“Take any one of you, my dear readers; separate him from his wife, from his children, from all those whose conversation makes life dear to him; cast him on the ends of the earth; let him there fall amongst reprobates who are the last stain and disgrace of our common nature; give him those obscene-mouthed monsters for his constant companions and consolers; let the daily vision of their progress from infamy to infamy, until the demon that inspires them has exhausted invention and the powers of nature together, be his only example; house him, at night, in a bark hut on a mud floor, where he has less comfort than your cattle in their stalls; awake him from the troubled dreams of his wretched wife and outcast children, to feel how far he is from their help, and take him out at sunrise; work him under a burning sun, and a heartless overseer, and the threat of the lash until the night fall; give him not a penny’s wages but sorrow; leave him no hope but the same dull, dreary round of endless drudgery for many years to come; let him see no opening by which to escape, but through a long, narrow prospect of police courts, of gaols, of triangles, of death cells, and of penal settlements; let him all the while be clothed in a dress of shame, that shows to every living soul his degradation; and if he dare to sell any part of that clothing, then flog him worse than any dog!  And thus, whilst severed from all kindness and all love, whilst the stern harsh voice of his task-master is grating in incessant jars within his ear, take all rest out of his flesh, and plant the thorn; take all feeling out of his heart, and leave the withered core; take all peace out of his conscience, and leave the worm of remorse; and then let any one come and dare to tell me that the man is happy because he has bread and meat.  Is it not here, if ever there was such a case, where the taste of bread is a taste of misery, and where to feed and prolong life is to feed and lengthen our sorrow?  And in pondering these things, do not those strong words of Sacred Scripture bring down their load of truth in heavy trouble to our thoughts, that, ’Their bread is loathsome to their eye, and their meat unto their soul.’”

But the bright side of the story of the Irish in Australia and New Zealand unfolds in the subsequent years.  The men who had been sent forth from Erin with the brand of the convict upon them became the founders of a new commonwealth.  To them were joined the numerous voluntary settlers who, attracted by the natural resources of the island-continent and especially by the gold discoveries of the fifties, migrated to Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales.  When in 1858 William E. Gladstone sought to establish a new colony to be known as North Australia, he opened a fresh field for Irish initiative.  As a result of his effort there stands today, on a terrace overlooking Port Curtis, the city of Gladstone, the terminal of the Australian railway system.  It was here, according to Cardinal Moran, that in 1606, Mass was first celebrated in Australia, when the Spaniards sought shelter in the “Harbor of the Holy Cross.”  The first government resident at Gladstone was Sir Maurice Charles O’Connell, a relative of the great Liberator; he was four times acting-governor of Queensland.