Potato Famine Orphans

Bol

At the height of the Irish Potato Famine, as a million people starved or worked to death around them, a group of teenage orphan girls were offered an opportunity to escape to a new and better life in the Australian colonies. But joy at their salvation from the workhouses was tempered by fear of leaving their homeland to travel for months to an unknown land half the world away. And even once they arrived, their youth, gender, ancestry and religion all served as fuel to the fires of discrimination from vicious newspapers and religious bigots.Yet despite these obstacles, through their sheer determination to succeed these girls became important members of colonial Australian society. Though their story has gone largely unreported, this book reveals how they survived the journey, faced and overcame the barriers and prejudice and made significant contributions to the development of the colonies in the nineteenth-century.

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Pages: 322, Paperback, Aurora House