the head of the Jesuit Priests, and he got a simple telegram back that said ‘get off that ship’. So fortunately for Father Brown he did get off that ship, and fortunately for us those photographs that he took have survived. It’s just an interesting little link there. He is slightly blurred there because he’s set his timer too short so he ran across to sit down for the photo. I don’t have a great deal of information about the 36 unfortunately but there was another big group that came out in 1930, and all the objects inside the case here, this is actually Sister Flora Heaney’s suitcase as well, this is her 1970’s habit, the same as in the photo there and a couple of her prayer books as well. This one was 38 Sisters. So 38 Sisters its quite confusing because they don’t match up to the years at all, but the 38 Sisters came out in 1937, and the little newspaper article here says “clad in black 44 Irish girl postulants disembarked from the P&O Liner Mongolia yesterday. The girls were selected from all parts of Ireland to be Nuns in the Roman Catholic order in Queensland. Their ages range between 16 and 20 years. 38 of the new arrivals are for All Hallows’ Convent, Brisbane and 3 each are for the convents in Herberton and Townsville”. So there’s a bit of a climate change I would imagine for those girls particularly wearing the big black serge habits that they used to wear. I do have a story from Sister Corona Phelan who was one of the 38. “The 38 left Dublin’s fair city to sail to the southern hemisphere under the watchful eyes of Mother Norbert and Sister Mary Brendan, and Miss Dooley the nun’s private eye, to join many on the SS Mongolia which sailed from Tilbury docks, London on the evening of the 27th arriving at New Farm wharf on the 11th January 1937. The All Hallows’ community were out in force and the Sisters orchestra were in full swing on the front veranda. As I was carrying my violin I was invited to join them and so ends the saga of our journey to southern Queensland.” It’s also a nice little representation of how short some of their stories are, they do have a tendency to kind of underplay things I’ve found. Anyway that’s just a nice little story from Sister Corona from the 38, and that is actually her Postulant’s habit in the case there as well. Now this is a large steamer trunk and when we found it in the trunk room of the convent. The last Sisters living in the convent moved out in 2007 and there was a number of months spent packing up


different things that had been left behind and, you know 148 years of residency in the building, so we found this trunk in the trunk room and it was quite heavy so we realised there was something inside it. So I picked the lock, it’s an interesting curatorial skill, but I picked the lock of this suitcase and found all these things inside. It looked to me like Sister Mary St Patrick hadn’t opened it since about 1965. There were newspaper clippings in there, some of her tatting is there in the front and a tin of sewing, bits and pieces, some of her lectures from the 1960’s over here and this is a lemon buns recipe down the front. She unfortunately passed away a few years ago so it looks like she locked it up and never opened it again. Actually this on the lid is a reproduction of her electoral enrolment from about 1954, there is just an interesting mix or bits and pieces inside this one. She was also a member of the first group to have their Reception Ceremony at Timoleague in Ireland in about 1943. Basically what that means is you’re a Postulant for six months, you have Reception Ceremony and become a Novice and then you have a Profession Ceremony to become a Junior Professed Sister. As the newspaper article here says “In July 16, Lettercollum (which was the name of the house in Timoleague that the Sisters owned as a Juniorate, which was the initial training area) had it’s first religious ceremony since the destruction of the Abbey in penal times, and received into the Order of Mercy were 14 novices destined for All Hallows’ Brisbane.” Obviously the reason for the Novitiate to take over in Timoleague was World War II, and during that period they couldn’t come out to Brisbane so they did extend it from the Juniorate into the Novitiate during that time. So the Sisters did their religious training there, and on her Act of Profession this is when she arrived in Brisbane in 1946, so she had made her vows originally to the Bishop of Ross, but these ones are for James Duhig the Archbishop for Brisbane. The Timoleague Juniorate existed right up until the 1970’s so Brisbane has very Irish connections because a lot of the younger did an initial period of training before getting essentially a one-way ticket to Brisbane. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that home visits began which is when the Irish born Sisters were allowed to visit their families back in Ireland, so it was kind of like a lottery and they had to go in pairs. You would normally see Mercy’s travelling in pairs. This is a photo of Sister Mary St Patrick, her group arriving in Melbourne after the war, its 1947 and you can see there is two Postulants at the front but the rest of them are Junior Professed Sisters so they’ve done their whole period of training. This one here is again a group that was trained in Timoleague in 1950 – 52. This is from a different exhibition, it’s from our Novitiate exhibition and 7 of them came out as a group in 1954, so I’ll just read a little story from one of these Sisters here, talking about religious instructions and the sort of books they had to read “another book we didn’t like was Rodriguez , who detailed the life of monks in the middle ages. He highlighted the links to which superiors went to demand obedience for example planting cabbages upside down. Lucky for us, Mother Benigna had a much saner approach to obedience. True at profession on the 14th January 1946 we took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but we tried to observe them in more sensible ways”. I just thought I’d show some of the Novitiate desks. This is a group of photos at Cork railway station in 1953 coming out to Brisbane in their first leg of the journey, and there were Reception Ceremony photos. This generally wasn’t allowed, it’s surprising how many exist though, but generally they weren’t allowed to take photos of Reception Ceremonies. The 7 girls, the Irish ones are the 7 over this side here, and these photos were taken because their families were obviously in Ireland so they had the photos done to send back to Ireland. So they’ve come back to us from the families. In a Reception Ceremony they enter the chapel dressed as a bride, before the 1960’s they used to enter the chapel dressed as a bride, make their commitments, go out the back and change into the Novice habit which is these ones. So again those seven there are these seven here and it’s the same day. One of the other stories that we have in trunk room is from the 1960’s, Sister Bernadette O’Dwyer was an Irish sister as well. She came out in 1960 on a P&O boat (the name has gone from my brain unfortunately) but she kept a diary and included postcards of the ship and this one has a cross and she’s written up in margin ‘note the ashtray in the bedroom’, so she’s made a couple of little comments as she’s gone through, but she’s particularity amused by the ashtrays in the tiny cabins on the boats. The newspaper clipping is, she came out to Brisbane in 1960 and she went to Papua New Guinea as a Missionary Sister in the 1970’s. There’s a little quote here from Monsignor Lyons who was officiating priest at the Mission Cross ceremony and he says “firstly she gave up her own home lands some years ago to come and do the work of God in Australia, secondly she’s offered herself in an even greater self-giving by her enthusiastic acceptance of missionary call to New Guinea involving the many more difficulties inevitably associated with religious life in a foreign land.”


I thought I’d just show you some of the pages from inside the book here. I quite like this one – they actually face each other but I’ve flipped it around so you can see it. She’s again put a little note ‘All Hallows’ is where the x is on this postcard’ and that’s her little X there. In the story on the side there she says ‘After tea we went to a convent in Toowong, a little town about four miles from All Hallows’. There are just five nuns there and they have a beautiful school there. We stayed there until Monday evening and then went back to All Hallows’’. Then she talks about receiving the Postulants cap. She was obviously one who did her Juniorate in Timoleague, came out to do her Novitiate in Brisbane. I’ll just take it back to Catherine McAuley, so this is one of our exhibitions on the ground floor of the Heritage Centre which is the story of Catherine McAuley, and you can probably see some of the photos and things that I’d mentioned earlier. If you understand the vow of chastity you’ll understand that Sisters of Mercy don’t have a direct impact on the Queensland demography beyond their own lifetime, however families often followed them or vice versa so when they came out to Queensland they’d report back home and families would often migrate out. The impact of the Sisters of Mercy is quite significant in Queensland. Over the years there have been 52 Sisters of Mercy schools throughout the state, the seven Mater Hospitals, 11,000 children were cared for at the St Vincent’s Home for Children at Nudgee, and another interesting statistic is one in five Queenslanders were born in the Mater hospital. Today over the 151 years now there have been 1100 Sisters of Mercy in just the Brisbane congregation. My last slide is just a shameless plug of our exhibitions, just to show you we’ve spread over two floors of the All Hallows’ Convent building, and there’s a number of different exhibitions throughout the space. I’ll just leave that up for you to look at for the rest of the afternoon and thanks. KATE EVANS: And before we get to questions from the floor I just wanted to put both of our guests on the spot for a moment. I’ve really enjoyed hearing these stories about what is obviously a very complex connection and complex history between Ireland and Queensland. And we’ve heard some very positive stories about medicine and education and migration, but I think we all know that for example in places like New York in the 1840’s there were anti-Irish riots, it’s also a history of politics and descent and some very, very lively things that have happened. Was there any anti-Irish events or movements that happened in Queensland? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Well we certainly didn’t have a Vinegar Hill here, as they did in NSW and we missed out on the Eureka Stockade in Victoria, but I think things like the 1912 tramways strike, there were plenty of people affected by that and marching, but I think in Queensland particularly going back to the 19th century the biggest problems were caused on religious grounds more than anything else. The Duke of Edinburgh had been here before, he actually had a pot-shot taken at him in Sydney, and there was a lot of fuss at school in Ipswich who had him as a guest, whether the Queen was toasted before the Pope or the Pope was toasted before the Queen. It ended up in court but the thing was, it was proven that the order of the dinner was exactly the way it would have been done in Europe so it fell to nothing. When they went to greet him at the exhibition grounds, all the schools had come in to day hello Duke, and it had been agreed that no banners would be carried but the tremendous squabble broke out between the Presbyterians and the Catholic schools because some of the Catholic schools turned up with banners. I think that’s probably as bad as it got, there was a Presbyterian minister here called the Reverend Charles Off and he kept taking teachers to court and everything like that because he said that they were proselytising in school rooms and that sort of mischief. I really think most of the problems happened between Mister Ogg and the rest of the community. KATE EVANS: But I guess in thinking about events that happened specifically in Queensland, one that stands out for me is the 1917 conscription referendum, and one of the most lively events happened in Queensland and when Billy Hughes came up here (with the egg throwing) and although in some ways it wasn’t explicitly Irish, in other ways the Irish community and the Catholic church was heavily involved both in terms of relationship to Britain, but also the politics of the church at the time. DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Well I’ve heard all sorts of stories about that one that the egg was enclosed in a 5 pound note and handed to a man to throw, also I understand there’s going to be a centenary of it in 2017, or 2018.


KATE EVANS: But it was a hugely cultural issue all across Australia. DR JENNIFER HARRISON: it was certainly a divisive thing and they’d come from Brisbane where the sensor had taken sides as well with the parliamentary papers and there’d been a climbing over the wall here. KATE EVANS: And that’s actually a great story and I should say that Hansard was censored and the censors own copy I know is here in John Oxley Library. One of the only copies. DR JENNIFER HARRISON: well the censor happened to be Staple, who most people know as editing on of the poetry books we had at school, so he was acting as the censor at the time. There certainly has been ill feeling and a friend of mine has been doing a tremendous lot of research on mixed marriages and its been a fascinating topic and it seems to have really grown from about 1908 onwards through the 20th century and I think within districts and communities and homes that probably was a very divisive thing as well. KATE EVANS: Peter I’m wondering what you can also tell us about the role of the Sisters of Mercy and their contact with the aboriginal people in Queensland. How much is that part of the story or part of the wider story of the Irish connection to Queensland? PETER CONNELL: last year for the 150 year, some of the Sisters worked with an indigenous curator to do a photographic exhibition and look at some of those connections. In the early years there’s not a great deal of evidence for what they did, but they were certainly looked after in the orphanage at St Vincent’s. KATE EVANS: Jennifer, in some of your work that Ireland that didn’t come up today, one of the things that really interested me was what you said about some of the myths about Irish migrations and in particular about some of the myths around the role of the Great Famine in Ireland. Can you just say something about that? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Well, about 10 – 12 years ago, more than that, 15 years ago we had the sesqui-centenary of the famine commemorated in Ireland and many of us were involved over a period of years in Ireland with those functions, and the big deal was the number who migrated during the famine. Now Patrick O’Farrell had looked at this and he said we had none of those people here in Australia, and that’s certainly true to an extent because migration generally was limited in 1847 and 48, it was just suspended. So we didn’t get any in those years but were certainly in this great influx that came in the 1850’s, had people who were affected by the famine very much, and all you’ve got to do because we’ve got NSW shipping lists for this period, there’s a column there where the parents are living, and so many o the parents are both dead, father dead, mother living in cavern or this information is on the shipping list. Unfortunately the shipping lists that exist from the time when Queensland took over were merely financial records and we don’t have this wonderful wealth of social information so all we’ve got are names, age and occupation in most cases. If we’ve got a county of origin which we’ve only got for about 8 years from 1860 through to the turn of century, it mainly just got accounting not the town land or anything that very interesting, so we’ve got a disparity there. With the famine in Ireland it was something that they seemed to do every second week, if they didn’t get a public holiday was have a famine. It was certainly Ireland was full of them in 30’s, so with people coming in to NSW were certainly affected by it then. We had the really big one in from 45 – 50, and 52 in some places but there’d been a huge one in Ireland in 42 as well, then went on and on, there was a big one in Galway in 1861 which is what added to the Bishop Quinn stories. There was the big Mayo lot in the 70’s, so when in doubt they had a famine. A tremendous lot of people over more than half a century were affected, and even the convict people coming in the 1820’s who were affected by darths, which are only little famines and then bigger ones from 1818 – 1822, as I say when in doubt have a famine, so the point that we didn’t get famine victims I disagree with because we had some many famines. KATE EVANS: But if they then came to Queensland thinking it might be a promised land of course they copped depressions in the 1890’s in Queensland, I mean how tough was it for people?


DR JENNIFER HARRISON: It was dreadful for them. People who were meant to get established in five or six years and normally would have, the second half of the 60’s were a time of problems here in Queensland, we had unemployment problems in 1866, and then again immigration was suspended and started up again in 1869. The end of the 70’s we suspended immigration, at the end of the 80’s we suspended immigration and then the 90’s here were just plain disaster. We had floods and then we had droughts, and then we had all sorts of problems. We had bank crashes in the 60’s, bank crashes in the 90’s all of this affected immigration in a great way, where as the Irish are fabulous for chain immigration and I’m glad you made the point about the nuns being a part of chain immigration, and of course we got plenty of nuns who had their Sisters and nieces, not many nephews, nephews among the priests, but they had members of their family in different orders that came out to Australia as well, and so the Irish often sent home for other people. KATE EVANS: And whether you came her as a nun in heavy surge or you came here as a domestic worker it must have been a bit tough going I imagine just coping with the weather. But I imagine that there’s all sorts of questions and comments, and if what you’re interested in is how to research your own stories, afterwards if you’re interested in having a look at the material on display in the John Oxley there will be other librarians there who can help you with specific questions about research,. But there are some radio mics going around, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting for those before you ask your questions just so we get your question on tape. Are there questions? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, I’m Denise – I’ve been researching the Walsh family, and of which there is many. But where did mainly the Irish settle when they came to Brisbane? Did they settle in particular areas, how big were the areas or did they just generally move completely around Brisbane, this is the one’s that didn’t got to the country of course. DR JENNIFER HARRISON: The Walsh family, huge yes. You’ve got your work cut out. The Irish from the first of those Bishop Quinn ships, the Eringabra, the Chatsworth and the Maryborough, some of those went to Beaudesert and Ipswich and there’s a little town there called Kerry which is suppose to have people from that, and some went to Waterford. But they’re about the only settlements that we can say that some from that ship went there. Most of them integrated into the community, a lot of them couldn’t get work in Brisbane so they went to Ipswich and Dreyton and Warwick and Dalby. The way we’ve managed to estimate where they actually went is from the 9 colonial censuses taken in QUEENSLAND between 1861 and 1896, and so practically every 5 years, and even though the names haven’t survived we can get the number in all these different little towns and some of them were terribly tiny, but it doesn’t really matter which town you were in there were Irish. But they didn’t go into ghettos, although down south more than even in Brisbane there were sections of some towns called Irish town, that was a name that was given to a little suburb mainly because the people were in large quantities there. But it’s very difficult to try and plot. I’ve had an offer to have an archaeological dig to try and find them. But the next thing I want to know is what they’re going to dig up and prove that they’re Irish? Because they came with next to nothing, that’s why I was asking Peter earlier what did his nuns bring, and they had these lovely trunks and things, but a lot of the immigrants didn’t have that, the convicts certainly didn’t have those. So what did they bring with them, and most of it was in there or in their hearts. KATE EVANS: And in songs as you say. AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Mike and I’m researching the Darcy family. I’ve traced back five siblings that came out in 1862, 64 and 66. And I’ve also traced down their land orders that they were assigned. Did moist of those get passed back to the passage providers or did quite a numbers of those actually take up those land orders in those locations around Queensland? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Well this is one of the things that we one day, one of the myths that Kate was referring to, that we one day want to get sorted, and I’ve got a paper half written on it, but land orders were never identified with land. It was cash money and they existed mainly during the 60s and the 70s, but the 60’s more than any other time, but there were still some that were revived during the 80’s. Now what happened with the 60’s lot which is where your lot are concerned – if a person paid their own fare they were given and 18 pound and order on arrival. If they stayed two years they were then entitled to a 12 pound land order. Now those that came under the Quinn scheme, if they paid their own fare and entitled to a land order the majority of them handed it over to the organisers of the


QES or the QIS, Queensland Emigration Society as it was known in Ireland, Queensland Immigration Society as it was known in Queensland. Now they could not get access to the second land orders so often you can find that even though they handed over the first land order to the church, and this was to bring out people who couldn’t afford to pay their fares. They were able to then have the second land order, now the trouble was because towards the middle of the 60’s we ended up with the Agra Mastermans Bank calling in their bills and so Queensland didn’t have any money to pay for immigrants, we didn’t have money to pay workers like the railway workers, so there were strikes and things. Now a lot of these people could not afford to buy land with their land orders, and it was about a pound an acre in those days so most of them kept the cash, and I’d love to know one day, just how many of them kept the cash because most of them did. There became a raging trade in Brisbane, there were land order depots where you could sell it and you would not get 12 pound, you’d get 10, you wouldn’t get 18 you’d get 16 and that was commission. KATE EVANS: Can I just ask very briefly where are those papers of the Queensland Immigration Society. Are they here in the State Library? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: Well there’re all sorts of papers but most of them are at the State Archives. KATE EVANS: Now there is actually quite a few more questions but we actually only have about five minutes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t have a question, I’m a product of two of family passengers on a ship called the Eringabra which is having its 150th anniversary this year. One family grew, accepted those land orders and they went down into the Albert and Logan areas and there are people today who are working those original properties. Up to six generations they pride themselves on. Some other of the other side of my family went into business mostly around the valley areas and they prospered. Can I put in a plug that at the end of this year we’re having a function at the Irish club for dinner to celebrate the courage and the audacity of those people who made those big decisions and came to hostile conditions. KATE EVANS: Thank you. We might just need to try and get through. Here’s a question here down the front. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to know the climatic conditions of the arrival of the Maryborough passengers in 1862. Was it drought or flooding rains? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: The Maryborough the Chatsworth and the Eringabra all arrived in one week in August 1862. I’m afraid I don’t know what the weather temperature was that day, there are plenty of dates that I have looked up but I haven’t’ looked up that particular one. You’d be able to do that quite easily by just going up to third floor and looking up the newspaper for that day, and you’d also find a lot of other stuff on the Maryborough. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was it the drought period or was it flooding rain? DR JENNIFER HARRISON: I’ve got no idea. Sorry. KATE EVANS: And so we’ll just have one final question. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d just like to go back to that question on where they settled. Whenever I’d been doing research always inevitable Brisbane seems to come back to Fortitude Valley, New Farm or Teneriffe and I’m just wondering if there’s been much search done on the Irish settlements there or what portions of those settlements were Irish. DR JENNIFER HARRISON: No, because as much as the Irish were there you’ll find other countries there. The English would be right through as well. This is why it’s often difficult to follow and it’d be nice if we can say well the Maryborough people went to Maryborough. That was named after the wife of Governor Fitzroy, it wasn’t Mary because she died in Sydney around this time, it’s got nothing to do with Maryborough. The Maryborough in Victoria is actually an Irish place name from Port Niche which is now Port Leash these days but the one in Queensland’s not. The Valley does feature and so does


Teneriffe area, but you’ve got to realise what the boundaries of Brisbane were in those days. If you lived out along Lutwyche Road your birth fall appear in country as opposed to Brisbane. So the whole thing is you’re sure they are in these areas, but this was the city of Brisbane in that time and the boundaries have progressed out, but it’s very hard to find a place that was totally Irish. And also Brisbane was divided more into working areas with labourers and working people and others and every so often they had the people on the hill were toffs, the workers were down on the sides of the hills, lived down there and so any suburb in Brisbane can be divided up that way. KATE EVANS: Class – we didn’t quite touch on this. Thank you very much and thank you for such a large audience on such a wet Wednesday, and out thanks to Peter Connell and Jennifer Harrison for a very interesting day. And don’t forget there is material on display and there’s been a terrific collection put together and a hand out and there’s something else will be available on the website with details of the resource material son the Irish in Queensland that you’ll be able to find. Thank you.

TRANSCRIPT: Out of the Port: Irish in Queensland Page 1 of 14 14 March 2012, State Library of Queensland, Auditorium 1







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Transcript of TRANSCRIPT: Out of the Port – Irish in Queensland, … · And we’ll do that via at least three...