ABSTRACT
A community like that which I am attempting to describe naturally falls into some regular system, and provides for itself certain rules and regulations. Fifty or sixty people separated from the rest of the world and existing in and by rebellion against society, naturally form some links of association; and when the means of life are the same, and shameful and precarious; when those who so live by them are poor as well as outcast; and when, also, they are all women, we may assure ourselves that a sort of socialistic or family bond will soon be formed. It is so amongst the wrens of the Curragh. The ruling principle there evidently is to share each other’s fortunes and misfortunes, and in happy-go-lucky style. Thus the colony is open to any poor wretch who imagines that there she can find comfort in it, or another desperate chance of existence. Come she whence she may, she has only to present herself to be admitted into one nest or another, nor is it necessary that she bring a penny to recommend her. Girls who have followed soldiers to the camp from distant towns and villages—some from actual love and hope, some from necessity or desperation—form a considerable number of those who go into the bush; and I also learn that the colony sometimes receives some harvester tired of roaming for field work, to whom the free loose life there has, one must suppose, attractions superior to those of the virtuous hovel at home. She walks in and is welcome: welcome are far less eligible immigrants too. Suppose a woman with child who has followed her lover to the camp and loses him there, or is admonished with blows to leave him alone; or suppose a young wife in the same condition is bidden by her martial lord to go away and “do as other women do” (which seems to be the formula in such cases); they are made as welcome amongst the wrens as if they did not bring with them certain trouble and an inevitable increase to the common poverty. I am not speaking what I believe they would do, but what they have done. It is not long since that a child was born in one of these nests; and wrens had made for baby what little provision it was blessed with; wrens smiled upon its birth (it was a girl); and wrens alone tended mother and child for days before it was born, and for a month afterwards:—then the unfortunate pair went into the workhouse. The mother of the babe which had so strange and portentous a beginning of life had followed its gallant father to the camp from Arklow—a fishing village many a mile away; but he unfortunately diverted his benevolence into other channels, and she sought refuge amongst the bushwomen when her trouble was near. They did what they could for her, and brought her safely through without recourse to the doctor.
