Official attitudes regarding Irish migration to Tower Hill and other parts of Victoria: an analysis of the “Report of the Immigration Agent into Colonial Emigration and Immigration for the Year 1854”
In the twentieth century, the Irish migration to Tower Hill in the previous century was a source of pride to the Reilly family and to the Koroit Irish community generally. The town’s Irish heritage is still celebrated today through events such as the Koroit Irish Festival. Koroit has frequently been described as having the greatest proportion of people of Irish heritage in Australia. This connection of Koroit with Irishness in the contemporary popular mindscape of Victoria begs some questions. In what ways was Koroit different from other towns in Victoria? What were the long-term ramifications of Koroit’s Irish heritage to the community? Indeed, was Koroit substantially distinct from other places?
The majority of Patricia’s forebears came to Tower Hill within a few years of each other. The ships that brought the original McNamara, Bowman, and Reilly forebears all arrived in Portland between the years 1854 and 1856. Additionally, Bridget Dwyer most likely also arrived at Portland around this time.
In the nineteenth century there was considerable debate regarding the merits of bringing Irish people to Victoria, especially the transmigration of young unmarried Irish women. There were discussions concerning the issue of how to “improve” the composition of the population of the colony. In some ways these debates mirrored the controversies surrounding convict transportation.
Some commentators couched their discussions in ways redolent of the eugenics tinged discourse then highly fashionable among the educated classes. This was a time when theories of scientifically planned systematic colonisation were in vogue underpinned by the pseudoscience of eugenics.
At a popular level, the discussion seems to have been somewhat akin to how a farmer might improve his herd through choosing the right bulls and cows for the breeding program based on supposed superior genetic lines and favourable behavioral traits. Any stock introduced into the herd needed to fit in with those already here and hopefully would serve to improve the line. This preoccupation with designating the right people for the nation has not entirely gone away.
A view held by many of the educated and learned people of the day was that there was perceived to be a hierarchy of races. Some in the so called lower orders may have held similar racialized views although perhaps not coherently articulated in a literary or academic way.
The British aristocracy and gentry class were of course placed at the top of the tree by the learned of the day. For some in the community, while the Irish were “whites,” and hence higher in the human hierarchy than “blacks”, they were at the lower end of the scale in terms of white people. At a time when the political class were debating whether to abolish convict transportation entirely, some advocated that the numbers of Irish Catholics allowed into the colony through assisted immigration should be restricted by the government in order to improve the human stock of “white” Australia.
From around 1830 till the first goldrushes of 1851, the British and Australian colonial governments subsidised tens of thousands of impoverished men and women to migrate to Australia. There were a number of different schemes. One particular program, which ran from 1835 to 1841, was the bounty reward scheme. So called Bounty Immigrants were selected by established colonists, who then paid a fee to cover the passage of the immigrant. When the immigrant arrived, the free settler would then employ the immigrant for a pre-determined period. The colonist had paid a “bounty” in the form of a portion of the cost of passage and was rewarded with a period of service. Some of the proceeds of land sales following government auctions of recently alienated Crown Land were allocated to help finance the assisted immigration programs.
The early assisted migration programs tended to favor the importation of single people or young married couples yet to have families. Nevertheless, family groups were included in early assisted migration programs. The Molan family from Limerick and the Freckletons from Ulster came to the Southwest in the early 1840s as migrants originally brought out by the New South Wales government’s bounty scheme. Some later programs actively encouraged the passage of family groups with a preponderance of female members.
In many cases, the sponsoring party, after a certain period, would be reimbursed by the government for all or part of the cost of the passage of the assisted immigrant. In part, such schemes were a government subsidy to assist employers procure workers. The British government supported the schemes as they were a way of ridding Britain of surplus people and of ensuring that vital Australian industries such as wool production had sufficient labor to fulfill its function of supplying raw materials to British textile mills.
Assisted immigration schemes were also be designed to function as vehicles to enable those already here to bring out their relatives or friends. This demonstrated a greater degree of agency on the part of some immigrants and it also served the government’s policy of attracting more workers to the colony. The fact that these immigrants already had a support network of family here made the task of assimilating the newcomers easier for the government.
Throughout 1856, for example, the Portland Guardian carried the following advertisement: “Immigration remittances – Notice to the public – Persons wishing to bring their relatives and friends from the United Kingdom to Victoria can procure passages for them in vessels chartered by Her Majesty’s Government on the following conditions: 1. The persons to be brought into the Colony must be in good health, free from all bodily or mental defects; of good moral character, sober, industrious, and in the habit of working for wages at the occupation specified in the application forms. Children under the age of fifteen years a must be accompanied by some competent person who will take charge of them during the voyage.” Further conditions were stipulated. The advertisements can easily be accessed on Trove.
To participate in the Family Reunion schemes, application forms could be obtained at the nearest post office and sent to the Immigration Office in Melbourne, then headed by Charles Edward Strutt, the Immigration Agent for Victoria. Forms could also be obtained and processed by designated Assistant Immigration Agents located in Geelong, Portland Port Fairy, Warrnambool and Port Albert. The schemes were well advertised in regions needing labor and considerable resources were devoted to the programs.
The position of Immigration Agent was a position of power and influence in the Victorian government of the day., Dr. Charles Edward Strutt was the Acting Immigration Agent for Victoria at the time the advertisements were placed in the press. Strutt had trained as a surgeon and arrived in Australia on the “Thomas Arbuthnot” in 1850, overseeing the care of young female Irish famine orphans sent out as part of the Earl Gray Scheme. He was appointed Assistant Immigration Agent at Geelong in June 1852 before becoming the Acting Immigration Agent for Victoria in 1856, succeeding Edward Grimes.
Some Australians assembling family histories make a point of stressing that their forebears were not assisted immigrants. If forebears were found to be assisted immigrants, their success was due to their exceptional qualities, their strong work ethic, and their moral rectitude and intelligence. Such selective readings can serve to disguise the plantation aspects of Australia’s settlement.
In the 1850s, after gold was discovered, around 230,000 assisted migrants came to Australia. This was around fifty per cent of all immigrants in that decade. The numbers surpassed the total number of convicts transported to Australia in all decades.
Assisted immigrants were more likely to establish families than were convicts, and they often married each other. This was due to the more equal gender balance among assisted immigrants when compared to emancipated convicts. Many assisted immigrants knew someone who was already here and so had a social network to plug into. Many of the Irish who came to the Southwest in the 1850s came out as part of a chain of relatives and friends. This was a result of the dire conditions in Ireland at that time and the hope that things might be better in Australia. Many were encouraged to leave Britain’s first overseas colony by the talk of a better life in Victoria.
The authorities in London, Sydney and Melbourne regulated and oversaw the operation of the assisted immigration programs in a very deliberate manner. The chief aims of the various programs was firstly to ensure that a cheap labor force was available to underpin colonial expansion and economic development. A secondly aim was to establish an outlet for Britain’s surplus population. A third dimension was the ideological desire to plant a specific population in the colonies based upon certain demographic criteria. It is clear from the words of many commentators of that period that British Protestants of a skilled trade or farming background were the preferred cohort in the colonies, though not necessarily by those parties in the motherland who wished to see people emigrate.
Somehow it was decided that Australia was to be a nation based on British stock, although this was not an inevitable outcome of either colonization or settlement. It was more an outcome based upon a particular ideological worldview. Other British colonies with different population policies produced different settlement outcomes based on different demographic preferences. Much depended on the ideological and economic choices that were made in each colonial setting.
The fact that many of the assisted immigrants were bonded in some way and were without material resources when they arrived was an asset to the authorities and to the ruling class in general. It ensured that in general the newly arrived workers were more pliable in the employment market. The historiography tends to highlight the supposed success of assisted immigration, but it tends to ignore or downplay the enormous cost to the people involved. Many of the impoverished people who arrived in this way had little choice but to work in harsh conditions for little reward. This is despite latter-day claims that Australia was a land of great opportunity that allowed immigrants the freedom to enjoy a much better life than what they would have had if they had stayed where they were.
When it came down to the practicalities of getting the harvest in, or collecting rents from the tenancy, most rural proprietors and employers did not much care where their workers were from, so long as the work was done and the leasehold rents were paid. There were prejudices against certain groups, inevitably, but this was most stridently expressed by politicians seeking support, and by some of the middle-class commentariat of larger cities and towns seeking a readership.
An important factor when considering the merits of the assisted immigration programs is the extent to which emigrants leaving Britain or Ireland had agency in the decision to depart. How freely made was the decision to leave? What were the viable alternatives for people? Was there a viable option to stay put? If a person was hungry and near landless, dependent on charity, confined to a workhouse, or at the mercy of unsympathetic estate manager, was he or she really in a position to resist a firm “suggestion” to go to the colonies?
Estate managers who wanted a tenant family to leave could organize the paperwork. The cost of a person’s travel was covered by the assisted migration scheme. Agents at “home” worked in conjunction with agents in the colonies to facilitate the passage of individuals who had “chosen” to emigrate. Sometimes family members at both ends of the network worked in conjunction with the immigration authorities to arrange passage. The prospective emigrant might be told that given conditions were so dire at home, then certainly a better future must await them in Australia. For many agricultural laborers and marginal tenants in Ireland and Scotland, the alternative to assisted emigration was a life of poverty following the loss of a tenancy and time in a workhouse.
A situation of relative powerlessness and marginalization is not conducive to making a free and informed decision. The immigration agent’s blandishment of a subsidized passage to sunny Australia was used as a lure to send migrants “of the right sort” to the country. In many cases, the impoverished laborer or servant knew virtually nothing of Australia. Many of the prospective migrants were barely literate and many had never travelled far from their original homes.
Prior to 1851, the administration of the assisted immigration programs was in the hands of the British colonial governments in London and Sydney. The Crown Colony of Victoria was granted self-government in 1851. From that time the Colony of Victoria was formally and legally separated from the Colony of New South Wales. From 1851 the Colony of Victoria was required to control its own immigration affairs in conjunction with the British authorities in London.
It is instructive to examine in some detail a report on immigration to Victoria produced by the Victorian Government in 1855 covering the preceding year. The date of the report is significant as it deals with the situation at precisely the time when some of Patricia’s Irish forebears were arriving in Victoria as assisted immigrants. The report in question is the “Report of the Immigration Agent into Colonial Emigration and Immigration for the Year 1854”.
The Victorian Government’s Immigration Agent in the early 1850s was Edward Grimes, and he likely had significant input into the drafting of this report. Although the report was issued by the Acting Immigration Agent for Colonial Emigration and Immigration for the Colony of Victoria, the style is very reminiscent of Edward Grimes’s previous work for this office.
The report looks specifically at the situation regarding the assisted immigration program for the year 1854, which was the year Bridget McNamara and her family arrived at Portland on the “Almora”. Earlier that year, the McNamara family left Ireland as assisted emigrants to Victoria, via a passage from Liverpool to Portland. The unkind words and the aspersions cast in the report were aimed directly at the likes of young women such as Bridget McNamara and her sisters. The agent’s report was written with girls precisely like Bridget in mind. Young women of her background were arriving in large numbers at a time when there were many complaints and negative sentiments expressed towards Irish domestic servants in the colony.
In the mid-1850s, the matter of the assisted immigration of southern Irish Catholic women to the Victorian colony had become something of a political issue, especially in Melbourne. In 1855 the Immigration Agent considered that single Irish Catholic women made up too great a proportion of the immigrants who had arrived in 1853 and 1854. This source of immigration was seen as coming at the expense of immigrants that might better be obtained from England. While the Agent understood that landed interests in Ireland wished for many of the tenancy to be gone, he felt that this should not mean Victoria should be obliged to accept such unfortunate people in such large numbers.
According to the Immigration Agent’s report, the unmarried Irish women who were brought to the colony in 1854 were characterized as too poor, too ignorant, and too expensive to support, due to their unique moral failures and general laziness. The report implied that the Irish women were uniquely prone to crime due to their overall ignorance, as demonstrated by their disproportionate inability to read or write the English language. How could their miserable lives be otherwise explained? Perhaps it was just the way they were. It should not be expected that these women could be reformed or improved so long as they held to their culture and religious beliefs.
It was quite clearly inferred in the report that the character failings of these women were due to their inherent personal moral weaknesses, something that was intrinsic to their ethnicity and religion. For the sake of future generations, Victoria should be getting more immigrants from the other nations of the United Kingdom, especially those of good English stock not of the criminal class. In transmigrating too many women from southern Ireland, the sound foundations of British society in Victoria might well be undermined through the contagion of good British blood and the increasing number of Catholics.
It was recommended in the report that in future the program should restrict the number of southern Irish women, with a preference expressed for obtaining better people from England and Scotland. The scope of the report is primarily limited to the assisted migration programs because they were managed, contracted and financially underwritten by the colonial authorities. Assisted migration was a joint enterprise of the British and the colonial Australian governments. While assisted migration served as a subsidy to the employer class, the numbers of arrivals could be adjusted as economic and political circumstances dictated. It seemed logical at the time for the British free settlers to consider how best to engineer an ideal population base for the new colony. Their views regarding ethnicity and race were reflected in the implementation of Victoria’s colonial immigration policy.
The Victorian Government’s Report of the Immigration Agent into Colonial Emigration and Immigration for the Year 1854 was written in 1855. It evaluated the government’s assisted migration program for 1854 and made recommendations for the program for 1856. The report is easily found online. It is notable that the title of the report highlights both Colonial Emigration and Immigration. Emigration from the United Kingdom and immigration to Victoria was a coordinated activity of the authorities in London and Melbourne.
Coordination between center and periphery was not without tensions arising from differing perspectives. Officials in Victoria were of a mind to push back against London in order to obtain the people they most wanted for the colony, whereas officials in the motherland seemed more inclined to be rid of just whichever people they did not want. Immigration Agents in Britain and Ireland had incentives to ensure that targets were met and so the report underscores the tensions that might arise between the dispatching and receiving ends of the trafficking business.
From the report, we learn that in 1854 forty-nine ships arrived with assisted immigrants at the following ports: Melbourne received twenty-five ships with 8795 people, Geelong received thirteen ships with 4269 people, and Portland Bay received eleven ships with 3254 people (Portland Bay referred to both Portland and Port Fairy). Given that Portland Bay was much more lightly populated than either Melbourne or Geelong, it is thus notable that Portland and Port Fairy received a disproportionate number of these migrants. The thousands who went to Portland Bay represented a significant demographic increase there, whereas the thousands of assisted emigrants who disembarked in Melbourne barely registered amongst all the other passengers arriving in the city at that time, many of whom immediately headed north to the goldfields in any case.
Arrivals at Portland during this period were predominantly assisted emigrants brought out to work in the Western District. This was unlike the situation at Melbourne. Portland was not the only port that saw the entry of assisted immigrants destined for the Southwest. Some of the assisted migrants who disembarked in Geelong were engaged to work on squatter properties in the Western District.
The total number of assisted immigrants in 1854 was 16,318 people, of which 5456 were males and 10,862 were females. The clear preponderance of females over males in these figures was an issue addressed in the report. On the one hand there was a recognition that higher female immigration was desirable, given the gender imbalance in the colony at that time. However, on the other hand there was concern expressed at the disproportionate nature of the national origins of these women.
The government’s assisted immigration program was but one component of the overall immigration to Victoria overseen by the authorities at a time of rapid population growth in the colony. However, the government program was particularly useful to those wishing to socially skew the demography of the colony, given that it was partly funded and administered by the colonial government.
At the end of his report, the Immigration Agent concluded that there were too many young Irish Catholic women and not enough unmarried Protestant English women put on the ships coming to Victoria. It was asserted that the makeup of the assisted immigration program risked a lessoning of the quality of the population of the Victorian colony due to the adverse consequence of too many southern Irish women in the breeding population. This was considered a problem due to the alleged deficiency in character and intellect of the Irish in comparison to other immigrants.
The fact that southern Ireland was still in a social crisis due to the famine was totally ignored in the report, despite the famine being a catastrophe that was at least in part caused by British policy in Ireland. It should have been obvious to the authorities that because of the famine there was a greater humanitarian need for young Irish women to emigrate for their very survival compared to the situation regarding English women. Humanitarian considerations seem not to have been a driver of the assisted migration program at all, at least not from the Victorian government’s side. British emigration policy was primarily concerned with the safe and efficient transfer of labor within the Empire although it did have a clear ideological aspect.
One policy consideration on the Australian side of the migration business was the desire to build a loyal British nation on Australian shores. There was a fear in some quarters that a rapidly breeding Irish Catholic population might eventually undermine social cohesion by introducing an inherently disloyal cohort of Catholic “Papists”. It was felt that such people would not integrate with British society and might introduce Irish Fenian extremism.
Good yeoman farmers and tradesmen from Protestant German stock were much preferable to the Catholic Irish, according to influential individuals in the colony. The Germans were hard working and intelligent and as Protestants they would integrate much better. Proper immigration controls were seen as important in preserving Australia as a British bastion and in determining the kind of society Australia might become. Organised Irish Fenian extremism in Australia did exist on the margins and Irish republican nationalism was an undercurrent in society. While very few Irish immigrants ever actively participated in organised Fenian agitation, there was considerable sympathy for Irish nationalism in general among certain Irish immigrant communities.
There was a clear gender imbalance in Victoria in 1854 and the Victorian Government hoped that a selective immigration program might help redress the imbalance. By the 1850s, an objective of the assisted immigration programs to Victoria was to bring to the colony more women than men. The Scottish Highlands and Islands Immigration Scheme that brought Sarah Campbell to the colony is an example of such a program. Care was taken to select families for emigration in which girls were in greater number than boys. Young single women were deliberately targeted for emigration.
It was judged that families with large numbers of young, unmarried women and girls were more likely to stay where they were put. Young single men might immediately depart for the goldfields or for the cities, but this was more difficult for unaccompanied women. It was expected that young women would marry soon after arrival and thereby the bonds of family and kinship could be relied upon to ensure that family units would remain together where they were most needed.
The preferences of local authorities with regard to migration were not always foremost in the minds of the authorities in Britain. Selection process varied considerably across the United Kingdom. Following the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, church parishes in Britain could sponsor poverty-stricken people and families to emigrate to Australia. This enabled civil and church sanctioned representatives to deport problematic people in their area so that further “charitable” support need not be provided from the limited coffers of the parish. Coercion and discrimination played at least some role in deciding which individuals were put on vessels bound for Australia.
In 1855 the Victorian Immigration Agent in his report raised concerns regarding the effectiveness of the assisted immigration program of the preceding two years. The Agent was motivated by what he thought was best for the future of Victoria. He was not deaf to the politics of the times and was responding to the intellectual currents of the day. The alleged shortcomings of the 1854 program were such that the report recommended that for the forthcoming 1856 program, assisted migration should be limited to 11,000 or 12,000 persons, down from the 16,318 persons of 1854. It was argued that this would both save money and would also ensure that the program was more targeted to bring out better quality women from the most desirable backgrounds.
The report broke down the numbers of male assisted immigrants arriving in 1854 according to their nationality and religion. It found that for England and Wales, the number of males was 2019, of which just 720 were single. For Scotland, the corresponding figures were 1759 males, of which 837 were single. For Ireland, the figures were 1678 males, of which 792 were single. Married English males with young and expanding families were well represented. Such migrants were of the preferred type and so the Agent was not notably concerned with these figures.
However, it was the figures for female immigration that was of real concern to the Immigration Agent. For all national groups, the number of females in the program was greater than the number of males. Also, for females, the number of women who were single outnumbered those women who were married. This was especially the case for Irish women. The number of single Irish women and girls was 4028 and this was the largest category of all. This matter was identified as being of singular concern. For the sake of comparison, the number of females from England and Wales was 3216, of which just 1924 were single. For Scotland, the corresponding figures were 2733 females, of which 1815 were single.
For Ireland, the figures were 4913 women in total, of which only 885 were married, while 4028 were unmarried! The Immigration Agent was not completely explicit in his views, but he clearly implied that the problem was obvious. He was of the view that these young Catholic women would breed and have large families. It should be noted that among the single Irish women and girls who arrived in 1854 was Bridget McNamara and her sisters.
In 1854, of the total of 10,862 women who arrived through the program, 4564 were Irish Catholics, the majority young and unmarried. These single Catholic females were deemed likely to marry other Catholics and have large Catholic families, and this would have unfortunate consequences for national cohesion and integration. Even though the total number of unmarried Church of England and Presbyterian females in the program was greater than that of Catholic females, the more morally virtuous and better educated English women would not breed as fast as the feckless and ignorant Irish girls, who were known for their lack of common decency and comparatively low intelligence.
Additionally, they were likely to be disloyal in their religious and political disposition. All of these tendencies made it more likely they would have a disproportionate number of children of unfortunate pedigree. These cultural and intellectual defects might very well be passed on to future generations. The point was unambiguously made that the gender imbalance in the colony and the shortage of female domestic labour should not be addressed in ways that would disproportionally increase the numbers of potentially disloyal and dull-witted Irish people in the colony.
In his report, the Immigration Agent wrote that he “expressed in 1854 his regret that selections should have been made so largely from the Irish Unions, in the cases of single women, and knowing that as a rule it has been deemed no less wise than just, both to the Parent Country and to the Colony, to select immigrants in numbers bearing a due proportion to the several portions of the United Kingdom, viz., England, Scotland, and Ireland, I am constrained to observe that no such just proportion is discernible”. In other words, there were disproportionally too many Irish women.
The report goes onto detail at considerable length the demographic justification for limiting female Irish immigration by arguing that since the population of England and Wales was so much greater than that of Ireland then it could in no way be justified that more single Irish women should be transmigrated under the program than English women.
The attitude of the immigration official with respect to this demographic argument is perhaps best conveyed through the words of the report, as follows: “Now as England, with a population of 18,070,735 in 1851, has furnished actually ·321 per cent of immigrants, or less than one-third of the total immigration; as Scotland, with a population of 2,288,742 in 1851, has furnished ·275 per cent., or more than one-fourth; and as Ireland, with a population of 6,553,178 in 1851, has furnished ·404 per cent., or about two fifths; it follows that England has furnished less than half of the immigrants she should; that Scotland has furnished more than twice as many as she should; and that Ireland has furnished two-thirds more than she should.”
The issue of education and literacy levels was also highlighted in the report. This was provided as evidence to support the proposition that there was a disproportionate level of poor-quality female Irish Catholic immigration in the assisted migration program, an argument based on the perceived merits of the immigrants rather than purely on proportional demographic considerations.
The argument concerning the respective qualities of the immigrants is perhaps best conveyed in the words of the report, as follows: “In speaking of education, I shall now designate as ignorant those who cannot read and write. Practically, those who cannot write, can read to little purpose; and my assumption is, in the main, a just one. The difference in education of immigrants from England and Scotland being only ·016 per cent. in favor of England, I shall dismiss it as a matter of excess of numbers only, for subsequent remark; but the condition of the Irish immigrants cannot be so considered. Ireland has furnished two-thirds more immigrants than she should; and of those she has furnished, two-thirds cannot read and write. It would be unnatural for anyone who has interested himself in the education of the people to pass over so glaring a fact. If ignorant persons come voluntarily to the Colony, I presume no word would be raised against their coming; but it is preposterous to suppose that it can be beneficial to pay £141,926 for the importation of 6591 souls from Ireland, two-thirds of whom have not the intelligence guaranteed by the ability to read and write. In the above Tables it is shewn that the number of members of the Church of England is nearly identical with the number of immigrants from England; the number of Presbyterians nearly identical with the number of immigrants from Scotland; and the number of Roman Catholics nearly identical with the number of immigrants from Ireland; and that the distribution of ignorance is coincident as to religion and as to country. But, as I furnish these facts merely for information, I shall not remark upon them.” Indeed, the author of the report has made it all too easy to understand his meaning, especially in the context of the political debates on immigration swirling in Melbourne at the time.
The British led colonial administration in Ireland was responsible for education there. Education had been disrupted by the famine and by the education policies implemented by the government. Large sections of rural Irish society in the west of the country were undergoing a language shift from speaking Irish to speaking English. A new system of National Schools was being rolled out and education in Irish language was curtailed. Given the discriminatory language policy and the famine conditions it was little wonder that educational outcomes were dire. In the midst of national calamity, no matter whether schools were provided or not, hungry and anxious children cannot learn, especially if the language of instruction is not their own.
Throughout the second half of the 1840s, famine stalked the countryside and this must have impacted schooling. Many children struggled to acquire literacy in the English language, which for many was not the mother tongue of their parents. In any case, the British had long pursued a policy in Ireland whereby sectarian based restrictions were put in place regarding the nature of the education that was available. The reasons for the widespread illiteracy in English among the Irish immigrants sent on transport ships to Victoria in 1854 should have been clear to the colonial government and to the Immigration Agent.
None are so blind as those who refuse to see. The lack of English literacy among Irish assisted immigrants was not seen as a shortcoming of British policy. As far as the Immigration Agent was concerned, the ignorance identified in the data was due to the inherent personal weakness and stupidity of the Irish themselves.
The attitude of the government of the day can perhaps best be characterized by the recommendations of the report, where it is stated that, “The Immigration Agent reported, in 1854, that many of the immigrants who had arrived in the early part of the year were of an inferior class; and for the remainder of the year the same objection may be put forward. More especially as regards the Irish, the selections were often ill-made; and it can be no matter of surprise that an influx of a large number of persons badly adapted to the stirring requirements of the Colony should have temporarily assisted to cloy the labor markets of Melbourne and Geelong. I think it should be insisted upon by the Colony that the immigration from each portion of the United Kingdom should bear due proportion to the Census Returns of each. This precaution would prevent the inundation of the Colony with any objectionable elements which peculiar circumstances, affecting either England, Scotland, or Ireland, might tend to cast upon our shores, not at the expense of the comers themselves, but of the country on which they are to become a burden.”
It was perhaps just as well that the likes of Bridget McNamara and her sisters were not in a position to read the official lies of the authorities in distant Melbourne. It is likely they would have taken issue with their characterization as being ignorant, lazy and not worth the cost of bringing to the colony.
Perhaps this also serves as a reminder that we should not be quick to judge the qualities of latter-day immigrants or their capacity to assimilate over time.
A total of eleven British ships transferred 3314 assisted immigrants to Portland Bay in 1854. Young unmarried Irish women from the southern counties were the greatest cohort. While their fortunes varied greatly after arrival, most lived lives of toil and hardship. Deprivation, dislocation, and isolation awaited many who got off the boats, dumped on a distant shore.
The fact that there was prejudice and discrimination directed towards Irish Catholics in Australia would not have been invisible to the Irish immigrants. The singling out of this community as different and problematic was a factor in why Koroit Irish people set themselves apart when they came to settle in numbers around Tower Hill in the 1850s. The published reports of several middle-class Englishmen exploring the Southwest, including James Bonwick in 1857, attest to the perceived foreign nature and alien customs of the local Irish encountered there.
It seems fair to say that the Koroit Irish were indeed set apart by others, and to some extent they set themselves apart, self-identifying as a separate group. In her history of the Crossley district, Helen Doyle makes the point that “The high concentration of Irish around Crossley and Tower Hill perhaps made it a safer environment for people to be more overt in expressing their Irish identity.” She adds that “The Irish settlers to a large extent transposed the same world around Tower Hill that they had known back home. This was largely due to practical and economic reasons rather than planned intent, but nevertheless resulted in an evident transferal of culture.”
This separateness persisted for a long time. The Catholic Irish in Koroit came from many parts of Ireland but evidently shared a sense of self-identification as Irish.
