We Irish tend to think about Tasmania primarily as the place to which many Irishmen and Irishwomen were transported, either as ordinary criminals or political offenders, during the first half of the 19th century.
Formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land, it is today a delightful place to visit – full of craft shops and great restaurants serving local produce, including fine wines. It is the smallest of the Australian states, with a population of just under 600,000.
Among those transported was William Smith O’Brien, his death sentence for his part in the abortive Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 having been commuted to transportation for life to Van Diemen’s Land.
He was held on Maria Island and later in the Port Arthur penal colony. The cottages in which he lived in both places have been preserved and can be visited. Incarceration in Port Arthur was the fate of the most recalcitrant offenders among the transported convicts from the early 1830s onwards.
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O’Brien was sent there because he had tried to escape from Maria Island, but he was there for only a few months. Port Arthur is now a popular “dark tourism” destination, with remnants of the original buildings – including the main penitentiary – beautifully conserved.
Some 13,000 convict women were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, sometimes for what we would consider trivial infringements. There is a striking memorial to them by the Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie at the harbour in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, where they were disembarked.
Entitled Footsteps towards Freedom and comprising four bronze figures – three women and a child – it was unveiled in the presence of President Michael D Higgins during his State visit to Australia in 2017. The sculptures of the women were modelled from living descendants of convicts.
Speaking at the unveiling of the “Footsteps” memorial, Mr Higgins made reference to Edmund Dwyer Gray who – as the President said – “was born to an Irish nationalist family in Dublin in 1870 and went on to become the premier of Tasmania in 1939”.
He was a scion of the family that owned the Freeman’s Journal, Dublin’s leading daily newspaper in the 19th century. His grandfather was Sir John Gray, whose statue stands in O’Connell Street, Dublin.
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His father, also Edmund Dwyer Gray, was lord mayor of Dublin in 1880. The Grays lost control of the newspaper as a result of the Parnell split, and Edmund emigrated to Australia in 1894 and settled in Tasmania.
He was prominent as a journalist and a politician in Hobart from 1912 until his death in 1945.
Gray’s decision to emigrate to Australia was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that his mother was the daughter and namesake of the English philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, celebrated as the “emigrants’ friend” for her work on behalf of female emigrants to Australia who, often penniless on arrival, were in danger of falling into a life of crime and prostitution.
She was, however, cruelly caricatured by Charles Dickens as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1924, Gray recalled his grandmother – then an invalid, and back living in London – telling him as a child “of the lovely land of Australia”.
Caroline Chisholm is one of 12 women depicted in a remarkable stained-glass window erected in 1995 in St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Hobart, dedicated to “women whose saintly and heroic lives brought grace and life to God’s people”.
Also included in the window are three Irishwomen: Nano Nagle, founder of the Presentation Sisters; Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy; and Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Religious Sisters of Charity. All three of these orders have had a presence in Tasmania.
Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land has been characterised as banishment to the other end of the world. It was surely that, and in Hobart – an hour south of Melbourne by air – one is very aware of being at the last point in Australia before Antarctica.
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It was Roald Amundsen’s first stop on his way home after reaching the South Pole – the first person to do so. Outside the General Post Office in Hobart there is a plaque recording the fact that he sent a coded message to King Haakon VII of Norway from that building announcing his epic achievement.
The plaque notes that the telegram was sent by the manager for Telegraphs, Frank Bowden, who was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement was made in London.
