While walking inside the St. Joseph Cathedral in Noumea, some may have noticed the representation of St. Patrick on one of the stained glass windows on the wall of the eastern facade. Why does the image of the patron saint of Ireland appear here, so far from the Emerald Isle?
To find some answers, we must go back to the second half of the 19th century. Before this period, the only Europeans to frequent the shores of New Caledonia were adventurers, traffickers and missionaries, mainly English or Scottish.
But history will also perhaps remember the name of Robert Sutton de Clonard, an Irish navigator from Wexford, and known in particular for having been second in command of the Boussole at the start of the Lapérouse expedition in 1785, then commander of the Astrolabe after the disappearance of Fleuriot de Langle.
A few decades later, it was a Franco-Irishman, Peter Dillon, a navigator and sandalwood merchant, born in June 1788 in Martinique, who discovered the site of the shipwreck of the two ships in Vanikoro in 1826.
Taking a model from what England had done in Australia, the French authorities decided to settle in New Caledonia and to dedicate the territory to Transportation from 1854. But the healthiness of the climate and the presumed fertility of the soil led them to also consider an embryo of free agricultural colonization, but restricted by lack of means.
However, the means of communication with Europe were non-existent and reduced to only state ships via Cape Horn and Tahiti, capital of the French Establishments of Oceania (EFO) on which New Caledonia then depended.
Before the arrival of the French administration, some commercial links had already developed with Australia. But from 1854, maritime relations became more frequent and the Australian press began to get more and more interest, observing everything that could happen there…
Advertisements extolling the advantages of settling in New Caledonia began to appear throughout the Australian press.
From 1856, some first investors officially declared themselves, signing the first concession contracts with the French administrative authorities, like Didier Numa-Joubert and Timothée Cheval, French traders in Australia, or the English trader James Paddon, already established for several years and who owned several trading posts on Grande Terre and the New Hebrides.
This is how the first families recruited in Australia landed in New Caledonia with the mission of putting the concessioned lands into production. Most were of British or German origin. But there were a few families of Irish origin among them. Their names include, among others, Newland, Ambrose, James, Daly, O’Donoghue, Casey…
Among the first Irish settlers to arrive in New Caledonia was a Casey family from Killrush, County Clare.
Disembarked from the “Francis” (often called the “Colonist”) on 15 August 1859 from Sydney, two of John and Ann Tracey’s daughters, Annie and Bridget, left some writings, valuable testimonies of living conditions in New Caledonia during the second half of the 19th century.
These transcriptions were taken up in particular by one of their descendants Jean-Marie Creugnet in the first volumes of his long family saga.
It had been a long time since the Irish used to be leaving their country searching for better life. As early as the 16th century, religious persecutions had pushed many Catholic families to flee Anglican repression.
Then, in the first half of the 19th century, all of Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom. Thereby, more than half a million Irish people left to work in English factories which have been developed within large mining areas.
From 1846, the great famine, which mainly affected the west of Ireland, caused the death of a million people and forced another two million to leave the country, mainly for other Commonwealth countries, connected to the British crown.
This emigration had always been encouraged by the British government, which saw in it the opportunity to populate the colonies. So the great migration began first in the direction of the United States and Canada. It was greatly helped by the development of the steam navy which had reduced the transatlantic crossing to three weeks, instead of twelve by sailboat.
At the same time, the reduction of the distances makes it possible to bring closer new territories that were still further away from Europe, particularly in the South Pacific.
Thus, Australia, initially a penal colony, soon attracted settlers, especially thanks to its gold mines from 1851, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand. Among those expatriates, some continued the journey to New Caledonia, perhaps inspired by the fact that the Catholic religion was naturally well established there due to the French presence.
The stained glass window on the eastern facade of St. Joseph’s Cathedral of Noumea, offered by the Irish community at the time of its construction and which represents St. Patrick appears as a testimony of this devotion.
Most of the Irish community that settled in New Caledonia therefore came from Australia, and especially from Sydney or Melbourne areas. Those two cities were already the most important in Australia at the time and the Irish community was already well-established there. Several of these pioneer families have descendants still present in New Caledonia, as can be seen by browsing the local telephone directory. Most of them continue to have connections on both shores.
The study of the civil status registers of New Caledonia has made it possible to construct a fairly precise typology of Irish immigrants, at least those who died there or who settled there. To this should also be added all those who have just passed through, or second or third generation descendants who declare themselves as Australian, New Zealander or American.
In addition to the concessionaire families, there are a few who came to try their luck in fields other than agriculture. Thus, a Hennessy family arrived around 1858, from which date, we find the father working as a carpenter in Lifou or Canala, before returning to Noumea. A video (in French) concerning this family can be found on the French page as well as several other videos concerning other Irish families in New Caledonia.
Among this flow of emigration, and in addition to the families counted, concessionaires or not, we observe the presence of a certain number of single women. Some come to assist the Catholic missionaries in their priesthood by becoming nuns. Others settle in the city and run small businesses in the hope of being able to marry Europeans. Some succeed, which offers them the opportunity, in addition to being able to start a family, to sometimes return to Europe in more dignified conditions than when they left when they marry a passing civil servant. On the other hand, few single men seem to have tried their luck…
In addition to our surveys (freely downloadable on our English genealogy page), we can also mention the work carried out, more than a quarter of a century ago by the Cercle Généalogique de Nouvelle-Calédonie (CGNC) on the subject and widely published in their quarterly bulletin. In addition to the ancestries and descendants of several pioneer families, we find many family stories and anecdotes.
The publications of the Société d’Etudes Historiques de Nouvelle-Calédonie are also an important source of information, particularly through its quarterly bulletin.
The descendants of several of these families have published their genealogies too. Most of them can be consulted on the genealogical website “Geneanet.org”. Some of them have even been the subject of short television documentaries on a local television channel. The video can be The videos can be viewed on the French version of this page.
Although numerically small, the Irish community in New Caledonia has inspired, through its destiny, several writers of popular literature.
Thus, in “Terre violente”, Jacqueline Sénès depicts the life of Hélèna, “born at the bottom of the valley of Tiendanite where her grandfather O’Connell had driven his tilburys and carts filled with furniture and Dublin crockery”. This novel was the subject of a Franco-Australian television adaptation about thirty years ago.
In “Le Grand Sud”, the family of a certain Feargus O’Flaherty, a farmer-breeder settled in the region of Saint Vincent, appears throughout the novel to come to the aid of the protagonists.
Unlike the Irish of Australia or New Zealand who form a large community in their respective countries, the Irish of New Caledonia, few in number and scattered across the territory, have completely blended into the Caledonian ethnic mosaic. In the process, they have also lost almost all cultural references concerning the land of their ancestors.
However, a small association has been formed in recent years in order to meet and bring back into fashion certain traditions transmitted by their ancestors. This is evidenced by this “Pudding’nade” (Irish version of cousin reunion) organized at Fayard Park in Dumbea, or the masses in honor of Saint Patrick, at the cathedral of Noumea. And for several years now, the “Fontaine céleste” on Place des Cocotiers in Noumea has been lit up in green every March 17 as a tribute to to the Irish pioneers.
Jean-Claude is looking for information about his ancestor Theresa Golden and her descendants. She had left Ireland at the age of 17 for Australia aboard the “Dunbar Castle” in 1871.
Arriving in Sydney, she answered an advertisement from the Metzger family who were looking for a lady-in-waiting to look after the family’s children. Then, she married Joseph Hertzog in Païta where they created the Cheval Blanc hotel and founded a family of several children. Unfortunately, Joseph’s accidental death left his widow Theresa in complete destitution.
A few years ago, Rémy contacted us to see if we had any information on one of his ancestors, a certain Captain William Vincent. According to him, his ancestor came from Ireland long before French colonization, to fish whales or sea cucumbers, we don’t really know, and he ended up founding a family on the island of Yandé, on the northern edge of Grande Terre. But while the presence of a Vincent family is well-known in this place, the documents in the local archives, including the civil status registers, are, for the moment, have not revealed much yet.
We do know, however, that Captain Vincent, a clearly colourful character, was still alive in 1859, since Bridget Casey-Caporn refers to him in passing in a sentence in her notebooks: “Capt. Vincent de Baba (Baaba?) and his men went to see Madame Marshall (Hôtel Sébastopol). The Captain was invariably transported in a wheelbarrow to the ship to allow it to weigh anchor.“
While waiting to learn more one day, Rémy, leader of the group “Soul Sindicate & Dub Trooper.” co-wrote a song about this idealized ancestor.
A few years ago, we were contacted by Marianne Y. about a Carter family, of Irish origin but native from the English West Indies, who would have lived in New Caledonia at least in the beginning of the 20th century. After some research, it turns out that a certain Douglas Carter, born in Trinidad and Tobago, died in Koumac in 1909 after spending more than 30 years in New Caledonia.
Probably arriving around 1874 via Australia, and married to Margarita Ann Powell (who drowned in 1914 in the Saint Paul wreckage off Moreton Island), we found one of the first hint of the couple’s in Maré, Loyalty Islands, thanks to the birth of their daughter Josephine born in 1875. Then later, Douglas was in Noumea working as a trader associated with Numa Joubert.
Described as a gentleman with a social fibre by his contemporaries, his local misadventures often made the front page of the Australian newspapers of the time.
The Carters also had a son, Douglas “Angelo”, born in 1878 in Noumea.
A chemist by training, Douglas A. worked in Népoui then in Tiébaghi before retiring in Dumbea for a few years and then ending his life in Sydney, Australia.
Despite this departure, this honourably known family will remain in the memories of Caledonia for several years as proven by the terms of the laudatory obituary of La France Australe when Douglas Angelo died.
During his stay in Australia, he had devoted himself to writing a mimeographed work devoted to the history of New Caledonia between 1774 and 1878, cited in several subsequent publications.
First published on 21st Mars 2022 – Updated 15th February 2025