Edmund Finn (1819-98), Irish immigrant, journalist, raconteur and eyewitness to the development of the Port Phillip District, is best known as ‘Garryowen’, author of The Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835-1852. His lively writing, essential to any appreciation of pre-separation Victoria, brings to life this often-neglected period and place. Yet little has been written about the man himself, his actions or attitudes, or the influences that shaped him.

Finn’s exposure to troubled times in Ireland during his youth was a major influence on his later politics and world view. Migrating to Melbourne in 1841, this well-educated man lived for more than fifty years in colonial Melbourne, passionate about his religion, actively engaged with his community while never forgetting the home he had left behind. This book explores the life of this talented man and the ways in which he contributed to the creation of a new society in Melbourne through his writing, his speeches and his leadership of the St Patrick’s Society.

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Victorian Community History Award 2023

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Review
Frank O’Shea, ‘The Story of Early Melbourne’, Tinteán, 10 January 2023

John Marshall assisted thousands of people to migrate in the nineteenth century from Great Britain and Ireland to the British colonies of Australia, Canada, Cape Town, New Zealand and North America. Immigration was as controversial in the nineteenth century as it is today. This book tells the story of the most active emigration agent of the nineteenth-century, John Marshall, and the processes he developed to ensure a smooth process from departure at his emigration depot at Plymouth to arrival in the colonies.

Marshall’s work also impacts the world today through Lloyd's Register of Shipping by instigating a review of the classification of ships and the merger of the red and green registers used by Lloyd’s shipowners and underwriters. This book explains how an unknown insurance broker from Yorkshire could rise to be a key player in London’s ship owning and merchant world of the early nineteenth century.

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Reviews
Stephen Wilks, Victorian Historical Journal, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Vol. 92, No. 1, June 2021, pp.217-220
Christine Sanderson, Descent, Journal of the Society of Australian Genealogists, June 2020, Vol. 50, Part 2, p.44

Single & Free is about the scheme administered by the London Emigration Committee to assist free women to migrate to Australia from Great Britain and IreIand. In the 1830s, approximately 3,000 women took advantage of this scheme, representing an enormous influx to the population of the two eastern colonies of Australia.

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The book analyses the women's motivations and life-experiences, challenging contemporary criticisms that  they were the 'sweepings of the gutters'. Many women migrated in family groups, or were joining family and friends in the colonies. They came from a wide cross-section of nineteenth-century society. They were bold and enterprising, and made ideal workers and wives in the new colonies.

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Single & Free provides life histories of many of the women who took part in this scheme and provides an  index of all the women and their ship of arrival.

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Reviews
Miranda Walker, Lilith, No 13, 2004, pp144-145
Kirsten McKenzie, University of Sydney, Journal of Australian Studies Review of Books, Online Issue 26, August 2004

In 1855 Anastasia Burke, a 27 year old woman from Callan, County Kilkenny, Ireland, migrated to Adelaide, South Australia. For many post-Famine Irish emigrants there was no guarantee of a welcome in the host country and the following year, the South Australian government launched an enquiry into the influx of single Irishwomen to its shores.

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Anastasia stayed in South Australia for ten years before joining the exodus to the new goldfields in Victoria. Stockyard Creek, a goldfield in South Gippsland, ultimately became her permanent home. Widowed after a brief marriage to William Thornley, Anastasia was a successful businesswoman who owned several gold mines and blocks of land in South Gippsland and the biggest hotel in town, the Exchange. Anastasia visited her homeland in 1901 and returned to Victoria to renovate her hotel in palatial style. She was tough and she was a survivor.

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This is the story of one remarkable Irish immigrant to nineteenth-century Australia and her never-failing support of Irish causes. Her legacy resonates today in both Callan and Foster (formerly Stockyard Creek).

Young women as fair game?

In 1832, the British government sent 400 young single women to Sydney and Hobart on two ships–the Red Rover from Cork and Princess Royal from London–to balance the male-dominated societies. Viewed as colourful butterflies alighting on the antipodean shores, the women were ‘fair game’ for employers and potential husbands.

This book analyses how this migration was allowed to happen while telling the women’s stories, describing who netted them in the hiring scramble and how they ultimately spread their wings.

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The Merchant’s Women is the story of over 200 young single women who left Britain in 1833 in the first ship to carry women from England to settle in the emerging colony of New South Wales. The title of the book reflects the ship’s name, the Bussorah Merchant, and the concept that the sex and labour of the female passengers were saleable commodities.

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While their labour and potential as wives and mothers were valued in the colony, the authors contend that the female migrants on the Bussorah Merchant were enterprising women who responded to advertisements which attracted them to migrate to far-away Australia. Each woman’s story is told in this book.

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Review

Lucy Frost: Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 12, 2012, pp.164-66

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In just two years, 750 young Irish women sailed from Cork to Sydney on the Duchess of Northumberland in 1834 and again in 1836 the James Pattison in 1835. For the women who took the courageous decision to emigrate, the pain of leaving Ireland was mixed with the excitement of forging a new life in the colony of New South Wales. This book examines the backgrounds and lives of these young women whose experiences are representative of countless single women who migrated to Australia during the nineteenth century. This book adds to the scholarship of Irish-Australian inter-relationships.

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Reviews

Babette Smith, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 17, 2015, pp.192-193

Patrick FitzGerald, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 15, 2015, pp.111-113

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Quarantined! is about the first full ship to bring Irish family migrants to Australia. When the Lady Macnaghten   set sail from Cork Harbour in October 1836 it contained over 400 emigrants, including 80 single women.

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When the ship limped into Sydney Harbour in February 1837, disease was raging on board and the immigrants and crew were dying from typhoid. It was one of the first uses of Spring Cove as a quarantine station and one of the most deadly.

This is the story of these brave people who chose to leave Britain and pre-Famine Ireland in search of a new beginning in a new country.

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Review

Janet McCalman, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 7, 2007/08, pp.98-100

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Bishopscourt is one of the last surviving pre-gold rush house and garden complexes within the City of Melbourne. Set in an Arcadian landscape, it was designed as an Italianate villa by James Blackburn, one of Melbourne's leading architects. The building was extended fifty years later by Arts and Crafts advocate Walter Richmond Butler, and although it has been renovated and refurbished over the years, the original building remains largely intact. The centre of diocesan life, Bishopscourt was built as the family home of Melbourne's Anglican bishops and archbishops and their wives. For the fourteen women whose task it was to manage her private household, Bishopscourt represented a unique challenge. Each of these women interpreted her role in her own way and each maintained the tradition of generous hospitality, but such a life was not without cost. This illustrated book focuses on the work and lives of these women

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