Mary Anne Roughan
| First name | Mary Anne |
|---|---|
| Last name | Roughan |
| Country of Origin | Ireland |
| Date of Birth | 1834 |
| Year of Arrival in Australia | 1850 |
| Submitted by | John Schooneveldt |
Story
THE MARY ANNE ROUGHAN STORY
On 28 October 1849 the ‘Thomas Arbuthnot’ set off from Plymouth for New South Wales carrying 195 Irish girls,mostly from the counties of Clare, Galway and Kerry,as well as four Irish families, a widow with two children, and six other single females. Mary Anne Roughan, who was 16 at the time, was an orphan, one of many on that ship.
The stories of a number of these orphan girls has been told before. They tell of the improved circumstances in travelling to Australia, living conditions after the convict period, and the enormous contribution these girls made to the early settlement of Australia.
The Emigration Commissioners gave each girl a wooden sea chest containing new clothes and goods such as needles, threads, tape, and a few yards of calico or cotton. Each girl also received a bible, a paper from the workhouse certifying her good conduct and ‘unblemished moral character’, and a medical certificate showing that she was of good health and had been vaccinated against smallpox.
The Surgeon-Superintendent for the voyage on the ‘Thomas Arbuthnot’ was Charles Edward Strutt who kept a diary of the trip. The girls were shipped from Dublin to England in late autumn on the open decks of a steamer. The journey took 36 hours, and left them exhausted, chilled and fearful. To raise their spirits, Strutt made sure they had a warm bath and a haircut. For the voyage to Australia the Catholic girls got a dispensation to eat meat on Fridays ‘to keep them healthy’ and he did his best to make sure they kept the ship clean.
According to Strutt, the Australian immigration officials:
‘… were greatly pleased with the order and regularity of the ship, the fatness of my girls and the cleanliness of their berths, tables, decks etc, and to do the poor wretches justice, they deserved the praise, for they had exerted themselves and worked like horses’.
On arrival the girls were sent to the Female Immigrant Depot at the old Convict Barracks at the top of Macquarie Street and placed in the care of the Sisters of Charity. Strutt volunteered to accompany 108 girls,102 girls and four single females from the ‘Thomas Arbuthnot’ and two girls from the ‘Lismoyne’,to Yass. They set out two weeks after their arrival, on Monday 18 February 1850. They travelled by steamer to Parramatta then by horse-drawn drays for the journey to Yass via Liverpool, Camden, Razorback Hill, Picton, Berrima, Paddy’s River, Marulan and Goulburn.
John Collins, a 30 year old Irishman was working as a ploughman at Fish River (near Jerrawa) and would have heard of the pending arrival of the girls. John was born in Galway. His father had died and when his mother remarried, John decided to come to Australia under the Bounty System operating at the time. He arrived in Sydney on 1 September 1841 on the barque, the ‘John Renwick’ which had left Plymouth on 14 May, some nine years before Mary Anne left from the same port.The voyage took 2_ months. The ‘John Renwick’ had left Sydney for England some 10 months earlier: an excellent time for a two-way voyage.
John Collins could neither read nor write. He gave his age as 21 on arrival and his occupation as ‘ploughman’. The immigration officials on arrival were impressed with his physical strength and described him as ‘superior’.
We don\’t know where Mary Anne and John met, but they were married in Yass on 24 November 1850, some 8 months after Mary Anne arrived. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth was born 11 October 1851 when they were still living at Fish River, suggesting that Mary Anne had found employment in that area. John was described as a ‘settler’.
When John Collins had been in the Colony around 10 years he purchased 40 acres on Fairy Hole Creek, near Yass, where he and Mary Anne took up residence. They had 5 more children: Thomas (born 28 November 1852), John (born November 1854), Margaret (born 14 March 1857), Mary (born 1 March 1860), and Rose Anne (sometimes given as Roseanna, born 21 October 1861).
John Collins worked as a carrier, transporting wool and other produce from Yass to Sydney. In 1861 Mary Anne died. There is no official record of her death, but it was probably after the birth of Rose Anne. She was 26 years old at the time and left John Collins with 6 children to raise under the age of 10.
Fortunately, a widow Mary Kenny, a dairy woman then aged 50 came to the rescue. She had been born in County Galway and treated the children as though they were her own. John Collins and Mary Kenny were married in 1863 and all 6 children were to survive to adulthood, an indication of the improving conditions in the Colony at the time. John died in 1889.