John Brabazon

John Brabazon was a Protestant emigrant from Co. Westmeath who kept a journal of life in the Argentine 'camp', the countryside of Buenos Aires province, in the first decades of Irish sheep farming. Juan José Delaney says the diary runs from 1845 to 1864 and was edited in Spanish by Eduardo Coghlan in 1981 as Andanzas de un irlandés en el campo porteño; Patrick McKenna, who quotes it, describes him writing about 1842 to 1852. No source opened for this site gives his dates of birth or death.

His journal is the earliest Irish voice from the sheep frontier, and it is not a flattering one. He described the Wexford people as 'all respectable', but wrote that Ballymore men fought Ballymahon men at the rural tavern, the pulpería, with sharpened sticks on Saturday nights, and he called them devils fit for Mullingar jail. He also described Irish men drinking and gambling with gauchos, which the community condemned.

The journal records the violence of the camp as well. Brabazon recalled that his first wife, Honoria, and her sister were stabbed to death in their home by a passing gaucho. McKenna sets that memory beside the ranchos built with the women's room behind the men's, the shepherds who came back broken or insane from solitude, and the flocks lost to flood and drought. Sinéad Wall's 2017 study reads Brabazon's journal alongside Kathleen Nevin's novel and William Bulfin's writing as the main first-hand Irish accounts of the pampas.