Book review: The Luck of the Irish, by Babette Smith

Early one morning in December, 1835, the Aboriginal people living just south of Jervis Bay, on the NSW south coast, went down to the beach to do some fishing. They were startled to discover about  300 Europeans, men, women and children, milling around on the beach, survivors of the wreck of their ship.

The ship was the convict transport Hive, carrying 250 male prisoners from Ireland. The convicts were guarded by 29 soldiers of the 28th Regiment. After a voyage of 109 days across 21,000 kilometres of ocean, and with Sydney Town only a day’s sail away, the ship was beached in a sandy bay, now known as “Wreck Bay”. The water was shallow and after the first panic all the crew and convicts managed to struggle ashore, and were taken to Sydney.

Years ago I explored the area around Wreck Bay but I never thought to ask why it was so named, or what the wreck was. The Luck of the Irish by Babette Smith, a noted historian of the convict era,  tells the full story of the wreck of the Hive and what happened to those on board. With great skill and meticulous research she uses the wreck as a springboard to examine the transportation of Irish convicts to the Australian colonies in the 1830s.

The author has taken the survivors of one ship, both the convicts and those who guarded them like the Lugard brothers, and presented an analysis that focuses on social and economic history. What happened to the members of this group?  What do their lives tell us about the Irish contribution to colonial society, not only convicts but even high officials such as the Protestant Irish governor, Sir Richard Bourke? The result is fascinating and will be a treasure for any reader who is descended from someone on the Hive. The author managed to contact quite a number of descendants.

In following the paper trail of those who arrived on the Hive, Smith found the dramatic and unusual circumstances of their arrival was a badge of honour, something to boast about, even in official records years later. The author asks why the convicts didn't grab the opportunity of the wreck to escape into the bush, or overwhelm the small number of guards and seize control of the camp, or flee in the longboat. Yet the convicts made no such attempt.

Smith concludes after an examination of the Irish background of this group that they were victims of poverty and hunger, caused by what she calls a pernicious system of landholding in Ireland and the threat of dispossession. But in the colony a local landowner named Alexander Berry, one of the first to hear of the wreck, saw his chance to get some men who would be very useful to him. Records show that most of the men from the Hive assigned to the Illawarra made their lives there, while their shipmates were being scattered across the land, some in Sydney or the Hunter Valley, or west to Bathurst and beyond, or south to the Goulburn district and the Monaro.

About 60 of the Irishmen on the Hive were assigned to the Hunter Valley. The author suggests that after the egalitarian Sydney culture, the Hunter Valley would remind the new arrivals of the Protestant landowning class in Ireland and of the prejudice such people demonstrated towards the Irish. Many free settlers feared an Irish uprising. The only example of such an uprising in the 1830s was the so-called “Ribbon Boys” gang in the Bathurst district, led by one Ralph Entwistle who was himself not Irish at all.

After following survivors of this one convict ship all over the country, the author notes that again and again the egalitarianism of Australian society was underlined. In the convict era the pressure for a classless society was strong and it grew stronger in later generations.

Smith concludes, surprisingly, that Australia is indebted to the Irish for religious equality. Through the influence of Irishmen like attorney-general J.H. Plunkett the constitution of the Commonwealth came to have section 116, prohibiting Australia from having a state religion, and so we emerged as a nation which could accommodate religious diversity.

Smith has given us a splendid study of a major Australian historical theme; the significance of the convict era through the eyes of survivors of this one ship. Her study suggests further topics for historians to unravel in years to come. This is Australian history filled with human interest stories, as it should be.