Jim Edwards' great-grandmother came to Australia as an Irish famine orphan. (Pic: Irish Echo/Martin Brady)

An 86-year-old Sydney man became the first Australian to be given a certificate of Irish heritage recently.

Irish Consul General, Caitríona Ingoldsby, presented North Shore resident Jim Edwards with the certificate at a special ceremony at Hyde Park Barracks on December 9.

His great-grandmother Hannah Rafferty, from Co Roscommon, was one of more than 4,000 young Irish orphan girls sent to Australia between 1848 and 1850 in the aftermath of the Irish Famine, and whose lives are celebrated and remembered by the Irish Famine Memorial at Hyde Park Barracks, where the girls were housed when they first arrived in Sydney.

Mr Edwards said he was delighted with his certificate.

“I’m overwhelmed because I never expected anything like this. I only got it as far as I’m concerned because I’m a representative of the [Rafferty] family,” said Mr Edwards.

“[Hannah] was orphaned during the Famine,” explained Jim. “She came out on the Digby in 1848.”

After being sent to Bathurst, Hannah met Jim’s great-grandfather. The pair married and had seven children. But when tragedy struck and left Hannah widowed, she raised the children on her own. She later remarried.

Asked what he admired about his Irish ancestors, Mr Edwards said it was “their attitude of self-sufficiency, even though you had lost the bread-winner, you still survived”.

Mr Edwards’ daughter, Sue Donald, 59, accompanied her father to the ceremony.

“He’s put a lot of work into the family tree. So it’s great to get that recognition,” she said.

Ms Ingoldsby, who presented the certificate on behalf of the Irish Government, said she was struck by Jim’s “extraordinary story”ß¡.

“Behind this apparently ‘ordinary’ Australian man was an extraordinary story of Ireland and of Australia, and of a young Irish girl who, like many emigrants before and since, had the courage to embrace the opportunity this wonderful country gave her.”

O’Dowd was born at Beaufort, Victoria to Irish emigrant parents who were preoccupied with Celtic ancestry and legend. But, in the hope that he would win paid secondary school and university fees, O’Dowd was not sent to Catholic schools.

He did win the fees but was forced to leave university and earn a living after his father was kicked by a horse, and, aged just 17, became the headmaster of St Alipius’ school at Ballarat. His then secularist beliefs led to his dismissal and in 1884 he opened his own school.

In 1885 O’Dowd passed the public service examinations and entered the Crown Solicitor’s Office in Melbourne. Three years later he resumed university and got degrees in arts and law.

After initially having verse published in the Ballarat Courier, Dawnward (1903) established O’Dowd’s identity as a radical poet. He wrote several law books as well as poetry.

His religious beliefs were often in flux and in turn he joined the Theosophical Society, the Australian Church and the Free Religious Fellowship. He was also a foundation member of the Victorian Socialist Party in 1905.

In 1912 he bravely denounced the White Australia policy as “unbrotherly, undemocratic and unscientific”. In 1934 O’Dowd declined the offer of a knighthood.

Historian

Born in New Zealand to Irish parents, O’Farrell moved to Australia in 1956 and, after receiving a PhD from the Australian National University, became a professor of history and, later, emeritus professor, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

Many of the 12 books he wrote concerned Irish Australia, Catholicism in Australia and Anglo-Irish relations. His most famous work, The Irish in Australia, first published in 1987, remains the most thorough account of the shared history of the two countries.  As he said himself: “If people don’t know history, they don’t know themselves.”

At the time of O’Farrell’s death on Christmas Day 2003, UNSW Vice-Chancellor, Prof Rory Hume, said he had made “landmark contributions to the study of Irish-Australian history and Australian Catholicism”.

Then Irish ambassador to Australia Declan Kelly said: “The government and the people of Ireland owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his scholarly work.”

O’Farrell held visiting professorships at both Trinity College (1965-66) and University College Dublin (1972-73).

He is survived by his wife Deirdre and their five children.

Explorer

Burke was born into a family of Protestant gentry in Co Galway and, like all the males in his family, became a soldier.

He served in the Austrian army and the Irish Mounted Constabulary prior to migrating to Australia in 1853. He joined the Victorian police and rose to superintendent before leaving, in 1860, to command an expedition to cross the continent from south to north.

The objectives of the Burke and Wills expedition, as it came to be known, were hazy and its route decided just weeks before it set out. When the last bill came in it had cost over £60,000 and seven lives, including those of both Burke and Wills.

Burke might have survived if he had accepted the hospitality of the Aboriginels who arrived in his camp, bearing gifts of fish.

But Burke was born and bred a member of the ruling race and could not bring himself to associate with natives.

Ironically, though Burke’s own journey was pointless and tragic, his contribution to the history of Victoria is still significant and he was seen as a brave man, despite his shortcomings as an explorer.

He was granted a state funeral.

Public Servant

Born at Murwillumbah, NSW to an Irish immigrant father and a Queensland-born mother, O’Leary was educated by the Christian Brothers in Ipswich, Queensland and began working for the Queensland Public Service in 1913.

Starting off as a clerk, by November 1922 he was appointed a ‘protector of Aboriginals’ and assigned to the district of Somerset, which encompassed the Torres Strait Islands and the northern half of Cape York Peninsula.

In March 1930 O’Leary was sent as acting-superintendent to Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement. It was a tough assignment as his predecessor had ‘run amok’ – firing a weapon, burning buildings and terrorising the inhabitants. By “tactful management” O’Leary restored confidence in the administration and was rewarded by being transferred to Brisbane as inspector and deputy chief protector of Aboriginals. He toured Queensland in 1935 to familiarise himself with the indigenous communities. He eventually rose to become director of native affairs.

O’Leary’s régime is remembered as dynamic and benevolent.

He had a genuine interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander welfare and devised a number of schemes to improve their lot.

He was appointed OBE in 1964. He died in Brisbane in 1971, survived by his wife, Frances, their daughter and two sons.

Trade Unionist

Born at Wentworth, NSW, the seventh of nine children of Irish-born parents, O’Neill was educated at the local Catholic school.

The family moved to Broken Hill and Paddy and his brothers became mineworkers. In 1899 he married Mary Anne Gearon, from South Australia. They had six children.

In 1908 he became secretary of the South Broken Hill branch of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association. His outlook was informed by social conservatism and his resulting preference for direct bargaining with employers, rather than arbitration, transformed him into an astute union leader and formidable negotiator.

In April 1913 he became a sanitary-cart driver with the Broken Hill Municipal Council. In 1922 he helped to form a local branch of the Municipal Employees’ Union and was its president, then secretary from 1924. But O’Neill’s greatest contribution to Australian unionism was his involvement in forming the Barrier Industrial Council (BIC) – a new, all-inclusive and powerful local peak union body in Broken Hill.

With O’Neill as its leader, BIC oversaw Broken Hill’s near-complete withdrawal from the State and Federal arbitration systems and the signing in 1925 of the first of what would become a stable regime of triennial collective agreements for local mine workers. He remained BIC president until 1949.

Cricketer

Born into an Irish family in White Cliffs, NSW, in 1905, William Joseph ‘Tiger’ O’Reilly would go on to become the greatest spin bowler of all time.

His father was a small-town schoolmaster who was moved around a lot and in 1917 the family moved north to the town of Wingello where “everyone was a cricket crank”, according to O’Reilly in his autobiography, Tiger.

It was here that his love for cricket began to blossom and playing club cricket for Wingello he would face a then 17-year-old Don Bradman.

Widely regarded as the greatest cricketer of all time, Bradman would go on to describe O’Reilly as the “greatest bowler I have ever faced or watched”.

Although the pair had a huge mutual respect, they did not get along on a personal level.

In many ways their fractious relationship with, Bradman, a Protestant, and O’Reilly, an Irish Catholic, was analagous to the sectarian tensions that existed in Australia at the time.

O’Reilly died in 1992 in Sydney by which time he had amassed 140 Test caps for Australia and 135 first-class appearances for NSW.

The Bill O’Reilly stand, opposite the Bradman Stand, at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) is named in his honour.

Priest

Born in Co Cork, the eldest of five children, O’Reilly was educated at St Colman’s College, Fermoy, before studying philosophy and theology at Maynooth. He was ordained a Vincentian priest in January 1890 and emigrated to Melbourne in 1892.

In 1899 he became information editor of the Catholic monthly, Austral Light, and was to contribute prose and verse to it for over 20 years. He published a volume, Poems (1919), which revealed the depth, seriousness and whimsicality of his rich personality.

O’Reilly was president of St Stanislaus’ College, Bathurst, NSW from 1903-14, and from 1910 was prominent in the education debate. He vigorously fought against the continued exclusion of Catholic schools from government funding.

O’Reilly entered into bitter controversy in 1911 over the celebration of Empire rather than Australia Day.

He was firmly of the view that “everything that was best and noblest in Australia was Irish”.

A powerful orator, he was greatly concerned for the poor and for the victims of sectarian bigotry, and once declared that the “Sydney ‘pommy’ Press is the vilest on earth”.

His funeral mass at St Mary’s in Sydney was so packed that 3,000 people, unable to find room in the cathedral, stood in Hyde Park during the service.

Politician, Businessman

Born near Thurles, Co Tipperary, Ireland, O’Shanassy and his wife Margaret arrived in Australia in November 1839. After initially buying a farm, they opened a drapery shop in Collins St, Melbourne in 1845.

O’Shanassy’s political career began the following year when he won a by-election to become a member of the Melbourne Council. In November he lost his seat thanks, at least in part, to lingering anti-Catholic sentiment after the ‘Orange’ riots in July of that year.

After becoming identified with popular causes such as opposition to any revival of transportation he won a seat in the first Legislative Council elections in September 1851. On March 11, 1857 he became premier, but this ministry collapsed after only seven weeks. He again became premier on March 10, 1858, leading a conservative government for the next 19 months.

O’Shanassy formed his third, strongest and most successful ministry in November 1861. This government was responsible for important reforms such as the Civil Service Act, which classified salaries and set out principles for promotion.

Though remembered as a great supporter of Catholic education, O’Shanassy warned against bringing old-world loyalties into a new land and said people should act as Australians in their adopted country.

Winemaker

Maurice O’Shea was born in 1897 in North Sydney, to John Augustus O’Shea, an Irish-born wine-and-spirit merchant, and Leontine Frances, who came from France.

The young O’Shea trained as a viticulturist and analytical chemist at the University of Montpellier before returning to NSW in 1920.

He began to make wine on the family property at Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley and in 1925 he named the vineyard Mount Pleasant – a brand still well known and respected to this day.

He died of cancer in May, 1956 in his flat at Newcastle.