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

by Thomas Keneally

Three women were to travel initially to the inland town of Goulburn—Mary Shields, a Bridget Conelly, who had arrived on the Diamond from Cork in March 1838, and Margaret Carthy whose transport the Sir Charles Forbes had put into Sydney on Christmas Day 1837. Shields herself had been applied for by William Bradley of Lansdown Park, Goulburn. The other two were off to similar employers in the County of Argyle hinterland. There is every reason to believe that Michael O’Flynn, now eight years old, travelled with his mother, bearing his reading and writing into the bush.

  Each of the three women carried on her person her ticket-of-leave, indicating that she was permitted to stay in the district of Goulburn. The women were to present their papers on demand to magistrates and police along the way, in the knowledge that any dallying or diversion from their approved route would be reported. This was their first extended and open experience of a society which was said to be the most debased on earth, and a landscape in which any European woman was a rare sight likely to release male frenzy. How they negotiated it, how they evoked protection and respect from some men to balance the savage intentions of others, we can only surmise. Ticket-of-leave men driving wagons or droving sheep watched them pass, and there were also crowds of English and Irish convicts in road and timber-cutting gangs. Unhappy and angry felons, some in chains, brushed their eyes over the travellers in sullen desire. That these three came from the Female Factory was evident in their well-kept clothing, and women from the Factory, because of their uniforms, and their repute both as racy women and potential brides, possessed a certain éclat.

  By day, they travelled on their own recognisances on the outside seats and perches of coaches, which transport consumed part of their 10-shilling advance, or took rides on wagons, walking up the steeper grades. They took pains to look like nobodies’ fools, not that they could have seemed an impressive company. Margaret Carthy was the squat worldling, a Dubliner, 5 feet 1, with light blue eyes. Her nose was remarked to be broad at the point, and she was older than the other two, in her early thirties. Brown-eyed Bridget Conelly, the marks of smallpox on her face, tallest of the three at 5 feet 3 inches, was from Galway and therefore an Irish-speaker. The offences of all three women were identical: stealing clothes.

  We do not know how much contact Carthy, Conelly and Shields chose to have with men in the camps along the way, or whether they wished to answer Gaelic endearments shouted from campfires. But the authorities did not want to see women molested or prostituting themselves around the night encampments, and police magistrates assigned them shelter in empty cells or unused police shacks. To the Factory women, a roof was welcome, for the Australian winter nights were growing frosty, and in the mornings a skin of ice needed to be broken on the washing pails.

  The browned, dusty country through which Mary Shields, Carthy and Conelly journeyed was, however, beginning to revive after some hopeful winter rains and to show an occasional burst of green now that the biblically long drought was ending. In this countryside, drought and land speculation had obliterated a great number of William Bradley’s fellow entrepreneurs and squatters. William Brodribb, Hugh’s immediate employer, had had to abandon his pastoral lease in the Monaro and was pleased to be given well-paid work managing Bradley’s ever-increasing squatting leases beyond the Limits of Location. The Bank of Australia also failed that year of Mary’s release, and some of the oldest free settler families were swept away by this disaster. The emancipists’ bank, the Bank of New South Wales, survived, underpinned by the massive trading deposits of the late Samuel Terry, ‘the Botany Bay Rothschild,’ a convict who had been transported for stealing 400 pairs of stockings in Salford, Lancashire.

  One of the chief signs of the recent economic crisis which the three women bound for Goulburn noticed from the start of their journey was the stench of boiling-down works in the bush and on the outskirts of every settlement. Earlier that year an Irish settler from Mayo named Henry O’Brien decided that the few pence value bankruptcy sheriffs put on sheep could not be a correct assessment. He conducted an experiment in his premises in Fort Street, Sydney, boiling down sheep for the tallow used in the manufacture of candles and soap. O’Brien reasoned that a sheep could produce 12 to 15 pounds’ weight of tallow even if starved. Eight hundred tolerably fat sheep would cost £109 to boil down and deliver to London, where the tallow would sell for £350. O’Brien calculated thus that—boiled down—a sheep was actually worth 6 shillings. So there was a bottom value to livestock. It could be said therefore that a Mayo man had saved European New South Wales from economic devastation—but at an environmental price. As flocks of sheep were driven to tallow houses and boiling-down vats, the foulness of the process pervaded the country, increasing the suspicions of the native people that these white ghosts were an accursed and poisonous race.

  Having crossed the Razorback and then sloped down Towrang Hill, the women approached the Goulburn police magistrate, who arranged for them to be delivered to their employers. Mary, at the end of her institutional existence, said goodbye to the last of her Factory comrades. She went in the first instance to Lansdown Park, Bradley’s home near Goulburn, a fair imitation of a British country estate, which employed dozens of convicts and former convicts. Recently elected to the new Legislative Council of New South Wales, representing the County of Argyle, Bradley had left management of his business within the Limits to a young Englishman, John Phillips, to whom Mary would at first have presented herself. She was not, however, to stay long here in the defined regions, but was slated to work as housekeeper or servant in the Monaro bush with the manager of the huge Bradley sheep-runs further south, Mr Brodribb. In the meantime, serving and sewing for Mrs Emily Bradley, daughter of the explorer William Hovell, and her five daughters at Lansdown Park, Mary—over a clay pipe of tobacco and a mug of tay taken with other Irish women—got what useful advice she could about remote stations.

  When Mary and her son Michael went off on a wagon to the far south, they still had to travel about the same distance as already covered, and in wilder and less administered country. It was of course possible, in view of what developed, that the wagon-driver was Hugh Larkin, now himself a veteran of the system, come to Goulburn for supplies. If so he would have received heavy warnings from Phillips as to his demeanour towards the woman from the Factory. The wagon advanced over the Limestone Plains and gradually upwards into the broad, grand, windy, stone-strewn, mountain-rimmed reaches of Monaro, where European women became a rarer and rarer phenomenon, and where men might feel liberated by suffering and distance from restraints they accepted in the churched and sainted world. Again Michael served as something of a protection as mother and son took their rest in rough company, in overseers’ and shepherds’ huts along the way.

  The homestead at which she arrived at last, her Factory neatness jaded by distance, lay beyond Cooma Creek at a place named Coolringdon. The approaches to the modern Coolringdon homestead lie along an avenue of fir trees planted to cut the wind, but that avenue did not exist when Mary arrived. The main house was not much more elegant than the habitations she had visited along her track, and certainly nothing like Lansdown Park. Brodribb planned to marry though and to introduce refinements. Inside the slab timber and bark walls, on the packed earth floor, Mary found an occasional excellent item of furniture, and good linen and silverware, and bound editions of the Latin and Greek classics as well as volumes of sermons, histories and even novels.

  The bark kitchen where Mary fulfilled some of her duties was separate from the house. The huts of the workers on the station stood about, of no more elevated construction than that of the master. In one of them resided her future lover, Hugh Larkin, whose Irishness and humour were, she clearly felt, close to her own.

  Larkin, one of the Great Dan O’Connell’s most distantly placed admirers, had by the time of Mary’s arrival at Coolringdon served ten years of his life sentence. Eighteen months earlier, on 21 December 1841, he had filled out a form he got from the police magistrate in the new village of Cooma, 25 or so
miles away. It was an application to have Esther and the children sent to Australia at the British government’s expense. ‘The Petitioner is desirous of being reunited to the family from which he was separated at the time of his transportation.’ Brodribb certified that ‘the Petitioner above named has been in my service since the month of March 1834, during which period his conduct has been such, that I respectfully recommend his Petition to the favorable consideration of His Excellency …’ Hugh’s application was signed too by a police magistrate and a clergyman.

  Esther’s own appeal to Dublin Castle in 1840 implies that there had been some letters between Hugh and herself, and that Hugh was operating on the basis of Esther’s stated willingness to cross the mighty ocean. Esther Tully of Lismany, Galway, of the Parish of ‘Cluntowescirt nr Lawrencetown,’ was listed in his own handwriting as spouse, and the children named as Patrick ten years and Hugh eight. The referees Larkin nominated in his arduous, broad-stroke handwriting were Walter Lawrence, Esquire of Belview, Laurencetown, County Galway, Ireland, and ‘Right Reverend Thomas Cowan, Bishop of Loughrea, County Galway.’ Hugh could have found out these men were alive and willing to be referees only from Esther. In her late twenties in 1840, she hiked by road to Loughrea to bespeak the bishop, or lobbied him while he was in Clontuskert parish on a pastoral visit. Similarly, she took a short walk south through country in which she knew every cabin, face, nuance of stone and mound and field, and up the long avenue to Belview House, to ask Mr Lawrence for the use of his name so that she might be removed from the familiar to an Australian future. For still she and her sons worked at Somerset, still she must find a space for herself within the ambiguous relationship with land and landlord. Hugh’s application would be her ticket out of a connection which, at the large house, in the cabin, in the field, poisoned the spirit.

  Having filled in the form, Larkin must have enjoyed the heartiest Christmas yet of his Australian exile. From assignments all over the Australian bush, other men also applied for reunion. James Doolan, a shipmate aboard Parmelia, wanted his wife Margaret Egan and two children to join him. Stephen Doyle of the Lady McNaughton, serving seven years for a Ribbon crime, had applied for his wife Jane McCone of Newry Street, Banbridge. But he had been flogged in January 1839, for losing sheep on Patrick’s Plains. A year later he was flogged again. His application would be marked, ‘Not Recommended on account of punishment.’

  Hugh’s petition needed to make its way by bullock wagon and mail coach to Sydney, where two months later a Colonial Secretary’s clerk checked Larkin’s record and wrote: ‘Nothing recorded.’ On that basis, Governor Gipps himself inscribed the petition: ‘Allowed.’ In May 1842, the Colonial Secretary in Sydney told the Superintendent of Convicts to apprise the successful applicants.

  Dependent on shipping availability, the approving document would have reached Ireland in the summer of 1842. There was no problem with the way Hugh had addressed the petition. Laurencetown was a well-known market centre, Lismany a few miles north of it. Since she was still in the parish of Clontuskert, in Laurencetown or Lismany, under the eyes of relatives and the clergy, it was not likely that a lover delayed her. In early 1840 she had been more than willing to go, in fact desperate to. If she did receive the invitation to travel, it may have been an elderly and ailing parent who halted her departure—it may even have been Hugh’s mother. Or perhaps when it came down to addressing the journey, Esther found she did not have the financial means to travel with her sons to the port of embarkation, or acquire the food and range of clothing required for the journey. Or maybe she never received the approval: sometimes, for reasons of inefficiency, laziness, malice or loss of documents, the papers were never delivered.

  The most likely, most pathetic explanation for Esther’s failure to reach Australia was the success of the anti-transportation movement. Convict transportation to New South Wales had been ended by a Royal Order-in-Council in August 1840. And the wives of convicts could receive free passage only on convict vessels. Even when Esther Larkin made her petition in February 1840, it was already nearly too late to link up with the last women’s ship, the Margaret from Dublin. About 1848 arrangements were made for convicts’ wives to travel on emigrant ships, but all these adjustments would be too late.

  The Reverend John Dunmore Lang, founder of Presbyterianism in New South Wales, complained that ‘the knot of squatters in the Legislative Council’ wanted to revive transportation. To supply labour needs left unsatisfied by the end of transportation to New South Wales, hill coolies (natives of the mountains north of Calcutta) were imported, and Chileans too, who pervaded the bush with the sound of guitar. The renewal of transportation was Esther’s best hope. There were still transports travelling to Van Diemen’s Land, but it was probably assumed by a bureaucrat within the Castle that Esther, landed in Hobart without connecting transport, might be reduced to prostitution. So, for lack of a ship, Esther remained, and all inquiries and demands she made at barrack gates in Ballinasloe and at constabulary posts in the countryside were futile.

  The Colonial Secretary in Sydney had signed Hugh’s ticket-of-leave on 1 June 1843. But near-freedom brought no hope of an Australian hearth. The dream of showing Esther the bush, of introducing sons to its particular grandeurs and squalors, of eating meat and damper with them in quantities to make them cry out in wonder, could no longer be entertained without pain. By the time Mary Shields and her son ascended the slight slope where the homestead of Coolringdon stood, Hugh was entitled to go out and seek employment where he chose; to set up in business in his own right if he wished. He chose to remain in this isolation, in the rawness and splendid space of that rising plain. He might never get his conditional pardon if he went off to some district more administratively fussy, or fell foul of new masters. Larkin knew Brodribb, Brodribb knew him. Even so, the arrival of Mary may also have been a cause of his sticking with Brodribb.

  One thing can be said for Hugh Larkin at this time of his exchanging flirtatious jokes in Gaelic and English with Mary: in his involuntary service Larkin had experienced empire-making adventures on the Sydney side of the Australian Alps, and on the far side too, where tangles of hills, lagoons, rivers, billabongs and thickets ran away towards the town of Melbourne on Port Phillip Bay. For someone who had worked as Brodribb’s man from the mid-1830s onwards, the tedium of bush life would have been interspersed with remarkable excursions. These he would ultimately have a chance to relate to Mary Shields and to children yet unborn, as well as—in ultimate freedom—to other men in pubs and shebeens in Goulburn.

  As drought hit Brodribb’s pastures in the Monaro in the late 1830s, he decided livestock could be moved west over the mountains to pasture in what is now the state of Victoria. He started out from his station with a considerable expedition: two bullock drays, 1,200 head of cattle, 3,000 sheep and 40 horses, and a number of his assigned servants. Though, as in the Americas, cattle stockmen despised shepherds, trusted men became proficient in both areas. They could both shear sheep and ride up into the mountains to chase and herd at breakneck pace wild bushians, wandering herds whose young bulls had never seen a rider before.

  Beyond the Port Phillip Pass in the Australian Alps, the country seemed wild but verdant. The natives of the region put up resistance, and in 1838, Mr William Faithfull of Goulburn had been attacked by Aboriginals in this location near the Hume River. Nine of Faithfull’s men had been killed and a large number of his sheep destroyed. So, beyond the mountains and in shared peril, convicts kept the same watches as Brodribb, and carried carbines. Given that he and many of his fellows had been transported for ‘Being in Arms,’ this must have struck Hugh as a divine satiric turn. It was from the weapons of these hair-trigger dispossessed of Europe that the natives received the thunderous news of their own coming dispossession.

  Brodribb for a period established a station in this country on the Broken River, and kept flocks and a herd there. With a trusted man—it might well have been Hugh—he rode to Port Phillip and into the small,
shambling town of Melbourne, whose few thousand Europeans had recently been joined by its first shipload of Scottish immigrants, and negotiated deals on ‘breeding cattle, sight unseen,’ to be delivered to Melbourne.

  On Brodribb’s 1839 expedition from Monaro, his brother Frank, with his own party of drovers, met him on the Melbourne side of the mountains and helped him on his way. They always needed to use ‘every vigilance.’ There were three watches during the night, ‘three men and myself took the first three hours … Large fires were kept burning all around the cattle …’ While Brodribb, having made his delivery, was still in Melbourne with some of his men, an explorer appeared from the east in the streets of the town. It was an extraordinary fellow named Count Paul Strzelecki, whose interest in remote places had derived in part from a failed elopement in his Polish boyhood and who did not then know that his future would be so taken up by the Irish question. He had named the stretch of country he had just crossed, a good way to the south of the track Brodribb had taken, Gippsland—after Mary Shields’s benefactor and his own patron. Brodribb began talking with Strzelecki about opening up Gippsland, establishing a port on that coastline from which cattle and sheep, shipped from New South Wales to Gippsland, could be driven from there to Melbourne, fattening along the way. So Hugh’s master called a public meeting in Melbourne, established a consortium to develop Gippsland, and chartered the 300-ton vessel Singapore to find a harbour on the Gippsland coast to and from which livestock could be driven. Thus many of Brodribb’s convict servants found themselves on the shores of Gippsland’s great coastal lagoons east of Melbourne, armed with carbines and a cannon, holding a little beachhead on the edge of primeval bush at an anchorage named Port Albert.

  Brodribb, for all his energy and that of his convicts and ticket-of-leave men, was unable to find a good stock route from Gippsland to Melbourne. And though he named one of the rivers he encountered in his reconnoitring in honour of Lieutenant Governor Latrobe of Port Phillip, from whom the Brodribb consortium hoped to get land grants in and around Port Albert, Governor Gipps in Sydney sent a surveyor to prepare maps for the development of Gippsland on Sydney’s terms. These did not include allowing Brodribb’s syndicate any of the 20,000 acres immediately around the port.