In Search of Hannah

Hannah Riordan did not leave Ireland by choice, nor was she sent away as a convicted felon. Circumstances far beyond her control forced her to leave her homeland in 1848 to embark on a long sea voyage. At nineteen years of age, she set off alone, without the comfort of any relative or friend, to travel to a strange and distant country from which she would never return.
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Born in 1829 in Ireland, in the town of Macroom, near the city of Cork, Hannah Riordan survived the Great Famine of the 1840s but was forced to join the thousands of Irish peasants who left their home country at that time. Arriving in Melbourne in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, Hannah experienced the excitement and disruption of the Gold Rush and eventually went to live on a goldfield many miles from the city. When her husband became a selector farmer, Hannah and her family endured the hard life common to so many Australian pioneers while the historic events of the time took place around her. Little was known of her story but, in this book, her great-granddaughter tells of her quest to understand Hannah Riordan's life.