Derision and Demography: New South Wales and the Irish Orphan Girls of the Earl Grey Immigration Scheme, 1848 to 1850

From 1848 to 1850, 4175 female orphans from Irish workhouses were sent to the Australian colonies to escape from the Irish famine and to address the gender imbalance in the colonies.  Anglo-centric colonial newspapers condemned the girls for their supposedly inferior demographics – Catholic, illiterate, Irish and female – and raised the spectre of Catholic predominance, leading to the cancellation of the immigration scheme at a time of great humanitarian need.  Using the original shipping lists of the girls who landed in New South Wales and the colony’s census data, this paper uses a quantitative analysis to argue that while newspapers were relatively correct in characterizing the girls’ demographics, they were incorrect in their claims about how the girls’ arrival would influence the colony’s demographic development.