On Sunday 28 October 1849 the Thomas Arbuthnot left Plymouth with a cargo of girls under the care of Surgeon-superintendent Charles Strutt. Some of these girls had never seen the sea or even a ship. After 99 days at sea they arrived in Sydney on 3 February 1850. Luckily the boat trip had been mostly free from the usual mishaps, seasickness or deaths.
Each girl had been issued with a bolster, blankets, linen bag, knife, fork, spoon, metal plate and a mug. They attended school most days, weather permitting, and although most were Catholic they still had to attend the Church of England service on Sundays. Food was monotonous and only changed when some fish were caught by the sailors.
Not the Same Sky focusses on the lives of four of these girls, Honora, Julia, Bridget and Anne. It observes them on the voyage, chronicling their impressions during the voyage, adaptation to shipboard life in general, behaviour and their relationship of trust with Charles Strutt and Matrons.
After landing the girls soon learnt that their ‘holiday’ was well and truly over. From the wharf they had to walk to the Hyde Park Barracks and stand like exhibits at a fair where eager employers or prospective husbands looked the girls up and down and checked their references. Most were selected by prospective employers from Sydney while others travelled to nearby towns to find employment. Some insisted on making their own way.
After being selected the ritual of goodbyes began. Shipboard friends were now separated as they went to different employers and towns. Many would not see each other for years, some never. The novel now follows them as they become women of Australia, negotiating their new lives as best as they could.
By highlighting their hopes, ambitions, work, luck and disappointments it also gives these young women historical importance and human presence in this elegant and subtle novel. Some of the girls did remarkably well, taking into consideration their limited education and young age. Most eventually married, half of them older Protestant Englishmen, and had large families.
Told in a modern Irish voice, Conlon delicately deals with memory and the importance for these girls of forgetting. Their journey to a strange country, comments on human dimensions of loss and dislocation. It also questions why it is that we remember and memorialise some things but not others. However repugnant the scheme of transporting children to Australia was, it did not stop the English or Australian governments to embark on similar schemes a hundred years later.
Not the Same Sky is a moving and poignant story of the famine girls’ plight. The launch coincides with a series of events in Ireland and Australia commemorating the Irish Famine.
Review by Nic Klaassen
The Novel,
Not the Same Sky, by Evelyn Conlon, is available at $24.95 from Wakefield Press
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