Memorial unveiled for 14 famine orphan girls shipped from Cork to Melbourne
Historian Michelle O'Mahony, Ambassador Designate of Australia Ms Chantelle Taylor, Heather Northwood, great, great grandaughter of Ellen Desmond who was one of the 14 orphan girls deported and Australian Chargé d’Affaires to Ireland Mr. James Hazell at the unveiling of a memorial of remembrance on the 175th Anniversary of the Famine Orphan Girls at the Gardens of Dunmanway Community Hospital, Co. Cork. - Picture: David Creedon
A ceremony of remembrance was held on Saturday May 25 for 14 famine orphan girls who departed Dunmanway under the Earl Grey Scheme of Assisted Passage to Australia in 1850.
The girls had been living in the Dunmanway Workhouse during the famine until they were shipped to Melbourne.
A representative of the Australian Embassy attended the event, which saw a memorial of remembrance to the orphans unveiled, as well as in interpretative sign documenting the shared story between Ireland and Australia and the story of these famine orphans.
The interpretative sign is funded by Cork County Council’s Commemorations Office and Heritage Department, while the monument is made possible by generosity of a great-great-granddaughter of one of the 14 orphans.
History consultant Michelle O’Mahony explained: “Last summer, a descendant of one of these girls arrived in Dunmanway in determined to find her ancestral homeland.
“She is the great-great granddaughter of Ellen Desmond, one of the girls who left on the Eliza Caroline in 1850 and is investigating her Dunmanway origins with the assistance of myself and the Dunmanway Historical Association.
“She is also active in the Earl Grey Famine Orphan Group in Melbourne and explained to me that many of the descendants of this group have identified their ancestors as being from Dunmanway. She was told by her grandmother the harrowing stories of their arrival in Melbourne and the difficulties they faced in their early years.”
On Sunday, a mass was held to remember the girls at St. Patrick’s Church in Dunmanway and to reflect and remember all of Dunmanway and the wider community’s famine victims, followed by a short ecumenical ceremony at the famine pits, located at the Fanlobbus Graveyard on the Dunmanway to Bandon road.
Ms O’Mahony explained: “These girls, as orphans had undoubtedly many family relatives buried in the burial pits in Fanlobbus Graveyard.
“The Earl Grey Scheme, despite offering these girls a better life, hid the real agenda, which was it being a scheme to address the growth of the population of the colony and address the issue of the gender imbalance in Australia, remembering that the early population of Australia consisted of convicts shipped out to populate these new world colonies."
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