The Potato Famine Orphans
At the height of the Irish Potato Famine, as a million people starved or worked to death around them, a group of teenage orphan girls were offered an opportunity to escape to a new and better life in the Australian colonies. But joy at their salvation from the workhouses was tempered by fear of leaving their homeland to travel for months to an unknown land half the world away. And even once they arrived, their youth, gender, ancestry and religion all served as fuel to the fires of discrimination from vicious newspapers and religious bigots.
Yet despite these obstacles, through their sheer determination to succeed these girls became important members of colonial Australian society. Though their story has gone largely unreported, this book reveals how they survived the journey, faced and overcame the barriers and prejudice and made significant contributions to the development of the colonies in the nineteenth-century.
Author Bio
Doug Limbrick is a graduate from the Australian National University majoring in economic history, geography, politics and economics. He worked for some thirty years providing social policy advice to the Commonwealth government and participated in a number of national enquiries and evaluations, as well as having a number of appointments to national and international bodies.
For his pioneering work on data collection and evaluation, he was awarded an Australia Day Medal. As a history writer, he has focussed on nineteenth-century Australian colonial history, particularly on exploring the reasons people emigrated, with a focus on disadvantaged groups and the social and economic changes in Britain that prompted so many people to emigrate to the colonies.
In his books he has written extensively about the the ships the emigrants sailed in, the passage to the colonies, the arrival process and impact on those who emigrated..
