The Irish famine orphan girls

Alone in a strange country, victims of poverty, bereavement and colonial prejudice, these young girls bravely grasped the opportunity for a new beginning. They secured work, married, typically raised large families, often experienced the hardships of frontier settlement and showed a feisty willingness to stand up for themselves. Today, the number of Australians that can trace their descent from these few girls is disproportionally large. Perhaps, too, these girls’ spirit, humour and attitudes to authority have also made a generous and lasting contribution to the national character.

The scheme was one of the British Government’s responses to Ireland’s Great Famine. At the time, the potato was the staple food of the Irish rural poor and around half the population subsisted almost exclusively on this crop. When, in 1845, the fungal disease potato blight