In a Subiaco park on a day bathed in sunshine, a man is looking at a statue. It’s more than simply looking. He is transfixed. And there is a tear in his eye. The statue is of a woman grieving, her veiled head bowing low, arms cradling only emptiness. It personifies the grief only a mother could give – a keening – in memory of the Irish girls who disappeared beyond the shores, headed to a place called the Swan River colony. The man is Fred Rea. He worked to have this statue built back in 2017. On the ground circling her is a prayer, ‘We remember those who were forced to leave our country in search of food and security.’

The commonly told history of Perth often begins with the arrival of the first British convicts. However, to Fred the story begins and continues from the wombs of the young girls eternalised in this statue. Their stories have largely been erased from the chapters of Australian history. Rea wants to change that.

A publisher for Irish Scene and chair of the West Australian Irish famine commemoration committee, 76-year-old Rea first uncovered their story in 2014.

“I was completely in the dark,” he says. “And then I’d heard about these young girls who had come to Australia, and it was like a Pandora’s box. It opened up and suddenly I found out there were these ships, with so many of these girls.”

The bride ships of ‘53

In 1853, a ship named Palestine arrived in Fremantle carrying 33 mostly orphaned Irish girls aged between 15 and 24. They had come from workhouses during Ireland’s Great Famine, An Gorta Mór, seeking a better life. What they hadn’t known was they were being brought for another reason.

Family History WA researcher Joanne Hyland says the Swan River colony was facing an issue. “We only had male convicts come to WA. They didn’t want, what they imagined, loosely moralled women to distract the men from doing good work. But they knew they needed women to be the wives of convict men,” says Hyland.

Ireland was also facing a similar problem.

“The young [Irish] men after the Famine were leaving to go overseas and work,” she says. “So you had a lot of young women and no marriageable partners. They were known as the bride ships because a lot of those girls ended up married. Whether they knew it or not, it was going to happen. At one point it was 11 men to one woman. It was a mess.”

Rea leads the effort to identify and remember these young women: the Irish Bride Ships Legacy Project. He estimates the number of descendants in the hundreds. Perhaps thousands.

“I meet older Australians every so often who say, ’I’m descended from one of the girls’. They want to know more about it. And we’re hoping their children’s children will have something to go to. To find out who their great grandmother was.”

A girl called Mary

In the 1800s, Ireland’s economy was struggling.

With the population soaring and the British exporting most of its food, poorer Irish families turned to potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Those without land rented small plots from wealthier landowners, paying them with labour rather than money. But in the summer of 1845, Ireland woke to find their potatoes completely destroyed by a mysterious disease. It was identified too late as being a manageable fungus, phytophthora infestans.

The British government dismissed it as a punishment from God on the Catholic population. Rents went unpaid. Landlords evicted families in the masses. A million died of starvation. It was during this time that a young girl Mary Ann Taylor became an orphan. Her great grandson former Wanneroo mayor Bill Marwick tells her story with sad pride.

“Mary was orphaned in that terrible time. She was illiterate but she had a heart of gold. And there were stories around that.”

Young Mary Ann Taylor managed to find a place in a workhouse set up by the British. She would spend long hours in needlework in exchange for harsh and humiliating living experiences. But it was a lifeline.

Marwick did not always know about his ancestry, however. It was in the 1980s, he began to ask questions.

“Who was this lady? What did she look like? Family members didn’t know very much about her,” he says.

“Although there were living relatives at the time who could tell me nice things. One of my uncles said she was as Irish as Paddy’s goat,” Marwick chuckles. “She never lost her accent or her big heart.”

Marwick’s curiosity continued until he described ‘a moment of pure gold’. A list published in the Perth Gazette in 1853 showed Irish girls who had arrived in Fremantle. In that list, Mary Ann Taylor.

“Mary was one of those fortunate few from the workhouses. She would help other people with soups and foods and custards and so on,” says Marwick.

“But they couldn’t bring them all. That was very fortunate because people were still dying in the streets and hunger and disease was rife. When she arrived, she had only just turned eighteen.”

In 2016, Marwick published decades of research in his book Mary Marwick of York. It was that book which was also a moment of gold for Rea.

“I got very interested,” Rea says, “I even went to Ireland where she was born. And out of that we found out there were two ships that arrived in the 1850s, the Palestine and the Travancore. And it all started with a girl called Mary.”

“I felt these girls needed recognition for their contribution to Western Australia. But once we did the memorial, we said, well there’s no database for these girls.”

Rea’s attempts to locate descendants were not easy. His efforts relied on word-of-mouth and a simple Facebook page. In 2022, he approached historian and Irish Scene journalist Dr Caroline Smith.

“Every so often, he would ask me about different [history] projects he was interested in,” says Smith. “We sat down and he told me about what he’d already done to gather information about the girls and then we kicked it off.”

At the State Library of WA, Smith spends hours looking over handwritten index cards listing passengers of the Palestine and Travancore. Where records end, she looks to records at Family History WA, tracing wives of convicts. Compiled into a data list, the recently launched website now has hundreds of entries.

“Some people get in contact with [Fred] and ask about their family. Some of these people have done their own research as well and some have written books about their family history,” she says.

Among them, none other than Dr Carmen Lawrence – former WA premier and Australia’s first female state leader.

Pride and politics

Travelling with Mary Ann Taylor aboard the Palestine was another young woman Johannah Duggan. Their great grandchildren met for the first time in 2017 at the unveiling of the memorial.

Like Marwick, Dr Carmen Lawrence spent her life not knowing until she too began to ask the same questions.

“I’d always known there were Irish in the family. My grandmother had what sounded like an Irish accent,” she says. “Over time you start to think…where do we come from?”

Dr Lawrence’s great grandmother too came from a workhouse during the Famine.

She now spends her days just outside of Perth researching her family’s bride ship legacy.

“I look at the workhouses. I look at transportation. I look at the political story that was simultaneously going on. I take the journey with them on the boats. From there, I’ve just tried to trace what happened to them. Not just the bride ship girls but the convicts. Who they married, what happened to their children.”

The task for Lawrence has not been easy. Many Irish records were destroyed by the British or never kept at all.

“Because they’re women, they don’t appear in any public records either. At the time only men could hold property. So their records are thin and the footprints they left behind are basically through their husbands and their children.”

“These people couldn’t write,” Lawrence says. “There weren’t going to be lots of lovely little letters home describing the experience of being in the colony. In Ireland when people were leaving they held a wake as if they were dead. Because they were, effectively, dead.”

The colony: a man’s world

The journey to the Swan River colony from Ireland took the girls a difficult four to five months. Each carried a simple travel box for essentials.

The highlight of the journey became ‘Crossing the Line’. A celebration once the ships crossed the equator. But the daily reality was difficult.

“The food was boring,” Hyland says. “The men were allowed to bathe but the women were not. There was a water allowance per day so you washed in that. If there was bad weather, [the deck] would be closed up. It could become smelly or noisy. And if people became sick, you were crammed with them.”

When their bare feet finally hit the Australian sand in the summer of 1853, they faced a new set of hardships. The colony was barely 30 years old. Roads were rough. Houses made of mud and straw. But mainly, the colony was not made for women.

“Women needed other things that weren’t catered for. They needed to give birth and had all sorts of privacy requirements,” Hyland says.

With some convicts already inclined to violence, the girls were at risk. Roads were deserted and the only way to get anywhere was to walk.

“There were girls that were raped on the road if they were travelling alone. They would have known they were vulnerable but they hadn’t any other way,” Hyland says.

Some of the girls refused to leave the depot.

“I think some of the girls had unrealistic expectations about what it would be like. So when some of them refused, they just put them on rations of bread and water to make them leave. Most of them were forced into marriage that way.”

Most of the girls married in the first year. Children quickly followed. Often around a dozen.

Some girls were also taken to neighbouring settlements like Northam or York where Marwick was born, and Toodyay where Dr Lawrence’s great grandmother was taken.

Today it’s a one hour and 20 minute drive. On foot they walked for three days. Men often accompanied them to keep them safe. Men like the ship’s surgeon or their medical officer.

“The Palestine and Travancore girls didn’t complain. They’ve had so much hardship at home and were hoping for a better life. So they just got on with it,” says Hyland.

The girls were sometimes cheeky, however.

Marwick laughs describing a time when his great grandmother was taken to court for ‘abusive language’ hurled at another lady. The magistrate, by then very much used to these issues, dismissed the case and asked the two ladies to leave his courtroom.

Yet what remains is the legacy and generational pride.

“I’m very proud of my Irish heritage and particularly proud of Mary. Her contribution was amazing. No question about it. Amazing woman,” says Marwick with a smile and a gleam in his eyes.

“At least 10 of [her descendants] were either mayors or shire presidents or councillors. One was in the Senate. One won the Victoria Cross. It just goes on and on, and all these wonderful mums raising families throughout WA,” he says.

Rea returns to the memorial in Subiaco at least once a year when the WA Irish famine commemoration remembers the mothers who never heard of their daughters again.

“Her name is Uaigneas,” he says, looking at the woman. “In Gaelic, her name means the eternal expression of loneliness.”

He stands quietly.

“Every year, I can’t [speak]. I find it very hard. I get emotional. Because I remember when I first came to Australia in 1972. [They] were the loneliest years of my life. So, I understand how the girls felt.”

The statue’s Celtic knots, Rea explains, symbolise the intertwining of Irish and First Nations’ cultures.

“They would have understood what it’s like when people come in and colonise an area. Take over their homes and take all the land away. Just give it away.”

In a Subiaco park on a day bathed in sunshine, Fred remains looking at Uaigneas. Dr Carmen Lawrence sits at home writing her book. Dr Caroline Smith pores over records in the State Library. And for Rea, a tear sits in his eye. He looks down at the brochure in his hand: The Irish Bride Ships Legacy Project. Their stories were once erased from Australian history. But Rea is changing that.