Catherine Joyce

Irish immigrant

Arrived 1850 on Panama

One of the names etched into the Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine at the Hyde Park Barracks is that of Catherine Joyce.

Born in County Mayo, Ireland, Catherine was 19 years old when she arrived in Sydney in 1850 on the Panama. She was a house servant, one of several on the ship. Her fellow passengers, 156 young Irish women, were nursemaids, needlewomen, dairymaids, housemaids, laundresses, kitchen maids and farm servants. All travelled to Sydney as assisted migrants in the wake of the famine and were accommodated at the newly established immigration depot at the Hyde Park Barracks, where they awaited employment.

Catherine was soon employed by the Reverend Joseph Oram and his wife of York Street, and two years later she married and started a family in South Australia. She and her husband, Dr R J Stuart-Robertson, had 10 children (four of them stillborn), but around 1873 he deserted her. She then lived with her children in Bourke, NSW, where she died in 1893. Catherine kept this small cross as a reminder of her homeland. It and her wedding ring passed to her descendants, who later donated them to the Hyde Park Barracks Museum collection.