Events

2002 Shirley Fitzgerald Oration

The 1840s, all over Europe there was economic hardship, political upheaval and revolution. And beneath all this there was an undertow of disaffection at rising food prices. Those who controlled the production of foodstuffs sold well and cleaned up a tidy profit. Those who worked the land and tended the crops often starved. No where was this more true than in Ireland. The times are known in Europe as the Hungry Forties.

In Ireland it was 'The Great Hunger.' An Gorta Mor

The potato harvest rotted. Food became scarce. Peasants sold what little grain they had to pay the rent. Or they ate the grain, and were evicted because they couldn't pay the rent. They were sent to the workhouse or to emigration,or life turned its face towards death.

The Cork Examiner December 3 1847

The state of this Union at present seems disastrous. From the small occupiers it has become almost impossible to obtain the rates; and in one district it appears that the collector's authority had to be reinforced by no less than two hundred policemen in order to force from the poor the means of relief for the poorer & the workhouse is full, and & the guardians have taken a store in the town; whence poor people are marched twice a-day for their meals, as a kind of test, before giving them out-door relief & the plan adopted accords with the wisdom of the Commissioners, who have always insisted upon the poor being disgraced before they are relieved. But in the present case, the degradation of the poor is not even rewarded; the rations which they receive [are] stated to be insufficient for their maintenance.

Men who were put to work digging ditches and building roads to justify their food handouts fell down from exhaustion and never got up. In the end it is estimated that about one million people died and one and a half million emigrated. The age of marriage rose and people stopped procreating. The population halved, from 8 million to 4 million.

But famines are rarely made by God alone. As the distress grew daily deeper, the landlords exported grain and wool and flax. And the right of the rich to sell this produce into the highest market was defended by the rich. Some of the poor questioned it, and sometimes the grain had to be escorted to Irish ports under protection of armed soldiers. Any insubordination of the poor was met with increasingly draconian laws drafted by an imperial parliament.

It is tempting to blame that imperial power for the disaster that unfolded in Ireland, but it would be better to understand the economic system that allowed it to happen. While many of those 1840s landlords were English and absentee, some were also Irish. The newspapers that recorded the unfolding disaster were read in the comfort of gentlemen's clubs in Dublin as well as in London. The system is called capitalism, a system that was never more cruel than in the 'hungry forties'. Except perhaps the cruel way it operates to impoverish some places today.

This memorial, this beautifully simple and evocative memorial, commemorates the Great Famine. But the story it tells is not just a story of the past. It is an ongoing story of the world. The right of the rich to sell into the highest market, the system that allowed the selling of grain out of Ireland is still the system that today allows men and women and children to starve and die in many parts of our world. Like the 13 million at risk of starvation in southern Africa today.

But this monument is not only about famine. Because of its location and because of its design, this memorial also commemorates the lives of the Irish orphan girls the 4000 girls between the ages of 14 and 18 who came to Australia under Earl Grey's pauper immigration scheme from October 1848 and August 1850. About 600 went to Adelaide, 1200 to Melbourne and 2300 to Sydney. Many of them were not orphans,they were just poor.

On the morning of the 21st of October 1848 the first shipment of girls walked through these gates into these barracks. What would they have been thinking? How would they have felt? The locals were not backward in slandering them as 'human dross' or 'Papist rubbish' even the Protestant ones. In this tough little Sydney town, built on the labour of convicts and criminals, many of the newly respectable were very ready to judge these girls as immoral or criminal or ignorant, on little or no evidence. They were young, they must have felt scared, many spoke little or no English, they were a world away from home and they could not have felt welcomed.

And how different are we today? We locals do not seem to behave any better towards the current crop of unwanted arrivals. There is our preparedness to let desperate people drown. To believe fabricated stories of parents behaving with brutality towards their own children. The stories we tell each other of the strangeness and 'otherness' of people from a war torn and hungry Middle East have strong resonances with the ill informed prejudices levelled against the Irish in the mid 19thCentury. The self satisfied smugness of we Australians who are of English or Irish or of any other kind of decent who have lived lives of relative ease in this wonderful country arguing that we have some kind of God given right to be here and that for others the wretched of the earth their just lot is to starve.

If we can stand here today to commemorate the Irish Famine and also condone the current situation, we have learnt very little from the past. These high walls were built for a convict institution, and they must have looked foreboding to a little fourteen year old girl newly arrived in this town in the 1848. But not as foreboding, perhaps, as the workhouse walls of home. And not, I think as foreboding as the razor wire fence of a Villawood or Womerah Detention Centre. Those girls, we know their origins:

But we know too little about their lives here. They left no diaries or memoirs, fragments of bureaucratic records hint at the hardships endured. Bridget Armshaw, 16, Tipperary, Roman Catholic, parents unknown.' Died in the Sydney Infirmary just down the road there a sadly unfulfilling end piece to a long journey from darkness to death.

For others the possibilities were more positive. For all the prejudice, the colonists needed labour and they needed women, so work was found for the girls as domestic servants and as wives. There was probably not much difference between servitude and marriage in many cases but marriage offered at least a chance to 'get on' and so many of them married young. In a colony with too few women they contributed much as the mothers of this nation. Some died of 'exhaustion' and too much child bearing. Some lived well and long, like Catherine Naughton, 18, Galway, father living in Sydney'. Sister Mary migrated too in 1849 and sister Bridget in 1854. Catherine married in 1852, had eight children and died in 1901, in very comfortable circumstances.

A few became wealthy. And in the end, if there was not wealth, we want to believe that for some at least there was hope. Did girls who dreamed of nothing in Ireland learn to dream here in this building? We hope that they did. This memorial is finely simple. A breach in the wall. Crossing the world. Crossing the divide from famine to life. An empty bowl on the outside and bread and the utensils of daily life on the inside. It is a memorial to the reality and to dreams. Today more than ever we need to contemplate its meaning.

Shirley Fitzgerald
7 September 2002.