In 2015, the Committee for the Commemoration of Irish Famine Victims (through its chief executive Michael Blanch) began a collaboration with the Irish Prison Service (through its assistant chief officer Mark O’Brien) to create a series of wooden boxes that would represent emigrants, specifically women, who left Ireland for Australia and the United States in the wake of the Famine.
The boxes are replicas of those which had been given to the young women – often residing in Irish workhouses and orphanages – to carry their worldly possessions on the journey to these countries. Inside, the girls would have placed clothing and toiletries made and paid for by the Poor Law Unions which oversaw the institutions from which they came.
The first replicas were completed in September 2015, and presented to the Mountjoy Museum and the Carrickmacross Workhouse, with many other museums, local authorities and commemorative organisations across Ireland, the United States and Australia receiving travel boxes after that time. Crucially, each box is unique, and tells the story of a person, a workhouse, or a ship – and the wider story of emigrants from Ireland whose circumstances caused them to leave their homeland for better opportunities elsewhere.
In 2017, the Western Australia Irish Famine Commemoration (WAIFC) committee commissioned several of these boxes to be presented in ceremonies across WA. Often, they were constructed to represent specific ‘Bride Ship’ women connected to a particular town: for example, Bridget Mulqueen from Limerick – who was commemorated through a travel box presented in Bunbury, where she had resided for much of her life; or Elizabeth Carbury from Galway who was similarly commemorated in Dardanup. Both commemorations occurred in 2017, and another box was presented at a St Patrick’s Day mass in Perth’s St Mary’s Cathedral in March of the same year. In 2018, the Governor of Dublin’s Arbour Hill Prison Liam Dowling presented the City of Subiaco with another Travel Box to acknowledge the council’s support for the ‘An Gorta Mór’ Famine Memorial in Subiaco’s Market Square.