Taken in
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Transcript
- Student from Piopio College
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Did any of the Irish people go back to Ireland after the potato famine had finished?
- Jock
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Well that’s a really good question too, because people always know about the migrants who come to New Zealand, but not many people know about the large number of migrants who took one look at New Zealand and went back home. In fact there was a book that came out in the 1880s called Taken In, about an English migrant who said that she came out because she had all this propaganda about what a wonderful place it was, and how much land there was, and what a great climate it was. She came out here and found out that there were earthquakes and storms, and the weather was terrible, and the land was poor, and so she got on the boat and went back home, and wrote this book called Taken In. And something like a third of the people who migrated to New Zealand, in the 19th century anyway, left again. So we forget about those people, you know the disappointed immigrants, we sort of assume that everyone who comes here thinks it’s the land of milk and honey, but quite a lot got homesick basically. You know they’d left their families, they left their communities, they left their culture and a lot of them did go home.
Actually I think the Irish were probably less likely to go home than the English. I mean we’ve all heard about the ‘whinging Poms’. On the whole I’d have to say the Irish, because they’d come from such a poor background, tended to think that New Zealand really was the promised land. And I think the numbers of Irish who returned was actually a lot fewer, than particularly the numbers of English who returned.