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on 6 December and arriving in Sydney on 29 April 1850.
    By early 1850 hostility to the entire scheme had built up in Australia. Due to the negative reactions coming from upper- and middle-class opinion and echoed in the national newspapers, the scheme was brought to an end in that year. There were a number of elements involved. There was an inherent anti-Irish, anti-Catholic and anti-female prejudice in the colonies at that time. The orphans were denounced as ‘immoral, useless and untrained domestic servants, a drain upon the public purse, a financial liability, who, being blindly devoted to their religion, threatened to bring about a Popish ascendancy in New South Wales and Victoria’. 41 In December 1849 the Orphan Emigration Committee in Australia stated that 200 of the orphans were unemployed and this was mainly due to their inability to perform housework, rather than the earlier charges of immorality. 42
    Added to the general objections as to their suitability was a particular prejudice towards Irish Catholic immigrants, promulgated in the main by Scottish and Northern Irish Presbyterians who had settled in New South Wales from 1840 onwards. Some of these were small landholders who sold their tenant rights and set out to seek a better life in the new colony. They had bought into the new lands available to them, were hard workers and were nervous that they would be out numbered now by Catholics. Their chief spokesman, John Dunmore Lang, then a Member of the legislative council of the colony, wrote to Earl Grey urging the emigration only of ‘virtuous and industrious Protestants’. 43
    Margaret Cronin
    Margaret Mary Cronin was the third child of Myles Cronin and Honora Clifford (‘Cluvane’ on her Baptismal Certificate), who were married on 10 February 1820 at Dunkerron in County Kerry.
    Margaret was born in 1831, which meant she was 19 years of age when she emigrated, but on arrival her age was recorded as 16. The other children of Myles and Honora were John born 1821, Mary born 1824, Myles born 1837 and Cornelius born 1840. The baptism certificate of Margaret records the following:
Name MARGARET CRONIN
Date of Birth 4 July 1831 [BASED ON OTHER DATE INFORMATION]
Address DUNKERRON
Father MYLES CRONIN
Mother HANORA CLUVANE
Father Occupation NR
Priest REV: R.F.M.
Sponsor 1 DERMOT SULLIVAN
Sponsor 2 MARY SIGERSON
Book
Number
Page
Entry Number Record_Identifier
1
N/R
165
KY-RC-BA-267000
    In the Tithe Applotment Books 44 of 1840, Myles Cronin’s rent in the townland of Dunkerron, Parish of Templenoe in the Diocese of Ardfert and Aghadoe is £5 10 s 0 d . By the time of Griffith’s Valuation (1848–1851) Myles Cronin’s family is no longer a tenant on this land. We would have to presume that both parents had died in the Famine prior to Margaret’s selection in Kenmare Workhouse in December 1849.
    Margaret arrived on the John Knox at Port Jackson on 29 April 1850. Her arrival documentation also states that her parents were ‘both dead’, she could not read or write and had no relatives in the colony. We have no record of where she was initially apprenticed, but it would appear that she stayed in Sydney and was not moved on to Moreton Bay as a number of the other Kenmare girls were.
    Margaret’s great-great-grandson Peter Booth tells us that:

    Margaret Mary Cronin arrived in Sydney on 29th April 1850 along with over 250 other Irish Orphan girls aboard John Knox after a voyage of nearly five months. She would have been assigned as a servant to a family in Sydney.
    On 8th January 1856, Margaret Cronin married John William Clark, a carpenter and free settler, who had arrived from Plymouth some three years earlier. They had ten children in various parts of New South Wales including George 1857, Ellen 1858, Ernest 1861, Margaret 1863, Agnes 1865, Kate 1866, Emily 1868, Minnie 1869, John 1872, before Margaret died with her last child in 1873. She is buried at Bathurst, New South Wales.
    Descendants include a Deputy