Irish Australians

People with Irish ancestry as a percentage of the population in Australia divided geographically by statistical local area, as of the 2011 census

External video
Part One of Booknotes interview with Thomas Keneally on The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, January 2, 2000, C-SPAN
Part Two of Booknotes interview with Keneally, January 9, 2000, C-SPAN

Around 40,000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, including at least 325[10] who had participated in either the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the rebellion of 1803 or the Young Ireland skirmishes in 1848. Once in Australia, some were involved in the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion. Continual tension on Norfolk Island in the same year also led to an Irish revolt. Both risings were soon crushed. As late as the 1860s Fenian prisoners were being transported, particularly to Western Australia, where the Catalpa rescue of Irish radicals off Rockingham was a memorable episode.[11]

Other than convicts, most of the laborers who voluntarily emigrated to Australia in the 19th century were drawn from the poorest sector of British and Irish society. After 1831, the Australian colonies employed a system of government assistance in which all or most immigration costs were paid for chosen immigrants, and the colonial authorities used these schemes to exercise some control over immigration. While these assisted schemes were biased against the poorest elements of society, the very poor could overcome these hurdles in several ways, such as relying on local assistance or help from relatives.[12]

Most Irish emigrants to Australia were free settlers. The 1891 census of Australia counted 228,000 Irish-born. At the time the Irish made up about 27 percent of the immigrants from the British Isles.[13] The number of Ireland-born in Australia peaked in 1891. A decade later the number of Ireland-born had dropped to 184,035. Dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1922 did not diminish arrivals from Ireland as Irish people were still British subjects. This changed after the Second World War, as people migrating from the new Republic of Ireland (which came into being in April 1949) were no longer British subjects eligible for the assisted passage. People from Northern Ireland continued to be eligible for this as British citizens. Only during the 1960s did migration from the south of Ireland reduce significantly. By 2002, around one thousand persons born in Ireland – north and south – were migrating permanently to Australia each year. For the year 2005–2006, 12,554 Irish entered Australia to work under the Working Holiday visa scheme.

It has been argued that Irish Australians and Aboriginal people (including those of mixed descent) feel that there is a historical and sentimental link between the two groups. The shared oppression of Aboriginal and Irish people by the British is seen as giving them common historical ground.[14]

The historian Patrick O'Farrell argued that (in contrast to other colonists) Irish Catholics treated Aboriginal people as equals, as evidenced by their willingness to intermarry, thus giving rise to the Irish surnames prominent among Aboriginal activists.[15]

This argument has been questioned. It has been pointed out that under the new colonial and state administrations, a European-style surname was required for official records relating to Aboriginal people. The local police (often of Irish stock) collected the relevant census data and allocated their own names to Aboriginal people for official purposes. In addition, however, many such policemen fathered children to casual or long-term partners from Aboriginal communities.[14]

The assumption that the Irish were less violent than other colonists has also been questioned, since Irishmen were among the bushrangers, squatters, police, timber getters and others known for violence against Aboriginal people.[14]

Over four thousand young female orphans from Irish workhouses were shipped to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine (1848–50) to meet a demand for domestic servants. Some settlers greeted them with hostility and some were exploited or abused by employers and others. Although a number eventually died in poverty, others made upwardly mobile marriages, often surviving older husbands to experience long widowhoods. The Catholic Church only became involved in the 1870s, when its relief agencies in England were overwhelmed with Irish immigration. Even so, only about 10% of the resettlements were through Catholic agencies until after World War II. Australian Catholic groups began importing children in the 1920s to increase the Catholic population, and became heavily engaged in placing and educating them after World War II. The practice quietly died out during the 1950s.[16][17]

Queensland Figaro and Punch cover, 16 March 1889, depicting Irish Australians offering enthusiastic support to Parnell's struggle for Home Rule.

The first convicts and soldiers to arrive in Australia included a large number of Irish speakers, an example being private Patrick Geary, who in 1808 acted as court interpreter for Patrick Henchan, a convict accused of theft.[18] An account from 1800 refers to convicts speaking Irish among themselves (this being regarded as evidence of conspiracy), and it was acknowledged in the 1820s that priests could not perform their duties in the colony of New South Wales without a knowledge of the language.[19] There is a reference to Irish-speaking bushrangers in Van Diemen's Land in the early nineteenth century.[20]

The gold rushes of the 1850s attracted many Irish to the colony of Victoria, with a high proportion of Irish speakers. An Irish-speaking priest, Fr Stack, was appointed to minister to Irish miners in the gold-rush locality of Bendigo.[21] Irish immigration was at its height in the 1860s, the main counties of origin being Clare, Tipperary, Limerick and Kilkenny, all of them areas where the language was still strong.[22] Irish continued to be spoken in Australian country districts where the Irish had settled, and there is some evidence of its being transmitted to the next generation.[23][24]

The Gaelic revival in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century found a response in Melbourne and Sydney, with branches of the Gaelic League being established. The 1970s saw a renewal of interest in the language, chiefly among Australians of Irish descent,[25] and there is now a network of Irish speakers in the major cities. The Department of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney offers courses in Old Irish and Modern Irish, and Newman College (University of Melbourne) houses a collection of books and manuscripts in Irish often used by scholars.[26] Australians have published fiction, poetry and journalism in Irish.

Alongside the oral Irish language, ISL (or Irish Sign Language) arrived with Dominican Nuns in 1875 with the construction of three schools where Australian Irish Sign Language (AISL) was taught.[27][28] As a Francosign language, AISL is quite distinct from Auslan and other Banzsl languages, though it is also notably unrelated neither to Gaeilge nor to the numerous Australian Aboriginal sign languages.

AISL and the more dominant Australian sign language, Auslan, were used as the primary languages of Deaf instruction from the late 1800s to the early 1950s.[27] By this point, however, with all sign languages experiencing the effects of oralism and audism, AISL has over time become relegated to small friend groups and select families.[28]

Although Catholic Irish were not generally politically powerful, the large number of Irish combined with universal male suffrage made it possible for Irish to sometimes gain office, such as the Victorian premiers John O'Shanassy (1857, 1858–59, 1861–63) and Charles Gavan Duffy (1871–72). Peter Lalor was the leader of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion, later a conservative member of parliament.

Before 1890, Irish Catholics opposed Henry Parkes, the main liberal leader, and free trade, since both represented Protestant, English landholding and wealthy business interests. In the great strike of 1890 Cardinal Moran, the head of the church, was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were critical of organised labour throughout the decade. After 1900, Catholics joined the Labor Party because its stress on equality and social welfare appealed to people who were workers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labor gained in areas where the concentration of Catholics was above average, and the number of Catholics in Labor's parliamentary ranks rose.[29]

Irish Catholics comprised a quarter of Australia's population in the early 20th century. They were largely working-class and voted for the Labor Party. The referendum on conscription in 1917, following the Easter Uprising in Dublin, caused an identification between the Irish, Sinn Féin, and the anti-conscription section of Labor. Pro-conscription forces exploited this, denouncing outspoken anti-conscription Catholics, such as Archbishop Mannix, and T. J. Ryan, the Premier of Queensland, for disloyalty. In general, Protestants, armed with the authority of tradition, championed the idea of Australia as an integral part of the Empire; and Catholics, freed from that authority by their Irish origins and their working-class affiliations, looked to the future by placing Australia first and the Empire second. There was no simple correlation between Catholicism, Protestantism and conscription, but the idea of an anti-conscription Catholic-Labor alliance stuck for many years.[30] Immediately after the War, Mannix's outspoken support for the cause of Irish independence caused further division, culminating in his arrest on the high seas by the Royal Navy in 1920 to prevent his landing in Ireland.[31]

Irish Australians have been prominent in Australian politics, primarily through the vehicle of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), whose support base was historically dominated by working-class Catholics of Irish descent. James Scullin was Australia's first Irish, as well as Catholic, Prime Minister in 1929. Labor Prime Ministers John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Paul Keating were also of Irish Catholic stock.[32] Anthony Albanese, whose mother was Irish-Australian, was elected Prime Minister of Australia in 2022 as well.

The same was true in the twentieth century at a state level. In New South Wales for example Labor premiers James McGirr, Joseph Cahill and Jack Renshaw were Irish Australian, while Queensland had Labor premiers T. J. Ryan, Ted Theodore, William Forgan Smith, Frank Arthur Cooper, Ned Hanlon, and Vince Gair.

Conversely, conservative parties contained few Irish Catholics for most of the twentieth century. An exception was Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who began his career in the ALP. The situation changed later especially following the Australian Labor Party split of 1955, which led many Catholics out of Labor via the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The careers of Gerard Henderson, Frank Devine and Padraic McGuinness are illustrative of the drift by some Irish Australians away from Labor and towards the conservative side of politics in the later twentieth century.

O'Farrell (1995) demonstrates the importance of St. Patrick to the Irish, whether northern or republican, Protestant or Catholic, and how Australian manifestations of the Irish festival evolved. St. Patrick's Day became an expression of Irish identity and was emblematic of Irish culture and traditional separatism that migrated with the Irish to Australia. The early immigrants to Australia from Ireland were mainly members of penal colonies; assemblies or any such expression of Irish culture were not permitted. St. Patrick's Day at first was the exception, because it was not highly political, was ecumenical and was subordinate to the wider recognition of Britain. It is first recorded as celebrated in the colony in 1795.[34] In a series of letters, a P. Cunningham, stated that a St Patrick's Day "jubilee" Ball was being held in Sydney in 1826.[35] The situation changed, however, in the 1830s with the growth of wealthy Irish Catholic emancipists and the introduction of Irish Catholic priests. These factors gave rise to conflicts and tensions that were to remain constant thereafter as the rise and decline of domestic Irish political movements influenced the Irish population in Australia. With the outbreak of World War I, imperatives imposed by the demands of war overshadowed Australian Irish sentiment.[36]

The idea of fraternity and how to organise it was one of 19th-century Europe's invisible exports to the New World. Fitzpatrick (2005) explores the international diffusion of the Loyal Orange Institution, with comparative reference to Freemasonry, its main model. Three alternative explanations are discussed for its appeal outside Ireland: that it facilitated the assimilation of emigrants, transmitted 'tribal' Irish animosities to fresh contexts, or adapted itself to preexisting sectarian rivalries abroad. These hypotheses are tested using evidence from South Australia, where Orangeism flourished in the absence of heavy Ulster Protestant immigration. A collective profile of Orange South Australia is derived from lodge records showing age, religious denomination, and occupation, and the appeal of Orangeism is related to local political and religious contexts. In this case, Orangeism was primarily an export of organisational techniques rather than Irish personnel or bigotry.[37]

The Catholic Church in Australia maintained a strong Irish identity. The first priests were Irish, beginning with Fr James Dixon who was permitted to minister in 1803. Irish Catholic separateness increased especially in the decades from the 1880s to the 1960s when state aid for church schools was withdrawn and the Church maintained a separate and separately funded school system. The leadership of the Australian Church was almost entirely Irish from 1883 to 1940, prominent Irish-born bishops including Cardinal Moran and Archbishop Kelly in Sydney, Archbishops Carr and Mannix in Melbourne and Archbishop Duhig in Brisbane. Many of the Catholic schools were run and staffed by Irish orders of nuns such as the Sisters of Mercy and Brigidines and Irish orders of brothers such as the Christian Brothers and Patrician Brothers. The Sisters of Charity worked in hospitals.[32] Irish nuns such as Sr Mary Baptist De Lacy, Mary Gonzaga Barry and Mother Vincent Whitty were prominent in founding hospitals and schools.

McGrath (1995) demonstrates the success of the Catholic nuns who arrived in Parramatta, New South Wales, from Ireland in 1888, noting their group's growth from nine newcomers into a flourishing congregation of over two hundred women within sixty years. By the 1950s this group of women religious was responsible for 24 primary schools, five secondary schools, and two orphanages. In Australia they carried on the Irish tradition of the Sisters of Mercy and lived a monastic lifestyle. Their sparsely furnished bedrooms were referred to as cells. There was little or no heating. The sisters' spiritual practices reflected the 17th-century school of spirituality.

Their relationship to the clergy was one of devotion, dedication, and subordination, thus reflecting the status of women in the larger population. It was societal pressures from without that eventually led to the decline of the Sisters of Mercy as Australia moved into the 1960s. Radical re-evaluations forced a restructuring of the Catholic Church as a whole, and a rethinking of what kinds of service the Church would require in modern times.[38]

In the 2011 Census 1,895 persons were reported as using Irish as a household language, most of them in Sydney and Melbourne.[46] This represents an increase from the figure of 918 in the 2006 Census.[47] There are no official statistics regarding the use of Irish outside the home.