AUSTRALIA
Under the British Government’s ‘Orphans and Paupers Scheme’, between 1847 and 1849 over four thousand young girls aged 14-18 were sent from the workhouses of Ireland to Australia. Untrained and unsuited to the work to which they were assigned, some of these girls ended up on the streets. One contemporary source estimated 50 per cent of Adelaide’s prostitutes, at the time, to be from the West of Ireland, leading to the accusation that the Irish girls were ‘Tipperarifying the moral atmosphere’ of South Australia. Many more went on to live tough but fruitful lives, their descendants (estimated at up to two million Australians) contributing greatly to Australian social, political and cultural life, today. The names of some 400 of the Irish Orphan Girls are remembered on the Glass Wall of the Great Irish Famine Memorial at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks. A commemoration ceremony organised by Sydney’s Great Irish Famine Commemoration Committee takes place at the Memorial on the last Sunday of August each year. It was the author’s great honour to be invited to give the keynote address at the 2012 commemoration, where his song Orphan Girl received its premiere performance by singer Sarah Calderwood with the Australian Girl’s Choir
From when the first vines were planted there in 1838, the Barossa Valley has now become one of the great wine-producing regions of the world. While Jasper Coombes and his Crockford’s Estate are fictitious, details of the development of the Barossa and the early winemakers are based on fact. This includes references to some of today’s most successful Barossan brand names. Bethany remains a beautiful and flourishing village at the heart of the Barossa, where many of the old German names and traditions still survive. A monument to those early Lutheran pioneers who ‘um des GlaubenswillennachAustralien’ – to Australia for the sake of their faith – stands atop nearby Mengler’s Hill.
The Ngarrindjeri people still live along the Coorong. At Camp Coorong, near Meningie, the late George Trevorrow, his wife Shirley, with others, provides an educational facility for those who wish to learn about the customs and culture of the Ngarrindjeri.
The outrages against the Aboriginal people described in the book are based on recorded fact or as handed down by oral tradition, and recounted to me.
The terms boong, lubra, natives, piccaninny, used in the mouths of some characters in the story, are all offensive to Aboriginal people.
GROSSE ÎLE
Accounts of conditions on Grosse Île, the adoption of orphans by the French-Canadian people, and the numbers who perished there, are all based on fact. Father McGauran was a Sligo-born priest who, after successfully combating typhus contracted on Grosse Île in 1847, returned again to serve there a few months later.
At the cemetery, the monument put there in 1848 by Dr George Mellis Douglas, Grosse lie’s medical superintendent, still stands: ‘In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of 5424 persons who, flying from pestilence and famine in Ireland, in the year 1847, found in America but a grave.’ More recently, the large Celtic Cross, on Telegraph Hill, erected in 1909 by The Ancient Order of Hibernians, also commemorates those who perished. One of the fever sheds built in 1847 still remains, as does the cannon which guarded ‘Quarantine Pass’. Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial were declared a National Historic Site in 1984 and opened to the public. The Site is now run by Parcs Canada and is open from 1 May to 31 October each year. In Quebec City in 2011, in a performance of the author’s musical and narrative work, From Famine to Freedom – Ireland to Grosse Ile, singer Meav Ni Mhaolchatha, along with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, paid tribute to the many Irish who came through Quebec’s quarantine isle in the famine years; to those whose remains are still there and to those Canadians who received them so well, often at risk to their own lives. The song, The Whitest Flower, received its first major public performance at the occasion.
BOSTON
Deer Island, Boston’s Quarantine Station in 1847, is today the site of the city’s waste-water treatment plant operated by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. The cemetery, which holds the remains of 852 Irish immigrants who died during the Famine, is currently being restored, and a memorial will be erected in 1999. In June 1998 the Irish Famine Memorial Park was unveiled in downtown Boston at the corner of School and Washington streets. It features twin sculptures by artist Robert Shure, and eight narrative plaques, text by Professor Thomas O’Connor, describing the odyssey of the Irish immigrant from tragedy to triumph in America. The memorial is located along Boston’s Freedom Trail.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Over and above the books listed in the abridged bibliography which follows, I acknowledge a special debt to the following authors whose work I found particularly helpful with regard to scope and detail.
IRELAND
Christine Kinealy’s two absorbingly analytical books This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Gill &Macmillan, Dublin, 1994) and A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (Pluto Press, London/Chicago, 1997).
John Killen, ed., The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841-1851 (The Blackstaff Press Ltd., Belfast 1995).
Canon John O’Rourke’s The Great Irish Famine (Veritas Publications, Dublin. First published 1874; abridged edn., 1989).
‘The Visitation of God’?: The potato and the great Irish famine by Austin Bourke. Edited for Irish Historical Studies by Jacqueline Hill and Cormac Ó Gráda (Lilliput Press Ltd., Dublin, 1993).
Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland 1780-1845 by S.J. Connolly (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin/St. Martin’s Press Inc., New York, 1982).
Mary E. Daly’s The Famine in Ireland (Published for the Historical Association of Ireland by Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 1986).
Donal A. Kerr’s ‘A Nation of Beggars’: Priests, People and Politics in Famine Ireland 1846-1852 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994)-
Peter Gray’s The Irish Famine (illustrated), (Thames and Hudson, London, 1995).
R. Dudley Edwards’s and T. Desmond Williams’s, eds., The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52 (Lilliput Press Ltd., Dublin, 1994).
Margaret Kelleher’s The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork University Press, Cork, 1997).
Helen Litton’s The Irish Famine: An Illustrated History (Wolfhound Press Ltd., Dublin/Irish Books and Media Inc., Minneapolis, 1994).
Chris Morash’s and Richard Hayes’s, eds., Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine (Irish Academic Press, Co. Dublin, 1996).
E. Charles Nelson’s booklet ‘The Cause of the Calamity: Potato blight in Ireland 1845-1847 and the role of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin’ (The Office of Public Works, Government of Ireland, Dublin, 1995). Also, E. Charles Nelson’s book with Eileen M. McCracken The Brightest Jewel: A History of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin (The Office of Public Works, Dublin, Boethius Press, Kilkenny, 1987) was invaluable for detail about David Moore, the then curator, and the Gardens themselves in the 1840s.
Cormac Ó Gráda’s The Great Irish Famine (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1989) was essential reading, as was CathalPóirtéir’s, Famine Echoes (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1995) and The Great Irish Famine – RTE Thomas Davis Lectures Series (Mercier Press, Cork, published in association with Radio TelefísÉireann, 1995) edited by him.
AUSTRALIA
Joan Druett’s book, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling wives at sea 1820-1920 (Collins Publishers, New Zealand, 1991), was an important source for details of whaling, gamming, scrimshawing, and life in the Pacific Ocean in the 1840s.
Maritime Heritage Booklets from Polly Woodside, Melbourne Maritime Museum
— No. 4 ‘The Immigrants’ by Barbara Cohen
— No. 6 ‘Life on the Cape-Horners’ (no author named)
— No. 8 ‘Winds, Currents, and Trading Routes’ (no author named)
— No. 12. ‘Port of Melbourne 1835-60’ prepared by Dorothy Minkoff,
all also provided useful information and technical data.
Ronald Parson’s book Migrant Ships for South Australia 1836-18
60 (Gould Books, Gumeracha, South Australia, 1988) and his booklet, ‘Port Misery and the New Port’ (early Port Adelaide) (R. H. Parsons, Lobethal, South Australia, reprint 1997) were extremely helpful with regard to landing conditions for immigrants and descriptions of the port of Adelaide.
For descriptions of The Barossa in the 1840s, the early Lutheran settlers and the first winemakers, the following all provided excellent source material: Vineyard of the Empire: Early Barossa Vignerons 1842-1939 by AnnelyAeuckens, Geoffrey Bishop, George Bell, Kate McDougall, and Gordon Young (Australian Industrial Publishers Pty., Ltd., Adelaide, 1988).
The Barossa: A Vision Realised, The Nineteenth Century Story by Reginald S. Munchenberg, Heinrich F.W. Proeve, Donald A. Ross, Anne Hausler, Geoffrey B. Saegenschnitter, NorisIoannou, and Roger E. Teusner (Barossa Valley Archives &Historical Trust, South Australia, 1993).
And Heinrich F.W. Proeve’sA Dwelling Place at Bethany: The Story of a Village Church © H.F.W. Proeve (printed by Openbook Publishers, Adelaide, South Australia, 1996).
Graham Jenkin’s prize-winning book Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri – The Story of the Lower Murray Lakes Tribes (Raukkan Publishers, Point McLeay, South Australia, 1995), was invaluable for ‘understanding’ (if that be the word) the dispossession of the Ngarrindjeri nation, and for providing detail on tendi, lakalinyerar, et al.
Aboriginal Studies 8-12. The Ngarrindjeri people: Aboriginal people of the River Murray, Lakes &Coorong (Education Department of South Australia, 1990) was also a source of much helpful information.
The South Australian Museum’s 1989 booklet, ‘Ngurunderi: An Aboriginal Dreaming, The Culture of the Ngarrindjeri People’, text by Steve Hemming and Philip Jones with Philip Clarke, for providing valuable details on the story of the Dreaming Ancestor.
Michael Cannon’s fascinating Old Melbourne Town: Before The Gold Rush (Loch Haven Books, Victoria, 1991) provided much factual information about streets, pubs, banks, Orange vs. Catholic riots and the ‘Parades Commission’ of 1847.
CANADA
I have already mentioned Marianna O’Gallagher’s two books which provided a wealth of factual information on Grosse Île, to which must be added, 1847: Grosse Île: A Record of Daily Events by Andre Charbonneau and Andre Sévigny (Canadian Heritage/Parcs Canada, Minister of Public Works and Government Services, Ottawa, 1997).
BOSTON
Thomas H. O’Connor’s book The Boston Irish: A Political History (Back Bay Books, USA, 1995/Little, Brown &Company (Canada) Ltd., 1995) was most useful in providing a social, economic, and cultural backdrop to what Irish emigrants experienced in 1847, and also alerted me to ‘Pope’s night’.
ABRIDGED BIBLIOGRAPHY
IRELAND
Adelman, Paul, Peel and the Conservative Party 1830-1830 (Longman Group UK, Ltd., 1989)
Barry, John, ed., Historical Studies IX (Papers read before the Irish Conference of Historians) (The Blackstaff Press Ltd., Belfast, 1974)
Berresford Ellis, Peter, Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society &Literature (Constable and Company Ltd., London, 1995)
Bull, Philip, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1996)
Campbell, Fr. Stephen J., The Great Irish Famine: Words &Images from the Famine (Famine Museum, Strokestown Park, Co. Roscommon, 1994)
Casey, Daniel J., &Rhodes, Robert E., eds., Views of the Irish Peasantry 1800-1916 (Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1977)
Colville Scott, Thomas, Connemara After The Famine: Journal of a Survey of the Martin Estate 1855. Introduction by Tim Robinson, ed., (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1995)
Corish, Patrick J., The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1985)
— Maynooth College 1795-1995 (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1995)
Crossman, Virginia, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, 1996) Dowley, Leslie J. &O’Sullivan, Eugene, Tate Blight &the Potato in Ireland’ (Teagasc, Oak Park Research Centre, Carlow, Ireland, 1995)
Engels, Frederick, &Marx, Karl, Ireland and the Irish Question (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971)
Evans, Eric J., Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, Power and Party (Routledge, London and New York, 1991)
Fitzpatrick, David, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork University Press, Cork, 1994)
Gallagher, Thomas H., Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred (Ward River Press, Co. Dublin, 1985) Gavan-Duffy, Sir Charles, Four Years of Irish History 1845-1849 (Gassell, Petter, Galpin & Co, London, Paris, New York, 1883)
Gillespie, Raymond &Moran, Gerard, eds., A Various Country: Essays in Mayo History 1500-1900 (FoilseacháinNáisiúntaTeoranta, Westport, Co. Mayo, 1987)
Guinan, Rev. Joseph, P.P., ‘The Famine Years’ (Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, Dublin, 1921)
Hall, Mr. S.C., &Mrs. S.C., Hall’s Ireland: Mr. &Mrs. Hall’s Tour of 1840: Vol. 1 &2 Michael Scott, ed. (Sphere Books Ltd., London, 1984)
Hamrock, Ivor, ed., compiled, The Famine in Mayo 1845-1850: A portrait from contemporary sources (Mayo County Council, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, 1998)
Hayden, Tom, ed., compiled, Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Wolfhound Press, Dublin/Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 1997)
Hughes, Harry, ‘Croagh Patrick – An Ancient Mountain Pilgrimage’ (Harry Hughes, Westport, Co. Mayo, 1991) Jackson Hurlstone, Kenneth. A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures (Penguin Books, UK, 1971) Keating, Rev. Joseph, S.J., ‘Souperism’ (Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, Dublin, 1914)
Keenan, Desmond, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Sociological Study (Gill &Macmillan Ltd., Dublin/Barnes &Noble Books, New Jersey, 1983)
Kerr, Donal, A., The Catholic Church and the Famine (The Columba Press, Co. Dublin, 1996)
— Peel, Priests and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church: Ireland 1841-1846 (Oxford University Press, UK/New York, 1981)
Kissane, Noel, The Irish Famine: A Documentary History (National Library of Ireland, Dublin, 1995)
Langan-Egan, Maureen, Women in Mayo 1821-1851: ‘A Historical Perspective’. Thesis. (National University of Ireland, 1986)
Laxton, Edward, The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus To America 1846-51 (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London, 1996)
Luddy, Maria, Women in Ireland, 1800-1918: A Documentary History (Cork University Press, Cork, 1995)
Lyons, John, Louisburgh: A History (Louisburgh Traders Association, Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, 1995)
Lysaght, Patricia, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (The O’Brien Press Ltd., Dublin, 1996) McCarthy, Justin, M.P., A Short History of Our Own Times: From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880 (Chatto&Windus, London, 1897)
Miller, Kerby, & Vagner, Paul, Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America (Aurum Press Ltd., London, 1994) Mokyr, Joel, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitive and Analytical History of the Irish Economy 1800-1850 (Allen and Unwin, London, 1985)
Morash, Christopher, The Hungry Voice: The Poetry of the Irish Famine (Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1989)
Nicholson, Asenath, Lights and Shades of Ireland, Annals of the Famine of 1847, 1848 and 1849 (New York, 1851) O’Connor, John, The Workhouses of Ireland: The fate of Ireland’s poor (Anvil Books, Dublin in association with Irish Books &Media Inc., Minneapolis, 1995)
O’Dwyer, Peter, O. CARM., Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1988)
— Towards A History of Irish Spirituality (The Columba Press, Co. Dublin, 1995)
Ó Gráda, Cormac, ed., Famine 150: Commemorative Lecture Series (Teagasc/UCD, Dublin, 1997)
O’ Hegarty, P.S., A History of Ireland Under The Union 1801-1922 (Kraus Reprint Co., New York, 1969)
Ó Ríordáin, John, J., C.Ss.R., The Music of What Happens: Celtic Spirituality: A View From the Inside (The
Columba Press, Co. Dublin/Saint Mary’s Press, Minnesota, 1996) Percival, John, The Great Famine: Ireland’s Potato Famine 1845-51. Foreword by Ian Gibson. (BBC Books, London, 1995)
Quinn, J. F., History of Mayo Vol. 1, 2 &3 (Brendan Quinn, Ballina, Co. Mayo, 1993)
Scally, Robert James, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 1995)
Sharkey, Olive, Old Days, Old Ways: An Illustrated Folk History of Ireland. Foreword by Timothy P. O’Neill. (The O’Brien Press Ltd., Dublin, 1985)
Shaw Lefevre, G., The Right Hon., M.P., Peel and O’Connell: A Review of the Irish Policy of Parliament from the Act of Union to the Death of Sir Robert Peel (Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York and London, reissued 1970) Somerville, Alexander, Letters From Ireland During The Famine of 1847. Introduction by K. D. M. Snell, ed. (Irish Academic Press, Co. Dublin, 1994)
Sullivan, A.M., &Sullivan, T.D., eds., Irish Readings (M.H. Gill &Son Ltd., Dublin, 1913)
Thackeray, William Makepeace, Paris, Irish and Eastern Sketches (Smith, Elder &Co., London, 1872.)
Thomson, David, ed., with McGusty, Moyra, The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith 1840-1850 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980)
Villiers-Tuthill, Kathleen, Patient Endurance: The Great Famine in Connemara (Connemara Girl Publications, Dublin, 1997)
Whyte, Robert T., James J. Mangan, ed., 1847 Famine Ship Diary: The Journey of an Irish Coffin Ship (Mercier Press, Cork, 1994)
AUSTRALIA
Baglin, Douglass, &Mullins, Barbara, ‘Aboriginals of Australia’ (Shepp Books, New South Wales in association with Mulavon Pty., Ltd., New South Wales, 1997)
Broome, Richard, Aboriginal Australians – Black Responses to White Dominance 1788-1994 (Allen &Unwin Pty., Ltd., New South Wales, 1994)
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