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To: All

The author should speak for himself. Isn't much of Australia's population "Scots-Irish"?


23 posted on 10/28/2004 7:31:51 AM PDT by milagro
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To: milagro
I'm not aware the Scots-Irish had a major impact on the settlement of Australia. The largest emigration from Northern Ireland occurred in the 18th Century, before Australia became a major focus of emigration from the British Isles. After 1800, the increasing industrialization of Ulster, the removal of legal barriers from Protestant dissenters, and the relative non-dependence on potatoes as a staple tended to keep them in Northern Ireland. The most significant British Isles group to settle Australia was the English, especially those around London, which explains the resemblance between Cockney and Australian English. In the latter 18th and early 19th Centuries, London drew many settlers fron East Anglia and the Midlands, basically the same area from which the Puritans originated before emigrating to New England. The second group were the southern, or original, Irish. Many Irish Australians trace their ancestry to Potato Famine era immigrants, although Irishmen were among the first white settlers of the continent. I suspect most of Famine-era immigrants have fourth and fifth cousins in places like Boston, New York, and Chicago. Most of them are Catholics, and a majority of that nation's Catholics (about 25% of its population) are probably of Irish descent.

The British Isles component of the Australian population is basically the same as the British Isles component of the U.S. Northeast and Great Lakes regions: Eastern English (Puritans who morphed into Yankees) and Southern Irish. (Until 1960, Australia received little Continental European immigration and none from outside Europe.) The political lines in Australia resembled those in the Northeast in the late 1800s: English Tories (like the Yankee Republicans) were the political establishment; Irish Laborites (like Irish Democrats) being the main challengers.

The Scots-Irish derived from a different region of the British Isles. The 17th Century emigrants to Northern Ireland came mostly from the Scottish Lowlands and the English border region. They were Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, and their ancestors had spoken English, or more precisely Lallans, for centuries prior to their immigration to Ulster. Racially, they were a mixture of Germanic (Anglians, Vikings) and Celtic (Picts, Britons, Gaels) strains. In Northern Ireland, they mixed further with Highland Scots, English, Huguenots, and the original Irish.

A majority of the Scots-Irish that emigrated to America in the 18th Century settled the interior of Pennsylvania and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Pennsylvania Dutch and Tidewater English also settled these areas. From these crucibles, a wave of mostly Scots-Irish settlers spread westward and southwestward. Their descendants dominate Appalachia, the Upper South, the Ohio Valley area of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, and the Southwestern states of Texas and Oklahoma.

These people, who wholly identify themselves as Americans, are very well represented in the military. Along with the mostly English descended citizens of the Lower South, they represent the core group supporting traditional values, conservative politics, and evangelical Christianity in America. To a great extent, they have prevented this nation from going as far down the road to Gramscian Marxism and socialism as have the other Western democracies, Australia included.

87 posted on 10/28/2004 10:33:23 AM PDT by Wallace T.
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