Rev. Michael Harrington Ryan
| First name | Rev. Michael Harrington |
|---|---|
| Last name | Ryan |
| Country of Origin | Ireland |
| Date of Birth | 1822 |
| Year of Arrival in Australia | 1848 |
| Submitted by | Frank Long |
Story
Rev Michael Harrington Ryan was born in Drumcondra, Ireland in 1822 and reared in Westmeath. He had family connections in Australia as his sister Mary arrived in Sydney on her way to Camden on January 10, 1842 with her husband Peter Bermingham. The Bermingham family eventually married members of the Long and Mallon families who are commemorated in the Immigration Bridge project.
The following information is from a short biography by Rev Roger Wynne in the Australasian Catholic Record of July, 1976 entitled “From Portland to Moreton Bay”. Michael Ryan attended the All Hallows Catholic Seminary which had been established by Reverend Hand as a missionary college to provide priests for the Irish Catholic diaspora, especially in Australia.
Archbishop Polding of Sydney visited the College in 1847 seeking priests for his diocese. Michael Ryan and his colleague, Eugene Luckie, who were deacons and one year short of ordination, accepted the call and sailed from Liverpool on October 7, 1847 in the St. Vincent. They arrived in Sydney on Sunday, February 6, 1848. He wrote to a friend in Ireland “You can form no idea of the sort of place this is. It far surpassed our expectations. St Mary’s Cathedral is a beautiful church with a grand organ, a most excellent peal of bells and the singing and ceremonies carried out with all due decorum”.
He was ordained in Sydney on May 7, 1848 and in September was assigned a position which no one else would accept, that of solitary Catholic chaplain on Norfolk Island. In writing to a friend he said, inter alia, “I feel it passing sweet beyond expression to sit with the prisoners in their dark solitary cells, to hear their sad and bitter tales, the circumstances of their youth, the sources of their misfortune, and the terrible heart-rending misery and degradation, both moral and physical, to which they had been made subject, and then in return to offer them whatever consolation I can”.
During his time in Norfolk Island the island was transferred from the diocese of Sydney to that of Hobart. He left Norfolk Island in 1853, travelled to Sydney and then set out on January 22 with one horse and a small portmanteau to take up his appointment at the convict settlement at Impression Bay in the south eastern corner of Tasmania. He travelled via Liverpool, Campbelltown, Appin, Berrima, Goulburn, Yass, Gundagai, Tumut, Adelong, Albury and the Ovens goldfields, ministering to the Catholics along the way, as there was no resident priest beyond Yass.
This was certainly not an easy trip because, apart from the hard riding and other privations, some of the towns were very primitive. For example, he says “From Gundagai I went to Tumut, a beautiful little township situated on the river of the same name, that falls into the Murrumbidgee a few miles above Gundagai. I arrived at this place on Sunday, late in the afternoon, and never before did I witness such a scene as there presented itself. There was no house of religious assembly of any kind in the place. But there were houses of irreligious assemblies – public houses into and around which the entire population of the township gathered. With very few exceptions, the power of reason had been entirely subdued by the powers of rum. Such a night I spent there! Confusion prevailed to its fullest extent. There was no constable, nor even the assumption of authority on the part of any individual. Everyone absolutely did and said just as he pleased.” He stayed five days in Melbourne, went by boat to Launceston and then rode across Tasmania to Impression Bay.
He was later transferred from Impression Bay to Port Arthur and then in 1861 returned to Ireland. Six months later he was received into the diocese of Westminster and given charge of the parish of Turnham Green. He returned to Australia in 1865 to work in the diocese of Maitland and was in succession Parish Priest at Grafton and at Newcastle. He served as Vicar General in the Maitland diocese and was then Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral for five years, succeeding in the mammoth task of bringing the first section of the new Cathedral to completion. Following that he served as parish priest at Appin and later Camden, where he had the assistance of his nephew, Father P.M.Ryan.
He died on November 12, 1887 and is buried in Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney.