Tinteán

Jeff Kildea’s address in Sydney on 16 August 2025 at Hyde Park Barracks for the annual ceremony to honour the memory of those affected by the Great Irish Famine.

I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to give the address today at this annual ceremony to honour the memory of those affected by the Great Irish Famine.

When I addressed this gathering in 2017, I spoke about my great-great grandmother Rose Fleming, who arrived in Sydney in July 1849 on the Lady Peel and whose name is inscribed on the monument. Today I want to pull back the focus and look more generally at the way in which the colonists in Australia responded to the influx of young women and girls who, during the Great Irish Famine, were brought to Australia from the workhouses of Ireland under arrangements known as the Earl Grey scheme.

Australia did not receive a large number of famine refugees compared to Britain or north America. Nevertheless, between 1848 and 1850, the Earl Grey scheme brought more than 4000 so-called Irish famine orphans to Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. It was under that scheme that my great-great grandmother emigrated to this country, as did the forebears of many of you here today.

Few of us present at this ceremony have experienced famine or been forced to leave our native country in order simply to survive. Were we in that situation, we would no doubt hope that we would be made welcome in the country to which we fled. But in the case of the young women and girls brought out under the Earl Grey scheme, that was not always the case. Many colonists were not enamoured of the idea of thousands of poor, young Irish women and girls being brought out to the colonies.

For some it was purely a question of cost, as it was the colonists who in large part financed the scheme. They did not like the idea of subsidising wealthy Irish landowners by relieving them of the financial burden of maintaining these young women in the workhouses, which were funded through rates on their estates. For others, racial and religious prejudice was behind their opposition to the scheme. That the young women and girls were Irish was bad enough, but the fact that 90 per cent of those who came to Sydney and 80 per cent who went to Port Phillip were Catholics was intolerable for many.

In his classic work on the Irish famine orphans, Barefoot and Pregnant?, Trevor McClaughlin writes: Critics of the orphan emigration scheme were not slow to voice their disapproval of the young women in the most deprecatory terms. The young women in the immigration depot in Adelaide were described as ‘dirty brutes’. An official of the Children’s Apprenticeship Board referred to the ‘extreme filthiness and unimaginable indelicacy of some of these workhouse girls’, while the Melbourne Argus slandered them as ‘the most stupid, the most ignorant, the most useless and the most unmanageable set of beings that ever cursed a country by their presence.’

Such attitudes to Irish immigration to Australia were not new. In an essay written in the early 1800s, Reverend Samuel Marsden, an English-born magistrate known as ‘the flogging parson’, described the Irish as ‘the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured with the light of salvation.’ Another antagonist of Irish immigration was Scottish-born Presbyterian Reverend John Dunmore Lang. Concerned at the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants under assisted immigration schemes, Lang published in 1841 a pamphlet entitled The Question of Questions! or, Is this Colony to be transformed into a Province of the Popedom? In it he described the Irish as ‘the most ignorant, the most superstitious, and the very lowest in the scale of European civilisation’ and warned of ‘the shoals of Roman Catholic immigrants that are now pouring in upon us from the south and west of Ireland.’ His concern was that Irish women were being brought out to become: the wives of the English and Scotch Protestant shepherds and stockmen of New South Wales, and thereby silently subverting the Protestantism and extending that Romanism of the colony through the vile, Jesuitical, diabolical system of ‘mixed marriages.’

Lang was not alone in his concerns. In 1840 the Sydney Herald told its readers ‘This Colony is flooded with ignorant and unskilful Irish Roman Catholics.’ What raised their hackles was the disproportionate number of Irish arriving under the various assisted immigration schemes. Between 1837 and 1850, 49 per cent of assisted immigrants arriving in the colony were Irish. The vast majority, in the order of 80 to 85 per cent, were Catholics.

In our own lifetime we have heard some of this type of vilification applied to immigrants and asylum seekers here and overseas: In 1996 Pauline Hanson in her maiden speech in the House of Representatives said: I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians

Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.

• In her maiden speech in the Senate 20 years later, Hanson added, ‘Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.’
• In 2001 government ministers assured us that asylum seekers were throwing their children overboard.
• In 2018 we were told that Victorians were ‘scared to go out to restaurants’ because of ‘African gang violence.’
• And just last year we were informed that Haitian immigrants in [US] Ohio were eating their neighbours’ pets.

It is often argued that an orderly immigration scheme is the best way to ensure that immigrants and refugees will be accepted into the Australian community. And to an extent that is true. But it is naïve to suggest that an orderly scheme will necessarily overcome the xenophobic prejudice that some people harbour.

Writing about assisted immigration in the early 1830s, historian Patrick O’Farrell observed, ‘it was almost impossible to get women of good character to emigrate’ so that the authorities resorted to ‘sweeping the streets’ for willing candidates. This expedient, which disregarded the interests of the colonists, hardened colonial attitudes.

But the Earl Grey scheme was different. It was well-ordered and well-regulated, both in Ireland and Australia. Emigrants were carefully selected and local committees or boards were established in the colonies to take responsibility for the welfare of the immigrants as well as securing their employment on proper terms with respectable employers. Yet, that fact did not lead to the scheme’s acceptance by the colonists. In fact, the opposite was true, particularly in Melbourne ‘where there was a higher proportion of Scottish Presbyterian Orangemen in positions of power within the community.’

The Argus of 24 January 1850 provides an example of the vehemence of the opposition. In it the editor declared it was ‘down-right robbery’ to lavish the colonists’ money on:

a set of ignorant creatures, whose whole knowledge of household duty barely reaches to distinguishing the inside from the outside of a potato, and whose chief employment hitherto, has consisted of some such intellectual occupation as occasionally trotting across a bog to fetch back a runaway pig.

Not satisfied with besmirching the orphan girls’ suitability for employment, the Argus’s rhetoric turned ‘Trumpian’, when it impugned their physical appearance:

[T]hese coarse, useless creatures … with their squat, stunted figures, thick waists, and clumsy ankles, promise but badly for the physique of the future colonists of Victoria.

Echoing John Dunmore Lang, who described the situation as ‘this monstrous injustice’, the Argus predicted that these young women, ‘all Roman Catholics’ would marry ‘our shepherds, hutkeepers, stockman, &c.’ and by dictating the religion of the children, will someday become ‘the centre of a Roman Catholic circle.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, though less outspoken, expressed much the same sentiments as the Argus.

The campaign of denigration of the Earl Grey scheme and of the orphan girls themselves had an effect. By the end of May 1850, the Colonial Office had received requests from the Orphan Committee in Melbourne and the Orphan Boards in Sydney and Adelaide seeking suspension of the scheme. The Melbourne City Council adopted a petition to Queen Victoria calling for its termination. Towards the end of the year the Legislative Council of New South Wales added its voice to the chorus of disapproval. The local Irish community fought back with public meetings, editorials, and petitions of their own, but to no avail. The last ship to bring orphan girls to Australia under the Earl Grey scheme was the Tippoo Saib, which arrived in Sydney on 30 July 1850.

In all, 4114 young women and girls on 20 vessels from 118 different poor law unions had been brought out. But more needed to be done and could have been done had the scheme not been terminated prematurely. According to historian Joseph Robins, ‘When the last orphan ship sailed in April 1850 it left behind in the Irish workhouses over 104,000 children under the age of fifteen, many of them orphans.’

While religious and racial hostility was significant in bringing about the decision to abandon the scheme, other factors contributed: economic conditions in the colonies saw the demand for labour decline, while the colonists strongly rejected the idea that the colonies should be asked to take in the unwanted produce of the workhouses and gaols of Britain and Ireland. The official explanation for colonial rejection of the scheme rested largely on the claim that the orphan girls were unsuitable for domestic service and farm work. But as historian Paula Hamilton observed, ‘[I]t was quite unreasonable to complain of a lack of training in girls destined to be apprenticed and therefore by definition untrained’, adding, ‘In reality colonial employers were unwilling to hire the orphans because their preconceptions were reinforced by the growing religious and racial hostility.’

Surely, it was traumatic enough that these young women and girls had been forced by economic and social circumstances to seek refuge in the workhouses only to be to be uprooted from their native country and transported halfway across the world to a strange land populated disproportionately by men seeking domestic servants and wives. Some did not make the transition well, including my great-great grandmother. Writer Anne Casey has uncovered the stories of some of those who struggled and their families.

Yet, in addition to the distress of their displacement, they were subjected to vilification and humiliation because of their race, their religion, their lack of skills, and even their appearance. However, despite all of that, as Robins observed, ‘It is probable that the great majority behaved well, gave satisfaction as servants, married, and brought up their families in better and happier circumstances than mid-nineteenth century Ireland could offer them’.

It is right and proper, on occasions such as this, that we look back to the past and remember these young women. But one of the great things about the vision of Tom Power and those others who established this monument is that, not only does it memorialise the past, it also provokes us into being mindful of the present and the future. As Tom said at the monument’s unveiling, it is ‘a continual reminder of the many terrible realities, similar to the great famine of Ireland, occurring in the world today and which cry out for our compassion and concern.’

Let us hope that in responding to that cry we will do a better job of welcoming the stranger than that prejudiced section of the Australian colonists who chose to vilify, denigrate, and ultimately reject the Irish famine orphans of the Earl Grey scheme.

If you wish to view a copy of the address that includes footnotes, visit https://jeffkildea.com/1147/great-irish-famine-commemoration-2025/

Dr Jeff Kildea

Jeff is an Honorary Professor in Irish Studies at the University of New South Wales and an historian of early 20th-century Australia. He is the author of Hugh Mahon: Patriot, Pressman, Politician (Anchor Books Australia, 2020)

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For more information about The Great Irish Famine Commemoration Committee, see this website.

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