Lost Children?
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 1:17 pmhttp://www.historyireland.com/20th-cent ... -children/
Readers of Joseph Robins’ Lost Children will be familiar with the story of Irish female orphan adolescents who were sent from the workhouses of Ireland to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine. Between 1848 and 1850 over 4,000 young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, some of them street-wise kids from Dublin, Belfast and Cork, others from famine ravaged rural districts around Skibbereen, Ballina, Roscrea and Loughrea. Their emigration was the brain-child of Earl Grey, secretary of state for the colonies, and primarily designed to meet an Australian demand for domestic servants and marriageable young women. Grey’s own Irish connections may also have prompted him to do something, however small, for famine-stricken Ireland.
Readers of Joseph Robins’ Lost Children will be familiar with the story of Irish female orphan adolescents who were sent from the workhouses of Ireland to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine. Between 1848 and 1850 over 4,000 young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, some of them street-wise kids from Dublin, Belfast and Cork, others from famine ravaged rural districts around Skibbereen, Ballina, Roscrea and Loughrea. Their emigration was the brain-child of Earl Grey, secretary of state for the colonies, and primarily designed to meet an Australian demand for domestic servants and marriageable young women. Grey’s own Irish connections may also have prompted him to do something, however small, for famine-stricken Ireland.