Irish Australians

[9] This nominated ancestry was third behind English and Australian in terms of the largest number of responses and represents 9.5% of the total population of Australia.

As late as the 1860s Fenian prisoners were being transported, particularly to Western Australia, where the Catalpa rescue of Irish radicals off Rockingham was a memorable episode.

This changed after the Second World War, as people migrating from the new Republic of Ireland (which came into being in April 1949) were no longer British subjects eligible for the assisted passage.

[citation needed] It has been argued that Irish Australians and Aboriginal people (including those of mixed descent) feel that there is a historical and sentimental link between the two groups.

It has been pointed out that under the new colonial and state administrations, a European-style surname was required for official records relating to Aboriginal people.

The local police (often of Irish stock) collected the relevant census data and allocated their own names to Aboriginal people for official purposes.

[15] Over four thousand young female orphans from Irish workhouses were shipped to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine (1848–50) to meet a demand for domestic servants.

Although a number eventually died in poverty, others made upwardly mobile marriages, often surviving older husbands to experience long widowhoods.

[19] An account from 1800 refers to convicts speaking Irish among themselves (this being regarded as evidence of conspiracy), and it was acknowledged in the 1820s that priests could not perform their duties in the colony of New South Wales without a knowledge of the language.

[22] Irish immigration was at its height in the 1860s, the main counties of origin being Clare, Tipperary, Limerick and Kilkenny, all of them areas where the language was still strong.

[28] By this point, however, with all sign languages experiencing the effects of oralism and audism, AISL has over time become relegated to small friend groups and select families.

[citation needed] Before 1890, Irish Catholics opposed Henry Parkes, the main liberal leader, and free trade, since both represented Protestant, English landholding and wealthy business interests.

In the great strike of 1890 Cardinal Moran, the head of the church, was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were critical of organised labour throughout the decade.

After 1900, Catholics joined the Labor Party because its stress on equality and social welfare appealed to people who were workers and small farmers.

The referendum on conscription in 1917, following the Easter Uprising in Dublin, caused an identification between the Irish, Sinn Féin, and the anti-conscription section of Labor.

Pro-conscription forces exploited this, denouncing outspoken anti-conscription Catholics, such as Archbishop Mannix, and T. J. Ryan, the Premier of Queensland, for disloyalty.

Labor Prime Ministers John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Paul Keating were also of Irish Catholic stock.

The careers of Gerard Henderson, Frank Devine and Padraic McGuinness are illustrative of the drift by some Irish Australians away from Labor and towards the conservative side of politics in the later twentieth century.

[citation needed] Walker (2007) compares Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain respecting issues of identity and 'Irishness.'

The outlaw Ned Kelly (1855–80) achieved the status of a national folk hero; ballads, films and paintings have since 1878 perpetuated the legend.

The Irish settler in Australia, both voluntary and forced, was crucial to the survival and prosperity of the early colonies both demographically and economically.

The early immigrants to Australia from Ireland were mainly members of penal colonies; assemblies or any such expression of Irish culture were not permitted.

Fitzpatrick (2005) explores the international diffusion of the Loyal Orange Institution, with comparative reference to Freemasonry, its main model.

Three alternative explanations are discussed for its appeal outside Ireland: that it facilitated the assimilation of emigrants, transmitted 'tribal' Irish animosities to fresh contexts, or adapted itself to preexisting sectarian rivalries abroad.

These hypotheses are tested using evidence from South Australia, where Orangeism flourished in the absence of heavy Ulster Protestant immigration.

McGrath (1995) demonstrates the success of the Catholic nuns who arrived in Parramatta, New South Wales, from Ireland in 1888, noting their group's growth from nine newcomers into a flourishing congregation of over two hundred women within sixty years.

[citation needed] Their relationship to the clergy was one of devotion, dedication, and subordination, thus reflecting the status of women in the larger population.

The Australian miniseries and historical drama Against the Wind deals with both the British rule of Ireland, and the development of New South Wales and Australia.

Ruth Park's 1948 book The Harp in the South portrays the life of a Catholic Irish Australian family living in a Sydney slum.