Forgotten and whispered memories: Eureka and its contemporary sources

The precise nature of violent events is often problematic. What was said or written about them is not always what occurred. Society’s interpretation of violent events changes over time and differs across different sections of society. Low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility and high population turnover lead to disruption of community cohesion and organisation. [1] Explaining the context of a violent event is often easier than explaining the event itself.

This problem is linked to the ways in which the actions of crowds have been perceived. There have been two leading interpretations of the politics of working-class crowds. One sees popular protest as occurring spontaneously and without prior organisation as a reaction to immediate material deprivations such as food shortages or wage reductions. The other views the crowd as an inchoate and unselfconscious mass that can be galvanised into activity, shown how to constitute itself as a potentially revolutionary class, only by an elite, usually of middle or upper class provenance, who may exploit its potential for violence for their own social and ideological agendas. The problem, Rudé observed

…is that conservatives and ‘Republicans alike had projected their own political aspirations, fantasies and / or fears onto the crowd without having asked the basic historical questions’...law-and-order conservatives, he complains, see all protest as a ‘crime against established society’; liberal writers have tended to comprehend all crimes as a form of protest.[2]

The classic conservative images of proletarian anarchy are Edmund Burke’s depiction of the rioting mob as a ‘swinish multitude’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hippolyte Taine’s account of revolutionary action as the breeding-ground for the ‘dregs of society’, ‘bandits’, ‘thieves’, ‘savages’, ‘beggars’ and ‘prostitutes’.[3] By contrast, the Leninist approach assumed that the revolutionary activities of the crowd must be directed by an elite, the Party, converting anarchic energy into effective political action. Rudé in his earlier writings, tended towards Leninism concluding that the sans-culottes were on their own capable of nothing more than economic motivation and that movement beyond that required the leadership and political ideas developed by bourgeois intellectuals, a model he later questioned recognising that the lower classes had ideas and motivations of their own.[4]

Both these issues are evident in the sources for the Eureka rebellion in December 1854 and create major problems for historians who want to describe and explain what actually happened. For example, government sources tended to overestimate the threat posed by the rebellion if only to justify the draconian actions that it took and playing up the role of ‘foreigners’, especially the European revolutionary participants at the Stockade while playing down the role of Americans. A further problem with the sources lies in the nature of the protest at Ballarat in late 1854. Although there is a succession of reports from the goldfield to Sir Charles Hotham that provide a developing view of the position of authority, most of the information from those involved in the protest was written after the Stockade was stormed and contains a strong dose of self-justification. Only the less than neutral reporting of the local and Melbourne press provides evidence for the developing crisis on the goldfield from the perspective, and then via a critique, of the miners’ stance.

The accounts of Eureka in various histories of Australia have a tendency to elide the specific details of the incident in favour of situating the event in a narrative of the nation. [5] The writing of histories of Eureka began soon after the event. The difficulty is that unusually the production of sources on Eureka and the early writing of histories of Eureka were almost indistinguishable. Many of those involved on both sides of the rebellion wrote accounts that were both partial and attempted to locate Eureka within a causal nexus. Normally, these accounts would have been used by historians to construct their narratives but not in this particular instance. It was not until 1913 that a specific history of Eureka was written as opposed to a literary heritage was published. [6] Hotham’s version of events is contained in a despatch to the Colonial Secretary dated 20 December 1854 [7] with the account in the Report from the commission appointed to inquire into the condition of the goldfields following in late March 1855. [8] Surprisingly few participants at Eureka wrote accounts of the event and they are for the most part partial. Lalor, [9] Vern [10] and Carboni produced accounts in 1855 and H. R. Nicholas [11] and John Lynch[12] in the 1890s. The same can be said of the only eyewitness account from the government camp written by Samuel Douglas Smyth Huyghue, a Canadian who was chief clerk to Robert Rede the Resident Commissioner on the Ballarat gold fields. Though originally drafted in Ballarat in November 1857, it was revised in September 1879 and not completed until 10 December 1884, some thirty years after the event.[13] The contemporary diary of Samuel Lazarus, though valuable on the aftermath of the attack, is silent on the attack itself that Lazarus appears to have slept through. A neglected source is the history of Ballarat written by W.B. Withers who deliberately sought out written and oral testimony from those involved in the rebellion.[14]

The most remarkable is Raffaello Carboni’s The Eureka Stockade that offers a vivid if unconventional history.[15] Geoffrey Serle made little sense of the book

Carboni Raffaello’s Eureka Stockade stands apart as a literary freak…its qualities of vigour, observation, humour and sarcasm raise it to considerable heights.[16]

Although roughly linear, Carboni included commentaries on events and what characterises him as a narrator was the mobility of his stance, ‘using the voices of reporter, judge, polemicist, philosopher, satirist, historian and participant’. [17] It is, however, a mistake to view the book as the record of a partisan and a tale of damnation of tyranny without scholarly detachment rather than a history. In two important respects, The Eureka Stockade is clearly a history: first, its use of particular narrative forms and secondly, its attention to evidence.[18]

Carboni wrote within the European historiographical tradition that had begun in the eighteenth century based around distinctive forms of emplotment, the narrator’s position and reader’s expectations. His account is consistently written in the forms of satire, comedy and tragedy but all these devices are subordinate to a romance of heroes, a vindication of his own character and those of the diggers. [19] Carboni was writing for the future in the expectation that the events at Eureka would be accorded the ‘historic’ status they deserved. He saw the book as an act of remembering events for the future that he was sure would be forgotten:

…it is in my power to drag your names from ignoble oblivion and vindicate the unrewarded bravery of one of yourselves...But he [Ross] was soon forgotten. That he was buried is known by the tears of a few true friends! The place of is burial is little known, and less cared for. [20]

He supported his case by an extensive accumulation of evidence that provided both the basis for his narrative and his means of authenticating the text as historically accurate. Carboni also drew on a much older form of history, the notion of historian as witness and made this claim explicit in the introduction:

I was at the centre. I was an actor and therefore an eye-witness. The events I relate, I did see them pass before me. [21]

Carboni was right that Eureka would not be instantly remembered in written history. Once the battle ended, the focus for most historians moved to Melbourne to pursue the effects of events: the demonstrations in the capital and across the goldfields, the resignation of Colonial Secretary Foster; the reform of the goldfields and the constitution and Hotham’s death. This shift was possible because Eureka was on the cusp of two processes already in motion: the demise of imperial autocracy and the emergence of limited self-government dominated by colonial liberalism. The introduction of the miner’s right deflated the causes of the crisis of 1854 and the local political élite, liberated by their new constitution, had little appetite for grappling with demands from the forces of popular protest, ‘the dark side of their commitment to democracy’. [22] Eureka had served its purpose and, with reforms secured, the rebellion became an event that had passed quickly and for the moment was left in the past.

This was clearly the case with Peter Lalor. His statement in April 1855 was, unlike Carboni, neither a narrative of heroism nor a history. [23] It is a defence of the diggers’ actions written by a man who deeply regretted having been forced to take up arms. His lesson from the rebellion was that reforms should have been introduced earlier and that, despite the bloodshed, civilisation would prevail. His only use of the word ‘history’ was in his boast that ‘I have taken measures to have the history of the outbreak and its causes brought before the House of Commons’, a very different audience to the one Carboni had in mind. Whether Lalor was a ‘forgetter’ as Molony suggests, it was increasingly the case that Lalor, now the parliamentarian, regretted Eureka as an ‘unfortunate affair’. [24] These characteristics were shared by other immediate historians of the event. Captain H. Butler Stoney arrived in Ballarat shortly after the battle and, like Carboni, relied heavily on evidence especially the Royal Commission and the report of Captain Thomas to provide a historical veneer. [25] His explanation for the rebellion was an even-handed apportioning of blame to abuse of power and wayward citizens and was the first historian to focus attention on foreigners.[26] ‘Even though their wild passions of rebellion had for a moment made them lose sight of their loyalty and obedience to her law’, Stoney concluded that the diggers were really loyal to the Crown, that there had been substantial progress in Victoria and that it was a fine place for investment opportunities.[27] For him, Eureka was an unfortunate aberration in the inevitable progress of the colony to economic prosperity.

Myth is a highly charged concept when linked with the study of history. To suggest that fable and fact may be reconciled to explain the past suggests that truth and falsity can explain the same historical event. Yet myth cannot be easily dismissed from a consideration of history, particularly from histories of nations and national identity. All histories have some element of myth, a distortion of the truth produced to draw out a significant explanation of the past; a sense of significance shared by a cultural group embracing a mythic explanation of the past in order to reinforce shared values. [28] Ernest Scott, for example, sought to explain how British racial origins and an accompanying heritage of liberal ideals creatively flourished in Australia. Gifted with ‘the most liberal endowment of self-government that had ever been secured in the history of colonization by dependencies from a mother-country’, the ‘thoroughly British’ Australian population had been left ‘free to work out their own destiny’. Thus Australia became ‘…a field for the exercise of their racial genius for adaptation and for conquering difficulties’. [29] In his identification of shared British origins, Scott offered a reassuring sense of familiarity, proudly enhanced by an account of how Australians had proved themselves worthy of their inherited traditions and faced the challenges of developing a new country.

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[1] Reiss, Albert J., Understanding and Preventing Violence, 2 Vols. (National Academies Press), 1993, Vol. 1, pp. 31-41, 129-139.

[2] Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, in George Rudé, The Face of the Crowd: Selected Essays of George Rudé, (Harvester Wheatsheaf), 1988, pp. 7-15.

[3] Ibid, Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, p. 6.

[4] Ibid, Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, p. 24.

[5] Elder, Catriona Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, (Allen & Unwin), 2007, pp. 23-40.

[6] Ibid, Turner, Henry Gyles, A History of the Colony of Victoria From its Discovery to its Absorption into the Commonwealth of Australia, Vol. 2, pp. 23-51, and Our Own Little Rebellion: The Story of the Eureka Stockade, Melbourne, 1913. McCalman, Iain, ‘Turner, Henry Gyles (1831-1920)’, ADB, Vol. 6, 1976, pp. 311-313.

[7] Duplicate Despatch Number 162 reporting a serious collision and riot at the Ballaarat Gold Field: Victoria Public Record Office: 1085/P, Unit 8, reprinted in ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies: Eureka Supplement, (December 1954), pp. 3-7.

[8] Anderson, Hugh, (ed.) Report from the Commission appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Goldfields, 1855, (Red Rooster Press), 1978.

[9] Lalor, Peter, ‘Statement on the Ballarat rebellion’, Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 8-14.

[10] Vern, Frederick, ‘Col. Vern’s Narrative of the Ballarat Insurrection, Part I’, Melbourne Monthly Magazine, November 1855, pp. 5-14. Part II does not appear to have been published.

[11] Nicholls, H. R., ‘Reminiscences of the Eureka Stockade’, The Centennial Magazine: An Australian Monthly, (May 1890), in an annual compilation, Vol. II., August, 1889 to July, 1890, pp. 746-750.

[12] Lynch, John, ‘The story of the Eureka Stockade’, Austral Light, October 1893-March 1894, republished as a pamphlet Story of the Eureka Stockade, (Australian Catholic Truth Society), n.d. [1946?].

[13] Huyghue, S.D.S., ‘The Ballarat Riots’, printed in O’Brien, Bob, Massacre at Eureka: the Untold Story, 1992, (The Sovereign Hill Museums Association), 1998, pp. 1-39.

[14] Ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, pp. 72-163.

[15] Ibid, Raffaello! Raffaello!: A Biography of Raffaello Carboni, and Rando, G. ‘Raffaello Carboni’s Perceptions of Australia and Australian Identity’, based on a paper presented at the Eureka 150 Democracy Conference, University of Ballarat, 25-27 November 2004 and ‘Raffaello Carboni’s Perceptions of Australia’, Journal of Colonial Australian History, Vol. 10, (1), (2008), pp. 129-144.

[16] Serle, p. 360.

[17] Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, (Cambridge University Press), 1997, p. 137.

[18] Ibid, Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism, pp. 139-142.

[19] Rando, G., Great Works and Yabber-Yabber: The Language of Raffaello Carboni’s ‘Eureka Stockade’, St Lucia (Qld), 1998, considers Carboni’s use of language.

[20] Ibid, The Eureka Stockade, p. 2.

[21] Ibid. The Eureka Stockade, p. 2.

[22] Ibid, Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism, p. 141.

[23] Lalor, Peter, ‘Statement on the Ballarat rebellion’, ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 8-14.

[24] Ibid, Moloney, John, Eureka, p. 210. See also Sunter, Anne Beggs, ‘The Apotheosis of Peter Lalor: Myth, Meaning and Memory in History’, paper in Remembered Nations, Imagined Republics: Proceedings of the Twelfth Irish-Australian Conference, Galway, June 2002, Australian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 4, (2004), pp. 94-104.

[25] Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria: With a Description of its Principal Cities...and Remarks on the Present State of the Colony; Including an Account of the Ballarat Disturbances, and of the Death of Captain Wise, 40^th Regiment, London, 1856.

[26] Ibid, Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria, pp. 106-138 considers Eureka.

[27] Ibid, Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria, p. 137.

[28] Collins, Rebecca, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: myth as mystification in historical discourse’, Rethinking History, Vol. 7, (2003), pp. 341-3, 356.

[29] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, pp. 330-332, 336.

Australia and Irish settlement: after the Famine

A strong Irish network existed in Melbourne before 1850 and indeed the meeting place of the first Parliament of Victoria was St Patrick’s Hall.[1] Bounty immigration swelled Irish numbers before 1850, but major waves of migration commenced only after the discovery of gold in Victoria and during the reconstruction of Irish agriculture in the period after the 1840s famine.[2] As a result, while the vast bulk of Irish settlers in Melbourne were drawn from rural Ireland and most likely from the small land-holding class, a steady stream of Irish professional men arrived in the 1850s, especially lawyers and doctors, who made an early and long-lasting mark on Melbourne life. The new University of Melbourne was shaped by its association with Trinity College, Dublin, most notably through the Irish political economist and one of the four foundation professors at Melbourne, W.E. Hearn. The first chancellor of the university, Redmond Barry, had also graduated from Trinity and emigrated in 1839. He founded the Melbourne Mechanics Institute, sat on the Supreme Court bench and played a central role in the creation and expansion of the State Library of Victoria.[3] Another Trinity graduate, Richard Ireland, born in Galway in 1816, was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1816 and arrived in Melbourne in 1852, where he defended the Eureka rebels before becoming a minister in governments headed by Irishmen Charles Gavan Duffy and John O’Shanassy.[4]

Bourke Street, Melbourne c1890

In Melbourne, the Irish settled most densely in the inner city. For a time some of the poorer lanes of the central city sustained conspicuous Irish populations. Yet the Irish-born were never a numerical majority in any local government area or city ward, even though they may have controlled local political and cultural life. In the city itself, Bourke, Gipps and Lonsdale wards had populations which were more than 20 per cent Irish in 1871, the peak year for the city’s Irish-born population. Irish women, who most typically worked in domestic service, moved from these concentrations to wealthy suburbs such as St Kilda and Kew. For most of the nineteenth century the inner municipality of Hotham (North and West Melbourne) was the most Irish locality, largely because of its position near the unskilled labour markets in the railway yards, warehouses and wharves and in carting at the western end of the central city.

Ulster Protestants gradually established a place in the skilled trades of Melbourne and also dominated some civil service departments by the end of the 1860s. Catholic Irishmen were typically unskilled workers or small shopkeepers. They too sought to cement networks in government employment, filling many positions in the ‘uniformed working-class’ such as the railways, post office and customs services. From its formation, the Victoria Police was structured along the same lines as the Royal Irish Constabulary and the typical constable was likely to have been born in Ireland, as were many of those he arrested.

‘Canvas Town’: South Melbourne in the 1850s showing temporary accommodation during the Gold Rush

There had been surprisingly little movement during the Famine and the heaviest influx was delayed until the 1860s. While the 1850s remained the most significant decade for Irish migration to Victoria, perhaps more important single years of emigration were 1864, 1879 and 1884, peaks associated with crises in Irish agriculture. The last great Irish immigration occurred between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s when immigration to the United States was less attractive because of depression in its economy. Australia was only ever the destination of choice for Irish immigrants when recession elsewhere made foreign labour markets unattractive for immigrants. The same applied when Australia experienced depression as it did in 1867, 1878-1879 and 1885-1886 when Irish immigration slackened. Colonial demand for immigrant labour and a willingness to provide assisted passage was greatest when there was significant economic growth in the absence of a large settled population. Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania offered little assistance after the 1860s while Queensland invested heavily in immigration during the 1879s and 1880s. NSW stopped providing assistance between the late 1880s and 1910. Since most Irish immigration depended on some form of state or private assistance, this resulted in settlers in different colonies coming largely from different generational cohorts. The most significant county of origin remained Clare but comparatively rich farming regions such as Meath, Tipperary and Armagh were more highly represented than the poorer western counties of Kerry, Galway and Mayo. Extended chain migration allowed these regional concentrations to persist until the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1864.

Although Victoria proved a magnet for immigration in the 1850s, the other colonies continued to receive Irish immigrants. The 1859 census for Western Australia records 2,406 Irish-born representing 16 per cent of the total non-Aboriginal population. This had risen to 3,569 by 1870 and 9,862 during the gold rush of the 1890s though many of these came from the eastern states rather than directly from Ireland. The Irish made up about a tenth of the convicts sent to the colony between 1850 and 1868.[5] NSW also saw an increase in immigration in the 1850s partly as a result of gold but also because of the continuing distress in Ireland. Most assisted immigrants between 1848 and 1870 were Catholic but about a fifth was Protestant. Apart from higher levels of literacy, there was no real difference between the two religious groups: men tended to be labourers and women farm or domestic servants. In the 1850s, for example, there was much distress in rural Donegal.[6] Under the British landlord system, the native inhabitants had to pay rents and were liable to be evicted if they could not keep up the payments.[7] After 1855, some of these emigrants took advantage of the NSW assisted immigration scheme. Under this, residents of NSW could pay a contribution to the government in Sydney to bring out a relative or friend from Britain or Ireland with the government subsidising the cost of the passage. As the immigrants of 1855 became established in NSW, many sent sums of money ranging from £5 to £50 back to Donegal to help their relatives to survive or to emigrate. By 1858, there was mounting concern in Australia about news that landlords were squeezing Donegal people off the land to make way for more profitable farming procedures such as large-scale sheep-raising, using Scottish shepherds.

In May 1858, Archdeacon John McEncroe, a Catholic clergyman from County Tipperary, convened a public meeting in Sydney to form a Donegal Relief Fund. McEncroe had been in NSW since 1832 and was the founder of a periodical newspaper, the Sydney Freeman’s Journal. He sought to make systematic use of the government’s assisted immigration scheme and took a deputation from the Donegal Relief Fund to interview government officials in July 1858. He gave the government a deposit of £900 pounds that then issued a certificate providing passages for 225 people. This special fare to Australia was £5 per male and £3 per female. McEncroe made subsequent deposits, bringing the total for 1858 to £3,800 and the government issued further certificates for passage. The first batch of Donegal Relief Fund migrants arrived in Sydney from Liverpool on the Sapphire in May 1859 after a voyage of 15 weeks. The vessel landed 286 passengers though not all sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund. The sexes were evenly balanced with 138 males and 133 females over 12 years including 42 married couples, plus eight boys and seven girls under 12 years. The arrival of each the subsequent four Donegal Relief Fund ships was reported in the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, which recommended the passengers to prospective employers as farm labourers or domestic servants. The NSW government encouraged the immigrants, especially the men, to go to ‘immigrant depots’ in country centres such as Maitland, Newcastle and Bathurst, from where they would be hired by landholders. The Donegal Relief Fund enormously boosted the number of Irish migrants to NSW in 1859. According to parliamentary reports, 3,723 immigrants entered NSW that year from all sources under government’s assistance scheme. Of these, the Irish accounted for 2,544, more than 68 per cent of the total, of which about a third came under the Donegal Relief Fund scheme.

Only two per cent of those who left Ireland in the nineteenth century came to Australia and the majority of these came through assisted passage. This seems to have been more likely the case for women since British and colonial authorities maintained assisted female emigration over longer periods and at lower rates. Irish women made up between 50 and 60 per cent of assisted female migrants during the 1850s and 1860s and in NSW they made up to 80 per cent. The peak periods of female immigration coincided with years of heaviest assistance. There was a boost to early Irish female immigration to the colony with government-sponsored ‘bride ships’ of the 1850s containing poor, predominantly Catholic Irish women.[8] Many of these girls went into the country as servants and sometimes married Protestants but more often men from the bond class. They represented a small if important part of the large-scale process of female migration to Australia that gathered momentum in the 1850s and 1860s. Some 1,700 single British and Irish women came to Western Australia but substantially more came on colonial-sponsored schemes to NSW (18,000), Victoria (13,000), South Australia (9,100), Queensland (46,000) and Tasmania (1,600).[9] The reason why many of these women migrated may have been to seek a spouse[10], but the attitude of colonial society was more ambiguous and bidders at the immigration depot included middle-class women seeking domestic servants of whom there was a major shortage as well as single men.

Over half of Irish women, even in the 1880s and 1890s entered domestic service and they appear to have not sought alternative avenues of employment though their daughters frequently entered factory work. There were several reasons why a higher proportion of Irish women than any other nationality entered domestic service. First, they came from a largely rural background and had no familiarity with factory work. Secondly, domestic work provided food and lodgings as well as wages and allowed women to save money easily to send back home to pay debts, to buy land or acquire a few luxuries. Finally, domestic service was a job that did not compete with the male labour market and work was available even during economic depression.

The Irish in Australia in the nineteenth century were simplistically seen as either Catholic, nationalist and republican or Protestant, empire loyalists, Orangemen or members of Masonic lodges. Irish Protestants made up a small proportion of the total Irish migration and comprised about five per cent of the total Australian population in the nineteenth century. Despite this, they played a disproportionately important role in the development of the country.[11] They can be divided into the Anglo-Irish who originated in the Irish gentry and who emigrated to Australia from the 1820s and Ulster Protestants representing a cross-section of Ulster society. The Anglo-Irish, dependent on their British connection, became the main stay of colonial administration, followed traditional routes into the law, the church or the military or entered the professions. The Trinity College link proved important and by 1880, for example, four of the five judges on the Supreme Court of Victoria were Irish Protestants.

The Australian Irish, like the American Irish, came from a variety of destinations and had emigrated for a variety of reasons. Many were born in Ireland but others arrived only after perhaps years in some British city or in the eastern and then western United States and who came with other ‘diggers’ in search of wealth on the goldfields. Yet while Irish descendants in America have retained pride in their ancestral culture, this is less the case in Australia. [12] The nineteenth-century Irish represented the major discordant element in what were strongly Anglicised colonies. Their role as loyal opposition, niggling and ridiculing the dominant English colonial culture was however a defining element in the shaping of Australian society and the Australian character. Their identity was Australian first and Irish second.

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[1] Strauss, Valda, ‘Irish influences in early Melbourne’, Mallow Field Club Journal, Vol. 14, (1996), pp. 149-153.

[2] Davison, Graeme, ‘Gold-rush Melbourne’, in McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold: forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 52-66 and The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, (Melbourne University Press), 1978.

[3] Phillips, John H., ‘A Black-Letter Lawyer’, La Trobe Journal, Vol. 73, (2004), pp. 23-28, and Ryan, Peter, ‘Sir Redmond Barry, (1813-1880)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 108-111, provide contrasting succinct studies of Barry. Neither Galbally, Ann, Redmond Barry, An Anglo-Irish Australian, (Melbourne University Press), 1995 nor Ryan, Peter, Redmond Barry, A Colonial Life, (Melbourne University Press), 1980, are enthusiastic about Barry’s judicial qualities.

[4] Ingham, M., ‘Sir John O’Shanassy (1818-1883)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 378-382.

[5] Oriesen, I.H. van den, ‘Convicts and migrants in Western Australia, 1850-1868: their number, nature and ethnic origins’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 72, (1986-1987), pp. 40-58.

[6] McClintock, May, ‘Donegal Orphan girls’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 53, (2001), pp. 59-65 considers Donegal orphans sent to Australia 1848-1850. Conaghan, Pat, The great famine in south-west Donegal, 1845-1850, (Bygones Enterprises), 1997 examines the impact of famine.

[7] See O’Donnell, Martina, ‘Government intervention in land improvement in county Donegal, 1846-1880’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 48, (1996), pp. 158-192.

[8] Erickson, Rica, The bride ships: experiences of immigrants arriving in Western Australia 1849-1889, (Hesperian Press), 1992.

[9] Gothard, Jan, ‘Wives or workers? Single British female migration to colonial Australia’, in Sharpe, Pamela, Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and global perspectives, (Routledge), 2001, pp. 145-162.

[10] Britain had a ‘surplus women’ problem: in 1851 there were 1042 women to every 1000 men and by 1901 this had risen to 1068. Assisted emigration was a possible solution to this problem for Britain by reducing the number of women and for the colonies by reducing their imbalanced sex-ratios.

[11] Forth, Gordon, ‘”No petty people”: the Anglo-Irish identity in colonial Australia’, in O’Sullivan, Patrick, (ed.), The Irish world wide: history, heritage, identity, Vol. 2: the Irish in the new communities, (Leicester University Press), 1992, pp. 128-142.

[12] Ibid, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, pp. 5-21 considers the contentious issue of Irish Australian identity. Campbell, Malcolm, ‘Irish nationalism and immigrant assimilation: comparing the United States and Australia’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 15, (2), (1996), pp. 24-43 provides comparison.