Mary Flanagan : Short Biography

Mary Flanagan was one of 31 girls who set off from Mountbellew Workhouse to journey 180 miles to Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire to catch a steamship to Plymouth, England and from hence the ship Palestine to Fremantle WA. For a more detailed account of this jouney CLICK HERE.

She was one of the Mountbellew Orphan girls who were given assisted passage to help increase the population of Western Australia after a plea by Governor FitzGerald in the most remotest British colony at the time.

Mary married George Smith, an English convict who held a ticket of leave and was working as government carpenter in Bunbury. Mary and George Armstead Smith were married twice in January 1854, the first a Church of England ceremony, the second Roman Catholic. In each of the ceremonies Mary asked her Irish friends to witness the marriage. Maria Lowe witnessed the first, and Ellen Noonan the second. Maria was also from Mountbellew.

In 1857 the lure of the Gold Rushes in Victoria saw the family on a steamer bound for South Australia. They moved from goldfield to goldfield in the north east of Victoria, George working as a carpenter.  Over the years Mary bore a total of 12 children, 9 of whom reached adulthood.  She was a remarkable mother and wife, pulling up stumps regularly as new employment opportunities arose.  George’s past as a convict was always on his mind, and they kept this secret to themselves.  One way of hiding it was to change their surname and he added to his Christian name.  He became known as Henry George Armstead Brown, and Mary was now Mary Brown.  

H.G.A. Brown applied to be a common school teacher and from 1865 until 1886 he and Mary lived at 6 country locations in Victoria, nearby the schools where HGA taught. Mary was now a school master’s wife and in most of the locations she bore and continued to raised her children.  In 1886 the family moved to Ballarat where they bought a 4 bedroom house with parlour and filled it with furniture and trimmings of a middle class family

Mary had a brother Patrick and in October 1858 she placed an ad in the Melbourne Argus looking for him. Sadly there was no response. In May 2018 Aleysha McGrath, Mary’s granddaughter, was in Mountbellew for the Palestine Brideship Project Commemoration with her siblings. She told Martin Curley of having done a DNA test and he looked through her matches. There he found a match with a descendant of Patrick. He had gone to Boston USA – after over 150 years the families reconnected and are still in touch regularly. 

Mountbellew Heritage are funding to create a new public space in memory of Mary and the other girls. For more information on this CLICK HERE.

This Chronicle was created with thanks to the Mountbellew Workhouse Orphan Girls Project