Workers for Australia: a profile of British and Irish migrants assisted to New South Wales in 1841.

Abstract

"This profile of 20,000 British and Irish assisted migrants [to Australia after 1841], based on individual-level data, establishes their age, sex, religious, educational and occupational characteristics. Their composition differed markedly from the existing colonial population and other migrant flows at the time. They reflected the recruiting methods of the time as well as the changing migration propensities in the British Isles. The migrants were better human capital than was acknowledged at the time. They constituted a new start in Australian demographic development."