Celtic Migrants in Australia.
The Nineteenth Century was a period of large scale emigration from Britain to the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and the Celtic peoples formed a large proportion of these migrants. In each of the societies where they settled they have made a very significant contribution to the life and culture of their host countries.
The Cornish:
Little has been said so far of the Celts of Cornwall- the Welsh of the West as they have been called.
Cornwall did not acknowledge Anglo-Saxon supremacy until the Ninth Century, but since then 1,000 years of subjugation and amalgamation into English political life has made the Cornish Celts the Celts most integrated into English society. However, Cornish, a language similar to Welsh, was spoken there until the end of the Eighteenth Century, and even in the Twentieth Century to a Cornishman a trip across the Tamar into England is a serious matter, virtually a visit to a foreign land.
The migrations from Cornwall were voluntary (except for those Cornishmen who went to America or Botany Bay as convicts; James Ruse, Australia's first farmer, was Cornish). Most migrants from Cornwall went overseas in the mid-Nineteenth Century to better their economic condition. Cornwall was the great centre of metalliferous mining in Britain, especially the mining of tin and copper. In the mid-Nineteenth Century about one in three of the population of Cornwall depended on mining for a living. Until the middle of the century there was plenty of work for miners, but by about 1840 the ore bodies began to peter out, and miners and their families faced dire poverty.
Cornish miners sought relief in emigration. Travel to the US cost five pounds, which could often be borrowed from an emigration society, to be repaid from wages in the new country. Emigration to Australia cost fifteen pounds , but in order to compete with the US, governments in the Australian colonies assisted migrants by paying ten pounds towards their fare, this being charged against the sale of crown lands in the colony. So essentially an emigrant could travel to Australia for five pounds, and mostly would not have to put up any money at all in the first instance.
the first Cornish miners arriving there in the 1840's. In 1848 a letter from one such miner was published in London. Peter Medler, the miner, wrote:
Brother and sister and neighbours,
We wish to let you know what a rich and splendid province this is. There are mines in the province that are worth all Cornwall.
Another, John Oats, wrote:
Here is the place to live. The dogs have got more beef and mutton than ever we could get in England. If you could see how we are living you would not stop home a day.
The result of such advertisements was a tide of Cornish migrants, which grew to a flood when news of the gold discoveries in NSW and Victoria reached England in the early 'Fifties.
Cornish miners in Australia were concentrated in South Australia, but some later moved into other areas, especially where there was metalliferous mining. They were among the miners seeking gold in Victoria, NSW and Western Australia. They were involved in the mining of zinc in Tasmania and silver and lead at Broken Hill. With their specialised skills and technologies they played a significant role in the development of mining as a basic industry in Australia.
The other abiding memorials of the Cornish in Australia are the brass bands for which Australian mining towns were once famous and the fiery preaching of the Methodist Church (now somewhat toned down in the Uniting Church into which Methodism has merged).
The descendants of the Cornish immigrants can be recognised by their names. A Cornish rhyme has it:
By Ros-, Lan-, Car-, Tre-, Pol-, and Pen-
Ye may know most Cornish men
Tre (a dwelling) and Pen (a headland) are the most common Cornish name prefixes, as in Tressider, Trewartha and Treglown , Pendennis, Penglase and Penhaligon, names well known in the Newcastle area.
The Welsh in Australia.
Like the Cornishmen the Welsh mostly went abroad on search of better living conditions. The Welsh migrants were mostly from the coal mining districts of South Wales. They were therefore mostly concentrated in coal mining towns in Australia.
Welsh coal was slow burning and low in bitumen. It therefore burnt without producing much smoke. This made it of special value to the British Navy when it changed over from sail to coal. For ships to be able to move without advertising the fact with plumes of smoke, which could be seen from a great distance, was of great tactical importance. The navy therefore tried to limit the production of the best types of Welsh coal, reserving stocks for its own use. Coal mining in Britain was always a cut-throat business, with intense competition between the various mining districts to win orders. The naval interference with the normal laws of supply and demand often put Welsh mines at a considerable disadvantage, and in an industry always plagued by uncertainty, stoppages and laying off of workers, Welsh miners suffered more frequently and more intensely than other miners in Britain.
Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, roughly from 1870 onwards, Welsh miners began moving overseas in search of a more secure livelihood, many of them to the United States, which was always the primary target for emigration, but many also to Australia, taking advantage of the assisted migration schemes available.
Many of those coming to Australia came to Newcastle which was the centre of Australian coal mining. Early in the Twentieth Century Welsh miners also arrived in large numbers to work on the South Maitland coalfields which had been discovered by a Welsh geologist, Edgeworth David, and which were being opened up at this time.
The concentrations of Welsh place names in the Newcastle and South Maitland areas, names such as Cardiff, Swansea, Abermain, Aberdare, and Stanford Merthyr, and the plethora of Williamses, Joneses, Prices, Morgans, Pughs and Thomases in the local phone book bear testimony to their abiding influence.
The most obvious legacy of the Welsh, like the Cornish, lies in their contribution to the development of mining in Australia. They also have left a musical imprint on Australian culture, through the vigorous hymn singing of the Methodist and Congregational Churches (now both integrated into the Uniting Church), through choral singing, especially male choral singing, and through institutions like the eisteddfod.
The best known Welsh -Australian was William Morris Hughes, Labor politician and Prime Minister during World War I.
The Highlanders:
In Gaelic Scotland all land , in theory, was owned by the clan. The clan chief, or laird, controlled this land on behalf of his people, leasing it out in large parcels to his tacksmen, who were usually his close relations, and who paid rent for it both in kind and in military service. The tacksmen sublet their leases in small portions as farms to members of the clan. The tenants paid rent to the tacksman, again both in kind and in military service. At the bottom of the system was a class of labourers who worked for the farmers in return for the right to farm a small plot of his land and to occupy a cottage. These were the cottars, and they too were obliged to come on to the field when the clan went to war. The power and prestige of a laird depended on his ability to field a clan regiment of his tenants and their labourers, officered by his tacksmen.
After the 1745 rebellion this social system was outlawed, and the military service owed to a clan chief was abolished. Moreover, English law was applied to clan land so that it was held to be owned by the clan chief, not the clan. Lairds were quickly seduced by Southern ways, by capitalist ideas and by the prevailing doctrines of agricultural 'improvement'. They also tended to move south to London or Edinburgh, leaving the management of their estates to factors, who were mostly lowlanders with no sympathy for highland ways. Soon the factors were asked by the absentee lairds to raise rents, and tenants who could not pay were forced off their land.
Rising rents provoked the first tide of emigration from the Highlands. Tacksmen, who were being squeezed out in the economic rationalisation began to sell up their belongings, charter a ship, and together with all their tenants migrate to the Americas. In 1791 a report to the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which was spearheading a missionary effort against Catholicism in the highlands, claimed that in the previous twenty years no less than sixteen vessels full of such emigrants had sailed from the Western parts of the counties of Inverness and Ross alone, "carrying away some 6,500 souls and at least 38,000 pounds sterling". Before the Seven Years War the Carolinas were the favoured target for highland emigration, but in that war newly raised highland regiments won Canada for the British. The demobilised soldiers mostly settled there after the war. Then Canada became the favoured settlement place for displaced highlanders. Nova Scotia, in particular, became saturated with highland settlers. During the first decade of the Nineteenth Century 10,000 highlanders settled in Nova Scotia alone.
The loss of tenants was only a temporary embarrassment to the lairds. The vacant lands were soon leased to lowlanders, who moved in with sheep, especially the sturdy Cheviot breed of the borders country, which could deal with the severe highland winters. The much higher returns from wool growing then induced other lairds to turn over their land to sheep, forcing their tenants off the land in order to make room for the Cheviots. All over the highlands clansmen began to be driven from their lands, with their houses burned behind them to prevent their return. The highland clearances had begun.
John Knox, a lowland traveller to the highlands in the 1780's wrote:
I often met bodies of people travelling to the ports. They generally edged off the road or turned away as if shy of an interview.
Those whom he persuaded to speak told him:
They had been driven away from their land by their chiefs, their cattle seized and their furniture taken in lieu of unpaid rents. 'Our fathers", said a Lochinvar man, "were called out to fight our master's battles, and this is our reward".
The depopulation of the highlands continued with growing intensity during the first four decades of the Nineteenth Century. By 1840 the highlands had effectively been cleared Those who had not departed overseas were allowed to build cottages and grow potatoes on small patches of garden. They subsisted on gathering kelp, a seaweed rich in alkali that was used in soap making, and by fishing and collecting shellfish. These were the crofters.
In their forlorn settlements the crofters were subject to a missionary onslaught from the agents of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which sought to convert them from "Catholicism and barbarism" to a more respectable Presbyterianism. Betrayed by their chiefs and dispossessed of their lands the crofters generally submitted, accepting the Calvinist doctrine that their sufferings had occurred because of their sins.
The last blow suffered by the crofters was the potato blight of 1847-1849, which affected Scotland no less than Ireland. By this time, however, many had migrated to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, often taking advantage of the bounties offered by colonial governments, andin the case of Australia, spurred on by the exhortations of the Rev. John Dunmore Laing, first Presbyterian minister in Sydney, who was an enthusiastic advocate of highland settlement in Australia. The potato famine, which reduced the remaining crofters to destitution led to another wave of emigration. When, after the gold rushes, the colonies discontinued assisted migration the British government began providing assistance for emigration as a means of relieving itself once and for all of the cost of poor relief.
By the time of the Crimean War those few crofters who remained on the edge of the highlands were poverty stricken, bitter and disillusioned. When the Duke of Sutherland sought among them recruits for the regiment of which he was still titular colonel he was told:
We have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to sheep. Since you have preferred sheep to men, let the sheep defend you.
In Australia, however, the highlanders made a very significant mark. Their experience in Scotland made them avid to acquire land in Australia, and they were prepared to endure any hardship and privation, postpone all pleasure, in order to own their own land. In every colony, within a couple of decades, a quite disproportionate number of land holders were resettled highlanders. In NSW their settlements were concentrated on the Manning and Clarence Rivers, and on the New England tableland. In Queensland they settled on the Darling Downs. In Victoria the favoured areas for settlement were Gippsland and the Western District.
Where they could not buy land they squatted. A survey of squatting in 1848 revealed that of 1449 squatting leases granted, no less than 468 were to Scots. There is no way of telling how many of these Scots were highlanders, but the large number of graziers with highland surnames suggests that they were present in considerable numbers. The solid affluence that their pioneering efforts provided can be seen today in the imposing Presbyterian churches that grace many country towns, and in the wealthy and prestigious boarding schools and university colleges which were endowed by these immigrants and their descendants and to which they entrust the education of their offspring. Perhaps the most successful of the descendants of these highlanders were Robert Gordon Menzies and Malcolm Frazer, each being Prime Ministers of Australia in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
By a bitter irony, the wool grown by Australian graziers, among whom were many displaced highlanders, was of much higher quality than that of the Cheviots which had displaced them from their homes. Woollen mills in Britain preferred Australian wool, and Scottish sheep farming collapsed. Sheep were replaced by deer, and more latterly by trees.
Today the highlands are, for all practical purposes, empty.
Migration from Ireland.
The first migrants from Ireland came to Australia against their will, as convicts to Botany Bay. It has been said that people from England were transported for committing a small crime, from Scotland for committing a great crime, and from Ireland for committing no crime at all. That is an exaggeration, but it contains a grain of truth, as the penal system in Ireland was very harsh and judges there were very prone to sentence miscreants to transportation for minor offences. Nevertheless most of those transported from Ireland appear to have been sentenced for genuine criminal offences, rather than for political ones. Not many convict transports recorded the nature of the offences of the convicts on board, but a full list for one, the King William, which sailed from Dublin in 1840 with 180 Irish convicts on board, recorded that of those 133 had been convicted of theft, only 4 for political offences.
About 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia during the period of convict settlement, and of These about one quarter were Irish. Of those transported from England, some 6,000 were Irish who had recently come to England as immigrants.
Transportation was suspended, then abolished in the Eastern states of Australia from 1848. This did not stem the tide of Irish immigration , however, for the convicts were soon vastly outnumbered by free immigrants, coming out under the bounty scheme and other schemes of assisted immigration. Of the total of migrants coming to Australia under assisted migration schemes before 1921, 9.6% were Scottish, 28.2% were English and 63.9% were Irish; ie. the Irish made up about 2/3 of all assisted migrants reaching Australia before World War I.
The background for both penal and voluntary migration from Ireland was rural poverty. In the Nineteenth Century Irish poverty was probably the worst in the western world. It appalled travellers who saw it. A French traveller, de Baumont, found in Ireland the worst extreme of human misery, worse than Negroes in chains. A German observer, Kohl, wrote: "No other mode of life in Europe can seem pitiable after one has seen Ireland". In 1841 a census divided Irish houses into four classes, the lowest of which was a one-roomed, windowless cabin, and the census commissioners reported that half of the rural population were living in houses of this lowest category. In 1837 the 9,000 inhabitants of Tullhobagly, Co Donegal, were reported to have between them 10 beds, 93 chairs and 243 stools.
The main cause and source of Ireland's rural poverty was the system under which land had come to be owned and occupied. Ownership of Irish land had mostly passed into the hands of English and Anglo-Irish landlords, the Irish peasants were tenants. Landlords mostly preferred to live in London and the task of letting out land and collecting rents for it was left to agents , whose chief responsibility was to extract as much rent as possible from the tenants. Even so, it is too easy just to blame the landlords for Irish poverty. Probably the basic cause was overpopulation. In the sixty years before 1850 the population of Ireland grew at a rate unprecedented in European history,--at the incredible rate of 172%, more than twice the rate of England and Wales, which were themselves experiencing a population explosion. Yet in Ireland there was no industry to employ the surplus population, nor could they be employed as rural labourers, for Irish farms were too small to require extra labour. Rural overpopulation led to the land being subdivided into smaller and smaller plots. This maximised the rents which could be collected, but it meant that tenant families lived very close to the margin of subsistence. The vast army of unemployed ( estimated to be two and a half million by the Poor Inquiry of 1835), subsisted by renting small patches of land from farmers and growing potatoes on it. In fact, living was only possible for the majority of the Irish population through the extensive cultivation of the potato.
The Great Famine:
In ordinary times the life of an Irish peasant or labourer was very hard, and this no doubt contributed to the crimes against property, for which most Irish convicts were transported. In 1847, however, disaster struck. A spell of wet unseasonable weather led to the proliferation of a fungus disease, the potato blight, across much of Ireland, and the crop on which most of the poor subsisted failed throughout most of the country. Landlords in England, however, insisted on their rents being paid, and many Irish tenants were turned out of their houses for failure to pay. The distress was widespread, and famine began to take a toll of the population.
In the following year the potato crop failed again, and the rural population was destitute. It failed for the third time in 1849. By then some relief efforts had been undertaken by the British government and by private charity, but by the end of that year nearly two million people were missing from Ireland. They had either died of starvation and related diseases or had emigrated.
Irish Emigration:
Most of the Irish who left in the period of the famine went to England. It only cost a few shillings to reach England, and some shippers would take passengers as ballast, charging them nothing. In England the Poor Law ensured that at least people would not starve. The cites of Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow were soon inundated by thousands of destitute Irish. English ratepayers in these cities, who had to bear the cost poor relief, were soon protesting at the numbers of unwanted guests crowding the cellars, spreading typhus and putting up the rates. Before long local authorities were turning them out of cellars in these cities and forcing them to move into the countryside, where Irish beggars were to become a common sight for generations.
Those who could afford the passage money of five pounds went to Canada and the United States. Migrant ships were overcrowded and disease, especially typhus, took a heavy toll. More than 17,000 perished during the voyage. In North America the Irish were as unpopular as they were in England. In 1847 the US Congress passed a Passenger Act increasing the cost of passages and individual ports refused to land passengers from ships where fever was present. Anti-Irish feeling, largely based on fears that competition from destitute Irish workers would reduce wages, led to rioting in Philadelphia and Boston.
By contrast Australia had only received 300,000 during the same period, although this was still a large proportion of Irish emigrants coming to Australia considering the relative population size.
The Irish in Australia.
(1) Irish Convicts:
As the proportion of Irish among the convict population was very large, the influence of Irish attitudes was very important during the formative years of the development of a distinctive Australian culture. This was especially true of working class attitudes, for after gaining their freedom the Irish generally occupied the lower socio-economic rungs of the Australian class ladder, a condition which the English establishment tried hard to preserve.
One indication of this early Irish influence can be seen (or heard) in Australian speech forms, particularly the use of 'youse' for the plural 'you', and the upward inflection at the end of a sentence. These seem to derive from Irish speech patterns.
Perhaps more significant, Australian attitudes to authority, especially to authority seen as being English in origin or ambience, probably has its origin in the attitudes of Irish convicts. Such attitudes were commented on by Alexander Harris in Settlers and Convicts, written in the 1840's. They were also much lamented by British officers who had dealings with Australian troops in World War I. The Irish convicts were the source of the two rebellions against the convict system. In March 1803 fifteen Irishmen absconded from Castle Hill, razed the surrounding countryside and terrorised land holders in the region. A year later the Irish convicts in the Parramatta area took up arms, and clashed with the soldiery at Toongabbie. The leader, Phillip Cunningham, was shot in the skirmish and his followers were either executed or sent to Newcastle. In the early Nineteenth Century many of the bushrangers who achieved a short lived notoriety were Irish, most notably Bold Jack Donahoe, the original 'wild colonial boy'.
It is significant that the archetypal cult hero of Australia is Ned Kelly, hanged for bushranging and murder in 1880. Kelly's views of policemen, as written in his famous Jerilderie letter, exemplify Irish-Australian attitudes from the convict period. Kelly described Victorian police as:
"a parcel of big, ugly, fat necked, wombat headed, big bellied, magpie legged, narrow hipped, splay footed sons of Irish bailiffs and English landlords...who for a loafing cowardly bilit (billet) left the ash corner, deserted the shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty, to serve under a flag and nation that has destroyed, massacred and murdered their forfathers..."(There is much more in similar vein).
(2) Irish Free Immigrants:
By contrast with the convicts, Irish free immigrants have often belonged to the more respectable sections of Australian society. Few famine victims came to Australia. Compared to Britain or America, Australia was a country very far away, and the fare was correspondingly greater. Emigration to Australia was not only more expensive but also required more forethought and commitment than emigration to Britain or America. Those Irish who came as free settlers to Australia, therefore, tended frequently not to be from the poorest strata of Irish society, and their experiences were therefore not as bitter as those who went to America. In Australia, moreover, there was always a higher level of government and charitable interest in the welfare of immigrants.The American Irish have been the greatest opponents of all things British, opposing America's entry into two world wars on the side of Britain and being the most ardent supporters of the IRA in its campaign in Ulster. Most of the Australian Irish, on the other hand, tend to regard the problems of Ulster as a sad but remote affair, over which they shrug their shoulders.
There was one issue in Australia over which Irish free immigrants became violent- the issue of gold licences . In 1852 the diggers of Ballarat, many of them Irish, and led by the Irishman Peter Lalor, defied the military on this issue and provoked at Eureka the only armed rebellion in post-convict Australia. After the legislation was revoked, however, the hostility evaporated. Lalor went into the Victorian Parliament later, as a very respectable representative of thoroughly moderate views.
The issues that that have dominated the attention of Irish-Australians in the last century have been the Irish Home Rule Movement, from about 1870 to the early years of the Twentieth Century; State aid to Catholic schools, from the 1870's until the problem was resolved in the 1960's; and conscription for military service, which dominated the period of the First World War. Of these issues the anti-conscription movement engendered the most heat and bitterness.
For the Irish-Australians the connection with Britain had been a source of some ambivalence, but in the early days of World War I Irish-Australians ( like the Irish at home),volunteered in large numbers for service. The Dublin Post Office siege of Easter 1916, and the subsequent secret trials and executions of several of the participants altered the attitude of Irish Australians to the War. When Labor Prime Minister, W.M.Hughes, tried to introduce conscription in mid-1916 it was opposed most strenuously by most Irish-Australians. Hughes took the question to the people in two referenda. His leading opponent was Daniel Mannix, the Irish-born Catholic prelate of Melbourne, whose lead was followed by most of the Irish. The issue split the country, and also split the Labor Party. Both referenda were lost, Hughes quit the Labor Party, which for the next thirty years was dominated by Irish-Australians and Catholics (categories which were virtually synonymous until the 1950's)
In the 1950's large numbers of migrants came to Australia who were neither British nor Irish. Even in the Catholic Church, which had for more than a century been their almost exclusive preserve, the Irish were overwhelmed by the newcomers. Churches bearing the names of St. Patrick and St. Bridget now were more likely to have congregations of Poles, Croatians and Vietnamese than of Irish. In the face of these demographic shifts there has occurred a rapprochement between Irish Catholics and the Protestant ascendancy that could not have been imagined a generation before. Irish, Scots, Welsh and English in Australia have now merged into a new grouping, called by modern commentators the Anglo-Celts.
One can only wonder what O'Connell and Parnell, to say nothing of Ned Kelly, would have thought of that!