Early O Beirne emigrants to Australia were from the Castleplunkett and Kilmore districts of Roscommon and were followed by relatives or neighbours to the same destinations.

The earliest known was Francis O'Beirne of Dangan House, Kilmore, Roscommon, the youngest son of the Chieftain. His older brothers emigrated to Virginia starting in 1793. Francis must have left Ireland for the same reasons: the insurrection that ended with the failed Rebellion of 1798 after which the Dangan family’s lands and property were confiscated. He settled at Lithgow, New South Wales, and, it was believed in Ireland, became one of the wealthiest landowners of Australia and a magnificent benefactor of the Church. Lithgow is in the Orange registration district of New South Wales, northeast of Sydney.  Other O'Beirnes from Kilmore followed him to Orange.
        No positive information could be found in Australia on Francis, his family, or his descendants. Relevant NSW records of vital statistics did not begin until around 1870. In view of the custom of the times of naming a son after a father or relative and the Dangan family's pride in the name Plunkett and thus its frequent use as a second name, e.g., in Virginia, a Francis P. O'Beirne who married in Sydney in 1882 could have been a descendant, perhaps a grandson. He moved to Taree, north of Sydney, where a son Francis J. was born in 1885.
        Other early immigrants to New South Wales were James, William and John O'Beirn who evidently were a father and sons as they married there in 1810, 1834 and 1843 respectively, John O'Bern who arrived in 1820, and Patrick O'Beirne, a native of Elphin, Roscommon, who died in Sydney in 1841 at age 30. Six Beirne girls, the eldest 18, arrived in Sydney by assisted passage in 1849. Judging from their ages when they died in Sydney,  Michael O'Beirne in 1865 at age 75 and Mary O’Beirne in 1872 at age 70 could have been early immigrants; Rebecca O'Beirne (d. 1858), daughter of George, may have been another. Fergus O'Beirne was listed as a householder in the Orange Electoral Records of 1869-79. He is likely to have been the farm labourer Fergus who at age 35 was one of two oldest of a party of immigrants who came to Australia by assisted passages in 1855. Emigrants tended to go to where there were friends or relatives, and Fergus, like Francis, came from Kilmore parish. Fergus' lather was Patrick as was Francis' eldest brother who inherited the Chieftainship, but he is not recorded as having had a son named Fergus. The other listed as age 35 who came to Australia with Fergus was Mary O'Beirne of Kiltoghert, Leitrim, which is about eight miles from Kilmore. She might have been the Mary Anne O'Beirne who came to Orange in 1855 or 1856 and died there in 1909. Francis O'Beirne was a farmer in Orange who married there in 1897. He might have been a descendant of the original Francis but more likely was related to those assisted immigrants as he named his eldest son Fergus and his eldest daughter Mary. The notorious Eugene Francis O'Beirne, described earlier, arrived in Australia in 1864. His activities there are not recorded. He could have been the Eugene F. O'Beirne who died in .Jerilderie, NSW, in 1886 at age 65, but in this event either the age or the date must be wrong.

The convicts transported from Ireland were involuntary immigrants. Twelve are recorded in the Irish National Archives; none could be found in Australian convict lists. Except for the first they were all identified as Beirne because of the British custom of omitting the O' from names in official documents. The twelve and their sentences and offences were: Thomas O'Beirne of Dublin to life in 1823 for uttering forged notes; Daniel of Leitrim, the sole supporter of his widowed mother and six children, to seven years in 1831 for aiding his employer, who also got seven years, in taking possession of a house; Denis of Roscommon to life in 1835 for sheep stealing, while a friend, John Mc Dermot of Elphin, a 60-year-old father of 13, also got life for forging signatures on a petition which he had written on behalf of Denis' wife; Catharine of Roscommon to seven years in 1836 for larceny; Anne of Westmeath to seven years in 1841 also for larceny; 19-year-old Michael of Leitrim to life in 1845 for appearing armed, theft of arms, assault, and endangering life; and in 1847 18-year-old Patrick of Leitrim for 10 years for stealing a cow; Timothy of Roscommon to seven years for assault; another Timothy of Roscommon to seven for malicious assault; and Thady of Strokestown, Roscommon, to seven for appearing armed; 18-year-old Jane of Leitrim to seven years in 1848 for stealing bed curtains; and Anne of Leitrim to seven years in 1849 for receiving stolen property.

Henry O'Beirne (b. 1824) emigrated from Ireland in 1860 to the great gold-mining centre of Ballarat, Victoria. There he worked as a laborer and in some capacity in the Ballarat Orphanage. In 1872 he established a family business at nearby Linton in buildings that he moved by bullock cart the 20 miles from Ballarat. The J. & F. O'Beirne Company - the initials were those of two of his five sons - processed sheepskins, wool, hides, and rabbit and fox skins and produced tallow and neatsfoot oil and had branches at Pitagong and Geelong for wool scouring. It operated for more than a century, to 1977. Henry, then Beirne, was son of a land surveyor and his birthplace and home was at Milltown, about a mile east of Castleplunkett, Roscommon, and near the townland of Clooneybeirne. He got into a legal dispute about the occupancy of his land, lost, and had to emigrate at age 36. He adopted the O' in Australia to be recognized as Irish. His family followed him to Australia three years later: evidently it took him that Ions to save enough to pay for their six fares.
        There is a tradition in the Linton family that Henry was definitely a relative, perhaps an uncle, of Thomas Charles Beirne, the Brisbane merchant. They were born about three miles apart and were then named Beirne without the O'. Another possibility is that it was Thomas O'Beirne (1860-1911) who was the relative of the family tradition. He was son of Roscommon farmer Cornelius O'Beirne and must have emigrated in 1880 or earlier because he got married in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1881. He lived in New South Wales for nine years and then in Western Australia for 18. There he operated a popular pub in the main street of Fremantle, died of liver cirrhosis, and had a street named after him in nearby Clarmont.

Fergus O'Beirne (1840-1896) was an early successful cattle rancher and businessman in northern Queensland. He arrived in Australia in 1864 and by 1870 operated a store in Rockhampton. With a relative, he leased land in northern Queensland to raise cattle and took it over when the relative died. By 1885 he was listed as the owner/proprietor of cattle station Laura, about 80 miles west of Cooktown in the far north. He died at age 56, his wile a few weeks later from dengue fever, and the station was inherited by their stockman sons Fergus and Matthew. By 1898 it had 2000 head of cattle and by 1908 8000 and had expanded to include Lakefield station. Those two stations are now part of the National Park. The business included meat processing and packing. Two other sons had butchers' shops in Cooktown: John, who also became an alderman and was in the Boer War; and Roderick who died soon after opening his shop. Fergus was born at Camogue, near Tulsk, Roscommon, seventh of the eleven children of "Big" Fergus O'Beirne and an older brother of philanthropist Roderick of Denison, Texas.

The Honorable Thomas Charles (“T.C.”) Beirne (1860 - 1949) became one of the few millionaires of his time in Australia. He was the founder of the T.C Beirne Company, Drapers and General Providers, which in his time and for years afterwards had the greatest turnover and profits of the three largest department stores in Brisbane. In the ten years after he established it he opened branches in Ipswich and Mackay, Queensland, managed by his brother Michael, and in London, England. The last was important to his business success as it enabled him to avoid significant harm from the Australian bank crashes of the 1890s by buying direct from England. An enormously hard worker, T.C. spent most of his working-day on the floor of his store rather than in an office, observing what was going on and making personal contacts. Probably he overworked as he took extended vacation trips in the 1890s and early 1900s on doctor's advice.
        Thomas Charles became increasingly influential and involved in public affairs as he prospered. He was Member of the Executive Council of Queensland, without party ties, from 1905 until it was abolished in 1922; he was President of the Brisbane Traders' Association, and starting in 1928 Warden of the University of Queensland for 12 years. He was a Director of many companies including the Australian Mutual Provident Society for 20 years, Brisbane Gas for 29 (16 of them as Deputy Chairman), Brisbane Tramway, Atlas Assurance, British Australian Cotton Growers Association, and Queensland Trustees. A close friend of the Catholic Archbishop, T.C was a strong supporter and benefactor of Catholic causes such as building the Holy Name Cathedral, Seminary, and Hospital. The T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland was one of his more memorable benefices. In his early days in Queensland in the 1880s he was a member of the Queensland Irish Volunteers and years later of the Imperial Institute of London. In 1917 he was awarded more than 5000 pounds in a lawsuit for libel against an Orange newspaper that accused him of sectarianism.
        His published autobiography, Life Story of Thomas Charles Beirne, edited by a daughter, Eileen Macrossan, shows that T.C. was born at Ballymacurly, about half way between the towns of Roscommon and Castleplunkett, son of John Beirne, a small farmer. After a rather scanty schooling he was apprenticed to drapers in Strokestown, Roscommon, Ballina, Mayo, and Tuam, County Galway. He decided at age 12 or 13 that there was no future for him in Ireland but it took him a dozen years to save sufficient  money to emigrate to Australia. After a year in three jobs in Melbourne he moved to Brisbane where he soon combined his resources with those of another recent immigrant from Ireland, M.D. Piggott, to open a store there. Piggott had operated the draper's shop in Tuam where T.C had been an apprentice. Why Piggott left Ireland is not clear. A surmise is that the name had fallen into bad repute there because of the sleazy journalist Pigott who attempted to destroy the reputation of Charles Stewart Parnell and was found out. The Piggott and Beirne store burned down, and T.C. sold out when the partnership expired in 1891. He then borrowed from a bank with no security other than his reputation to establish his own business, located in the Fortitude Valley area of Brisbane. The site turned out to be fortunate because the store escaped harm from the great floods of 1893 which destroyed much of South Brisbane as the main retail centre.
        Thomas Charles is still remembered in Brisbane, often by anecdote, for his decisiveness, integrity, fairness, and honesty. He had some remarkable precognitive dreams. He was universally regarded as a good employer and was trusted by the then infant  Labour Party. He attempted to introduce profit-sharing schemes for his employees but failed because of bickering between employee groups. Five of his ten children did not survive infancy. The five that survived were daughters, so that present-day Queensland Beirnes of the family are descendants of his brothers Michael ("M.J.") and Edward ("Ned"). The grounds of T. C.'s family home, Glengariff, near what is now Brisbane airport, are now a municipal public park named after him: the T.C Beirne Park. The house was donated by T.C.'s daughters to the Catholic Archdiocese as a residence for the Coadjutor Archbishop. It is now privately-owned. What T.C. regarded as his greatest honor was being made Knight of the Order of Saint Gregory (KSG) of the Catholic Church.

Dominic Beirne (b. 1954) became known in the media as “The Beirne Phenomenon" because in less than three years and at age 27 he had become the biggest bookmaker in Australia with holdings of more than a quarter of a million dollars in bets each race day, or over $30 million in the year. He had taken over the leadership from the Waterhouse family who had ruled bookmaking for three decades. The rivalry and power struggle between the two at the track even extended beyond bookmaking: when a Waterhouse became a father he gave only his staff champagne; when Dominic became a father three weeks later he had large cigars for everybody at the track. Dominic's spectacular success was for a combination of reasons: he was brilliant with figures; he began a college actuarial course which involved detailed study of probabilities and odds; he would spend eight to 10 hours before each race day becoming fully informed about each of the 16 horses in each of the eight races; and in a highly stressful occupation he operated under pressure with cool, calculating patience. His opinions were so consistently right that punters followed them increasingly. He had absorbed the subject before striking out on his own as his father Keith was a bookmaker, his brother Greg a big-time punter and his brother Paul worked for a leading bookmaker named Terry Page who also employed Dominic and groomed him for that occupation. Dominic was particular about his appearance and the opposite of the typical flashy, loud, flamboyant Australian bookie. He was always impeccably groomed and conservatively dressed and was described as having a clear-cut, flesh-laced, choir-boy look.
        He got out of the bookmaking business in 1988 after nine years, wealthy at age 34, when the market began to diminish. He was owner and breeder of racehorses and an investor in business enterprises. Business failures, notably of a furniture factory, created financial problems that forced him to put up for sale in 1995 some of his racehorses for an estimated $2.4 million.
        Edward John Keith Beirne (1919-1984), Dominic's father and known as Keith, also had an extraordinary ability with figures and in judging racehorse form astutely. An exceptionally bright and award-winning student he was forced to leave school at age 15 when his father died. Eventually he became a well-known but, relatively speaking, small-time bookmaker in Sydney. Devoutly religious, he was renowned for his generosity, especially to Catholic charities for which he was honored by being made Knight of the Southern Cross. His oldest daughter, Dominic's sister, Margaret Beirne (b. 1943) entered the Order of Sisters of Charity and became well-known for her activities in promoting a greater role for women in the Catholic Church. She appeared on ABC-TV as a specialist on that subject including the controversial topic of the ordination of women as priests, and became noted for optimism and good humor. Gifted in mathematics and languages she has studied in three countries and has university degrees in English and Pure Mathematics, Theology, Education, and, for her doctorate, Distance Education Theology. "The Janet Beirne Memorial Park” in Sydney is named after Keith's mother, Janet Ellery Beirne (1886-1961), in recognition of her involvement in the New South Wales Labor Party and her significant role in the election of Premier Cahill. Her husband Edward (1888-1934), a storeman, was a son of Joseph (b. 1858) who emigrated to Sydney in the early 1880s from Roscommon where his father Patrick was a farmer.

Early New Zealand families originated from two first cousins who came from Ireland via Australia.

Francis Beirne (1843-1914), son of Francis O'Beirne, emigrated in 1860 from Cartron, near Dangan in eastern Roscommon. He was forced out as the O'Beirne's land there was confiscated in 1860, leased back to them, the rent raised to intolerable levels - the rack rent system, and the land again confiscated. Francis married a girl from County Clare in Victoria in 1864 and three years later moved to new Zealand dropping the O' en route. During the next 35 years he roamed the gold mining districts of the west coast of the South Island and was at all the principal gold rushes there. Starting in 1903 he became a storekeeper, owner of houses, and operator of two hotels in the town of Greymouth where some of his descendants still live. The family split up when his youngest son, Thomas Owen Beirne, a gambler who later became respectable, married a Protestant, a daughter of a Grandmaster of the Masonic Order of New Zealand, and remained divided even after she turned Catholic. Graham Beirne, son of Thomas Owen's brother Jim, became a successful car dealer in Christchurch because of his fearlessness in taking chances and meeting challenges. Later these characteristics and a willingness to seek expert advice made him a millionaire by buying, selling, leasing, breeding and betting on harness racers. That began in 1991 when on impulse he bought a horse sight unseen; up to then he had refused for 15 years to set foot on a racecourse in the Christian belief that horseracing was evil.

Hugh Gerald O'Beirne (1834-1909) was son of a different Francis O'Beirne who was an uncle of the above Francis who emigrated. The rack rents forced him out of Roscommon. He settled in Ballineer, Sligo. Hugh, his son, moved to Ballina, Mayo, and in 1880 emigrated to Australia with his five children and other relatives including at least one brother. It is not known where they went to in Australia or when they moved to New Zealand. There he came to own an extensive farm near Nelson in the South Island. He married a sister of Eugene Joseph O’Connor (1835-1912) of “Milton, Roscommon" which presumably was Milltown where Henry came from and where the O'Connors had been large landowners up to the Cromwellian expropriations and where an R.J. O'Connor still had 1500 acres. In 1879 Eugene also had emigrated to New Zealand where he became Secretary of the Nelson Provincial Council and Member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. He claimed to be a lineal descendant of Roderick O'Connor, last King of Connacht, who in 1392 threw the O Beirne Chieftain into prison for conspiring to depose him as King.
        Francis Hinde O'Beirne (1827-1883), an older brother of Hugh, died on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. There is no information on why he was there or about his career in Australia and New Zealand. A son of Hugh, Gerald Cecil Francis O'Beirne (1872-1942), lived with his family in Brisbane, Australia.
        Hugh claimed descent from the James O'Beirne who died in Barcelona, Spain, in 1678 and who was believed by some to be the father of Maria Teresa O'Beirne who became Duchess of Wharton. However, as explained in the discussion on the O'Beirnes in Spain, Maria and Teresa probably were different people and a generation apart and that it was Teresa, daughter of Henry, and not Maria, daughter of James, who married the dissolute English Duke. But this does not weaken the story that Hugh was descended from James.

***************************************

This review is only a beginning. Which deserving O Beirnes are missing, or could not be identified because they became Byrnes or Burns? Who were O Beirne achievers in Latin America, Asia and Africa or in professions such as the Church, medicine, and the military in which achievements of individuals are regarded as duties and thus not widely publicized? What happened to descendants of O Beirne "Wild Geese”? What are the histories and the relationships of individual O Beirne Families and the accomplishments and occupations of their members in Ireland and overseas?  
        Who will seek and provide answers to questions such as these and thereby assist in making the O Beirnes the first of the many small native Irish Families whose contributions to history and to humanity are comprehensively identified and evaluated? The answer: those who are justifiably proud of being O Beirnes.