Settling

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, about 1853. National Library of Australia.

Exploration and rural settlement: Duffy's big map

Charles Gavan Duffy, (1816–1903) a follower of the 'Young Ireland' nationalist party in the 1840s, was arrested in 1848 and tried five times, unsuccessfully, for high treason. Ireland was then in the grip of the Great Famine, and Duffy felt that one practical solution to the problems besetting the country would be to make it possible for poor tenant farmers to buy and own their land. Nothing came of his efforts in that direction, however, and in 1855, despairing of the British parliament's ability to improve conditions in Ireland, he settled in Melbourne.

In 1856 Duffy was elected to Victoria's first Legislative Assembly. During the second half of the 1850s, the easily won alluvial gold, which had attracted thousands of immigrants, began to run out, and a major issue of the day was what to do with this restless surplus population. In Victoria, as in Ireland, Duffy supported the idea of giving access to land to those with little capital. Farming would provide a 'healthy and pleasant pursuit' for ex-diggers who might otherwise become 'discontented and dangerous to public safety'. And for his Irish countrymen, who had been driven from the land in Ireland, Duffy saw the prospect of a 'more prosperous home on the genial soil of Victoria'.

Duffy's 'Land Act' (The Victorian Lands Act 1862) attempted to cater for this land hunger. In his Guide to the Land Law of Victoria, Duffy referred to a 'large map', hanging in Melbourne's Parliament House, which showed the distribution of land ownership in Victoria. Apart from areas unsuitable for agriculture, official surveyors identified 4 million hectares where men who had been labourers in England, or tenant farmers in Scotland or Ireland, could become owners of the soil. Intending settlers could 'select' blocks of up to 260 hectares for a small initial sum, with the rest to be paid as rent over a number of years.

The Act failed because the great pastoralists or squatters, especially in the Western Districts, were able to evade its provisions and acquire the land for even larger sheep and cattle runs.

Tropical habit for the Sisters of St John of God. St John of God Heritage Centre, Perth.

Exploration and rural settlement: Tropical habit

On 6 June 1907 an amazing sight was to be seen at Beagle Bay, Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia. Wading ashore, through water over a metre deep, were six Irish nuns, Sisters of St John of God, in black habits. In wet clothes and bare feet they walked 11 kilometres to their new home, the Pallottine Fathers' mission station. The sisters were part of a party of nine led by Mother Antonio O'Brien; seven came from the order's mother house in County Wexford, Ireland, and two from Perth.

In their early years at Beagle Bay, and later in Broome, the St John of God sisters wore their characteristic long black habits. When Irishman Father John Creagh arrived in 1916, he was horrified at their living conditions. Among other improvements, Creagh ordered white bales of cotton from Perth, and the sisters gradually adopted lighter, white habits more suitable for work in the tropics.

The sisters today are working actively for reconciliation, having acknowledged that in the past they were one of those agents of change that had a destructive effect on the culture and society of Indigenous Australians in the north-west. Many of that Stolen Generation of children, educated by the nuns and boarded in their institutions, have spoken favourably of the Irish sisters, recalling how they genuinely seemed to care about them. Not long before she died in 2007, after 67 years at Beagle Bay, Sister Bernadette O'Connor was asked whether she wanted to go home to Ireland. 'Why should I want to do that?' she replied. 'You are my people.'

Shield made by Wathaurong people, Victoria about 1836. National Museums Northern Ireland.

Contact: Wathaurong weapons

It is widely acknowledged that the development of European Australia since 1788 has occurred on land taken from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Irish settlers profited as much from these acts of dispossession as any other group.

The earliest major European settlement around Melbourne, or what was then the Port Phillip district, began in the mid-1830s. Prominent among some of the early settlers who came to Port Phillip from Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land) around this time were two young Irishmen, John and Robert William von Stieglitz. They took up sheep runs near Geelong and at Ballan, 80 kilometres west of Melbourne. Robert's attitude towards those who had occupied the land before the settlers set up their runs was typical of the times: 'The general rule is, if the people cultivate or grass the land they have a claim on it, but these creatures did neither'. It was the perfect settler excuse for the expropriation of land, by force if necessary.

Unsurprisingly, the von Stieglitz brothers soon came into violent conflict with the local people. Robert, in particular, tells of going out to hunt Aboriginal people who had attacked and killed settlers. When they returned to Ireland in the 1850s, the brothers took home a remarkable collection of weapons picked up after one such expedition. Among the earliest Aboriginal material collected in the Port Phillip district, these artefacts are a reminder of the reality of frontier conflict in early Victoria.

Ballan House in 1851 (detail) by Emma von Stieglitz. State Library of Victoria.

John and Emma von Stieglitz lived in Ballan homestead, north-west of Melbourne, in the 1830s and 1840s. They employed local Aboriginal people, and it was probably during this period that they acquired domestic artefacts which they brought back with them to Ireland.

Doll's house and furniture about 1871. On loan from the Earl of Belmore.

Cities: The Australia House

In 1868 the fourth one of Ireland's leading peers of the realm, accompanied by his wife, Honoria, landed in Sydney to take up his post as the new governor of New South Wales. The couple were given a hearty welcome and quickly whisked off to Government House, where they spent the rest of the day at a formal reception, shaking hands with the colony's rich and influential citizens. Few probably paid much attention to one brief sentence in the lengthy report of the governor's arrival issued the next day: 'The four children of the Earl and Countess of Belmore were brought on shore at a subsequent hour of the day'.

For the next four years, Government House was also a family home to the four young Belmore girls: Therese, Florence, Madeleine and Mary. Lady Belmore's delicate condition, and the summer heat, led the family to a country retreat, Throsby Park in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, and it was here that the couple's first son was stillborn. Another son, Armar, was born in Government House in May 1870. His wife's poor health, however, caused Lord Belmore to ask for an early recall to Britain, and the family left Sydney in 1872.

The people of the city thought highly enough of their governor and his wife to present the children with a doll's house on their departure. Known to the family ever after as the 'Australia House', it may have reminded them, in the cold northern winter, of the sunlight and warmth of New South Wales.

(clockwise from top) The Earl of Belmore, the Countess of Belmore, Ladies Florence, Mary, Madeleine and Therese, 1868–70 from photograph album, 'Who and what we saw in the Antipodes'. Attributed to Helen Lambert. National Gallery of Australia.

Cities: The Australia House

The fourth Earl of Belmore needed a well-paid job. The expenses of his Irish estate and a growing family led him to accept the post of governor of New South Wales in 1867. He arrived in Sydney in 1868 with his wife and four young daughters.

Apart from his considerable administrative abilities, and his skill at managing the colony's unruly politicians, Belmore was appreciated for his extensive travels to meet the people. Everywhere he encouraged local agricultural and railway development, describing himself as a 'practical man of business'. In all, he made 16 trips around the colony by rail, steamer, buggy and on horseback, before the family returned to Britain in 1872.