Mary Josephine Hourigan
| First name | Mary Josephine |
|---|---|
| Last name | Hourigan |
| Country of Origin | Ireland |
| Date of Birth | 1845 |
| Year of Arrival in Australia | 3 -11-1854 |
| Submitted by | Leonard Johnson |
Story
Mary Josephine Hourigan – an immigrant who arrived in Australia on 3 November 1854
Mary Josephine Hourigan was born in London in 1845 and emigrated to Australia in 1854. She was the daughter of Irish parents – John Hourigan and his wife, Mary Evans, who had emigrated to London in 1840 from the Townland of Ballymackeough in County Tipperary, Ireland. Mary Josephine Hourigan was raised with a brother and two sisters among the Irish community in East London until her family emigrated to Victoria in 1854. They sailed on the passenger ship, Apolline, which departed Plymouth on 16 July 1854 and arrived in the Port of Williamstown, Victoria, on 3 November 1854. Mary Josephine was recorded in the ‘Nominal List Apolline\’ as an eight-year-old native-born Catholic who could read but not write. On arrival they were met by their father, John Hourigan, who had gone ahead to find work and shelter for his family. The Hourigans settled permanently in Williamstown, living in a house on the corner of Twyford and Thompson Streets until 1910.
When the Mary Josephine Hourigan arrived in Victoria in 1854, Williamstown was a seaport with a permanent population of 3,500 and a floating population of about 1,000 seamen. It was the oldest continuous settlement on the shores of Port Phillip and was a wild town, though for the immigrants it was a place of ‘delight and hope\’ when compared with crowded slums in East London. There were noisy hotels filled with boisterous colonial drinkers, bawdy houses and gambling dens, pigs, goats and poultry roamed freely, and wild dogs hunted through the streets. There was a long foreshore of mud flats, mangroves and swamps and low lying ground was regularly flooded. Williamstown was ‘unmetalled, unbridged, unsewered\’ and so muddy that women usually wore wellington boots outside their houses. On occasions prisoners working on pathways carried housewives across muddy roads. There was no sanitary service, no reticulated water, no street cleaning and no gas lighting. Victoria\’s prisoners were a common sight in Williamstown. Five yellow painted prison hulks were moored offshore and there was a marine penal stockade in the the centre of town. During much of Mary Josephine\’s early life, Williamstown was an undeveloped crude place.
Mary Josephine was raised as a Catholic. Her parish church in Williamstown was St Mary\’s and she attended St Mary\’s primary convent school and later the new bluestone Chapel School until she was about ten years old. She lived at home with her mother in Williamstown until she was twenty-six. On 27 July 1871 she married Edmund O\’Gorman, an Irish immigrant from the County of Limerick, in the Church of St Francis in Melbourne. They had nine children between 1872 and 1893 and lived together in Carlton for the whole of their married life. Edmund made a living as a hansom cab driver in Carlton; Mary Josephine stayed at home and raised her family in the difficult circumstances of urban life in nineteenth century Melbourne.
She lived in a time when Melbourne was experiencing its fastest and greatest growth, and population outpaced facilities and services. Keeping house in urban Melbourne was demanding for mothers like Mary Josephine. Working class houses were exceptionally crude and routine housework difficult. Cooking was done in cast iron pots hanging on hooks in open fireplaces, firewood was chopped in small backyards, washing was boiled weekly in outside coppers and hung on backyard lines, lighting was by candles or kerosene lamps, and water was collected from street pumps or rain barrels. Public hygiene was poor. The air was polluted with coal dust and wood smoke, refuse rotted uncollected in the streets, drains were blocked with decomposing rubbish and backyard cesspits overflowed. Despite these difficulties, Mary Josephine kept her family together and successfully brought all her children to adulthood except one – James Joseph – who died died of diphtheria at age of seven. She died in Carlton on 17 July 1910 after suffering a stroke, and was buried on 19 July in the Melbourne General Cemetery. She was sixty-five years of age.
Mary Josephine Hourigan was one of the many thousands of sturdy Irish immigrant women who contributed to the exceptional growth in the prosperity of the Colony of Victoria and brought a distinctive Irish ethos to Australia.