Disembodied Irish voices waft down from a solitary lilly-pilly tree in the courtyard of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. The leaves rustle in a gathering wind.
"There was no day until Ned died but he'd be talking about that. . . the woman lying dead and the little child sucking at her and wailing with hunger. . ."
"They went body and sleeves from the land. Taking the emigration. .
"Their legs swing and rock like the legs of a doll. They smell of mice. Boys? Or girls? You can't tell"
The words die out to the gentle lapping of water.
Melbourne artist Paul Carter conceived this sound installation from archive material gathered by groups such as the Irish Oral History Commission, which set out in the 1890s to record the voices and stories of emigrants.
The fragments of words and song in English and Irish are melded with environmental sound, "to bear witness to an unspeakable disappearance. . .the fragmentation of human presences, the sweeping away of an entire way of life."
Three bronze cast stools are casually arranged under the tree, as though their occupants had just left. A few metres away, a large section of the barracks' sandstone wall has been dismantled and rotated on its axis, a symbolic rendering of the disruption and dislocation of the Famine years. A bronze table intersects the stone wall as both a symbol of domesticity and sparseness and a link between the lives of those who stayed and those who left. Replacing the demolished wall are two glass panels inscribed with names, all female: Mary Rattigan, Bridget McMahon, Jane Dunford, Anastasia Brophy. . . The names fade towards the edges, lost to memory.
A terrible stillness surrounds the sculpture, in spite of the city traffic. The work, by Iranian-born Hossein Valamanesh and his Welsh-Australian wife, Angela, along with Carter's sound installation is Australia's National Monument to the Great Irish Famine
Although only about 20,000 Irish came to Australia as a direct result of the disaster, the Famine created a culture of leaving which would eventually see 40 per cent of Australians claim Irish descent. In Sydney, as the 150th anniversary of the Famine approached, the Irish community wanted to commemorate the Australian legacy of those years. But how adequately to convey the shame, sorrow and anger the Famine evokes, even still? How to find a human dimension in the horror? The answer lay with twenty shiploads of teenage girls.
ON October 6th, 1848, the Earl Grey entered Sydney Harbour. On board were 183 "orphan" girls, recruited from the workhouses of Ulster and offered free passage to Australia, to become domestic servants. Over the next two years, 4,114 girls, aged between 14 and 20, would be sent from every county in Ireland to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
Although all were in the workhouse because they had no family support, some, like eighteen-year-old Eliza Fraser from Belfast, had one parent alive.
"Her father was a bootmaker. He was dead, but her mother was in New South Wales, residence unknown," says Eliza's great-granddaughter, Joan Dwyer, who has studied the family history. Dwyer believes Eliza's mother, Margaret, was given her ticket-of-leave around the same time Eliza arrived. "To my knowledge, she never knew her daughter had come out to Australia as well. They never met. Margaret died alone."
Even before the first ship docked, the `orphan girls' were in trouble with the authorities. As historian Trevor McClaughlin documents in his book Barefoot and Pregnant, the surgeon singled out the 56 Belfast girls as "notoriously bad . . . violent and disorderly, obscene and profane, many of them prostitutes".
Joan Dwyer is incensed at the assumptions made. "I love the deposition from one of the constables in Belfast. He said, `just because people are foulmouthed doesn't mean they're unchaste.' And I thought, thank you."
The girls were disparaged for their job skills as much as their morals. Employers overlooked the fact that they were getting servants at bargain wages precisely because they were by definition `apprentice'. According to the Melbourne Argus, they were "the most stupid, the most ignorant, the most useless and the most unmanageable set of beings that ever cursed a country by their presence . . . whose knowledge of household duty barely reaches to distinguish the inside from the outside of a potato".
Despite the dubious welcome, there was no shortage of volunteers from Ireland. When two girls died before one ship left, two others assumed their identities. Why? Because however hard and lonely life at the other end of the world might be, it could not have been worse than their native place, by 1848 reduced to what the transported rebel John Mitchel described as "a dread, silent, vast, dissolution".
The idea of sending 4,000 orphans to Australia arose from economic pragmatism. It would relieve pressure on the already overflowing Irish workhouses, ease the labour shortage in Australia and help redress the gender imbalance. But as Charles Trevelyan, a British Treasury official noted, the Australians, "although not quite so fond of a grievance as the excitable and imaginative Irish", might take it amiss if they thought they were getting substandard stock. He advocated sending two shiploads of Protestant girls first, to gild the pill. (A century later Arthur Calwell adopted a similar ruse, assuaging the latent racism of Australians by ensuring the first boatload of postwar European migrants were blue-eyed Balts, not swarthy southerners.)
But the girls on the Earl Grey and the ships that followed were mostly Catholic, and the predicted sectarian outcry ensued. It was led by the Presbyterian Minister John Dunmore Lang, who fulminated about Irish Catholic females "silently subverting the Protestantism and extending the Romanism of the colony through the vile, Jesuitical, diabolical system of mixed marriages."
Lang was right in one respect - the orphan girls, much more than other Irish emigrants, did tend towards mixed marriages, not just across religion, but across race. Trevor McClaughlin estimates that almost half married men of different religions, while the majority married Englishmen. Perhaps it was because, having no family networks, they had no-one to advise or criticise them. Or maybe they were innately more adventurous.
Joan Dwyer's great-grandmother, Eliza, wasted no time. Within four months she had married Edward Dwyer, an ex-convict transported for robbery. Lang would have been horrified: despite all the solid Protestant men in the colony, the Protestant Eliza chose a Catholic. Worse, although Lang had contended the Popish mothers would inflict their religion on the children, in this case Edward won out. But their first son, Joseph, restored things by marrying a Presbyterian.
"She was a good strong Orangewoman from Northern Ireland - and Catholic was never mentioned in the family again. She wiped it off the map."