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BOOK REVIEW
| Barbara Hall, The Irish Vanguard: The Convicts of the 'Queen', Ireland to Botany Bay, 1791, Barbara Hall, Sydney, 2009. pp. xix + 238. $50.00 paper.
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| On 26 September 1791, the first ship bringing convicts directly from Ireland sailed into Sydney harbour. The Queen disembarked 126 men (another seven had died during the voyage), 22 women, and three small children transported with their convict mothers. At least 23 of the men had already endured a bungled voyage of transportation. Sent to Nova Scotia as one of the final cohorts shipped to the American colonies, they were off-loaded by a ruthless captain on the inhospitable shores of Newfoundland. Those who survived the trek to St John's were received with horror by locals who sent them back to London, where they were received with equal consternation because they posed a legal conundrum by returning from transportation while still under sentence. Legal niceties were overcome by sending them to Ireland, and from there to New South Wales on the Queen. |
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Biographical details about these unfortunate travellers and their shipmates have been pieced together by Barbara Hall in this fifth in her series of books about convicts on the five ships sent from Ireland before 1800. The book is structured as a biographical dictionary with an entry for each convict. As Hall says, 'the amount of information found on individuals can vary enormously'. Verifying even the most basic details has been complicated by the destruction of Ireland's transportation registers during the 1922 attack on the State Paper Office in Dublin. Hall counts as her major achievement 'the collating and publishing, for the first time, of a large number of trials and/or crimes'. I would add as an equally important contribution her painstaking pursuit of what happened after they disembarked. |
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Their death rate in New South Wales was appalling. Emaciated when they arrived, they complained of short rations during the voyage. A board of enquiry decided that they had a case – 'but that it was impossible to apportion blame'. In a colony near starvation, ailing convicts from the Queen struggled to find the nourishment they needed, and within a year of arrival, only 50 of the 126 male transportees remained alive. Given these circumstances, many entries in The Irish Vanguard provide nothing beyond information about crimes, trials, and burials. In other instances, Hall has tracked her subjects through their periods of sentence and into later life. |
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Occasionally the entries run for several pages, with details which seem to invite a novelist's further imagining of who these people are, and what they felt during the events recorded. Catherine Edwards is one of the most tantalising examples. A month after disembarking from the Queen, Catherine suffered the death of her two-year-old son. Less than a week later, she apparently joined a group of 20 men who absconded 'with the chimerical idea', wrote David Collins, 'of walking to China or of finding in this country a settlement wherein they would be received and entertained without labour'. Somehow Catherine (who was seven months pregnant) became separated from the others, and wandered through the bush for three days on her own until she emerged at the coast, was spotted by a government boat, and returned to the settlement. There she gave birth to another boy, who lived less than two months. And then her luck seemed to improve. She took up with another convict named William Yardley, and over the next decade they acquired land and became the parents of four children. In 1806, however, their home burned to the ground, with Yardley inside. At first the Sydney Gazette pointed to 'the rancour of the Branch natives', but soon was reporting that Catherine and a male servant had been arrested for suspected murder. She got off for lack of evidence, and later married again, but in 1818 her body was found below a high rock not far from a public road, 'a dog was gnawing her hand and had eaten off the thumb'. Her son-in-law was tried for the murder, and convicted. |
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Barbara Hall's study of convicts on the Queen makes a valuable contribution to understanding Australia's earliest days of settlement by turning our attention to individual men and women who had not come of their own free will to a land they experienced as wilderness, but many of whom nevertheless took to the life of the pioneer and brought up families whose descendants are now interested in their stories. For academic historians following patterns as well as individuals, these biographical outlines offer texture and detail. The unevenness of the sources, the scarcity of information, are themselves reminders of how precarious the original venture really was – especially for those whose survival depended on navigating through both the convict system and the strangeness of an utterly foreign place. |
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| University of Tasmania |
LUCY FROST | |
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