Australia, Migration and Empire by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030223892
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Irish South Australia: Size and Place

So what did the Irish in SA look like? Just prior to the first visit from the Irish envoys in the early 1880s, the Irish-born in South Australia represented 6.5% of the colony’s population compared with an average of 9.5% across Australasia. 17 They resided alongside the Scots at 3.8%, the English who represented 21% of the total, Germans and Austrians at 3.2%, the remainder being mostly Australian-born (59.83%) with small numbers of Chinese and French. 18 Thus, as a group the Irish were almost twice as big as the next two most sizeable ethnicities in the colony. But there is absolutely no argument to be offered against the fact that the Irish were a small group in the colony. Size, however, should not always be equated with significance. The Irish were a much-talked about people—few other groups were a constant feature of the daily press. Famine Relief and then Home Rule support provided a focal point for activity.

The Irish did not cluster in particular areas of the colony to any great extent. Though there were recognisably Irish areas such as Clare and the Burra, there were few places which did not have an Irish-born component as illustrated in Table 7.1. The figures given also show the decline, particularly between 1891 and 1901, of the Irish-born in the colony. Some areas maintained their levels of Irish-born inhabitants through this decade, e.g. North Adelaide and East Torrens, and some, like Yatala and Onkaparinga, even increased. The Yatala district encompassed the town of Auburn where a strong Orange Lodge emerged from around 1874. Like this area, Wallaroo also had a noticeably smaller Catholic population and it too was an active Orange area suggesting that a good proportion of the Irish community here might have been Protestant. Between 1891 and 1901, areas such as Sturt and Gladstone saw a slight increase in their Irish-born populations, but the majority demonstrated a steep decline as the colonial-born ratio, not surprisingly, began to exceed all foreign-born figures. Of course, the nationalist movement also depended on the next generation of Irish-Australians. In 1895, Davitt referred to his 30,000 fellow countrymen in South Australia including in this the offspring of Irish immigrants. 19 Table 7.1Catholic and Irish percentages of population of each electoral district in 1881 and 1901. The Irish-born numbers for 1891 are also given to aid comparisona

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