Taking the mick out of the Irish

Source: S.T. (Samuel Thomas) Gill (1818-1880) Coffee Tent & Sly Grog Shop, Diggers Breakfast 1852. From Victoria Gold Diggings and Diggers as They Are (Melbourne: James J. Blundell, 1852).

Apologies for the title of this post but I can't resist a bad pun.

A couple of my Cornish grandfathers left South Australia for the Victorian goldrush in around 1851 or 52. The story below about two Irishmen caught up in the gold fever comes from the Illustrated Australian Magazine, published January 1852.

The Irish copped a really bad time of it in early Australia, being the butt of jokes and generally thought of as the dregs of society. In the learned journals up until around the 1850s there was often paternalistic debate about the "Irish/Catholic question" in the colonies. But, in the immortal words of the bag lady who stuck her head into a small pub in Kilburn the other day, wheezing out at the top of her lungs: "The Oirsih built this focken country!" ("Straight home dear, you've had enough" came the general reply from the retired navvies).

They did build the country to a large extent. Though the Chinese helped later along the way too (and took the heat off the Irish). Is it bad form to link to your own stuff?

Yellow Peril

I think this image is from: W. Fearn-Wannan, Australian Folklore: A Dictionary of Lore, Legends and Popular Allusions. 1970. Please put me right if my attribution is incorrect


Here's another story involving a Pascoe. It appears this one was one of the directors at Lothair mine in Clunes, Victoria, and rather a belligerent one at that, according to how it was reported in the Grey River Argus 20 December 1873* (a proudly left wing paper).


The articles below give a good account of the story, where thousands of mine workers (mostly Cornishmen) and their families violently demonstrated against the introduction of Chinese labour.


Since the strike at the Eureka stockade in 1854 just down the road, miners were a raucous crowd and kick-started the Labour movement in Australia (In Australia, thanks rumouredly to a signwriter making a mistake, the political party is named "Labor"; but it is a "Labour" movement. I'm inclined to think it was merely that Americans were a big part of the movement at the time). These incidents also helped build the Australian culture of hating the police ("traps" in those days), as by keeping the peace, they were seen as always working for the bosses.


*In case you're wondering: I'm getting all these Australian stories from foreign sources because there are no database with good Australian newspaper content as yet. The National Library of Australia is working on one though.