Barrie Dowdall

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3. CONVICT WOMEN SERIES

CONVICT WOMEN & ORPHAN GIRLS 4 Part TV SERIES (4 hours) Writer & Producer SIOBHÁN LYNAM Director BARRIE DOWDALL From 1787 to 1853, over 25,000 women, nearly half of them Irish, were transported in the dark holds of ships on a 16,000-mile journey to the other end of the earth. Arriving alone, or with small children in the colonies, these single, married and widowed women, lived, loved, toiled and died under Australian skies, there was no repatriation. In a two-year period during the Great Famine, over 4,000 young orphan girls, inmates of the overcrowded Irish workhouses, were carefully selected and transported as free migrants on what became known as the ‘Famine Bride Ships’, to the colonies where men outnumbered women by 9 to 1 in the outback. Such infusions of Irish female blood at the end of the 18th and in the 19th centuries had a telling influence on the development of colonial Australia. Neither ‘damned whores’ or passive victims, these women and young girls and the choices they made, shaped the world in which they lived. They were the founding mothers of modern Australia.