Margaret Wogan’s voyage to the colony of New South Wales took four months. Her arrival
was her chance to begin a new life and start a family. She faced challenges living
in a colony that held biases against Irish orphans because of their nationality,
religion, and morality.
On their arrival in Sydney Cove on 27 November 1849 on the William and Mary, the
girls from Ireland walked up Macquarie Street to their accommodation at Hyde Park
Barracks. The building was previously used to hold convicts and, from 1848, as an
immigration depot.1
In the Immigration Board records of her arrival, Margaret was described as 16 years
old, a farm servant from Skreen, County Meath.2 She could not read or write and was
in good health. Her religion was Roman Catholic. The girls were housed at the
barracks until their assignments were organised and contracts signed with
prospective employers. An orphan committee in each of the accommodation centres was
tasked with ensuring only respectable people hired the girls. Many of them were employed
for one to three years as indentured servants, and paid an annual wage between £5 and £11
depending on age and skill.3
- Museums of History New South Wales https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/hope-1848-1886/
- Museums of History NSW – State Archives Collection; Persons on bounty ships to
Sydney,
Newcastle, and Moreton Bay (Board’s Immigrant Lists); Series: 5317; Reel: 2460; Item:
[4/4915] - Blair and McIntyre, 58.
The 1844 Master-Servant Act, amended in 1848, increased penalties for child
apprentices who absconded and for masters who mistreated or abandoned them. Because of
breaches of the Act, some orphans were sent to regional areas following misdemeanours or
disagreements in their original postings.4
There is no record of Margaret’s indenture or when she became employed. In 1850,
there were many stories of indentures being cancelled, but no names of the orphan
girls were mentioned in the newspaper reports.
On 27 August 1850, the Immigration Board listed Margaret as one of nine girls to be
sent to Bathurst and delivered to the Police Magistrate at the Immigration Depot.
Mary Tynan and Margaret were from the William and Mary.5 The journey to Bathurst
took a week, with bullock drays used to transport the girls on a cart across the
mountains.
In the early 1840s Sophia Stanger, a free colonist of New South Wales, wrote to her
mother about the journey across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst.6 She described the
dray they had engaged as being full of bulky items and herself and her children
having to sit on top of the load with no comforts during the ride. Camping places for
bullock or horse drays were about 14 miles apart, and some had little water on offer,
so the drivers had to carry water in kegs. At stops where there was an inn,
innkeepers charged large amounts for a bed. Consequently, travellers would roll out their bed
underneath the drays.
- Museums of History NSW – State Archives Collection; Immigration Board Letters
NRS-5247
[4/4638] pp.254-255; Letter No: 50/686; Reel 3115 | Date: 27/8/1850-27/8/1850 - George Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales,
1813-841. (Dubbo, NSW: Review Publications, 1978), 255-264.
The route ran through Parramatta and Penrith, where a punt took the drays across the Nepean
River. After reaching Emu Plains, the mountains came into view, and the climb to Lapstone
Hill began. Sophia described its beauty with ‘large overhanging rocks on our left hand and its
awful gullies on our right’.
The pace of travel was slow as they reached traffic or heavy roads and the family
walked behind the dray until they arrived at a camp in Springwood. A few days later,
they reached Mount Victoria and started the gradual descent to the Western Plains.
At the time of Margaret’s arrival, Bathurst was a developing town surrounded by
mountains and sitting on a plain by the Macquarie River. The town had expanded
around the military barracks and gaol. Churches, stores, banks, and hotels were built
alongside government buildings. In 1851 the population of Bathurst was 2,591.7
The Bathurst Free Press was the local newspaper and was not as critical of the Irish
orphans as other papers within the colony. On 16 January 1850, it quoted an article
from another paper about the immigration of the Irish orphan girls causing much
‘attention and dissatisfaction’.8
The most strident newspaper criticism came from The Argus in January 1850:9
‘To withhold our funds from decent, eligible, well brought up girls to lavish it
upon a set of ignorant creatures, whose knowledge of household duty barely
reaches to distinguishing the inside from the outside of a potato, and whose
chief employment hitherto has consisted of some intellectual occupations as
occasionally trotting across a bog to fetch back a runaway pig. Our money
ought to be expended upon the rosy cheeked girls of England, who are pining
away without profitable employment or reasonable chance of marrying instead of being
wasted on these coarse, useless creatures who, with their squat, stunted figures, thick waists
and clumsy ankles, promises (sic) but badly for the physique of the future colonists of
Victoria’.
- Graham Lupp, Building Bathurst: the story of those who built Bathurst and central NSW
1815 – 1915. (Bathurst, NSW: Bathurst Regional Council, 2018), 53. - Sydney and Country News. Bathurst Free Press (Bathurst, NSW), 26 January 1850, 6.
- The Argus. The Argus (Melbourne, VIC), 24 January 1850, 2.
The article continued with a scathing attack on the girls’ religion and its impact on the
future colony:
‘These girls are, we believe, exclusively Roman Catholic; their main and
avowed object, in coming here, is to get married and that great end of
women’s ambition being usually achieved by the most ordinary of them, as
should calculate a little on the probable result. These women, all Roman
Catholics, will naturally wed with our shepherds, hutkeepers, stockmen, etc.,
who, as a body, we blush to say, are little better than heathen; shut out from
all Godly influence – without either access to, or desire for, religious
observances of any sort, and never hearing or using the name of their
Creator, but for the most horrible and blasphemous of purposes. The result of
such a match is, that if the children have any religion at all they will be Roman
Catholics to an individual; the mother will dictate the religion of the family and
every one of these girls will someday be the centre of a Roman Catholic
circle’.
This mindset towards the girls was typical of the attitude to the Irish in general at that time.
Source: Research by Linda Waters, a descendant of Margaret Wogan.