Author's Blog 8 March '26:
Diamond of the Desert is a historical adventure-romance story of early colonial Western Australia. Released to coincide with WA bicentennial events, 2026-2029, The Diamond relays an accurate history of first decades of The Swan Colony and its northerly expansion in the 1850’s through an engaging romance-adventure historical fiction.
Today I’m continuing the ‘WA’s Early Days’ series with a focus on Ireland and England. For half a world away from The Swan Colony’s far-flung shores, in 1845 Ireland was struck down by the dreadful Potato Famine, and England slipped into recession resulting in a new stream of migrants in the 1840s and 50s – brutal preconditions to WA’s colonial expansion in the 1850s, at a time the little colony was close to failure.
“As the first potatoes of 1845 were pulled from the ground, it was immediately clear that a dreaded blight had taken hold. Where once there were fields of productive land, now there were barren fields.
Potatoes had been a reliable and cheap source of nutrition for much of the Irish population for decades, and the failure of nearly half the crop that year was devastating. Many Irish lived on small plots and potatoes were the only thing they could grow that provided the nutritional mix needed for their families. In the countryside farms and townships, emerging poverty and starvation was palpable as increasingly, the weakest, the oldest and the poorest began to die.
The Irish came to know this time as ‘An Drochshaol’ – The Hard Times – but in truth this was an understatement. Over the seven years of 1845-1851, over a million people died and simultaneously the era known as ‘The Great Migration’ began, with over two million people leaving Ireland for greener pastures. The population was reduced by a quarter as the Irish left their island in droves.
Tens of thousands migrated to far away Australia, with the effect that by 1871 the Irish accounted for one-quarter of all foreign-born settlers, half a planet away on the opposite side of the world.
One in six did not survive the crossing – about the same odds of surviving the famine.”
Many readers reported they loved reading about the English and Irish precursor history to better understand WA’s own past. I felt it was important to show the social and economic preconditions – a horrific famine that killed 1 in 6 Irish, and a terrible set of social policies that not only failed to offer any help, but that blamed the poor for their own misfortune and actively punished any who provided aid.
Dark days indeed – and quite literally ours in the making.