he was arrested and promptly sent back to England.  Before the ship sailed he tried repeatedly to return to the house of Davis where the Blessed Sacrament was preserved in a cedar clothes-press, but the surveillance of his captors was strict and unsleeping.  So in the dwelling of the convict Irishman the Sacred Species remained.  Before this unwonted repository Davis kept a light ever burning day and night; and day and night crept the loyal Irishmen of the settlement to kneel in prayer before the improvised shrine.  The “Holy House of Australia”, as the Davis dwelling came to be known, remained the only Catholic church in the colony until 1821, when two Irish priests, Father John Joseph Therry of Cork and Father Philip Connolly of Kildare, were permitted to attend to the spiritual needs of the Irish Catholics.  Their coming marked the beginning of religious toleration in Australia and the termination of the sufferings and sacrifices of the Irish colonists, several of whom had had to pay dearly for their religious convictions.  Davis himself had been twice flogged and once imprisoned for refusing to attend Protestant service.

Today, on the site of the “Holy House of Australia”, stands the church of St. Patrick.  Davis gave the land and the sum of one thousand pounds to the church, and his fellow exiles contributed according to their means.  This episode in the history of the Irish in Australia pays a touchingly eloquent tribute to the spirit of loyalty to God and country which has characterized the sons and daughters of St. Patrick everywhere whither their feet have strayed.  It is the spirit which has embodied itself in the imposing cathedral of St. Patrick in Melbourne and the splendidly equipped college of St. Patrick in Sydney.  It is the spirit which has made the Irish play so conspicuous a role in the civic and commercial history of Australasia.

Originally known as New Holland, Australia became an English penal colony after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in the United States of America.  An Irish element came into the colony in the last decade of the eighteenth century when, during the Orange reign of terror, upwards of a thousand people from the west of Ireland were deported by the Ulster magistrates and by Lord Carhampton, the notorious “Satanides”, who was charged with the pacification of Connacht.  And during the first three decades of the nineteenth century the stream of Irish transportation flowed on.  As a result of the Tithes agitation, the Charter and Reform movements, the Combination Laws and the Corn Laws, many more Irishmen were forced across the sea.  It was not until 1868 that the convict system was permanently abolished.

It is difficult for us of a later day to realize the meaning of that word, transportation.  Let us form some conception of what the Irish exiles suffered from the graphic picture painted in colors, somber but not untrue, by one who knew from firsthand experience the lot of the political prisoner.  Writes Dr. Ullathorne in The Horrors of Transportation: