A fascinating trip into colonial history, the result of collaboration between family historians, genealogists and social historians

The women of Ireland, bond or free, have left a distinctive mark on Australia's population and culture. Irish Women in Colonial Australia provides an intriguing picture of the richness and variety of the Irish experience in the making of a new nation. Ireland provided the majority of female convicts for the first forty years of the penal colony, and Irish women made up a significant proportion of assisted and free immigrants throughout the nineteenth century. Through nine lively essays, a rare collaboration between family historians and professional historians enables the reader to range across the lives of murderers and orphans, workers and the new rich, country maids and slum dwellers. Who were these women? Why did they come here? What did they bring with them? And what did they make of their lives in the raw, new world so different from the world they left behind?

In just two years, 750 young Irish women sailed from Cork to Sydney on the Duchess of Northumberland in 1834 and again in 1836 and 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. Their experiences are representative of countless numbers of single immigrant women who came to Australia during the nineteenth century.

Irish immigrants – although despised as inferior on racial and religious grounds and feared as a threat to national security – were one of modern Australia’s most influential founding peoples. In his landmark 1986 book The Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell argued that the Irish were central to the evolution of Australia’s national character through their refusal to accept a British identity. A New History of the Irish in Australia takes a fresh approach. It draws on source materials not used until now and focuses on topics previously neglected, such as race, stereotypes, gender, popular culture, employment discrimination, immigration restriction, eugenics, crime and mental health. This important book also considers the Irish in Australia within the worldwide Irish diaspora. Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall reveal what Irish Australians shared with Irish communities elsewhere, while reminding us that the Irish–Australian experience was – and is – unique. ‘A necessary corrective to the false unity of the term “Anglo-Celtic”, this beautifully controlled and clear-sighted intervention is timely and welcome. It gives us not just a history of the Irish in Australia, but a skilful account of how identity is formed relationally, often through sectarian, class, ethnic and racial divisions. A masterful book.’ — Professor Rónán McDonald, University of Melbourne

On account of its remarkable reach as well as its variety of schemes and features, migration in the Victorian era is a paramount chapter of the history of worldwide migrations and diasporas. Indeed, Victorian Britain was both a land of emigration and immigration. International Migrations in the Victorian Era covers a wide range of case studies to unveil the complexity of transnational circulations and connections in the 19th century. Combining micro- and macro-studies, this volume looks into the history of the British Empire, 19th century international migration networks, as well as the causes and consequences of Victorian migrations and how technological, social, political, and cultural transformations, mainly initiated by the Industrial Revolution, considerably impacted on people’s movements. It presents a history of migration grounded on people, structural forces and migration processes that bound societies together. Rather than focussing on distinct territorial units, International Migrations in the Victorian Era balances different scales of analysis: individual, local, regional, national and transnational. Contributors are: Rebecca Bates, Sally Brooke Cameron, Milosz K. Cybowski, Nicole Davis, Anne-Catherine De Bouvier, Claire Deligny, Elizabeth Dillenburg, Nicolas Garnier, Trevor Harris, Kathrin Levitan, Véronique Molinari, Ipshita Nath, Jude Piesse, Daniel Renshaw, Eric Richards, Sue Silberberg, Ben Szreter, Géraldine Vaughan, Briony Wickes, Rhiannon Heledd Williams.

The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and fascinating story." --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost Historian Deborah J. Swiss tells the heartbreaking, horrifying, and ultimately triumphant story of the women exiled from the British Isles and forced into slavery and savagery-who created the most liberated society of their time. The Tin Ticket takes us to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of Agnes McMillan, whose defiance and resilience carried her to a far more dramatic rebellion; Agnes's best friend Janet Houston, who rescued her from the Glasgow wynds and was also transported to Van Diemen's Land; Ludlow Tedder, forced to choose just one of her four children to accompany her to the other side of the world; Bridget Mulligan, who gave birth to a line of powerful women stretching to the present day. It also tells the tale of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their lives. Ultimately, it is the story of women discarded by their homeland and forgotten by history-who, by sheer force of will, become the heart and soul of a new nation.

An invaluable book for historians and general readers alike, and all those interested in genealogy and Australian connections. --Book Jacket.