Free Kerry Girls by Kay Moloney Caball Page A

know what sort of quality we were going to have that we wanted clean knives. I told her that if she didn’t clean them Saturday she should Sunday – she said she wasn’t going to clean knives or boots or shoes. 10

    Reading the Australian newspapers of the day, there is no doubt that there was an inbuilt prejudice against both Irish females and their Catholic religion. The longer that the colony got settled and began to have confidence in its long-term future the more the wish was to have a replica of the ‘mother country’. Old fears and suspicions brought to the colony by English Protestants and Scottish Presbyterians in the main, came to the fore. A number of Ulster Scots, as they liked to be known, had taken their Presbyterian faith with them from the northern counties of Ireland. They had left small farms in Ulster and were now settled as substantial landowners in Australia, and they did not want to find themselves back with a Catholic majority. The difficulties of 700 years of Anglo-Irish relationships had followed to the other side of the world. These fears resulted in discrimination against the Irish population in the colony and the orphans were easy targets. As well as the strident editorials and letters to the main newspapers, James Dunmore Lang, who had protested even before they arrived, now got into his stride. He led a tireless crusade against ‘Popery’ and the Irish saying that they were ‘the most ignorant, the most superstitious and the very lowest in the scale of European civilisation’
    In hindsight, Lang had little to fear as a great numbers of the orphans married outside their faith and their large families were latter pillars of the different Christian Churches. Nineteen per cent of the 1,285 orphans who disembarked at Port Phillip were Protestant and 28 per cent were born in the nine counties of Ulster, but they were all labelled with the ‘Irish orphan’ stigma. 11
    So while the early colonial government wanted to promote family life within a stable society, in reality they wanted this to be a microcosm of what they had left behind in Britain – Victorian values in a white protestant community.
    The ‘orphan’ apprenticeship contracts became another political issue. While the strict structure of indenture or apprenticeship which in the main was adhered to, with recognised rates of pay of between £6 and £8 per year, the rates were actually lower than the current rates then being paid to female servants in the colony. There was a fear that this would have the effect of reducing the wages of all female servants.
    There is no doubt that the Earl Grey Scheme was meticulously planned and executed. The orphans were well looked after and properly fitted out for their new lives. But they were after all very young and inexperienced girls, sent to the other side of the world with little or no preparation for a new life there. Where they were guided and supported, as they were by Charles Strutt, they thrived. Where they were thrown on their own devices without support, they were not always successful.
    The colonial pressure brought the Earl Grey Scheme to an end barely two years after it started. Gold had been discovered in Australia, Britain did not want to lose control of what was now a valuable colony rather than a penal outpost. Considerable profits were being made from the different agricultural exports. British companies as well as individuals were investing in both bush and town. British banks and mortgage companies had by now set up to operate in Australia. By the 1830s, wool had overtaken whale oil as the colony’s most important export, and by 1850 New South Wales had displaced Germany as the main overseas supplier to British industry. 12 The Australians who had been paying the bills to bring the immigrants to their shores, made it clear that this would no longer be the case. The Colonial Office in London soon saw the way the political will was blowing and needed no further persuasion to