Irish life and progress in colonial South Australia
South Australia was the least Irish part of nineteenth-century Australia. Proportionately fewer Irish arrived at Port Adelaide than at the other great immigrant ports of the southern continent. They also came later: relatively few Irish participated in the first dozen years of colonisation in South Australia after its inception in 1836. In contrast with other parts of Australia the Irish were slow to reach a tenth and never reached a third of the colonial population. They were not in South Australia ‘a founding people’. They were indeed conspicuously a minority which faced the established and unquestioned primacy of Anglo-Scottish colonisation.South Australia was overwhelmingly English in its origins. From the beginning it was virtually a fragment of southern England, a Home Counties colony expressly designed for superior expatriates. It was also heavily advertised as a haven for Protestant dissenters. The first Catholic priest in South Australia, William Benson, was hardly exaggerating when he described it in 1843 as ‘a little dissenting colony, exclusively Protestant evangelical’. He went further, saying that ‘when this colony was established no Catholic gentlemen of property were allowed to join the founders’ — implying thereby that the planners deliberately discouraged Irish participation. Only when the colonial population reached 14,000, asserted Benson, did ‘our late evangelical governors’ feel confident enough to permit a minority of Catholics reasonable and equal entry. Another Catholic Irishman, Major Thomas O’Halloran, also claimed that the early colonial planners had been anti-Irish, wishing to restrict their numbers to less than 5 per cent of the colonial population. It is little wonder that South Australia seemed, in Irish eyes, the most alien quarter of the new continent.