“Thorns in the sides of hundreds of Protestant husbands” : The emigration of Irish Female Orphans to the Australian Colonies and the Earl Grey Scheme controversy (1848-1850)

Abstract

International audienceBetween 1848 and 1850, over 4,000 female orphans were sent from Irish workhouses to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land as part of a scheme devised by Earl Grey, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in John Russell's Whig government. This emigration programme, conceived both as a solution to alleviate the consequences of the Irish famine and as a means to address the gender imbalance and the labour shortage in these colonies, had to be abandoned after only two years due to the political outcry it caused. From the landing of the first ship in Sydney in June 1848, the orphans became the target of violent attacks in the colonial press, while Earl Grey was accused by the Presbyterian minister and member of the New South Wales Legislative Council John Dunmore Lang of plotting to replace “Protestantism with ‘Romanism’” in the Australian colonies. This paper seeks to assess the importance of the closely intertwined anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish prejudice behind the various reactions, and show how the controversy can only be understood as part of the current dispute over transportation between London and the colonies, of which the young women became, to a large extent, the collateral victims