Parnell Rd

By happy accident, I followed a tweet to the walking papers project, which is a project to improve the data in the Open StreetMap project, and found myself looking at a map of part of Fremantle with a Parnell Rd slap bang in the middle, right off Clontarf St, and I immediately asked myself why would be there a street named after Parnell in a city in Australia.

Well, of course it is easy to start answering that question – Australia has a large Irish emigrant population right back to when many Irish were sent there as convicts. There are a great many places in Australia named after Irish places or, in this case, Irish political leaders.  We have always been aware that Irish exiles played a role in shaping Australia in the nineteenth century, and we can see, in newspaper reports for example, that the global community of Irish at home and overseas were aware of what was happening politically around the world.

It does make me wonder though, when were Parnell Rd, and the nearby Healy Rd and Clontarf Rd, named? Was this before or after 1900? Before or after 1920? The date of naming these places would be significant. If we could run down the date, it would be possible to unearth the debates around those placenames, and establish the reasons why those places were named after an old Irish Battlefield and two nineteenth century political leaders.

Curious, I threw the names into the OpenStreetMap search, and found a bunch of ‘Parnell’s. There are also a few ‘Healy’s but while a Healy Rd near a Parnell Rd is probably named after T.M. Healy, the Irish MP, it is harder to guess with randomly located placed called ‘Healy’, because Healy is a more common name than Parnell. (some of the Parnells in the search can also be eliminated – There is a  Jack Parnell oilfield which obviously has nothing to do with the late Nineteenth Century Irish political figure). There are a smattering of both across the American midwest, and those may or may not mark the progress and settlement of Irish emigrants westwards over time.

One cluster is near Sheboygan – there is a Parnell Esker. Now, esker is a word we associate with ‘ridge’ in Ireland – I think no one but an Irish person would call a ridge an ‘esker’ and sure enough Parnell Esker is close to a towns or villages called Parnell and Mitchell -  John Mitchell being, of course, one of the leaders of the “Young Ireland” Movement, as well as a a bunch of other places with Irish names.

It would be interesting if there was a geographical name search tool which supported “near” searches to identify clusters of places with names of Irish origin, particularly names of Irish political figures. All good research fun, but it must be filed for future reference as I have classes to prepare.