Greetings from adelaide South Australia. This artical was written by myself for inclusion in the journal of the South Australian Heraldry and Genealogy Society. This artical was written,with that as convenor of the Irish special interest group, there was a requirment to write short articals for the journal. And I have been at this research game for a short time, and as the research is Irish you can understand that my attention had wandered in a different direction. This turned into the direction of Australian History. Primarily South Australian history, With this in mind I intended to study Australian history at the university of South Australia. The cost associated with this fell well outside my budget. So the next best thing was to find some books on the subject, this almost proved as far outside my budget as studying. Anyway i managed to get my hand on the 6 book set of the history of Australia by C.M.H. Clarke and first published by the Melbourne University Press in 1962. Early Irish Transportee?s in Australia Their faiths and an insight it played in their lives Irish transportation did not start until the late 1799 to the new Colony of New South Wales, some twelve years after Governor Phillip first achieved settlement, in January 1877. In between 1791 and 1800, 1140 males and 275 females, 1415 in total came from Irish Ports. Between 1801 till 1802, 701 (610 males and 91 females). Between 1803 and 1810, 546 (409 males and 47 females). >From 1811 to 1823, 5847 (5069 male 778 female). Or 8509 in total 7228 men and 1281 Women. (1) Contemporaries viewed them as martyrs in the cause of liberty and human happiness, just as historians who shared their aspiration esteemed them as the forerunner of those men at the end of the nineteenth century declared man?s power to make and unmake social conditions. So history became not so much half guess and half lies as a support for the political creed, in which process not only was the character of the man lost, but their immediate contribution suppressed. (2) The criminal law also provided the occasion for the coming of another great creative force in the shaping of that civilisation ? Irish Catholicism and the Irish character. In 1790 an act passed by the Irish Parliament empowered the lord-lieutenant or chief Governor to name a place to which felons and vagabonds could be transported. By an order of 1790 the lord ?lieutenant named New Holland. (3) In the same way the contribution of the Irish convicts lay not so much in their numbers, but in the transportation to New South Wales of the sense of their melancholy history, and Irish Catholicism. The Melancholy history was reflected in the types transported; for whereas in England and Scotland The thieves predominated, of the two thousand and eighty-six transported from Ireland between 1791 and 1803, about six hundred were convicted for riot and sedation. The religion persuasion proportions were reversed too, for on Irish ships the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants by about twenty-three to one.(4 ) One curious accident of that melancholy history was the absence of any selection among the convicts from Ireland. All were transported without reference to age, health or Crime.(5) As with the rest of the convicts the selection process was quite strict, the custom was to select men under 50 years of age, the average age of men over the years 1813 to 1823 was between 24 to 29. Women in the same years was 23 to 25 of age.(6) For Ireland a totally different set of rules seemed to apply, or as it appears a total lack of rules. In the northern counties the men and women sentenced to transportation were first brought to Dublin, where they were examined by a doctor, shaved, bathed, clothed and then shipped to Cork to board the convict transport at Cobh. The sheriffs in the southern counties dispatched their men and women direct to Cork. The quantity of food, the standard of cleanliness, and the clothing issued were the first taste some of the Irish had enjoyed of that higher civilisation which the English never wearied from reminding them was the blessing of the Protestant religion and British political institutions. The Irish convict generally arrived in New South Wales in sound health, and many of them expressed the wish that their passage could last forever. (7) The Irish sense of wonder, the awareness of magic in the world, and their quaint twist to the Christian Hope of the life of the world to come, preceded that Protestant ascendancy, the occasion of their nursing a melancholy history. For the Irish not only looked for the resurrection of the dead, but used their imagination to explore the delight of such a life: I would like to have a great lake of beer For the king of kings I?d love to be watching the family of heaven Drinking it through all eternity. They were a people whose holy faith and family affections lent a charm to and softened the harshness of their lives in their wretched cabin, and compensated them for their worldly privations.( ) The wretchedness of their lives contributed to the extremes in their behaviour, to the creation of a type who one hour was dignified with every kind and noble sentiment, only to be degraded the next by acts of the most brutal malevolence.(8) Misery and idleness encouraged drunkenness and feuds, and created too the conditions in which loyalty to their own groups and treachery to their eternal enemies governed standards of conduct. Lying, deceit, double dealing, perjury, subornation of witnesses, violence, even murder, ceased to be reprehensible or damnable if perpetrated against the Protestant ascendancy. They refused to believe in justice for Irish Catholics in British law courts: they despised their laws, defied their administration, and cursed all who collaborated with their oppressors. The poverty contributed to the gross and sordid ignorance of the largest part of the population, which brought in its train barbarous habits and taste, an ill-equipped agriculture, and improvident marriages, and aggravated that tendency to anarchy and violence. (9) One other effect of the Protestant ascendancy was the power and prestige of the priest in the Catholic Section of the Irish society. The Protestant Ascendancy had evicted the Catholic landlord and replaced him with a Absentee Protestant Landlord, whom the Catholic tenant despised as an alien and a reprobate. The Tenant turned to the Priest not only for the consolations of religion, but as a guide to a better leader in the fight against poverty and oppression. The priest looked to the tenant as the sole support for the maintenance and welfare of the church: so the priest was obliged to ride the popular wave, or be left on the beach to perish.(10) To the Protestant, this dependency of the Catholic on the priest tended to perpetrate that ignorance, superstition, priestcraft servility, poverty, filth, disease, drunkenness and lying which in Protestant eyes followed Catholicism as night followed day. For the Protestant believed passionately that Protestantism represented the higher level or order?industry, intelligence, and civilasation. (11) So here is a short insight what was the mood of the English Protestant on one side dictating his authority to, the Irish People who where predominantly Catholic in birth. It set the scene for many an interesting episode in the new Colony of New South Wales. I intend to write for the next issue of the journal about the The Irish uprising in the new colony. The total reference is to volume 1 chapter 6 ?Convict and the Faith of the founders? of a history of Australia by C.M.H. Clarke and first published by the Melbourne University Press in 1962. Ref. (1) Page 90, Ref.(2) Page102, Ref.(3) Page 93, ref. 4 page 102, ref.5 page 102 ref.6 page 94 ref. 7Page 102 ref. 8 page 103 ref.9 Page 104 ref. 10 Page 104 ref. 11 page 104/105 This Article was written with the permission of the copy write holder the Melbourne University Press, on behalf of Manning Clark. I wrote a second artical which i put out like this soon regards robert __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com