The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Unlike Hugh, Mary had not arrived in Sydney in a prosperous year. The price of sheep had begun its 6-year crash from 60 shillings to 1 shilling. Private coaches and other luxury items were offered for a sixtieth of their value. Some free labourers cleared out on trans-Pacific vessels to Valparaiso, Chile, and poorer settlers and their families were lean enough to look familiar to Irish eyes. The names and skills of the Whitby women, advertised in the New South Wales Government Gazette, brought relatively light demand, and none for women with children. So on 1 July, with perhaps this or that Whitby sailor dwelling on a woman’s face and regretting her loss, the women and their infants were rowed down-harbour and landed on the western side of Sydney Cove at the dockyard. Lined up unchained, they were lectured by a number of colonial wives, members of the Ladies’ Committee, who gave them sisterly though sometimes highly evangelical advice on the perils and possible rewards ahead of them.

  It was unlikely that, on their way to the women’s barracks at Hyde Park, they much resembled Mudie’s description of newly arrived women convicts: ‘a herd of females of all ages, and of every gradation of vice, including a large proportion of prostitutes of all trades … All who can carry with them the whole paraphernalia of the toilette, with trunks and boxes stuffed with every kind of female dress and decoration …’ Dulcineas, he said, whores, were the commissioned officers of these rabbles of women. But the demographics of Whitby makes unlikely the concept of a flaunting cavalcade of debased colleens, laden with boxes of dresses and trinkets from home.

  Five Irish Sisters of Charity had come from Cork the previous December to look after and protect their convict sisters. Two or three of them would be seen at the women’s section of the Hyde Park barracks. The others were visitors at the Female Factory, which was to be Mary’s home. Much later, a visitor to the barracks said that the sisters ‘spread a monastic sphere of quietness, gloom and silence throughout the place,’ though it is unlikely that they had managed to do so within their first six months of residence in Babylon-on-the-Pacific. In any case, Mary’s detention in Sydney was brief. The Whitby women and children were brought back down to the water, put into whaleboats by constables and rowed up the Parramatta River, a broad waterway with islands, inlets and fine juts of sandstone, and, further up, broad mangrove swamps.

  It could be a pleasant journey even in Sydney’s mild winter. In the intimacy of a whaleboat, something like normal male society was now temporarily restored to Mary. The constables and oarsmen were all former or serving convicts, some honourable men, some rascals. The Colonial Secretary of New South Wales had, however, taken measures to ensure that reliable fellows had the post. The journey was only 14 miles as the crow flies, somewhat more by the bends of the river, and many fine picnic places lay along the way. Until the 1830s the trip to Parramatta had sometimes taken constables and women three days. Liquor travelled with the parties, and in camps set up early—so it was surmised by the Colonial Secretary—evening bush orgies had been the pattern. These days the journey was meant to take only one long day, or in exceptional circumstances two, and the presence of children would in any case have helped mute wilder behaviour. Boats still generally stopped for refreshments at Squire’s Public House, a large slab-hut inn at Kissing Point, above a beach surrounded by sandstone ledges and bush. Here was a sand bar which boats kissed against, but it had a repute too for convict sexual recreation. Squire’s Inn provided Mary with her first Australian drink and social occasion, and she was partial to both.

  The Female Factory, opened in 1821 at Parramatta, was built on 4 acres on the river bank, and was judged necessary because of the perceived fallen nature of the women, but also because of the degraded nature of society. The disproportion of male to female in convict society—100 male convicts to every 17 women convicts—had called the place into being, to save females from prostitution. So the Factory would always have an ambiguity of intent—was it a haven or was it a gaol, was it workshop, hospital, marriage bureau? Certainly the latter, since ticket-of-leave men called there, on their way to the bush, to look for a wife. It had been designed for all possible purposes by the talented convict architect Francis Greenway. Behind its 9-foot walls, it was three storeys high, and was meant to house 300 women.

  Within a year of Shields’s arrival there, it held 887 women and 405 children. Since free immigration for deserving poor spinsters from the British Isles was taking jobs once given to convict women, women accumulated in the Factory. Before he even left England the new governor, Sir George Gipps, had sought and received permission to extend the Factory. But although he built more cells, he did not expand accommodation for women like Shields, those who were not serving sentences for crimes committed in New South Wales but who were simply detained there for lack of anywhere else to put them.

  In some ways the Factory was an extended, land-based version of the convict deck. In the dormitories, women competed for space through sly stratagems and by maintaining a phalanx with those from the same ship and county. Whitby women stuck together against women from earlier arriving ships such as Lady Rowena, Diamond, Sir Charles Forbes, Surrey and Planter. The English women from these last two ships had their own encampment in the Factory’s long dormitories, but the Irish had a larger one, and many of the arguments over space and food were conducted with that Irish raucousness which would become an Australian characteristic, but which polite people wrongly mistook for lowness of soul. The Sisters of Charity did their best to mediate, but may have understood better than male officials that the Factory made a woman edgy and assertive. Those who lost the fight would wither under melancholia, die, or be sent to join the mad at Tarban Creek asylum.

  A few months before Shields’s arrival at Parramatta, Governor Gipps had as part of his new initiative dismissed a tipsy matron and a strait-laced and incompetent superintendent. All Gipps could fall back on was a pragmatic but venal couple, the Bells, earlier sacked, who returned now to the jobs of matron and steward as the only people willing to manage the place. The chances for corruption inherent in such an institution were lustily embraced by George and Sarah, who, during Shields’s time at the Factory, were its day-to-day managers.

  The Bells had in their care three categories of women. Category I consisted of women like Mary who were eligible for assignment as servants, had the right to go to church on Sundays, could receive friends at the Factory and earned wages if there was something for them to do. Single women in this category were sometimes ‘drawn up in a line for the inspection of the amorous and adventurous votary, who, fixing his eye on a vestal of his taste, with his finger beckons her to step forward from the rank.’ There was a colonial song about this extraordinary process:

  The Currency Lads may fill their glasses,

  And drink to the health of the Currency Lasses,

  But the lass I adore, the lass for me,

  Is a lass in the Female Factory …

  The first time I saw the comely lass

  Was at Parramatta, going to Mass, etc., etc.

  The Factory’s Sunday clothes were designed perhaps to attract the attention of a newly pardoned drover or shepherd in church: a white cap, straw bonnet, long dress with a muslin frill, a red calico jacket, blue petticoat, grey stockings, shoes, and a clothes bag to store all these in between Sundays. For weekday wear the women had plainer garments: calico cap, serge petticoat and jacket, and an apron.

  Category II women were those who had been returned by masters as unsatisfactory, sometimes because of pregnancy. ‘In fact,’ the jaundiced James Mudie had told the Select Committee a few years before, ‘it is a common joke in Sydney, that it is not a factory, but a lying-in hospital.’ These women ate Indian cornmeal instead of wheaten bread.

  Last of all, Category III inmates had committed crimes in the colony, and were in the strictest sense prisoners. They resided in cells which Greenway had designed at a tight 5 feet by 7.

  When it came to quality items, beef and vegetables, at least in theory the daily ration for Category
I was more than twice that of Category III, and included such luxuries as salt, brown sugar, a quarter ounce of tea (considered very precious by Irish women) and a quarter ounce of yellow soap. Mary’s son Michael O’Flynn was entitled to a ration equivalent to half his mother’s. But the Bells, who had few airs and too willingly drank with convict women, also engaged in short-weighting, of which Bell had already in his earlier occupation of the post been accused.

  The facilities of the place were as erratic as the rationing. When Gipps had first inspected the Factory, he found that the four huge dormitories in which most of the women lived had broken windows and inadequate mattresses and blankets. To prevent rain penetrating the dormitories, the women would pile up mattresses against the shattered window panes. Gipps had been horrified to find too that the women were completely idle, apart from cooking and washing for themselves. The year before Shields arrived, the governor decided that he would introduce a supply of New Zealand flax which could be picked by the women and turned into mesh for fishing nets and screens for fruit trees. From 18 October in the year of Mary Shields’s arrival, 1839, the public was informed too ‘that Needlework of all sorts is performed at the Female Factory in the best possible manner and at very moderate charges.’ The Colonial Secretary set a scale of prices—slips 1 shilling and 6 pence; shirts from 1 shilling and 10 pence; baby gowns upwards of 6 pence. None of the Factory’s operations was particularly profitable for government, but Gipps favoured them for their rehabilitative aspects. Any woman who produced more than the requisite nine items of clothing per week received 9 pence for every extra article.

  Lady Gipps, daughter of a British major-general, had some of the best-behaved of the Factory women visit Government House, Parramatta, to receive lessons in needlework, which she conducted in the parlour with the help of a housekeeper. Mary Shields walked up the driveway of the vice-regal residence to attend these sessions, and breathed the urbane air of a civilised household. The classes were interrupted in the early 1840s by Lady Gipps’s bad health.

  With whatever skills she possessed, Mary was motivated to maternal vigour to ensure her son’s rations. When he reached the age of five, some time in 1840, he was taken from her, and sent to one of the orphan schools in Parramatta, probably the one founded by the Sisters of Charity. Contact between Mary and Michael would of course have been permitted, especially on Sundays. The boy was growing up amongst the children of other convicts, yet the orphanages of Parramatta did not seem to be schools for criminality. Michael would not come to manhood lawless.

  Hugh Larkin and Mary Shields were, in the late 1830s, two of the few thousand most southerly placed Irish felons on earth, and would be so until Van Diemen’s Land began to receive Irish prisoners again about 1840. Those it would receive however included political figures of more exalted stature than Hugh.

  Helena, the capital of the state of Montana, would on the face of it be a strange reference point for the careers of Australia-bound Irish felons. But on a terrace before the main entrance of the granite Legislature stands a massive statue of a mounted Union general, riding parallel to the Rockies, which can be seen to the west, beyond the Helena airport. This towering figure on its large plinth faces north, as if marching towards Canada, an enterprise in which some Irish would during the century involve themselves. Around the massive monument’s base are samples of the general’s oratory: in Ireland as a youth, in Van Diemen’s Land as a prisoner, or in the United States as a defender of the Union. The man represented here is Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irishman and, for a time, Australian convict.

  He was born in Waterford on 23 August 1823 into one of that small number of Catholic mercantile families who, despite the penal laws, could be found in the big ports, supplying shipping and imports, needed by the landowner establishment. The family wealth derived from his grandfather, who had left farming in Tipperary in the previous century, and emigrated to St John’s, Newfoundland, establishing an import-export business with Waterford. At one stage—in a foreshadowing of the melodramas of his grandson’s life—he was captured by a French privateer.

  Meagher’s father, also Thomas, had been put in charge of the Waterford end of the family’s business, and ran it until August 1820. That year he married Alicia Quan, daughter of Thomas Quan of Wyse, Cashen & Quan, one of the largest trading companies of Waterford. Thomas Francis Meagher’s birthplace was an elegant pier front home on the west bank of River Suir. It was a household of excellent Irish linen, and furniture and draperies from England and France. In February 1827, when the boy was less than four years of age, his mother died, leaving a husband with three children, one daughter and two sons. The boy retained for life the questing intensity of a child too early deprived of a mother.

  His father, Thomas Meagher senior, was a member of Daniel O’Connell the Liberator’s Catholic Association, ‘a silent, steadfast man held in general respect.’ His austerity of character would always distance him from his flamboyant son, although his lifelong generosity was often exercised across a gulf of incomprehension. Elected first Catholic mayor of Waterford in 1829, he would later hold a seat in the House of Commons. Like many wealthy Catholics, he distrusted the Establishment’s Trinity College, Dublin, and looked to the Jesuits of Clongowes Wood in County Kildare to supply his son with the attainments and tastes of a nineteenth-century Catholic gentleman. Thomas Francis Meagher was sent there in the year of Hugh’s trial, 1833. (Much, much later, Clongowes would also give the young James Joyce a childhood home and education.)

  Meagher’s fellow student and lifetime friend on three continents, Pat Smyth, later remembered it was never Meagher’s ambition to win the regard of the priests. ‘I have known him in a football match to let fly deliberately at a master’s shins.’ He was no doubt practising for whacking the shins of Westminster, and ultimately those of the man nearest to God on a secular level, O’Connell.

  In the years of Larkin’s early vast detention in Monaro, the Jesuits were refining if not tempering the ardent, husky Meagher. While he had saving intellectual and artistic enthusiasms—he would begin to play the clarinet, and join the Debating Society—in retrospect he saw Jesuit Clongowes as an ill-assorted place, not fully possessing Irish roots or English validity. ‘Architecturally considered,’ he wrote, ‘it is a curious compound.’ What he was taught he believed similarly mixed:

  they talked to us about Mount Olympus and Vale of Tempe; they birched us into a flippant acquaintance with the disreputable Gods and Goddesses of the golden and heroic ages; they entangled us in Euclid … gave us a look, through an interminable telescope, at what was doing in the New World; but, as far as Ireland was concerned, they left us like blind and crippled children, in the dark.

  There were, Meagher remembered, sacred Irish sites around Clongowes, such as at Maynooth the ruins of the Fitzgeralds who rebelled in 1534 against Henry VIII, or the grave of United Irishmen hero Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown churchyard. The boys went out on rambles under the care of Jesuits, ‘without a finger to mark them on our memories…. Ireland was the last nation we were taught to think of, to respect, to love and remember.’

  There is no reason to doubt the claim he would make, decades later, at the Irish Immigration Society of St Paul, Minnesota, about the

  one scene I witnessed in the morning of my boyhood which left upon my memory an impression that can never be effaced. That scene was the departure of an immigrant-ship from the quay of my native city of Waterford … On the deck of the ship were huddled hundreds of men, women and children—the sons and daughters of Innisfail … Young as I was, I had heard enough of the cruelty that had, for years and years, been done to Ireland, to know that her people were leaving her not from choice but from compulsion; that it was not the sterility of the soil, or any other unfavourable dispensation of nature, but the malignant hostility of laws and practices …

  At the same time as the boy Meagher took instructions from the Jesuits, a young man subject to different Irish influences, another future Australian convi
ct, was running his estate in Limerick, and participating in the national political debate. This man’s name was William Smith O’Brien, a tall young aristocrat already thirty years of age at the time of Larkin’s sentencing.

  O’Brien’s birth date was significant, 1803, three years after the abolition of the Irish Parliament and the initiation of the Union of Ireland and England. He would grow up a formidable enemy of that Union, since it saw laws made for Ireland by a Parliament at Westminster in which the Irish were represented by a mere 100 members. O’Brien’s birthplace was Dromoland Castle in County Clare, on the O’Brien estate of Dromoland. He was a direct descendant of Brian Boru, who in the tenth century had fought his way across Ireland, absorbing allegiances until recognised as High King. Boru had died, a Gaelic hero, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, when his forces defeated a combination of Irish and Danish opponents. Saving Ireland seemed to be a genetic responsibility for O’Brien. But so was saving family land. In the sixteenth century Murrough O’Brien had submitted his crown to that of Henry VIII for the sake of retaining ancestral land. Young William Smith O’Brien wrote in the 1820s: ‘The lapse of more than three hundred years which has taken place since that humiliation was inflicted upon our family does not reconcile me to it.’