AustLit
Cherry Smyth, Famished. Pindrop Press, 2019.
Publisher's blurb: This collection is startling. More than that, it is vitally important. Combining lyrical poetry with statistics, quotes, newspaper cuttings, snippets of conversation and even nursery rhymes, it charts the Irish Famine from the potato blight and the impossible poverty that followed, through the disease and death on a massive scale, the political decisions that worsened an already dreadful situation, to the people forced to pay passage to North America and Australia on freight ships, known as ‘coffin ships’. Finally, Cherry Smyth evokes the current day as she describes the journey into her country’s past, its language and the ‘plot of scarcity’ that decimated a nation – a scarcity that bears no little comparison to the plight of political and economic refugees today.
Famished is dedicated, in part, to two of the Great Famine migrants:
'Eliza Taafe, aged 18, from Dublin, was declared insane when she arrived in Adelaide, one of 4,114 workhouse girls sent to Australia under the Earl Grey Orphan Scheme. One doctor argued she simply needed tenderness and time, too full of what she'd suffered.'
'Alice Ball, a 16-year-old Earl Grey Orphan, a Protestant from Enniskillen, made pregnant by her employer, drowned herself in the Yarra River in Melbourne.'
The consequences of the Great Famine were a core topic of discussion in contemporary Australian newspapers across the 1840s and 1850s.
First came the news columns with fundraising reports: British troops in India had raised so many rupees; a meeting had been held in the Market Shed in Sydney and the Lord Bishop of Australia, absent from proceedings, had sent a cheque for £10; the Southern Highlands town of Berrima passed the hat around for £14 8s. 6d. and sent the funds to Sydney.
Then came the political reports, the reprinted speeches of first Sir Robert Peel (Prime Minister in his second term, 1841-1846) and then John Russell, Earl Russell (Prime Minister in his first term, 1846-1852): the first a Conservative, the second a Whig, both criticised and praised in the Australian press.
Finally came the shipping arrivals with line after line of steerage passengers: 'Thomas Brown and wife'; 'Thos. Tylet, wife, and eight children'; 'Chas. Swift, wife, and five children'; 'W. Mason, wife, and child', 'George Humbert and infant'.
Throughout the period, people also wrote creatively about the horrors, mostly in poetry in the early years, trying to express their sense of loss and distress. Some were simply anonymous, some signed with initials, and some with marks of solidarity, like the 1847 poem signed 'An Irishman'.
The example on the right, part of which is quoted below, captures something of the spirit of these outpourings.
Thy brothers and sisters,
Are all gone before thee.
The corpse of thy father,
Lies cold in the grave,
And, I left alone,
Can do nought but weep o'er thee,
Too wasted to succour —
Too languid to save.
B.R., 'The Irish Mother to Her Child', Port Philip Patriot, 14 August 1847.
Explore nineteenth-century works about the Great Famine in AustLit.
To explore one aspect of how newspapers discussed the Great Famine, check the following newspaper searches:
- the term 'Distressed Irish' in Australian newspapers of 1840-1849.
- the term 'Irish Famine' in Australian newspapers of 1840-1849.
- the term 'Irish Famine' in Australian newspapers of 1850-1859.
- the term 'Irish emigration' in Australian newspapers of 1840-1849.
- the term 'Irish emigration' in Australian newspapers of 1850-1859.
Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame (1998)
Thomas Keneally provides an overview of the impact of the Great Famine, with a particular focus on the diaspora, including those, like Keneally's ancestors, who left Ireland in chains for Australia or America.
The people he highlights include William Smith O'Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, sentenced to solitary confinement in Australia; Thomas Francis Meagher, who escaped Australian captivity to become a Union general and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, a Confederate newspaper reporter who returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O'Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth-century America's leading literary lights.
Helen Townsend, Above the Starry Frame (2007)
Based on the letters of Helen Townsend's great grandfather, Above the Starry Frame is a biography of both William Irwin and of Ballarat, a city swelling in size under the gold rushes and the diaspora.
Irwin is an eighteen-year-old farm boy when he flees the horrors of the famine to arrive in Australia; in Ballarat, as a gold miner and a publican, he is swept up in the events of the Eureka Stockade in a revolt against the colonial administration in Australia.
Evelyn Conlon, Not the Same Sky: A Novel (2013)
Not the Same Sky imagines the stories of four famine orphans who arrive in Australia on the Thomas Arbuthnot. The ship itself is real; constructed in 1841, she was one of the largest of the many ships that ferried famine orphans to Australia and returned to England with holds full of Australian gold.
Conlon is an Irish writer, who spent three years in Australia in the 1970s. In this novel, she returns imaginatively to this country, a journey made by so many of her fellows, few of whom could return home.
(For more information on the Thomas Arbuthnot, see Further Reading.)
Colleen Burke and Vincent Woods (eds.), The Turning Wave: Poems and Songs of Irish Australia (2001)
Like this exhibition, The Turning Wave takes as its starting point the 1840s newspapers and contemporary reaction to the Great Famine, reprinting poetry from sources ranging from official newspapers to the handwritten sheets of The Wild Goose, the newsletter produced by Fenian prisoners on the Hougoumont, the last convict ship to Australia.
The Turning Wave is an invaluable collection of Irish voices from this moment of despair and displacement.
Kirsty Murray, Bridie's Fire (2003)
Bridie's Fire is the first in a quartet of books that run from the 1840s to the present day, a series in which the child in each book becomes a mentor to the next child. In this way, as Bridie mentors Billy, Billy mentors Colm, and Colm mentors Maeve, Murray weaves the history of Irish identity in Australia, and its roots in famine, into the series.
Bridie's Fire is the work mostly closely connected to the famine, as Bridie, mourning her parents and baby brother, makes her way alone to Australia.
James Moloney, Bridget: A New Australian (2015)
The New Australian books are designed to highlight the role of migration in making Australian culture: other instalments include child protagonists whose parents are fleeing unrest in China, the chaos of post-war Europe, or other moments of historical unrest.
Bridget and her sister are famine orphans, striking out for Australia. Like Kirsty Murray, Moloney seeks to bring the history of the famine to younger readers. Unlike Murray, he positions the orphan sisters not as a part of a continuity of Irish experience in Australia, but as part of a continuity of unrest and displacement across history and across the globe.
Arthure, Susan, Fidelma Breen, Stephanie James, and Dymphna Lonergan (eds). Irish South Australia: New Histories and Insights. Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2019.
Crowley, John, William J. Smyth, and Michael Murphy (eds). Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Fairall, Jonathan. Earl Grey's Daughters: The Women Who Changed Australia. Glebe: SPSP Publishing, 2018.
Gibney, John (ed.). The Great Famine. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2018.
McClaughlin, Trevor. Barefoot and Pregnant? Irish Famine Orphans in Australia. 2 vols. Melbourne: Genealogical Society of Victoria, 1991-2001.
Ó hAodha, Mícheal, and John O'Callaghan. Narratives of the Occluded Irish Disapora: Subversive Voices. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012.
Tóibín, Colm, and Diarmaid Ferriter. The Irish Famine: A Documentary. London: Profile Books, 2001.
Reid, Richard and Cheryl Mongan. A Decent Set of Girls: The Irish Famine Orphans of the Thomas Arbuthnot 1849-1850. Yass: Yass Heritage Project, 1996.
For individual book covers and standalone newspaper clippings, see captions.
Header: The Coolmountain Famine Soup Pot, Ballingeary, County Cork. Photograph by 'Osioni', 24 July 2018. Via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Scrolling title image and image credits background: Potato plants from Illustrated and Descriptive Catalogue of Garden, Field and Flower Seeds, Kendall and Whitney (firm), 1897. Via Internet Archive. Source.
Newspaper gif: Articles from the Sydney Chronicle, 7 August 1847 (source); the Cornwall Chronicle, 30 January 1847 (source); the South Australian, 29 June 1847 (source); the Adelaide Observer, 3 July 1847 (source); the South Australian Register, 21 July 1847 (source); the Argus, 4 September 1846 (source); the Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1846 (source); the Sydney Chronicle, 25 July 1846 (source); the South Australian Gazette and Mining Journal, 15 September 1849 (source); the Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 1850 (source); the Sydney Morning Herald, 5 January 1850 (source); and the Colonist, 1 January 1840 (source). [Note: source list does not reflect order in which articles appear on screen.]
Emigration background image: Engraving of 'Emigrants leaving Ireland' by Henry Doyle, published as the preface to Mary Frances Cusack's An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 (1868). Via Wikimedia Commons. Source.