Fair Delinquents?: Irish Famine Orphans of Colonial Bathurst and Beyond by Leonie Glynn Blair and Perry McIntyre

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges.

Over 2,200 teenage orphan girls volunteered to leave the workhouses of Ireland during the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1852, arriving in Sydney, New South Wales, between 1848 and 1850. They braved the long sea voyage to become apprentice domestic servants, making a new life for themselves in a new country. New skills, newly earned wages, new opportunities for marriage and family, and a new life beckoned the girls as they set foot on the ships of the Earl Grey scheme.

They were destitute teenaged orphan girls from the Irish workhouses with nothing to lose. They volunteered for New South Wales, and the new life beckoned. Surely, apprenticed domestic service had to be better than the death and disease surrounding them in Famine Ireland.

Were they truly Fair Delinquents and ignorant children as stereotyped by the colonial newspapers? Discover the stories of 185 Irish Famine orphan girls who settled in Bathurst, the first inland settlement of New South Wales. (publisher blurb)