Kerry Girls (21 page)

Strutt, although he had planned to go on to Allbury, Wagga Wagga and Tumut, where he reasoned that the rest of the girls would be hired, found that there was no need, the last of them were placed in Tumut. He then sold his horse and returned to Sydney by the mail coach, calling on the way at a number of the homes where he had placed girls. In a couple of these he was not satisfied with the hirers and he removed the girls and got new places for them with ‘more Christian people’.
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He stopped off at Camden to check on Mary Brandon and Mary Conway. Mary Brandon, who had recovered but whose leg was still not quite better, had got a satisfactory placement but he wasn’t able to see Mary Conway as she lived some miles outside the town. He also got an opportunity to thank the Italian priest for looking after them.

On his return through Yass, Strutt was presented with an address, signed by H. O’Brien, the Warden of the District of Yass and several highly respected citizens, ‘expressing the general satisfaction my girls had given in Yass and the neighbourhood’.
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He mentions at this point that Miss Collins had been placed in a country district outside of Yass. On his return to Sydney, Strutt was thanked in a letter from the Committee. On May 8 he boarded the
Thomas Arbuthnot
and set sail again for England.

While these
Thomas Arbuthnot
girls were placed in widely spread outlying areas of New South Wales, there was some comfort to be had in knowing that groups of them had got placed in the immediate environs of centres such as Yass, Gundagai and Tumut, where we would hope they met in later life.

The girls from Kenmare, who arrived on the
John Knox
in Port Jackson on the 29 April 1850, included inmates of workhouses in Monaghan, Wexford, Tipperary, Down, Cork, Meath and Kenmare. A number of these girls were hired in Sydney, in the outlying areas of Bathhurst and again a number were sent on to Moreton Bay and from thence to Ipswich where they settled and married. Anne Husband of Kenmare was apprenticed to Dr Richard Greenup, who had been the surgeon superintendent on the
John Knox
and who travelled with his wife and children. Dr Greenup initially opened a private practice in Sydney. He was quickly involved in helping to organise the new University of Sydney, became its secretary on 17 March 1851 and later was also treasurer and registrar.

The
Tippoo Saib
was the last ship that left Plymouth to bring orphans to Sydney under the Earl Grey Scheme. It arrived in Sydney on 29 July 1850 with immigrants from Listowel, Limerick, Longford, Meath Leitrim, Queen’s, King’s, Westmeath. Unfortunately these Listowel girls did not have the same good luck as their predecessors on the
Thomas Arbuthnot
. From the records that have survived, there is very little information available to us to identify where they got employment. We know that a number were hired immediately in Sydney, two of those being the Listowel Workhouse girls – Julia Daly (Tralee) and Mary Connor (Causeway) who were placed with the solicitor, Mr McCullagh, in Elizabeth Street, but who ran away and were subsequently the subject of a court case. The immigration authorities at Hyde Park prosecuted the case, under the Hired Servants Act, against Captain Morphew of the
Tipoo Saib
who was accused of enticing Julia to run away and live as his wife. He was convicted in his absence, Mary Connor gave evidence for the prosecution and also said that when Julia decided to leave Mr McCullagh, she [Mary] would ‘go anywhere with her rather than stop alone’.
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The majority of the
Tippoo Saib
girls seem to have been sent on to Moreton Bay again for settlement in the Brisbane and Ipswich areas, in order to dissipate the criticism that was being loudly expressed in the newspapers, principally the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the
Melbourne Argus
, for some time prior to their leaving Ireland in December 1849.

Even before these girls were ever selected from the Listowel Workhouse, hostility to the entire scheme had built up in the colony to such an extent that it was decided to scrap it entirely. In early 1850 a dispatch was on its way to the Colonial Office from Governor Fitzroy, recommending the cessation of this type of emigration. Before the dispatch reached England, four more ships had been sent out, three to Sydney and one to Port Philip.

By September 1850 all the Kerry girls had been placed and were spread throughout South Australia, New South Wales and the vast territory later named as the State of Queensland. By 1853, from Adelaide and Victoria in the south to the Condamine in the North and from the coastal settlements on the Pacific through to the newly explored interior the Kerry girls were living, working and starting to rear families.

Once settled in employment, the vast majority of the Kerry girls were married within a year or two. They mostly married older men who had been in the colony for a number of years, as squatters, stockmen or convicts. The latter now had almost all acquired their Tickets of Leave and were free to move to and from the different districts. In New South Wales and inland from Moreton Bay, the town of Brisbane was opening up and the rapidly developing rich grazing and farming lands in the interior were being settled. These areas attracted immigrants and ex-convicts who were rough and ready to take on the challenges of opening up a new country, taking opportunities or dealing with catastrophes and adversity with the same attitude.

The Kerry girls who went to Moreton Bay and became the female pioneers in the inner unexplored tracts, were to face many of the same challenges when married as they would have had at home. Coming with the experiences which they had from their lives so far in Ireland, these situations were not new to them. The challenges were different in the sense that the physical land that they occupied faced droughts, floods, unusual crops, strange animals and insects, but poverty, hard work, large families, violent and unexpected deaths were all situations with which they were only too familiar. Situations for which they would not have been prepared would be the isolation and monotony of life in the bush, the huge distances from neighbours or help in an emergency. The Kerry girls would not have had any experience of riding horses; here, in their new life, that was the mode of transport expected of them. That is the way they would travel to the nearest habitation or station to get help in a crisis.

If food was plentiful, there were still problems. To keep meat fresh it was generally salted, eating this seven days a week demanded improvisation and imagination. Later, when life got somewhat easier, they kept chickens and pigs. Those near to the great Australian rivers like the Manning River in northern New South Wales would have had a slightly more varied diet: ‘Salt Beef was the normal meat, Fowls were reared, pigeons, turkey and fish were plentiful’.
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Their slab and bark huts would have been a great improvement on the cabins they had left behind, and as the years passed, these were enhanced and extended on their own land without reference to landlord or middleman.

From the descendant’s stories and histories of the girls, we know that many of them went to the goldfields with their new husbands. After gold was found in Bathurst in 1851, life changed for ever in Australia. Within a month, thousands were making their way to the goldfields. Later discoveries of gold in Victoria meant that long treks were made on foot, on horseback or by dray to get to the mining localities of Beechworth, Bendigo and Ballarat. We have many stories of the girls accompanying their husbands on these long trudges, hoping to seek their fortunes at the other end. They lived a nomadic existence in these locations. Initially living in tents where up to 40,000 people could be camped close together, as they were at Bendigo, with all the deprivations of living cheek by jowl with so many others, little or no sanitation, shortages of water, the orphans had to fall back on all the resources they possessed. Food had to be found and cooked. Like the early squatters, miners lived on bread, tea and mutton. As well as cooking, their lot was to chop wood for the fires, washing and helping in the never ending search for the elusive gold. There was a lot of sickness on the diggings, the results of poor living conditions, bad food, heavy manual work and long hours working outdoors in all kinds of weather from the searing heat to downpours and floods. Those who stayed on for a number of years and presumably found some traces of gold, bettered their situation by building slab and bark huts, the wives found other work in the many stores that had sprung up or taking in washing. They kept a few hens and goats, started families and life began to regularise.

Some parents sent their children to school on the diggings. The children’s parents paid a fee so that their children could get the education that they had not been able to get themselves. As one could imagine, the standard of education from these schools was not very high. Children moved from one goldfield to another. If there was no teacher there, they had to wait until one turned up. Teachers, like others on the goldfields, lived in tents.
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The poor education that the Kerry girls had received prior to their arrival in Australia militated against them in their new homes with their growing children. Those who did not live in the cities and who settled in the bush or the goldfields, in the early years, lived too far away from schools that existed at that time. The fathers, who might have had the basics of reading and writing, after long days of physical work would have little interest or energy to teach their children, and the mothers were unable to do so. ‘If a mother on a station or farm could not instruct her children, education was rarely possible and though some older children may have helped the younger ones, few would have had any formal assistance.’
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Unfortunately we have proof, that some of the first generation of children were still signing their own marriage registers with an ‘X’.

We can see that while none of the orphans achieved huge material success, they enjoyed moderate prosperity and it was as one generation succeeded another that their descendants prospered. We learn from the stories of their early times in the colony that in their search for financial security, land or gold they were not successful. In their constant quest for work which would provide them with this security, they uprooted themselves and their families and moved about a lot. ‘We are reminded that pioneering required plenty of honest perspiration and unglamorous toil: it also requires a quality of silent heroism and the capacity to endure heartbreak.’
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The great difference between the lives of the Kerry girls and their husbands with those of the Limerick Monteagle immigrants was not where they came from, their ages or capacity for hard work. It was that Monteagle emigrants travelled to Australia in family groups; the small amounts of capital that the Limerick people brought and most importantly the chain migration which followed very quickly, was their key to early success. Brothers, sister, cousins and in-laws arrived over the next twenty years, all rowed in to help each other to get jobs and to work, just as they had at home, in the traditional
meitheal
, on each other’s farms and stations. Because of this family support, the Monteagle immigrants were very successful almost immediately, acquiring land selections, opening stores in the principal streets of Melbourne, building Hotels on the Hume Highway.

We have no evidence to show that the Kerry girls ever had the opportunity to send home for any of their families or indeed if they even kept in touch with home. A majority of them had lost both their parents and their siblings in the Famine and the link had broken for ever. In one case, that of Ellen Leary, we know that she must have kept in touch with her family in Glenflesk, as three generations later her family were able to say that her brother Ignatius had been ordained as a priest.