An immense island, to which geographers have now given the name of the fifth continent, from the dawn of creation lay sleeping between the seas known as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. A few thousand savages, said to be the lowest type of the human family, roamed aimlessly over its extensive wilds. Out of the ordinary route of circumnavigating explorers, few European ships had reached its coast, when the Dutch attempted to form establishments on its southern and western sides, giving it the name of New Holland. At the end of last century the English Captain Cook formed the first successful European settlement— Botany Bay—in what he called New South Wales, at the south- eastern extremity of the island. The French surveyed a considerable portion of the western coast at the beginning of this century. But finally, as has so far generally been the case with other colonies, the English remained in possession of the whole, and, though their first thought was to use it merely as a penal settlement, they soon saw the importance of removing their convicts to Van Diemen's Island, and now no less than four or five distinct British colonies embrace the entire coast-line of the continent, the interior still remaining an unknown desert.
Immigration, other than the transport of criminals, began only in 1825; and the white population of New South Wales, which in 1810 was only eight thousand three hundred, in 1821 only thirty thousand, increased rapidly after the discovery of the gold- fields in 1851, so that in 1861 more than seven hundred thousand free colonists had been landed from British ships on the continent and large islands of Van Diemen and New Zealand, notwithstanding their enormous distance from Great Britain.
The importance of this vast colony, or, rather, of this agglomeration of colonies, should not be estimated from their extent and productions alone, but chiefly from their proximity to Asia toward the north, and to America toward the east. Already lines of steamers connect the new continent with China on the one side and San Francisco on the other; and when we reflect that the English tongue is the only one spoken throughout that vast territory; that English political institutions, with all their attendant machinery of parliaments, elections, municipal governments, and liberties, toleration, a free press and free discussion, are day by day becoming more deeply rooted in the habits of the people, it is easy to perceive how soon the peculiarities of Japhetism, starting from that centre, will invade the whole line of Southern and Eastern Asia and the countless island-groups of Polynesia. The Catholic reader will at once perceive how the true religion must have been left to struggle, hopelessly almost, in its mission of enlightenment and mercy, surrounded as it was by so many adverse circumstances, had not the Irish element been at hand to fall back on.
Our information on this important branch of the subject is unfortunately not extensive; nor is this to be wondered at, since it is only from 1851 that Irish immigration really began to show itself in Australia, and take an active part in the European rush toward that quarter of the world, or, rather, to use the phrase of Holy Writ, "to dwell in the tents of Sem."
When Great Britain sent out her first cargoes of convicts to Australia, it never entered into the ideas of that enlightened power that such an attendant as a minister of religion might be wanted, and, as Mr. Marshall says in his book on "Christian Missions:" "The first ship which bore away its freight of despair, of bruised hearts, and woful memories, and fearful expectations, would have left the shores of England without even a solitary minister of religion, but for the timely remonstrance of a private individual. The civil authorities had deemed their work complete, when they had given the signal to raise the anchor and unloose the sails; the rest was no concern of theirs. "He adds something more extraordinary and more to our purpose still:
"Among the emigrants to the new continent, soon some of those children of Ireland, whom Providence seems to have dispersed through all the homes of the Saxon race, that they might one day rekindle among them the light of faith, which their own long misfortunes have never been able to quench, were carried as the first fruitful seeds of the ever-blooming tree of the Church."
To these exiles it was necessary to convey the succors of religion. The first Catholic priest who arrived in Australia on his mission of charity, and whom the policy of self-interest, at least, might have prompted the authorities to greet with eager welcome, was treated with derision, and "was directed," as one of his most energetic successors relates, "to produce his permission," or "hold himself in readiness for departure by the next ship." He was alone, and consequently a safe victim; and though, as the latest historian of the colony observes, "his ministrations would have been not less valuable in a social than in a religious point of view," he was seized, put in prison, and finally sent back to England, because his presence was irksome to men who seem to have felt instinctively that his proffered ministry was the keenest rebuke to their own cruelty and profaneness.
This first Catholic priest was the Rev. Mr. Flynn, on whom the Holy See had conferred the title of archpriest, with power to administer confirmation. Arrived at Sydney in 1818, he did much good there in a short time. Mr. Marshall has told us how the colonial authorities treated him.
But a circumstance, not mentioned in this clever author's work on "Missions," shows who and what were those Irish exiles whom the priest had come to serve and direct in his spiritual capacity. When suddenly carried off to prison, he left the Blessed Sacrament in their little church at Sydney. There the faithful frequently assembled during the two years which followed his departure, as large a number as could muster, to offer up their prayers to God, and look for consolation in their affliction. The visible priest had been violently snatched away from them; the Archpriest of souls, Christ, remained.
The Rev. W. Ullathorne, now Bishop of Birmingham, England, was afterward made Vicar-General Apostolic of that desolate mission by the Holy See. He informs us, in a letter published among the "Annals of the Propagation of the Faith," how these poor Irish people were treated by their "masters" in Australia.