Their ghosts are everywhere. In the dormitory where they slept, a canvas hammock swings slightly as if someone had been there only a few seconds ago. Upstairs, there's the echo of voices long since dead. Downstairs, a sewing machine, a prayer book, a bonnet, writes Mary Russell
Their names form part of Ireland's litany of loss - Ellen Casey, 17, Catholic, Listowel: parents dead. Mary Considine, 15, Catholic, Ennistymon: parents dead. Bridget Fury, 14, Catholic, Galway: parents dead. There were 2,200 of them in all, young Irish girls whose parents had perished in the Famine, brought on government- assisted tickets to the Female Immigration Depot in Sydney, from which they were sent off to work as domestic servants in the households of Australia's newly emerging middle classes.
The depot, housed in Hyde Park Barracks on Sydney's Macquarie Street, is a fine Georgian building built in 1817 to plans by Francis Greenway, a Bristol architect sentenced to 14 years' transportation for financial forgery, who rehabilitated himself by designing the barracks and much else besides. Ironically, considering his crime, his face graced the $10 bill when Australia went decimal in 1966.
Greenway was transported in 1814, 26 years after the first batch of convicts arrived in Australia. A further 160,000 would arrive over the next 80 years. The Hyde Park Barracks was originally built to accommodate this growing prison population and it continued to be used for that purpose until the 1840s, when transportation to New South Wales ceased. Then, in 1850, the Irish orphans came, their places subsequently taken by scores of "unprotected women". Later, the upper floor was used to house the Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women.
But bare and institutional as it was and with its built-in history of separation and dislocation, the barracks was nevertheless home to those young girls so very, very far from Scariff and Dingle, Dublin and Kilbeggan. It was a place, as one immigrant put it, "for the friendless female". There were others, of course, whose passage was paid: almost half of all female convicts were Irish. It was at Hyde Park Barracks that the Famine refugees were especially remembered when, in 1998, President McAleese initiated the installation of a haunting memorial which commemorates not only the dead but also the survivors of the Famine, those Irish who made Australia their home and, as migrants, contributed so much to that country's prosperity. Ireland's loss had become Australia's gain.
Created by husband and wife team Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, the memorial, entitled simply An Gorta Mór, is a three-legged stool and table on which is a soup plate and a spoon. The plate is empty. Beside the table is the barracks wall in which a section of stone has been replaced by a sheet of sandblasted glass bearing the names of the young orphans. Passers by outside may look in on the table but, to do so, they must also look at the names of the people commemorated here and whose belongings are displayed within the museum: medals, rosary beads, sewing needles - the detritus of their lives dropped between the floorboards and found again when the building was restored. Rats' nests disturbed during the renovation revealed that small bits of apron and skirt had been carried off to make the nests more comfortable.
This is a magnificent museum, displaying great compassion for the men and women who lived there. A set of leg-irons - which visitors can try on - is a reminder that male convicts had a hard time of it. Remnants of babies' bonnets and broken toys also bear witness to the fact that "well-behaved" convicts were later allowed send for their families to join them; the wives and their babies were held here until permission had been granted for them to join their spouses.
But the curators have also set the whole thing in a historical context, describing the arrival of Captain Cook as the beginning of "the occupation" of Australia. The Irish migrants, despite their hardship, fared far better than Australia's aboriginal inhabitants, but that's another story.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in partnership with RTÉ One, will televise Midnight Mass from Hyde Park Barracks at 11.10pm on Christmas Eve. The celebrant will be the Auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Donal McKeown.
The Governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir, in recognition of the role played by the early migrants, will be there to deliver her own personal message to the 6 million Australians who today claim Irish ancestry. And surely there also will be the ghosts of the young orphan girls who will join the congregation, their sighs and laughter an unheard testimony to another not yet forgotten era in the history of both Australia and Ireland.