Proudfoot, Lindsay and Hall, Dianne ORCID: 0000-0002-2303-8226 (2005) Points of departure: remittance emigration from South-West Ulster to New South Wales in the later nineteenth century. International Review of Social History, 50 (2). pp. 241-277. ISSN 0020-8590

Abstract

This paper considers aspects of the local geographies of Australian emigration created in south-west Ulster by the New South Wales government-sponsored remittance emigration scheme between 1858 and 1884. The scheme mobilized the financial resources of settlers in New South Wales to part-fund the passage of friends and relatives from Britain and Ireland. The paper utilizes the comprehensive socio-economic and demographic archive generated by the scheme, to explore the response of rural communities in thirteen civil parishes in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to this opportunity to emigrate. It concludes that although the emigrant sample's demographic profile accorded with conventional models of Irish assisted emigration, it was also marked by pronounced over-representation of Protestants and under-representation of Catholics. Possible explanations for this are considered in terms of the positionality and human capital of the three major denominations and the efficiency of their social networks in negotiating the bureaucratic process in Australia.

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