It is estimated that 8 million men, women and children emigrated from Ireland in the nineteenth century, of whom some five per cent, a not-insignificant proportion, found their way to Australia and New Zealand. Just as significantly, The Oxford Companion to Irish History (1998, p. 31) considers that Irish migrants ‘made up nearly a quarter of all immigrants [to Australia] during that period’.
The significance of the historic links between Ireland, particularly the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster, and Australia and New Zealand, are explored in The Irish in Australia and New Zealand: A Resource for Family Historians.
Essays include:
- The Irish in Australia by Patrick O’Farrell
- The Irish in New Zealand by Michael Bellam
- ‘That infant colony’: Aspects of Ulster Emigration to Australia by Trevor Parkhill
- The Anglo-Irish Tradition and Anglo-Irish Migration to Colonial Australia by Gordon Forth
- ‘Prospects of this new Colony’: Letters of Ulster Emigrants to New Zealand 1840–1900 by Trevor Parkhill
- Green Threads of Kinship! Aspects of Irish Chain-Migration to New South Wales by Richard Reid
- Lives moved to New South Wales: Free passage for convicts’ families by Perry McIntyre
- Barefoot and Pregnant? Female Orphans who emigrated from Irish Workhouses to Australia, 1848–50 by Trevor McClaughlin
- Horesman, pass by: Irish-Australian Gravestones by Trevor McClaughlin
- Ulster and the Bay of Plenty: The Katikati Special Settlement in North Island by N.C. Mitchel
- The Goldrush to Lamlough, near Avoca in Victoria, Australia during 1859–60 by Denis Strangman
- Family Migration to New Zealand: The Bassett Family of Ballygawley, Downpatrick, County Down by John Bassett
- Sir Samuel McCaughey – Ulster Australian: Irrigator, Breeder and Benefactor by James Thompson
- John King – An Ulster Explorer of Australia by William B. Alderdice
- John Ballance – New Zealand Premier, 1891–3: Irish Origins and influences by Tim McIvor