In this podcast I talk about my great-great-grandparents, Mary and Patrick Meaney. They are my father’s father’s father’s parents who independently arrived from County Clare in Ireland and settled in South Australia in the 1850s. The shipping list for the Utopia can be found:
http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/australia/utopia1858.shtml
Information about why Mary and Patrick’s families may have decided to emigrate from Ireland can be found in the following documents:
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/famineclare.htm
http://www.clareroots.com/clareemigrationmore.htm
Information about hedge schools which may have been where Mary gained her education can be found at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_school
In 1861, Mary and Patrick married and produced 17 children in 28 years. The podcast focuses on why they might have wanted to immigrate to South Australia and what their lives were like once they settled on a farm, outside of Kapunda.
The farm was situated on sections 272, 354, 355, and 581. These can be seen in the map of the Hundred of Light below.
Most of the court cases mentioned in the podcast can be found by searching Trove, the Australian National Library’ repository of digitalised documents including local newspapers. Below, I provide the link to the description of the rape case.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/108264428?searchTerm=Patrick%20Meaney
To find out more about life for the Irish living in and around Kapunda in the nineteenth century, the work of Susan Arthure is very informative:
My Forgotten and Invisible Family 