2021 media person of the year: Grace Tame

In May Grace Tame was the first non-celebrity on the cover of Marie Claire’s Australian edition in its 25 year history. She returned to the cover later in the year with Brittany Higgins.

Grace Tame started the year with an important accolade as Australian of the Year and now ends it with a less prestigious one – this site’s 13th annual media person of the year. I started the award in 2009 with an Australian focus when I gave the first one to the then ABC boss Mark Scott for taking up the fight to Murdoch. Though it went to an Australian a year later for Julian Assange’s Wikileaks exploits (and though he has spent much of the last decade in detention he was a good candidate for a second award this year), Assange’s global focus encouraged me to look beyond our shores for recipients. Looking back on the 13 winners, they were mostly people I respected (Trump the obvious exception) but the common denominator was they used their voice to great effect. Last year I gave it to World Health Organisation boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for dealing with the unimaginable global challenge of COVID and his unheeded warning of the need for equity in vaccine distribution. COVID remains the dominant theme of 2021 though no one individual stands out in response.

Looking elsewhere it was another watershed year in the fight for genuine equality between the sexes. The UN says gender equality is a fundamental human right and a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. But despite many advances in recent decades, the UN says discriminatory laws and social norms remain pervasive, women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and one in five women and girls between 15 and 49 experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner within a 12-month period.

Grace Tame is one of those women. She is an Australian activist and advocate for survivors of sexual assault. She is a yoga teacher, visual artist, and champion long-distance runner, having won the 2020 Ross Marathon in a female course record time of just under three hours. She turns 27 in late December though the highlight of her 2021 was back in January when she was named Australian of the Year. That award is conferred by the National Australia Day Council a not-for-profit Australian Government–owned social enterprise. The award given since 1960 has evolved over the years though scientists and sports stars have always done well (three Australian cricket captains feature). There has been an increasing number of female and Indigenous winners and two of them, Adam Goodes (2014) and Rosie Batty (2015) have used the award to campaign hard on issues of importance, risking great unpopularity for speaking out.

When Tame was named Australian of the Year, Batty wrote her an open letter, warning of the pressures and demands ahead and pleading with the National Australia Day Council to better support recipients. “If there was one thing I would ask NADC to consider,” Batty wrote, “it is to prepare the honourees more thoroughly. Give an indication of the avalanche about to hit.” That avalanche certainly hit but Tame was ready for it, living up not to her surname but to her first name, the epitome of grace under fire. In 2021 Tame took her activism to the next level, directly attacking the government and its leaders, inviting political displeasure in a year when the ruling Coalition has been beset by “women problems” which are really “men problems”.

Tame knows a lot about men problems. Born in Hobart she was a gifted, outgoing child with a loving but disrupted childhood. Her parents separated when she was two and she spent 13 years moving between two homes. She was a dual-scholarship holder at St Michael’s Collegiate girls’ school and was diagnosed with anorexia in Year 10. She was groomed aged 15 and then repeatedly sexually abused by 58-year-old teacher Nicolaas Bester. The school knew about the predator but did nothing to stop the abuse until Tame reported her attacker. Bester was arrested and convicted of “maintaining a sexual relationship with someone under the age of 17”. In sentencing, Justice Helen Wood said Tame, who had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, was “particularly vulnerable given her mental state” and that her abuser “knew her psychological condition was precarious” and had “betrayed the trust of the child’s parents and the school’s trust in an utterly blatant fashion.” Tame argued the offence needed to be renamed as in other jurisdictions due to its misleading use of the word “relationship” when what was really meant was “abuse”.

Her attacker showed no remorse. After release from prison in 2015, Bester boasted about his crime on an internet forum. “The majority of men in Australia envy me,” Bester wrote. “I was 59, she was 15 going on 25 … It was awesome.” He was convicted a second time as a result, and for sharing further child exploitation material. In 2017, Bettina Arndt interviewed Bester for her YouTube channel in a segment she called “Feminists persecute disgraced teacher”. Arndt claimed there was “sexually provocative behaviour from female students” and said young women needed to “behave sensibly and not exploit their seductive power to ruin the lives of men”.

Arndt made no attempt to understand the power differential between Bester and Tame or the way he tried to ruin her life. She had not contacted Tame for the story and published her name without consent. Tame criticised Arndt for falsehoods and supporting her abuser and “trivialising” and “laughing off” his crime. “Ms Arndt never reached out to me in the pursuit of balanced journalism; never heard my side of the story; was not present at any stage of the abuse; did not attend any of the court hearings; yet confidently labelled me a ‘provocative’ teenager who used her ‘seductive powers’ to ruin a man’s life,” Tame said.

Though Bester had spoken publicly about the case many times, Tame could not as she was gagged by a Tasmanian law supposedly designed to protect victims. Since 2001 the Evidence Act prohibited publication of information identifying survivors of sexual assault. Journalist and sexual assault survivor advocate Nina Funnell worked with Tame on a campaign called #LetHerSpeak, with Marque Lawyers and End Rape on Campus Australia seeking to overturn this law and a similar law in the Northern Territory. The campaign attracted global support from Alyssa Milano, Tara Moss and John Cleese and from the MeToo movement.

Grace fought her own private battle to speak publicly in the Supreme Court of Tasmania. After two years and a $10,000 legal bill, she was given special leave in August 2019 to tell her story, the first woman in Tasmania granted the exemption. Then in October Tasmanian Attorney-General Elise Archer announced legislation would be amended to allow sexual assault survivors to publicly speak out with changes to the wording of the crime noting that “the word relationship has connotations of consent.” That law came into force in 2020.

As a result Tame became an international advocate including work with the Los Angeles Human Trafficking Squad helping people understand grooming and psychological manipulation. Her focus is on education as prevention rather than looking for cures which can “fuel the unconscious belief that child sexual abuse is just a fact of life that we have to accept in our society”. LA Human Trafficking Squad task force leader Detective Ray Bercini said Tame’s insights were invaluable. “It’s a mind manipulation, it’s a way that these guys are able to control and manipulate victims who are just looking for someone to love them or give them some direction,” he said. “They don’t want to disrespect them if they’re older, and so a lot of the process that happens in the grooming, that’s what draws that bond, and that bond becomes very, very difficult to break through. And if I can understand that, then I can have a little more patience and compassion in knowing that that’s what’s happening.”

Grace Tame was named Tasmanian of the Year in October 2020 and three months later became the first Tasmanian winner in the 61 years of the national award. The award panel cited her “extraordinary courage, using her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness about the impacts of sexual violence.” In her acceptance speech she spoke of her assault: “I remember him saying, ‘Don’t make a sound.’ Well, hear me now, using my voice amongst a chorus of voices that will not be silenced.” Tame said child sexual abuse and cultures that enable still existed and the lasting impacts of grooming were not widely understood. “Predators manipulate all of us — family, friends, colleagues, strangers in every class, culture and community. They thrive when we fight amongst ourselves and weaponise all of our vulnerabilities.” Her powerful speech “brought the house down” and marked Tame as an important new voice.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced her that night but probably winced at the speech, with several members of his own government accused of inappropriate conduct, a Coalition staffer on trial for rape of Britanny Higgins and allegations of bullying made by former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate. Tame later said his measly response was “Well, gee, I bet it felt good to get that out”. With plausible deniability Morrison said he’d called her Australia Day speech “very brave”: “That is exactly what I meant when I said that to her on that occasion”.

Morrison may have wanted to sweep it under the Canberra carpet but Tame was just getting started. At a March 4 Justice rally she said evil thrived in silence. “Unspoken behaviour ignored is behaviour endorsed,” she said to huge applause. She acknowledged while having a voice in these conversations was “terrifying”, women needed to know they had the power. “The fear of doing nothing should outweigh your fear of doing something.” Tame stood shoulder to shoulder with Higgins and both made the cover of Marie Claire’s “Women of the Year” issue, with the magazine recognising them for their “bravery, honesty and smarts”.

Morrison’s “well, gee” reaction suggests he had no grasp of the problem but the evidence was mounting. In April Queensland introduced a Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce to examine coercive control and review the need for a specific offence of domestic violence. Morrison responded with his own Cabinet Taskforce on women’s security and economic security the same month, though he remained opposed to quotas for women in his own party.

Tame made enemies, criticising the appointment of Amanda Stoker as the new assistant minister for women, saying the Queensland senator had supported a “fake rape crisis tour” that inflicted great suffering on survivors. Stoker said Tame’s claims were “utter nonsense” and said different points of view should be spoken and heard even if they had the potential to offend. She probably had Arndt’s Bester story in mind. Stoker had previously supported Arndt who got an Australia Day award a year before Tame, ironically, for her contribution “to gender equity.” In the real world of gender inequity a report by sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins found one in three people working in federal parliament had experienced some kind of sexual harassment. Tame said “until every recommendation has been implemented and real changes follows, sadly all this will amount to is another theatrical announcement. I’m loathe to have to criticise once again, but this is the reality.”

Tame did not back off. Speaking on Twitter after the report was released she said the Prime Minister led a coalition “whose behaviour evidences a distinctly corrupt standard’. Tame said “it rots from the top. “Parliament’s ecosystem of abuse has been revealed. 15 minutes after the 500-page Review launched today, Scott was already claiming it’s a safer workplace than when Brittany was there. This, days after he coercively orchestrated the ambush of Bridget Archer.” Archer was the female MP dragged into the PM’s office for a dressing down after crossing the floor, a fate not shared by male Senator Gerald Rennick when he did the same thing.

Just as the Murdoch press hammered Australian of Year Adam Goodes for being an “uppity black” after he spoke out about Indigenous issues, their army of conservative columnists pressed into action again against Tame. A sure sign she was hitting home came from Janet Albrechtsen who accused Grace of dividing the country. “By antagonising many Australians with her increasingly political interventions, many people will stop listening even when she has something non-partisan to say,” Albrechtsen wrote “More and more, she is surrendering her unique presence as a sexual abuse survivor to dirty partisan politics.” Albrechtsen was lamenting the fact Tame was unafraid to speak her mind. She was using that voice she promised.

A further sign Tame was on the right track came when Pauline Hanson’s New South Wales muppet Mark Latham (who has spent the last 17 years reminding Australians they dodged a bullet when he lost the 2004 election) claimed she had “disgraced” the role of Australian of the Year. Latham’s sole evidence was that Tame was a “one-person political attack machine” on the prime minister and had betrayed the traditional role of the Australian of the Year staying out of partisan political attacks and trying to unite Australians. In Latham’s view, “uniting Australians” is only a good thing if it is uncontroversial, while dirty partisan politics was best left to dirty partisan politicians like him. If my award was for drongo of the year, Latham would be a strong contender, but his words show the truth in reverse. Tame has thrown great honour and meaning on the award, and is an shining exemplar for having the courage of her convictions. After emerging from a difficult dark past, Tame is using her voice to achieve effective change on an international level and a deserving winner of my 2021 media award.

“Child sexual abuse is permanently damaging but it doesn’t have to stop you from doing anything, In fact, it can be the very thing that drives you to achieve great things.” – Grace Tame

Woolly Days media person of the year winners:

2009 Mark Scott

2010 Julian Assange

2011 Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies

2012 Brian Leveson

2013 Edward Snowden

2014 Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed

2015 Clementine Ford

2016 David Bowie

2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia

2018 Donald Trump

2019 Greta Thunberg

2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Kevin and Eva O’Doherty, Brisbane’s Young Irelanders

The grave of Kevin and Eva O’Doherty at Toowong cemetery. Photo: Author’s collection.

Researching the Young Irelander revolutionaries of 1848, I sought out the graves of the Brisbane contingent. Husband and wife Kevin and Eva O’Doherty are buried in the rambling Toowong Cemetery. The prominent grave was easy to find in Portion 7 (Irish Catholic section). The grave is inscribed “SACRED To The Memory Of KEVIN IZOD O`DOHERTY The Irish Patriot Died 15th July 1905, Aged 81 Years Whose Name Will Live In Irish History And Whose Memory Ever Remains En-Shrined In Irish Hearts At Home And Abroad. Also His Gifted Wife ‘EVA of the NATION’ Died 22nd May 1910, Aged 80 Years Requiescant In Pace.” These lesser known rebels are celebrated in Ross and Heather Patrick’s Exiles Undaunted.

I first heard of Kevin Izod O’Doherty while researching the 1883 visit of Irish nationalists, John Redmond and brother Willie. The Redmonds were promoting Irish home rule in Australia and despite encountering sectarianism, they found O’Doherty an obliging host in Queensland. O’Doherty was Brisbane’s leading Irishman, a Queensland parliamentarian, and president of the Queensland Medical Association and the Queensland branch of the Land League. O’Doherty presided as Redmond spoke to 2000 people at a Goodna picnic to set up a branch of the Irish National League.

Almost four decades had passed since O’Doherty was one of seven Young Irelanders transported for a failed 1848 rebellion along with William Smith O’Brien, John Mitchel, Thomas Francis Meagher, John Martin, Terence MacManus and Patrick O’Donohoe. They were young radicals unhappy at the pace of reform of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, dedicated to repeal of the union between Britain and Ireland. They were transported to Van Diemen’s Land where they continued a spirited campaign to keep the Irish nationalist cause alive.

The Young Irelanders were the scions of wealthy families who took their name from Young Italy, Mazzini’s movement to unite Italy in the 1830s. In 1843 O’Connell was nearing 70 while Meagher and O’Doherty were just 20. There were young women in the movement, including Jane Elgee writing as Speranza (later to become Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar) and black-haired poet Mary Ann Kelly known by nom de plume Eva.

They were well-educated liberal moderates pushed into extreme action by the government and their own naive idealism. Led by older Ascendancy parliamentarian William Smith O’Brien (who called himself “Middle Aged Ireland”) they were appalled by the British crackdown on Repeal agitation in 1843, gradually leading to a split with O’Connell’s moderates. In 1847 they formed the Irish Confederacy dedicated to independence. Ireland was in the middle of devastating Famine while Europe was wracked by revolutions. In February 1848 the people of Paris took to the barricades to establish a republic, toppling the monarchy. Revolts in Germany, Denmark and across the Hapsburg Empire also reverberated in Ireland.

O’Doherty was the son of a Dublin solicitor. In 1842 he commenced studies at the Original School of Medicine. He had a flair for journalism and wrote stirring editorials in support of revolution in Ireland. Poetry and light verse also helped readers imagine an Irish nation and one of the most powerful pens belonged to Mary Ann Kelly.

Kelly was the daughter of wealthy Galway landowners. Aged 15, she wrote a poem The Banshee about a spirit whose wailing heralded the death of members of leading Irish families including her own and it appeared in the Nation, the Young Ireland newspaper. Her first contribution as Eva was “Lament for Davis” after the unexpected early death of Nation founder Thomas Davis in 1845. Her The Awakening of the Sleepers was a call to arms: “The time is come – it is the hour / Warrior chiefs of Eire, now for your pow’r”. Kelly became known as Eva of the Nation.

A mystery poet who originally signed off as a “gentleman of Dublin” was soon revealed as Jane Francesca Elgee, daughter of Protestant Loyalists. Elgee reinvented herself as “Speranza” (hope) passing herself off as a distant relative of Dante. Her poetry electrified the Nation amid the worsening Famine and she showed “the vehement will of a woman of genius” as editor Charles Gavan Duffy said. She attracted the attentions of many Young Irelander men and was possibly Meagher’s lover.

The hottest head of the Young Irelanders belonged to John Mitchel. He used the Nation to advocate open rebellion against the official line of the Confederates to support constitutional reform. Alarmed by his writings, Duffy sacked him from the Nation, so Mitchel founded his own organ the United Irishman. In April 1848 the British introduced the Treason Felony Act punishing printed and spoken words promoting rebellion with transportation. Mitchel was tried and convicted under the new act and transported for 14 years.

Others took up the mantle. O’Doherty launched the Irish Tribune in June 1848 feting Mitchel and accusing Britain of creating a “state of slavery” in Ireland. The Tribune lasted five editions. In the final edition O’Doherty reminded readers of the Famine. “Every ditch has a corpse and every lordling Moloch his hecatomb of murdered tenantry. Clearly we are guilty if we turn not our hand against the enemies of our race”. In July O’Doherty was arrested and taken to Dublin’s Newgate Gaol, weeks before his final medical examinations. While he awaited trial, the British suspended habeas corpus. Smith O’Brien led a swift and sorry failed uprising in Co Tipperary.

O’Doherty, then 24, was one of three, with Gavan Duffy and John Martin, tried for their publishing blitz after Mitchel’s arrest. In custody O’Doherty was visited by “Eva” Kelly and the two young revolutionaries fell in love. She appeared in the courtroom every day of the trial. He was tried three times before an all Protestant jury found him guilty under the Treason Felony Act. After the second trial, the British offered him freedom if he pleaded guilty. He discussed it with Eva before refusing the offer. He was sentenced to ten years’ transportation with Martin. Eva promised to wait for O’Doherty’s return. O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O’Donohoe were sentenced to death for treason but had their sentences commuted to transportation.

Kevin and Eva O’Doherty in later years.

O’Doherty was transferred to Richmond prison where he met Eva daily. Their romance was sealed with a secret betrothal. On June 16, 1849 he and Martin were taken to Cork and put aboard the Mount Stewart Elphinstone convict ship. They sailed to Sydney then transferred to Hobart aboard the Emma. In Van Diemen’s Land, O’Doherty accepted a ticket-of-leave like the others except for leader Smith O’Brien who was sent to Maria Island. O’Doherty went to Oatlands in the midlands. There he wrote letters to Eva and put his training to use, though island governor William Denison frustrated his bid to practise medicine. O’Doherty and Meagher bent the rules not to fraternise, meeting for dinner at a bridge over Blackman’s River at the junction of their separate police districts, each man seated in his own district.

Meagher built a house at Dog’s Head Peninsula, Lake Sorrell where Young Irelanders gathered. Meagher named a boat Speranza for his old flame who had married Irish doctor Sir William Wilde (O’Doherty studied at a hospital Wilde founded). She gave birth to Oscar Wilde in 1854. Meagher married a Tasmanian woman but O’Doherty remained faithful to Eva, the others calling him “St Kevin”. He asked authorities permission every month for her to come over and dispensed free medical care at a local clinic to improve his chances. The unforgiving Denison briefly jailed him for being outside his police district.

Smith O’Brien stepped up a high profile campaign against his jailers and became a leader among those calling to end transportation to the island. He was helped by the Irish Diaspora who treated the transportees as heroes. Several including Meagher and Mitchel escaped to America with Irish aid where they became the toast of Irish America, Meagher in particular. The US government lobbied Britain for the release of the remaining prisoners.

O’Doherty’s friends got him an appointment as house surgeon at St Mary’s, a self-supporting Hobart hospital run by surgeon Dr E.S. Bedford. The Land Board of Medical Examiners gave O’Doherty permission to practise medicine at Port Cygnet but he relied on money from Ireland to survive.

In 1854 Home Secretary Lord Palmerston granted conditional pardons to Smith O’Brien, O’Doherty and Martin. They could leave what was soon to become Tasmania and travel anywhere except Britain and Ireland. They went to gold-rush era Melbourne where they were greeted as Irish heroes. O’Doherty made an unsuccessful trip to the goldfields and was possibly at Ballarat during the Eureka Stockade, though not involved in the miners’ strike.

Eva remained foremost on his mind. In 1855 he sailed incognito to Liverpool and then to Dublin where still illegal, he kept a low profile. He took a stagecoach to Galway and after six years’ absence, he reunited with Eva. Despite the secrecy Dublin Castle was informed of the rebel’s return. The couple made plans to marry and O’Doherty made a hasty exit to Paris to continue his medical education.

The couple met again in London in August 1855 where they were secretly married by Catholic Archbishop Wiseman. They moved to Paris where they had second nuptials in November. Eva fell quickly pregnant and suffered far from family while O’Doherty worked long hours at the hospital. In May 1856 Smith O’Brien, Martin and O’Doherty received unconditional pardons. The couple returned to Dublin for Eva’s confinement and she gave birth to son William on May 26. O’Doherty graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons a year later.

O’Doherty felt great concern for post-Famine Ireland and sensed hostility against him, especially in his own anti-republican family and the established church. The couple believed opportunities for the Irish in the self-governing colonies of Australia were more favourable. Eva gave birth to two more sons while O’Doherty became friendly with Dublin priest James Quinn who was sympathetic to the Young Irelanders. After Quinn was appointed Bishop of Brisbane in 1859 he encouraged his friend to join him in the new Queensland colony. The couple sailed to Sydney in 1860 with their growing family, Eva pregnant with a fourth boy.

Eva continued to write poetry promoting Irish nationalism but O’Doherty became a Home Ruler based on his Australian colonial experience. Bishop Quinn met them in Sydney and persuaded them to join him in the new northern capital in 1862. O’Doherty was registered as Queensland’s 14th doctor and the most highly qualified medic in the colony. He commenced practice in Ipswich to help Quinn in a dispute with a local priest and was surgeon at the new Ipswich Hospital. The family grew in Ipswich (they had eight children) while O’Doherty joined leading citizens in support of a rail line west from Brisbane.

In 1865 they moved to Brisbane where Kevin worked at Brisbane Hospital and built up a large private practice. He was one of Queensland’s two foremost surgeons and the leading Catholic layman in the city. He helped establish the All Hallows convent and St Stephen’s Cathedral. In 1867 O’Doherty was elected to one of three seats for North Brisbane in the Queensland Legislative Assembly and sat on the cross-bench as an independent. Now a conservative city father, O’Doherty’s past was temporarily forgiven by the press (like Gavan Duffy, who became premier of Victoria) though some spread unfounded rumours he associated with Fenians.

O’Doherty established Queensland’s first health act to reduce veneral disease. While it improved the problem, the act was hypocritical with compulsory medical examination and detention of prostitutes while there was no provision for action against men who frequented brothels or who suffered from venereal disease. He was also a leading critic of the “blackbirding” of indentured Kanaka labour.

In 1868 supposed “Fenian agent” Henry Farrell attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred in Sydney causing anti-Irish sentiment across Australia. O’Doherty led a Brisbane-Irish motion condemning the attack. He also formed a committee to build a road to Gympie where a new gold-rush was in place. He was re-elected in 1868 and topped the poll in 1870. He was returned a fourth time in 1871 unopposed. His biggest achievement was the 1872 Health Act providing for a central health board appointed by local authorities. He retired after six years at the 1873 election.

O’Doherty returned to private practice and maintained his interest in gold becoming a mining company director. Eva managed the large family and helped her husband in Catholic fundraising efforts. She was homesick for Ireland and had almost abandoned her writing. Still, the San Francisco Monitor remembered ”Eva of the Nation” when they visited America. In May 1877 O’Doherty returned to parliament, appointed to the Legislative Council. He also published a report into quarantine services at Peel Island and was appointed a member of the Medical Board of Queensland.

O’Doherty was concerned at possible famine in Ireland in 1879 and set up a successful Irish famine fund. There were calls for him to return to Ireland as a member of parliament, a thought revived after his great friend Bishop Quinn died in 1881. New Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell was troubling British governments and a Brisbane branch of the Irish Land league was formed in January 1881, chaired by O’Doherty. The Redmond brothers’ 1883 visit coincided with the trial of men charged with the Phoenix Park murders and allegations Land Leaguers were involved. O’Doherty was condemned by sectarian media for supporting an all Australian Irish Land League as “a disloyal assemblage aimed against Queen and country.”

O’Doherty and Eva returned to Ireland in 1885 with an election expected that year. He met Parnell who assured him a safe seat. He received the freedom of the city of Dublin, which the Brisbane Courier said bizarrely, showed he had not renounced the 1848 rebellion. In November O’Doherty was elected MP for County Meath. He was in parliament as prime minister Gladstone introduced a home rule bill but saw it defeated, leading to Gladstone’s resignation and another election.

O’Doherty declined to be re-nominated and returned to Brisbane to sort out financial difficulties. The Courier campaigned against him and his medical practice was damaged by his Home Rule stand. In August 1887 O’Doherty, aged 64, was appointed government medical officer at Croydon goldfield for £50 a year and the right of private practice. With financial troubles continuing, he moved to Warwick in 1891 before the government appointed him to the Queensland Health Board as the supervisor of quarantine. There was family tragedy – within 10 years they lost all four sons and one grand-daughter. In later years the almost blind O’Doherty and Eva lived in rental accommodation in Rosalie. He died aged 81 in 1905. The near penniless Eva received £300 from an Irish insurance policy on Kevin’s life. Eva continued to write until her death in 1910, aged 80. They were among the few Young Irelanders to see the 20th century.

On 18 January 1912, 1500 people gathered at the O’Doherty grave for the unveiling of a memorial by the Queensland Irish Association. On the base is inscribed: “This monument is erected by admirers of the late Dr O’Doherty and his wife as a mark of appreciation of their unsullied patriotism and exulted devotion to the cause of Ireland”. It should have added at the end, “and Queensland.”

Thomas Francis Meagher in America

Monument to Meagher at the Antietam National Battlefield site. Photo: Author’s collection

I wrote recently about Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher and his amazing life in three continents, first Europe, then transported to Tasmania, before escaping to America. Since then I picked up American author Timothy Egan’s biography The Immortal Irishman. Egan is the typical breathless Irish-American when describing 700 years of “the Irish refusing to be English” and his knowledge of Tasmania is sketchy, but his tale becomes more persuasive when Meagher finally makes it to America. Most impressive is Egan’s description of Meagher’s final years as acting first governor of Montana. Egan comes from Washington state and he brings his knowledge and love of the west to the last chapter of Meagher’s amazing life.

Meagher was involved in the failed 1848 Young Ireland rebellion and was sentenced to life transportation in Australia. Despite marrying Australian-Irish governess Catherine Bennett, he wanted to escape and the American whaler Elizabeth Thompson picked him up after 10 anxious and starving days on Waterhouse Island off Tasmania’s north-east coast.

On May 27, 1852 Meagher arrived in New York to great expectations. The Boston Pilot wrote that “in him the Irish will find a chief to unite and guide them”. Meagher visited the law office of Young Ireland friends Richard O’Gorman and John Blake Dillon. Dillon told him New York was alive with possibilities for the Irish though a rising nativist party, the Know Nothings, vowed to keep new immigrants from becoming citizens.

Word quickly spread that Meagher had arrived. The Irish 69th New York state militia arrived at O’Gorman’s office with a band, serenading the fugitive and firing guns into the air. The New York Times feted him as “an apostle of freedom” saying his arrival “created universal satisfaction”. In Ireland, the Nation predicted a great career “under the flag of Washington”.

Meagher clubs sprang up in the eastern cities and there was a song in his honour, “The Escape of Meagher”. The Meagher Guard militia began in Philadelphia and president Millard Fillmore wanted to meet him. Theatres played the TF Meagher polka nightly on the dance floor. Meagher was overwhelmed by the reception and had to deal with the news his infant son Henry Emmet Fitzgerald Meagher had died in Tasmania, barely four months old. Meagher arranged for Catherine to join him and also worked with schoolfriend Patrick J. Smyth on a successful plan to spring John Mitchel from Tasmania. On August 9, 1852 Meagher took the oath of allegiance to become an American citizen.

The Know Nothings began the counter-attack on Meagher’s reputation. Founded in 1844 in Philadelphia against “the bloody hand of the pope”, the Know-Nothings’ and their Wide Awakes paramilitary arm conducted sectarian attacks on Irish neighbourhoods. They planted stories in newspapers attacking Meagher’s character calling him a “wordy-warrior knave” who shamefully fled Tasmania with “Papist aid”.

The Irish almost universally voted Democrat, and Meagher was befriended by 1852 Democrat presidential elect Franklin Pierce and invited to the inauguration. Meanwhile Catherine arrived in Waterford in June 1853 where 20,000 greeted her and she was warmly received by Meagher’s father. Together they sailed for America. She was reunited with her husband but could not handle his stardom and despite being pregnant went back to Waterford with her father-in-law. She gave birth to a second son, also Thomas, but complications of the birth killed her on May 9, 1854 aged 22. She is buried at Faithlegg.

Mitchel escaped to New York in 1853. Mitchel and Meagher started the Citizen newspaper but while they remained friends, Mitchel’s pro-slavery views were too extreme for Meagher and Mitchel left for the south. Britain pardoned the remainder of the Young Irelanders in Tasmania though the escapees would never be forgiven. Meagher never saw his native Ireland again or his surviving son. Meagher had two lucky escapes in 1854. First he dodged a bullet from a newspaper editor he’d challenged after he defamed Meagher then in November he was in a foggy traincrash in Michigan having just moved out of a carriage where there were many fatalities.

The following was better – he met and married Elizabeth “Libby” Townsend, aged 24. Libby was from a wealthy Protestant family. Despite her father’s distate for Meagher and the Irish, Meagher and Libby married on November 14. In 1858 she travelled to Waterford but the time was not right for her to take Meagher’s son back with her.

America was tearing itself apart over the slave-owning south. In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision which held that blacks could never be citizens. Chief Justice Roger Taney said blacks were “of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race”. The decision moved an outraged Abraham Lincoln to run for office. He lost the Senate race of 1858 but became the moral voice of the new Republican Party.

Meagher could not avoid the great question of the day. While Daniel O’Connell had been a fervent abolitionist, the Irish in New York were less enthusiastic, worried freed blacks would take their jobs. Meagher remained devoted to the Union, which tolerated slavery. “We can’t get rid of slavery in our time”, Meagher wrote, “and should therefore confine our efforts to alleviating the evils that accompany it.”

In 1856 Meagher started the Irish News which gained a circulation of 50,000 putting it in the top three papers in New York. It was filled with advice to travel west, as well as poetry, commentary and world news. His paper tiptoed around slavery, unlike Mitchel’s fiery support from his new paper in Knoxville, Tennessee. Meagher was on surer ground defending his friend Michael Corcoran, commander of the 69th Regiment of the New York state militia, who refused to parade his men in honour of the visiting Prince of Wales in 1860. Amid calls for Corcoran’s deportation, Meagher defended him as a “man of conscience”. But in an election year, the reputation of the Irish suffered across America.

In that election, the Democrat vote was split between three factions and offered a clear run for Lincoln despite him not appearing on the ballot in southern states. Lincoln carried the north (except New Jersey) and though he didn’t promise to abolish slavery, his election worried the Irish who would “have to compete with the labor of 4 million emancipated Negroes,” as the New York Tribune warned.

Southern states seceded from the Union, and seven states had left by the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. The Confederate States of America launched its constitution with Article 1 denying any law impairing the “rights of property in negro slaves”. Ambiguous New York considered splitting off to set up its own city state. While Democrat Meagher and his city prevaricated, the south attacked Fort Sumter beginning the war.

Corcoran’s court-martial was immediately dropped and Meagher joined his friend in the 69th New York, offering their services to the Union. Meagher roused immigrants into action. He never mentioned Lincoln or slavery but offered a fight for America, and an eventual fight for Ireland. He established a unit of Irish Zouaves, named for the elite French force and took out an ad in the Tribune: “one hundred young Irishmen – healthy, intelligent and active – Wanted at once to form a Company” under his command. He drilled his men and paraded them in New York before taking them to nearly deserted Washington where the capital was under threat.

There Meagher encountered then-colonel William Tecumseh Sherman. Meagher believed Sherman treated the Irish like farm animals, calling him an “envenomed martinet”. They ran into their real enemy at Manassas rail junction on July 21, 1861. In the Battle of Bull Run, the first major engagement of the war, Rebels repulsed waves of Union troops before the Irish saw action but they too were beaten back. Corcoran was taken prisoner, Meagher was blown off his horse by cannon fire, and the Union was routed. “We beat their men. Their batteries beat us,” Meagher wrote. Union troops fled the battle in disarray though the 69th’s reputation was intact.

Returning to New York, Meagher was besieged with requests to lead an all-Irish brigade. At Jones Wood he spoke in front of 60,000 Irish offering them the chance to seal “their oath of American citizenship with their blood”. He said the English were aiding the South and asked “us that hail from Ireland stand to the last by the stars and stripes”. He went to Boston and Philadelphia rousing the masses with Libby by his side. One regiment, the 88th New York, became “Mrs Meagher’s Own”.

In late December, Meagher’s 3000 Irish Brigade troops trained at Arlington using old-fashioned Prussian smooth-bore muskets. In February 1862 Meagher received his commission as brigadier general. The army top brass called him a “political general” but the Irish celebrated the honour. Lincoln issued War Order No 1 to throw a huge expanse of men against Richmond, the Confederate capital. By May 1862 the Irish Brigade was on Richmond’s doorstep with the Confederacy in panic having lost the early advantage of Bull Run. But Union General George McClellan was content to besiege the city. With the battlecry “to Fontenoy” (where the original Irish Brigade fought for the French in 1745) they entered combat at the Battle of Fair Oaks. Meagher’s men went into battle “under a hurricane of bullets” as he wrote. After heavy casualties the Confederates withdrew to save Richmond. McClellan stopped his advance saying “victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost”.

For three weeks there was an impasse and thousands of soldiers came down with malaria. Confederates now under Robert E. Lee counter-attacked at Chickahominy River splitting Union forces north of the river from the main army south of the river. On June 25 Lee’s Confederates broke out at Gaines Mill. The Irish Brigade was forced to retreat under constant shelling and sniper fire. At Malvern Hill, Meagher narrowly avoided cannonballs and bullets as he urged his men into battle. They stopped the advance but one in three of the Irish Brigade was dead. After Seven Days Battle, the Union was repulsed from Richmond, and McClellan gave Meagher leave to recruit more “wild Irishmen”.

Back in New York Meagher found a discontented city, willing to compromise with the Confederacy. Meagher tried to convince the Irish they were still fighting for Ireland though it was a harder task with the death toll rising. Archbishop John Hughes warned the Irish would not continue fighting “to justify a clique of abolitionists”. Irish banners were more blunt: “We won’t fight to free the nigger”. Meagher appealed to Irish pride though many told him to “take the Black Republicans” instead, referring to the radical wing of Lincoln’s party. Meagher recruited 350 men of the 2000 McClellan asked for.

In September 1862 Lee’s army marched through Maryland threatening Washington. Union soldiers found Lee’s battle orders wrapped in cigar leaves and the two armies met at Antietam Creek. In the cornfields 3000 Union men died that morning before the Irish joined the battle, falling in rows of pointless charges. In 20 minutes 500 Irish soldiers were dead at “Bloody Lane”. Meagher was concussed as he roared his men on. The bloodiest single day of the war took 20,000 casualties, 5000 dead.

Many of Meagher’s ablest lieutenants were dead. His “poor little Brigade was awfully cut up”, he told Libby. “The earth was hidden under acres of slain and dying.” He was not sure Irish freedom was advanced by so many dead but Lincoln saw Antietam as a signal victory. He announced the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves at the start of 1863. This move broke his inauguration promise and outraged Irish Democrats. Meagher could no longer maintain the fiction the war was to free Ireland. Irish soldiers had died to free the black slaves of America.

Meagher’s men took another huge body blow at the battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia in December 1862. Union General Burnside pounded the city defended by sharpshooters across the Rappahannock river. Meagher ordered his 1200 men wear a sprig of green boxwood so the enemy would know they were Irish. It was carnage. Three Union soldiers died for every defender, as they charged in waves at Marye’s Heights. The attack failed. Meagher’s honour was intact but his Irish Brigade was cut to pieces. “The Irish spirit for the war is dead,” wrote the Boston Pilot.

Meagher met Lincoln on the president’s 54th birthday on February 12, 1863. Meagher asked for promotions for his surviving leaders and Lincoln acquiesced. Meagher went on another recruitment drive and held a massive St Patrick’s Day festival with horse and foot racing and a feast at Falmouth camp. He led the Irish Brigade into one final battle in May at Chancellorsville. It was another Confederate victory and the Irish losses were bad again.

Five days later Meagher tendered his resignation to “what was once known as the Irish Brigade”. Despite the setbacks the Irish Brigade survived and without Meagher, would help win the battle of Gettysburg. There was anti-black rioting among the Irish in New York and a federal gunboat anchored at the foot of Wall St. Meagher’s portrait was burned as a “Lincoln lover” and “negrophiliac”. In 1864 he went west to Tennessee where his old nemesis Sherman was on his march to the sea. At Nashville the Democrat Meagher campaigned for Republican Lincoln’s re-election. Meagher’s service in the west was not as glamorous as in the east and amid failures to move troops he was cashiered out of the army in early 1865.

Meagher faced a new challenge as the war ended. Aged 41, he headed to Montana in recognition for his war service and an opportunity to populate the west with the Irish. New president Andrew Johnson appointed him secretary, the second highest office in the territory of 15,000 people. Meagher travelled by rail to Denver, crossing the Rockies and into the valley of the Great Salt Lake and across mountains to Bannack, Montana. Here he was greeted by his boss, governor Sidney Edgerton who told him he was leaving. Edgerton disappeared east without government permission a week later.

Meagher was de facto territory leader but had to face its real power, the Vigilance Committee spurred on by attorney Wilbur Sanders (Edgerton’s nephew) and newspaper editor Thomas Dimsdale. The Vigilantes ruled with the gun, burnings, and the noose, cold bloodedly executing anyone who stood in their way, approvingly recorded in Dimsdale’s Montana Post. They feared the motivations of the newcomer. Sanders told Meagher that Montana’s Democrats were “rebels and traitors” implicitly warning him not to interfere.

Meagher sought out the Irish in the territory including world-class boxer Hugh O’Neil. He founded the first Catholic church in the capital Virginia City and he threw his energy into governing the lawless territory. He called the moribund legislature into session. He ordered food for the starving territory. He insisted schools be free of religious bias and stopped the granting of monopolies for steamboat navigation. The vigilantes started a smear campaign. He was a drunk, they said, “polluting his bed and person in the most indecent and disgusting manner”. The Vigilantes conducted more executions including Irishman James Daniels, who Meagher had reprieved from a death sentence after a card fight. After Daniel’s lynching the assassins warned ominously “The Acting One is next”.

By the end of 1866 Meagher was broke having turned down an executive salary. Libby joined him in a shanty log cabin in Virginia City. They buttressed the Catholic community calling on the church to send a bishop. A new governor Green Clay Smith arrived but left after three months leaving Meagher in charge once more. Sanders went to Washington to campaign against him and got Congress to nullify all of Montana’s 1866 laws.

In June 1867 Meagher went to Fort Benton on the Missouri to pick up a cache of arms for use against the Native American population. Old enemy Sherman had prevaricated in sending the guns until the Sioux ambushed the army at Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Meagher preferred to negotiate than fight. “He will quiet the Indians by talking their heads off,” a reporter wrote. At Fort Benton he stayed on the stern-wheeler GA Thompson as a guest of Irish pilot Johnny Doran. They dined aboard that night. Meagher told Doran he’d met Sanders that day and Sanders wanted to make friends though Meagher demurred. He also said he was finished as secretary and could finally move east again to rebuild his life. Doran warned him British soldiers were heading to Fort Benton to look into reports of a Fenian plot against the Empire with a British army captain reputedly murdered by an Irishman on the river.

Doran left Meagher with a book and said good night. He was staying in the stateroom on the open port side. About 10pm a crewman heard a splash and the desperate sounds of a struggle. When he shouted “man overboard” Doran knew it was Meagher. He heard “two agonised cries from the man, the first very short, the last prolonged.”

A search at first light was unable to find the body. Sanders led the official mourning and implied it was a suicide. He claimed Meagher was loudly demanding a revolver when they last met. He said he had escorted Meagher to bed, a claim denied by Doran who said Sanders was not aboard. Meagher’s supporters said he was around water all his life in Waterford, Clongowes Wood, Tasmania and the civil war and disputed he had suicided or tripped to his death. His widow Libby left the territory without knowing what happened to her husband and had no body to grieve over.

She lived modestly in Westchester, New York in a small cottage on a Civil War war pension of $50 a month. She was still alive in 1905 when Montana’s capital Helena was honoured with a statue of Meagher outside the capitol building. “I am there in spirit”, she wrote. The dying Sanders also missed out on the event though was close enough to hear the cheers as they read out Meagher’s words chiseled onto the side of the monument. They were from his 1846 Meagher of the Sword speech inciting the Irish to maintain the rage against the English.

Meagher was a man of limitless energy and charisma who could have been a great political leader. America’s first Irish president, John F Kennedy, paid tribute to Meagher in his speech to Dail Eireann on June 28, 1963. Kennedy brought with him an Irish Brigade flag from the Battle of Fredericksburg, which he said was led by Meagher, “who had participated in the unsuccessful Irish uprising of 1848, was captured by the British and sent in a prison ship to Australia from whence he finally came to America.” Kennedy’s own ancestors crossed the Atlantic when it was a “bowl of bitter tears.” But by 1963 Meagher’s long cherished dreams – for Ireland and America – had come true. The words and deeds of a long-dead Irishman still mattered.