SUSAN ARTHURE, STEPHANIE JAMES, DYMPHNA LONERGAN and FIDELMA McCORRY (eds)
Wakefield Press
AU$45.00
ISBN 9781923042339
REVIEWED BY Elizabeth Malcolm
Elizabeth Malcolm’s most recent article, with Val Noone and Dianne Hall, is ‘Irish women in Australia and Irish-Australian women: a survey and bibliography’ (2022), available at: https://isaanz.org.
This collection of studies devoted to the Irish in Australia is the second volume edited by a team of academic researchers based in South Australia (SA). The first book, published in 2019, dealt solely with that state and, although this new work foregrounds women, nearly half of its sixteen chapters are also about SA. Despite attracting fewer Irish immigrants during the nineteenth century than the eastern colonies of New South Wales (NSW), Victoria and Queensland, SA still offers important opportunities in terms of Irish diaspora research. Comparisons with other colonies reveal significant similarities, but also notable differences—SA, for example, was never a penal colony.
Perry McIntyre uses SA data to challenge accusations of prostitution levelled against the 4,114 girls shipped from Irish workhouses to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide during the Famine. Of the 464 whose lives she has traced in SA, only 60 were accused of public order or vagrancy offences—that is 13%. Yet even most of these women appear to have eventually married and settled down to long law-abiding domestic lives. There were some Irish women, though, whose married lives were far from law-abiding. Anita Stelmach and Stephanie James chronicle the career of Bridget Fitzgerald O’Hara, who arrived in Adelaide in 1877, married twice and, between 1881 and 1923, accumulated 265 convictions for vagrancy offences, most of them alcohol-related. All the colonies had draconian vagrancy laws. The first, introduced in NSW in 1835, was aimed specifically against former convicts, but these laws had the effect of criminalising poverty and homelessness, and they were widely used to incarcerate destitute women.
Another woman who fell foul of the law was Carlow-born servant Mary Anne Geary. In Adelaide in 1861 she sued her wealthy Derry-born employer for unpaid wages which had accumulated during the nine months she spent in Sydney in 1855 while pregnant with his illegitimate child. As Rory Hope, a descendant of the employer, explains, although the jury found in her favour, the verdict was later overturned by judges on appeal. Fortunately for Geary, though, John Hope had gifted her a small parcel of land during their relationship, so when his appeal succeeded she was not left penniless.
Judicial systems, which always generate vast amounts of paperwork, provide much information on working-class women about whom we might otherwise know little. But such women are hardly representative, even if their particular struggles with authority open a window onto social attitudes towards women in general. As other biographical chapters in this collection demonstrate, the majority of Irish-born women never appeared before Australian courts. Some, however, were activists working outside the home, and they too have left traces in surviving archives. In colonial SA, these women included a community fighting eviction during the early 1880s, using tactics similar to those being employed by Irish women in the Land War, and a leading campaigner for women’s suffrage, which was achieved in SA in 1894, decades before Ireland and Britain. Elsewhere in the collection there are short biographies of several women, including an Irish cook who worked with Indigenous people in Victoria during the 1840s; an immigrant who arrived as a servant in 1855 but became a wealthy publican and landowner in Victoria; a member of the Irish Ladies’ Land League who settled in Sydney in 1884; and three women who campaigned against attempts to introduce conscription during the First World War.
Later chapters move beyond SA and biography to examine women promoting Irish dancing in Australia and others fighting for gender equality in the Queensland Irish Association—not fully realised until 2001. Although the collection’s title refers to the Antipodes, only one chapter deals with New Zealand (NZ). Kathryn Patterson writes about the difficult lives led by the wives of 1,260 Irish-born former British soldiers who settled in NZ before 1870. The final chapter by Kevin Molloy examines Irish women emigrating to Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. As well as interviewing some of these women, Molloy compares them with two other immigrant groups of the time: women leaving Britain for Australia and women leaving Ireland for Britain. This analysis provides an important comparative and transnational perspective on female migration.
While this collection contains much valuable research, what is really needed currently is a large-scale study of Irish female immigration to Australia and Irish-Australian women. Compared to British settlers, women were disproportionately numerous among the Irish, while women of Irish birth or descent have played particularly prominent roles in Australian culture and politics. Some of the country’s foremost female writers were of Irish birth or parentage, as were the majority of its early female trade union leaders. The first woman to graduate from an Australian university was the daughter of Irish immigrant parents. In politics, too, Irish and Irish-Australian women were pioneers: the first female federal senator was of Irish descent, while the first female federal cabinet minister was born in Belfast. Yet today the influence of these women is little known or appreciated. When a major study of Irish women in Australia appears—as I am sure it eventually will—chapters from this collection will certainly feature in it.