Anniversary Celebrations

Anniversaries

Since 2001 we have enjoyed an anniversary celebration of the unveiling of the Irish Famine monument at Hyde Park Barracks. It usually occurs on the last Sunday of August beginning at about 12.30pm. Distinguished guest speakers deliver an oration, representatives of the Irish government attend, a wreath in green and purple is laid at the monument by orphan girl descendants, and a lovely Irish air is played by guest musicians and singers. Afterwards we gather in the Barracks yard for refreshments and acquaintances are renewed. That 2-300 people come along each year and thus make the monument a 'living' monument is due to Tom Power and his small group of unsung volunteers.

In the past, dignitaries from Ireland have included President Mary McAleese and former President Mary Robinson who visited the monument in November 2002 and was mightily impressed. Other representatives from the Irish Government have included the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in March 2000, Minister of State, Seamus Brennan (2001) and a large delegation of Irish parliamentarians from Dail Eirann who came in October 2003 and laid a wreath. A Minister visits during 'Irish week', around St Patrick's Day, 17th March. Making the monument a focal point for the Irish community has benefited greatly from representatives of the Irish government in Australia such as Ambassadors Richard O'Brien and Declan Kelly and Consuls General Anne Webster and Patrick Scullion. Long may the association continue.

Below you will find some extracts from the orations and some photographs relating to the anniversary celebrations, 2001-2005. The speakers were as follows, Trevor McClaughlin (2001); Shirley Fitzgerald (2002); Cheryl Mongan (2003); Hon. Susan Ryan (2004); Tom Keneally (2005).

Trevor McClaughlin began his speech with a quotation from his favourite contemporary Irish poet, Louis de Paor. It is from a collection entitled Cork and Other Poems/ Corcach & Dánta Eile published by Black Pepper. The poem is called Bóthar an Ghleanna/Under Ground which Louis says is about the Famine though few people have understood that. Evidently it is about a mass grave at the time of the Famine, something the orphan girls who came to Australia were lucky to escape.

In 2002 Shirley Fitzgerald gave a moving oration. Here is an extract from her speech.

"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"

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 19th Century. The self satisfied smugness of we Australians who are of English or Irish or of any other kind of descent  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:

Belfast and Ballina; Cashel and Clonmel; Limerick & Skibbereen.

And we know their names, from: Aikens; Boyle & Brady; Cahill & Casey; Devlin & Dooley & through to Ryan and Rooney; Shanahan & Shea , Troy & Whittaker.

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."

In 2003 Cheryl Mongan gave an uplifting account of the orphans who came by the Thomas Arbuthnot. Here are just a couple of paragraphs from her very thorough narration that emphasize the young women's role in family reunification.

"The girls were unconditionally accepted by Yass and district residents and were placed in suitable employment with settlers, storekeepers and government officials-Catholics and Protestants alike. This arrangement was carried out under the watchful eye of Charles Strutt, the Surgeon-Superintendent of the Thomas arbuthnot in consultation with local magistrates and clergy. It was a necessary precaution that the orphans should not be employed in ins and other houses of public entertainment, as unscrupulous persons frequently tried to exploit the vulnerability of the orphans...

After many years of separation, individual orphans successfully reunited family members, sometimes paying their fares to Australia out of their meagre earnings as domestic servants. Bridget Davies, a 16 year old hired by Mrs Lucy Howell of Arkstone Forest, received letters from her uncle Matthew Kennedy in Gurtaveha, Co Clare, imploring her to send money for the fare of her brother Patrick.Shortly after receiving the letter Bridget deposited the sum of £4 with the Immigration Office in Sydney to obtain a free passage for Pat who arrived on the Maidstone later the same year...

In some cases, the orphan scheme was a means to bring about family reunions...the Stephens sisters, Jane and Ruth, had upon the arrival of the Thomas arbuthnot stated that their parents were in Sydney. Their father John Stephens was not in Sydney. He had been convicted on a charge of stealing two cows at the Wicklow Summer Assizes in July 1846 and was transported on the Tory to Tasmania in 1847. Soon after his arrival he obtained a Ticket of Leave and started a new life working for the Archer family at Longford. The girls' mother, Eliza,was in Sydney having arrived as a single woman on board another orphan ship, the Lismoyne in November 1849, shortly before the Thomas Arbuthnot...In September 1850 Jane Stephens married William Caldwell in Longford in Tasmania. In early May 1851, her mother, Eliza was delivered of another daughter, raising the likelihood of a family reunion in Tasmania by July 1850, only five months after the girls arrived in Sydney."

In his oration at the 2005 anniversary celebrations Australia's prize winning author, Thomas Keneally was his usual witty effervescent self. But he likened the misery of the Irish orphan girls who came through Hyde Park Barracks to the desperate plight of the Sudanese refugees in Darfur today."I think the traumas that the orphan girls lived through are being lived through now in the Sudan". He went on to say 'we honour the history of these girls, the matriarchs of so many of your families describing their lives as 'a triumph' and said they had proved how wrong people were when they said someone wasn't fit to be an Australian.