Irish Immigration To Australia 1840
. A guide Guide to immigration records held at the Public Record Office of Victoria. From 1820 to the start of the Civil War they constituted one third of all immigrants.
With all of the Irish coming in they started at the very bottom of the social ladder and had to work their way up. The National Archives of Australia has a collection of finding aids at recordsearchnaagovau. Until after the World War I the Irish were second only to the English as a component of Australias immigrant.
The Immigration Collection also names 163 million passengers arriving in the UK from foreign ports outside of Europe between 1878 and 1960.
Yet between 1840 and 1914 over 300000 Irish men and women emigrated to Australia2 Although this may not be a terribly large number compared to the exodus to North America the Irish have always formed a large and significant minority in Australian and New Zealand history. Charles Carroll was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. They may have arrived as a fare-paying passenger as an assisted migrant a member of a ships crew in military or naval service or as a convict. With all of the Irish coming in they started at the very bottom of the social ladder and had to work their way up.
