1848
A Staffordshire porcelain figurine of Protestant Irish nationalist convict William Smith O’Brien
The Irish question
This figurine of the Irish nationalist, parliamentarian and convict William Smith O’Brien would have been made for the home of an Irish descendent or Irish nationalist. Figurines of public figures, local heroes and the notorious were popular in early Victorian times. This one was made by the Alpha Factory potters in Staffordshire. The figurine shows O’Brien, barefoot and in convict garb of white shirt and trousers, hands manacled with gold cuffs, leaning against a pink plinth. The statuette weighs 500 grams and is a little under 25 cm in height.
O’Brien was born into a minor aristocratic family in County Clare. He sat in the British parliament but was increasingly taken by the cause of Irish nationalism. He led an unsuccessful rising against police on 29 July 1848 and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life. After being imprisoned on Maria Island in Van Diemen’s Land, O’Brien was transferred to Port Arthur.
By 1854 O’Brien was considered sufficiently rehabilitated to be conditionally pardoned, and he returned to Europe. There is a statue of him on O’Connell Street, Dublin, and the cottages in which he lived on Maria Island and Port Arthur have been preserved in their 19th-century state.
Like O’Brien, the Irish generally came to Australia with chains on their ankles or hunger in their bellies. On the arrival of Minerva in 1800, with its cargo of around 800 Irish people, Elizabeth Paterson, wife of Governor William Paterson, wrote: ‘I cannot say I like the place near so well as I did before.’
A second-tier English Protestant class established Australia, which meant that the Irish were always going to be second-class citizens. That the majority of Irish people were Catholic further entrenched the social division. Catholics were officially excluded from many clubs and organisations right up until the 1970s. An unspoken discrimination went even deeper.
Some of the most effective troublemakers in Australia were Irish. The first convict uprising, the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804, was dubbed the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill after a battle of that name (Cath Chnoc Fíodh na gCaor in Gaelic) in the Irish rebellion of 1798. Philip Cunningham, who led the rebels at Castle Hill outside Sydney, was in fact in New South Wales due to his role in that 1798 stoush. He led 200 convicts in a plan to capture ships and return to Ireland to continue the war of independence. Needless to say, the uprising was ill considered and quickly suppressed; its leaders were hanged.
The threat of an Irish uprising was widely felt in the colony afterwards, and the first militia group was founded in New South Wales to protect citizens from a possible attack.
Around 40 000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, and about one-third of convict women were Irish. Given that the Irish were heavily discriminated against and oppressed in Britain, it’s unsurprising that they would have a high crime rate. And then there were the revolutionaries: the last batch of 280 convicts transported to Australia in 1868 included 62 Irish rebels. In 1876 the world’s most extravagant prison break was organised to free Sinn Fein prisoners in Western Australia; the plot involved sailing around the world and a last-minute chase to international waters.
At least half the rebels at the Eureka Stockade were Irish; the leader, Peter Lalor, certainly was. He had cut his teeth as a firebrand in Ireland and was one of the few at the stockade to have any political skills. Lalor survived Eureka and went on to a distinguished and conservative career in the Victorian parliament. Such a transition story was not uncommon.
The Great Famine (an Gorta Mór) in Ireland that began in 1845 saw unprecedented migration from the country, especially to the United States and Australia. The discovery of gold in 1851 turbocharged that migration, and some 101 540 arrived between 1851 and 1860. The peak of Irish migration occurred in 1891, when it reached 228 230.
During the famine years, the secretary of state for the colonies, Earl Grey, devised a scheme whereby young women between the ages of 14 and 18 in workhouses could be given assisted passage to Australia, where they would find work as domestic servants. Some 4114 Irish girls were transported under this scheme, which operated for just under two years.
The poverty in Ireland and the oppressive rule by the British were always powerful incentives for migration. In 1871, more than 25 per cent of the Victorian population was Irish, though they were not all in poverty. Such was the penetration of the Irish at the time that Ireland’s most famous Australian son, Ned Kelly, was sentenced to death by another Irishman, Sir Redmond Barry.
The most famous Irish Catholic Australian in the first half of the 20th century was the Most Reverend Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne. He was born in County Cork and came to Australia in 1912. Mannix loved God and hated the English with equal fervour. His distaste for England and his Irish republicanism made him a fierce opponent of World War I; Mannix was the prime mover in the anti-conscription campaign.
Mannix made a tour to the United States and then to Rome in 1920. He planned to visit his homeland but British prime minister Lloyd George launched the Royal Navy to intercept the RMS Baltic and had Mannix put ashore in Penzance, Cornwall, where he could be watched and contained.
Despite discrimination, many of the founders of the Australian nation were of Irish decent, including High Court judge Henry Bournes Higgins, solicitor Francis Bede Freehill, brewer John Thomas Toohey, and businessman and underworld identity John Wren – a broad cross-section of society.