The Castle Hill rebellion: Australia’s Vinegar Hill

Convict uprising at Castle Hill 1804, unknown artist. On the right a rebel says “Death or liberty, major” and Major Johnston replies “You scoundrel, I’ll liberate you”. National Library of Australia

Early penal colony Australia’s worst fear came true on March 4, 1804. That night the Irish republican battle cry “Death or Liberty” broke over the bush at Sydney’s western settlement, Castle Hill. Colonial governor Philip Gidley King had expected it, having warned London not to transport more Irish republican prisoners. “I do not know what will be the consequences”, King told the Colonial Office. “They have hitherto kept us in a constant state of suspicion.” King issued a draconian proclamation act which prevented seditious oaths on pain of flogging and denied meetings of more than 12 prisoners without permission. Two meetings in defiance of this law was punishable by death.

That did not stop Irish convicts at the big government-run farms west of Sydney, where they swapped news of Ireland and made plans and weapons. Ireland had simmered since 1798 when the United Irishmen rebellion was brutally down in the decisive battle of Vinegar Hill in County Wexford despite French intervention later that year. Rebels kept up guerrilla warfare in the Wicklow hills first under Joseph Holt, and when he surrendered in November 1798, under Michael Dwyer. Resistance spluttered on until 1803 when Robert Emmet’s Dublin plot was betrayed. Dwyer surrendered in December that year. The revolution had one final epilogue half a world away the following year.

Between 300 to 500 Irish rebels, Holt and Dwyer included, were transported to Sydney where they continued to nurse grievances against the British. They were joined by 200 Irish malcontents who had been transported since 1791 for agrarian crimes of resistance. Irish legal administration against offenders was vindicative, arbitrary and careless, there was no documentation about sentences, and many languished as convicts long after their sentence expired. There were rumours of failed mutinies aboard transport ships adding to the paranoia of Sydney officials. They disdained the Catholic Irish who were, as flogging Protestant parson Samuel Marsden put it, “the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured with the light of civilisation.”

The convict Irish sought safety in numbers especially at the Parramatta government farm where they spoke, sung and plotted in Irish and used go-slow tactics against their captors. The leader Holt had privileges and got a land grant, but authorities were still suspicious, especially after he met Scottish Martyrs leader Maurice Margarot. Holt was briefly arrested in 1800 while false rumours of his plotting were investigated. He was freed but many Irish were doubly punished, sent to the fearsome secondary penal station at Norfolk Island where they suffered under sadistic commandants Joseph Foveaux and James Morriset. Two Irishmen were executed in 1800 for planning an uprising on the island.

Tensions rose in Sydney after news of Emmet’s failure in 1803. Holt said plans for a western Sydney uprising were well advanced by 1804. He claimed he was against it and warned plotters that it would lead to the gallows. Planning continued with the support of Margarot and others on the outside. The leader was United Irishman Philip Cunningham who survived Norfolk Island and was now back in Sydney where his stonemason skills were in demand. Born in Kerry around 1770, Cunningham was not involved in the 1798 rebellion but became a key figure in the reorganisation of rebel networks in Munster and Leinster in 1799. He was convicted of sedition at a Clonmel court martial and his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. He was sent to Norfolk Island for participating in a violent convict mutiny but by 1804 he had returned to Sydney. As overseer of masons at Castle Hill, he led the plotting among 500 mainly Irish convicts.

On March 4, convict John Cavenagh set his hut alight as a signal to start the rebellion. Convicts overpowered the hated floggers and constables and seized muskets, swords, axes and ammunition from nearby farms. Cunningham assembled convicts on Toongabbie’s Constitution Hill and sent columns to collect men and arms for an attack on Parramatta and Sydney. They accumulated around a third of the colony’s armoury. Like in 1798, they occupied the high ground, which they named Vinegar Hill in honour of that rebellion.

The plan was to set fire to Macarthur’s Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta to draw the garrison out and signal to other prisoners to join the rebellion. A messenger named John Griffen turned informant and alerted the Parramatta garrison rather than the convicts at Windsor and the Hawkesbury. The garrison secured the streets and dispatched a rider to inform the governor in Sydney. The Macarthurs and Marsden led civilian evacuations from Parramatta downriver in darkness. Elizabeth Macarthur saw flames at Castle Hill and heard that 300 Irishmen were bearing down on the barracks. Governor King rode to Parramatta on hearing the news and declared a state of rebellion. Major George Johnston led the New South Wales Corp west to face the rebels.

On Constitution Hill, Cunningham was disappointed to find Parramatta had not risen and decided not to attack the barracks. Instead he marched his men towards Windsor where he hoped to link up with prisoners from the Hawkesbury. Johnston’s men caught up with the rebels near Rouse Hill and quickly routed them. Though only 29 soldiers and 50 militia faced 270 rebels, the British had vastly superior firepower. Johnston resorted to deceit to further improve his odds. He rode ahead under a flag of truce to discuss demands with Cunningham who supposedly asked for “death or liberty” and a “ship to take us home.” Johnston put a pistol to Cunningham’s head and ordered his troops to open fire. The ill-trained rebels fled under sustained gunfire. Twenty were killed despite surrendering with another 40 captured. There were no Crown casualties. Cunningham suffered a sword wound and was hanged that night without trial. The Castle Hill rebellion was over.

Johnston was rewarded with a land grant, despite his dishonourable tactics. Though King admitted the rebels had committed no atrocities, his revenge was harsh. Besides Cunningham, eight rebel leaders, some of them English, were sent to the gallows and nine more received severe flogging. Forty other supposed ringleaders including Margarot were sent to secondary penal stations. Holt was also imprisoned, despite his claims of innocence and served 19 months in Norfolk Island.

Castle Hill was the most serious insurrection in settler Australian history. It far dwarfed the later Eureka Stockade rebellion as the relative size of the convict population, compared to free settlers and soldiers, left the government vulnerable if all the prisoners rose. And unlike the 1808 Rum Rebellion against Governor Bligh which left the authority of the crown and the system intact, the Castle Hill rebels rejected both. They paid a heavy penalty for their failure. An upper class Irish convict transported for kidnapping an heiress who arrived in Sydney shortly after the rebellion could “smell the bones and hear the groans of dying patriots.”

Michael Dwyer arrived in Australia in 1806 and missed the rebellion. King was worried his arrival would add “to the number of disaffected of that class already.” Dwyer was closely watched and arrested for supposed plotting. He served two years in Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land. Holt became a landowner in Sydney and was wealthy enough to return to Ireland, which he later regretted.

Most other Irish convicts eventually came to an accommodation with their new land. Dwyer ran a western Sydney pub and became a policeman, rising to chief constable of Liverpool. He was sent to a debtor’s prison when his business collapsed and died of dysentery in 1825. Yet Dwyer showed Irish ambitions to prosper in Australia. The Irish working class brought their solidarity to the workplace, helping found trade unions and the Australian Labor Party. In 1988 ALP hero Gough Whitlam unveiled a monument to the Irish rebels at the probable Rouse Hill site of the Castle Hill rebellion. The unveiling was almost completely ignored by national media and unlike the mythology surrounding Eureka, Castle Hill remains a mostly forgotten part of Australian history. Though the final act of the 1798-1903 rebellion, it is also sadly ignored in Ireland.

How the word is passed: A reckoning with the history of American slavery

The Jefferson Memorial, Washington DC. Photo: Author’s collection

A side benefit of researching Thomas Francis Meagher is learning more about the American Civil War in which Meagher fought for the Union. The cause of that war, as Meagher knew, was to protect slavery. The confederate states seceded in 1861 after newly elected president Lincoln promised to stop slavery spreading to western states (he would not interfere with slavery in the 15 southern states where it already existed). Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens’ cornerstone speech of March 21, 1861, confirmed the new southern government was founded on slavery. “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” Article IV of the Confederate constitution stated that in all new territories, “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognised and protected by Congress.” However after the war, Southern states promoted the “lost cause” hypothesis, a deliberate obfuscation that the war was fought for states rights. Clint Smith’s 2021 book How the Word Was Passed is a “reckoning” on how that history of American slavery and the war it sparked is remembered, and in many cases, forgotten.

The book has seven chapters about places important in the slavery story. The first is Monticello, the Virginia plantation of American founding father, third president, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson. While in Virginia last year to visit civil war battlefield sites I did not make it south-west to Monticello. Monticello is now a World Heritage site run as a non profit and the mansion and gardens are world famous with Smith (a black writer) noting most modern visitors are white though Monticello is finally attempting a reckoning with its black past. Most of Jefferson’s workers (130 at peak) were slaves, far outnumbering the Jefferson family and paid white workers. Enslaved workers helped Jefferson maintain his lifestyle of reading, writing, and hosting white guests. Jefferson’s Farm Book recorded everyone in bondage, including those he sold. Though he believed he was a benevolent owner and was aware of the impact of selling enslaved people, he saw them as an economic asset and sold over 100 slaves in his lifetime, splitting families and flogging those that tried to escape. As president he signed an act prohibiting the importation of slaves but allowed slavery to flourish. He noted “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” There were other benefits. Jefferson had a four-decade long sexual relationship with slave Sally Hemings and he fathered four of her children who lived to adulthood. Jefferson’s white descendents denied the link until it was proven by DNA tests in 1998. Monticello now acknowledges the fact and provides slavery tours. An administrator told Smith they were “telling the full truth of who he was”. To understand Jefferson, it is necessary to understand slavery.

The second chapter is about the Whitney Plantation an hour west of New Orleans. This 18th century Louisianan plantation was owned by the German Haydel family which established a successful sugarcane enterprise on slave labour. After the civil war Brandish Johnson bought the property and renamed it Whitney, his son-in-law’s surname and many former slaves stayed on to work the land. The tiny slave cabins remained in use as housing until the 1970s. White lawyer John Cummings bought the property in 1999 and after finding out about the property’s slavery history turned it into a museum dedicated to slavery. An area called the Field of Angels honours 2200 dead enslaved children while a series of sculptures by Woodrow Nash called “the Children of Whitney” represent young former slaves at the time of emancipation. Cummings invested ten million dollars into the enterprise and by 2017 it had 68,000 visitors a year. In 2019 he sold Whitney to a non-profit organisation. Smith says Whitney is a “laboratory for historical ambition.” Intergenerational poverty still plagues the area which is 90pc black. Health issues due to nearby petrochemical plants gave it the nickname Cancer Alley. A civil rights leader says the land is still holding people captive through environmental injustice and devastation.

Smith’s third chapter is set two hours north-west of Whitney at Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola Prison. One of the impacts of the Jim Crow laws was to funnel black people into the convict leasing system to replace the workforce lost by emancipation. Convict leasing was allowed under 13th Amendment allowing blacks to be imprisoned on spurious charges and “rented” to companies. Southern “pig laws” designated minor property theft as grand larceny leading to five year sentences. To get more prisoners Louisiana shifted the law in 1880 to allow juries reach a non-unanimous verdict undermining the effect of the occasional black juror, with the state admitting the decision would “establish the supremacy of the white race.” The laws remained in place throughout the 20th century. Smith visited Angola Museum, a bizarre tourist destination, with photographs of blacks working in the fields, exhibits of ball and chains on “problem prisoners” and gift mugs reading “Angola A Gated Community”. The museum did not mention Angola was a working plantation or describe its antebellum history as a slave plantation. Smith notes that if Germany built a prison on top of a former concentration camp and then incarcerated mostly Jewish people there would be international outrage. Yet in America, the reaction is muted. The average sentence at Angola is 87 years with dozens on death row, two thirds black.

Smith’s next chapter is on Blandford Cemetery at Petersburg, Virginia where 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. The cemetery is near the site of the Petersburg siege and the infamous Battle of the Crater where Rebels executed black soldiers attempting to surrender. After the war, a Ladies Memorial Association wanted to honour the memory, not of the black soldiers, but the Rebels whom they believed deserved the dignity of Union cemeteries. They exhumed thousands of Confederate soldiers across the south to rebury them at Blandford where their memory could be cherished and commissioned Tiffany’s to build stain-glass windows in an Anglican church. Blandford is now a Lost Cause pilgrimage site. Smith attended a Blandford Memorial Day event organised by the Sons of Confederate Veterans chief Paul Gramling Jr amid Confederate regalia and flags. They sang the national anthem followed by the Rebel anthem “Dixie”. As Smith stood nervously at the back of this event in an open-carry state, Gramling told the crowd the Confederate dead had earned their “rightful place to be included as American veterans” (though they fought against America). He quoted Rebel general Roger Pryor’s claim that slavery fell not by war but by an act of God. “I don’t know if it is true, but I like it,” Gramling said. He said today’s enemy wanted to “eradicate this country’s moral fabric” and take away Confederate symbols. “US symbols, Christian symbols will be next,” he said. Echoing Donald Trump, Gramling said they needed to “make Dixie great again.” Smith noted that there were 2000 Confederate monuments and place names still in existence, mostly erected in the 20th century after the original veterans had died. The goal was to remember their cause but also to reinforce white supremacy when black communities were being terrorised. Another spike in southern monuments coincided with the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s.

The next chapter focuses on Galveston Island and the tradition of Juneteenth. On June 19, 1865 Union general Gordon Granger arrived at the remote island on Texas’s Gulf coast to announce the end of slavery. Though Lee had surrendered in April, Texas property owners kept the news from slaves. The celebration of Juneteenth was a rebuke to the Lost Cause and a black reminder of the real cause of the war. It began with church celebrations and a reading of the Emancipation Declaration and often included parades, games and a feast. The celebrations were rendered invisible after Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow laws were codified in the late 19th century, aided by the constant threat of lynching. Juneteenth retreated into private homes and black churches. It reemerged in Texas in the 1970s and black Texan state legislator Al Edwards fought hard to make June 19 a public holiday. By 1980 Edwards was successful in Texas. Often seen as a black “Independence Day,” Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021 after a nationwide campaign. Smith says Juneteenth is a day to solemnly remember what the US has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. The freedom project is precarious, he said, and “we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it and how many people there are still waiting.”

Smith;s next chapter us a walking tour of New York’s slave history. Slavery, the tour guide said, was based on a racial caste system wrapped around European notions of superiority. Slavery arrived in Dutch-owned New Amsterdam in 1626 and it expanded under British administration with the city’s economy reliant on the slave trade. One in five New Yorkers were slaves and slave rebellions in 1712 and 1741 were violently put down. After independence, New York abolished slavery but its bankers still financed the slave trade and half the goods shipped from New York Harbour were produced in slave states. At the start of the civil war mayor Fernando Wood suggested New York should stay neutral to protect the cotton trade. Throughout the 20th century many people believed New York had no slavery history. In 1993 the re-discovery of an African Burial Ground with hundreds of skeletal remains underneath a new office tower building site challenged that perception. Half the remains were from children under 12. Black infant mortality and infanticide was high. Harvard labs found osteoarthritis in the bodies of young people, a condition that normally affects people over 60. The Burial Ground is now a national monument. Even New York’s physical history was testament, Smith said, to how the city benefitted from slavery, which was “deeply entrenched in the soil.”

Smith’s final journey was to another World Heritage Site, Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal’s capital Dakar, which houses the House of Slaves museum. The Portuguese set up a trading post at Goree in the 1440s and they were followed by the Dutch, British and French. Slave trading started here in the 16th century. The Museum has a famous “Door of No Return” looking onto the Atlantic, supposedly the last thing millions of slaves saw before being sent to America. Though that figure was a gross exaggeration to provide drama for the house of slaves and the door was likely a spot to dump waste, the huge American demand was real. European slavers considered Africans as merchandise and paid local tribal leaders for prisoners of war. This created a cycle where tribes were encouraged to capture more prisoners so they could be sold to Europeans for weapons and money. Goree Island shows that slavery and colonialism were inextricably linked and both were a system of plunder that Africa still lives with. European philosophy going back to Kant and Hegel, emphasised African inferiority, which still infects European-African relations today. One Senegalese schoolgirl told Smith slavery and colonisation had shaped her country with Western influence and mindsets. “We can’t forget it,” the girl told Smith. “Because even if it is not the same slavery or colonisation it is still here.”

It was the same in America. Smith’s epilogue documented the racially-charged lived experience of his own grandparents who lived with prejudice throughout their lives. Whether at Monticello, Whitney, Angola, Blandford, Galveston or New York, the history of slavery is the history of America. It was not peripheral but central to America’s founding and not irrelevant to contemporary society but created it. “This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must be in our memories,” Smith concluded.

John Uniacke, Waterford’s connection to the founding of Brisbane

The northern entrance to the Pumicestone Passage at Caloundra with Bribie Island on the far shore. Uniacke and Oxley encountered castaways Pamphlet and Finnegan near here with the Bribie Island people. Photo: Author’s collection

John Fitzgerald Uniacke is not well remembered in Brisbane history, but his account of John Oxley’s voyage to the Brisbane River 200 years ago is an important text documenting life in Queensland prior to European occupation. It also tells the remarkable story of European castaways they found living with Indigenous tribes. 

John Uniacke (pronounced YUNE-yak) was born in Cork in 1797 from a wealthy Stradbally, Co Waterford Protestant Ascendency family. His mother Annette Uniacke was one of the all-powerful Beresfords, which dominated Waterford and national politics before Catholic Emancipation. His father Robert Uniacke was MP for Youghal in the Dublin parliament pre 1801 Act of Union. John was educated at Trinity College Dublin but did not complete his studies. Robert was inept financially and the Uniackes fell on hard times before John emigrated to Sydney in 1823 as a free settler. Eager to impress, he met New South Wales Governor Thomas Brisbane and accepted a place in surveyor-general John Oxley’s expedition to find a new penal settlement in what would become Queensland. Uniacke was designated “super cargo” and was treasurer and storekeeper for the expedition while doubling as a naturalist.

Uniake’s narrative “Mr Oxley’s expedition to survey Port Curtis and Moreton Bay” commences in Sydney on October 21, 1823. “Mr. Oxley, Lieutenant Stirling of the Buffs, and I, embarked on board the colonial cutter Mermaid (Charles Penson, master), about noon, and proceeded down the harbour; but the wind proving unfavourable, we came to under Point Piper where we remained till the next day at midnight, when a moderate breeze springing up we got under way and ran out of the harbour.”

Four days later they arrived 400km north at Port Macquarie, which Oxley visited in 1818, and where a penal settlement was established in 1821. They went ashore, Uniacke noting that maize and sugarcane grew well and would be “a lucrative form of export”, a prediction which came true for sugarcane. On the beach after dinner they were “highly amused by a dance among the natives” who were coming to an accommodation with the new settlement. Uniacke said “some of the more civilised” were working as constables. “Whenever (as frequently happens) any of the prisoners attempt to escape into the woods, they are instantly pursued by some of this black police, who possess a wonderful facility in tracing them” for which they were rewarded with “blankets, spirits &c.” Native troopers became a major part of frontier policing throughout the 19th century, especially in Queensland.

After two days the expedition continued north. They arrived at Point Danger four days later on October 31. In a whaleboat, they explored the mouth of a large river which Oxley named the Tweed. Uniacke was impressed by the scenery which “exceeded anything I had previously seen in Australia” with Mount Warning, “the highest land in New South Wales,” in the background. Locals included a man “curiously scarified all over the body, the flesh being raised as thick as my finger all over his breasts” who spat out a biscuit offered by the Europeans. While Uniacke saw no weapons in a nearby village, 200 warriors gathered with spears and they watched quietly as the ship sailed north. 

South-east Queensland places named in the text.

On November 6, they arrived 550km north at Port Curtis (Gladstone) where they searched for water in hot weather and bathed “in defiance of sharks.” They camped at a sandy beach and were “persecuted all night by musquitoes (sic) and sand-flies.” The following morning they hiked six hours through barren country seeing nothing but kangaroos. The only sign of humans was a grave near a tree whose bark had been stripped off, “the wood deeply engraven with a variety of rude symbols some resembling the print left on soft ground by kangaroos, emus and other animals.” They explored streams and found a large river they named the Boyne, but the ship could not cross the bar. Having found what became Gladstone Harbour, Oxley headed south.

After several days they laid anchor north of Brisbane at “Pumice-stone River, Moreton Bay” the passage inside Bribie Island, that Cook (1770) and Flinders (1799) both assumed was a river. On Bribie Island they saw natives, one a lighter colour and taller than the rest who shocked the seafarers by speaking in English. He was ticket-of-leave convict Thomas Pamphlet (sometimes Pamphlett). Seven months earlier, Pamphlet sailed south from Sydney in a boat with fellow convicts John Finnegan, Richard Parsons and John Thompson to cut cedar at Illawarra but were blown out to sea by a storm. After three weeks they landed on the east coast of Moreton Island. Thompson died of thirst and their boat was broken up by the surf. Though they were 800km north, the survivors somehow believed they were south of Sydney and walked north along the beach.

They paddled to Stradbroke Island in a native canoe and built their own canoe in which they crossed to the mainland. Continuing north they found an impassable large river and walked upstream until they found a canoe at what became Oxley Creek. They crossed the river, returned to the mouth, and followed the shore of Moreton Bay north to Redcliffe Peninsula and Bribie Island where Oxley found Pamphlet on November 29. Parsons and Finnegan abandoned him six weeks earlier when Pamphlet’s feet were too sore to travel. Locals treated him with “great kindness.” When Parsons and Finnegan quarrelled a few days later, Parsons headed north towards Noosa (and was found by Oxley on his 1824 voyage) and Finnegan returned to Pamphlet. Finnegan was hunting with tribesmen when Uniacke’s ship arrived. A day later Finnegan returned and the two castaways told the travellers of the great river south of the bay.

Oxley and Stirling accompanied Finnegan to find the river by whaleboat while Uniacke stayed behind to transcribe Pamphlet’s story and explore Bribie Island. There were 30 adults and 20 children who lived there in huts which held 10-12 people “built of long slender wattles, both ends of which are stuck into the ground” forming a one-metre high arch, “strongly interwoven with rude wicker-work and the whole is covered with tea-tree bark” to keep out the rain. Women carried heavy burdens, “whatever rude utensils they possess, with a large quantity of fern-root, and not unfrequently, two or three children.” Men carried spears and fire-sticks and caught fish by driving them into hoop-nets in shallow waters. They were amazed by Pamphlet’s ability to boil water in a tin pot he saved from the wreckage. Both sexes were naked and unornamented. They refused clothing though they accepted Uniacke’s gifts of strips of red cloth, bunting and cockatoo feathers.

Uniacke Park, Tweed Heads, NSW. The text reads “John Fitzgerald Uniacke (1798 sic -1825) was the son of the member for Younghall (sic) in the Irish House of Commons. Soon after his arrival in the Colony he was appointed Superintendent of Distilleries, and later Sheriff and Provost Master of NSW. His special role in the 1823 Oxley Expedition that discovered the Tweed River was the identification of Rocks and Minerals.”  Photo: author’s collection

Uniacke noted how tribes painted themselves, some blackened with charcoal and beeswax, some with white pigments and others with “red jaspar (sic), which they burn and reduce to a powder.” Their “chief” was a tall middle-aged man with two wives, which was “not common with them.” The women had lost “the first two joints of the little finger of the left hand” but young men did not practise tooth avulsion.

While the natives begged for everything the visitors had, Uniacke saw only one example of theft when someone stole an axe. Uniacke made his retrieval mission known by sign language. As he approached a young man with the axe, the man ran away but the tribe delivered it back the following morning. With trust restored, many ventured to board the ship, where they were astonished by the cats and goats. They caressed the cats, but were in awe of the goats’ horns and would not approach them.

Uniacke found no religion in the Bribie Islanders. He never saw them pray or have any good or evil spirits. Pamphlet said the women were treated well and never beaten, except by other women. Uniacke said the women were beautiful, “tall, straight and well-formed”. The tribe quarrelled with other tribes, sometimes with fatal effect. Finnegan told him of a women’s fight with sticks he’d witnessed, “in five minutes, their heads, arms &c, being dreadfully cut and swelled” and a spear-fight between two men, where one was killed and skinned. It was followed by a general fight “in the manner of light infantry” where Finnegan’s party was forced to give way after several deaths. Finnegan himself was captured but opponents merely laughed at him and left him unharmed.

Pamphlet witnessed a more gladiatorial fight where there was no bloodshed. This was a one on one contest in a “combat ring” watched by 500 men. Two combatants entered the ring and shouted abuse before throwing spears at each other which they warded off with shields. When one spear finally penetrated a shoulder, “the tournament concluded with loud huzzahs.”

Uniacke fretted when Oxley and Stirling failed to return to Bribie as expected on December 4. The following night, the ship heard gunfire. Oxley’s party arrived exhausted at midnight, having rowed all day. Oxley said they found a “magnificent river” which meandered 50km through rich soil and “flat country, clothed with large timber” with excellent wood. The Mermaid left Moreton Bay a day later and sailed south. Uniacke ended his journal saying they arrived in Sydney on December 13.

Oxley named the magnificent river for Governor Brisbane. After he returned in 1824 it became the site of a penal colony, and later Australia’s third largest city. Uniacke published Pamphlet’s narrative. Historian Thomas Welsby said the credit for the European discovery “must be given without hesitation” to Uniacke because he “gleaned from the men their pitiful tale (and) heard from their lips the finding of the river itself.” Uniacke did not live to see the settlement he helped found. He failed to gain advancement in Sydney other than a trifling position as “surveyor of distilleries.” In 1824 he got a temporary job as sheriff and provost marshal but could not make it permanent.

On January 13, 1825 Uniacke contracted a remitting fever and died, aged 27. The Sydney Gazette praised his “high and delicate sense of honour” and his “honest feeling heart” which sympathised with “the distress of the poor”. He was interred at Devonshire St cemetery. When that was cleared to make way for Sydney Central Station in 1904, his body was exhumed with thousands of others, and moved to La Perouse. Uniacke’s journal and his description of adventures of the castaways gained wider circulation in Barron Field’s Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, published in London in 1825. Biographer Serge Riviere said Uniacke had found “a place in Australian history” though his memory has been largely forgotten with only a park at Tweed Heads in northern NSW named for him. His 1823 travel journal is an important document for the remarkable tale of the castaways and his descriptive and dispassionate account of native life in Queensland prior to European settlement.

James Francis Xavier O’Brien: Fenian filibuster

JFX O’Brien in later years as a Westminster MP.

James Francis Xavier O’Brien was an adventurer and revolutionary in the mould of fellow County Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher. Born in Dungarvan in 1828, O’Brien was five years younger than Meagher. Like Meagher, O’Brien survived a death sentence for his role in an Irish revolution, ended up in America where he fought in the civil war (though for the Rebels, not the Union like Meagher), and supported American manifest destiny ambitions in Central America. Unlike Meagher, he returned to Ireland and became a Westminster MP before dying in 1905.

O’Brien came from a prosperous mercantile family and was educated at a Dungarvan private school and St John’s College, Waterford. His grandfather was a big farmer near Dungarvan and his father kept two shops in town, a draper’s shop and a general merchant store selling corn, butter, timber and coal. In New Orleans in 1859, O’Brien his 1848 rebellion leader namesake William Smith O’Brien, himself related to Brian Boru, who told him James’s family was descended from Thomond O’Briens who settled in the Comeragh mountains in county Waterford.

In his journal, James said that as a young man, he lost faith in O’Connell’s movement and turned to the Young Irelanders like Smith O’Brien, Davis, and Duffy though makes no mention of fellow Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher. As a clerk in his father’s business, O’Brien remembered the impact of the potato blight and resulting famine. “I remember distinctly walking in the country near Dungarvan in the early part of July (1845) having noticed an extraordinary stench as from rotting vegetable matter.” Before long, “starving men, women and children were seen on the footways of the town unable to move, lying, I might say, in the agonies of death. It was a terrible time.” O’Brien said there was an abundance of food in Ireland and a native government would have seen to the lives of the people first. “The foreign government concerned itself about the landlords’ rent. Few more hideous crimes stain the pages of history,” he wrote.

In July 1848 Smith O’Brien launched the failed Ballingarry rebellion. A month later, John O’Mahony was reported to be attacking Portlaw barracks with 1000 followers and was heading towards Dungarvan. The raid was quickly put down and O’Mahony eventually escaped to America. At St John’s College, O’Brien fell under the influence of Fintan Lalor, who was plotting another uprising. O’Brien organised a rebel group in Dungarvan and met Thomas Luby in Carrick-on-Suir where he purchased pikeheads for the revolution. However he missed out on the 1849 attack on Cappoquin police barracks. “I suppose notice was not given me because of my youth,” he wrote. He enrolled 100 people in Dungarvan, and when police found out, they issued a warrant for his arrest. “This I easily evaded by crossing to England in a vessel belonging to my father,” he said.

After hiding in Wales for several months, O’Brien returned to Clonmel where he worked for the family business until his father died in 1853. In 1855 he moved to Paris to undertake medical studies. There he attended lectures and met revolutionary John O’Leary. Returning to Ireland in the summer of 1856 due to ill health, a doctor advised him to take a holiday and he moved to New Orleans in late 1856. In 1857 a new adventure called with American conquistador William Walker. Walker was a former journalist and medical student (like O’Brien) who led a failed raid on Baja California before leading an expedition to Nicaragua in 1855. Walker exploited local divisions to become president of Nicaragua, where he re-introduced slavery, but was deposed by a coalition of Central American armies. Locals called Walker and supporters “freebooters” or “filibusters” from “filibustero” the Spanish word for pirate.

Walker avoided arrest when he returned to America in 1857, thanks partly to the legal work of Thomas Francis Meagher and tried to regain the presidency of Nicaragua. In New Orleans, Walker met Joseph Brenan, who led the Cappoquin attack in 1849. Brenan advised Walker to employ O’Brien as a staff officer and in the spring of 1857, O’Brien sailed with Walker’s new expedition. It was a fiasco. By the time it reached Nicaragua, Walker surrendered to the United States Navy and the entire crew was jailed. In prison, O’Brien quarrelled with superiors including Walker’s brother and managed to flee the camp, seeking humiliating refuge with the British consul. O’Brien got back to New Orleans where he was employed in a wholesale business. He proved his worth and progressed from a clerkship at $20 a month to a partnership worth $3000 a year, with a wife and two children. Then the civil war intervened.

O’Brien ignored the advice of fellow Irish revolutionary and Confederate sympathiser John Mitchel that he should return to Ireland. He enlisted in a Rebel regiment of mostly Irish married men. When they found out he was a medical student he was appointed assistant surgeon, though he never used his skills in battle. While most Louisiana infantry regiments were ordered north to Virginia, O’Brien was still in New Orleans when the city fell to union troops. Possessing only worthless Confederate money, he became bankrupt. In October 1862 he decided to return to Ireland, securing a pass from New Orlean’s infamous Union commander Ben “Beast” Butler. In New York O’Brien met John O’Mahony and took a steamer to Queenstown (Cobh) before settling in Cork.

He got a job as a general manager and bookkeeper for Cork tea and wine merchants and again proved his worth in business, tripling his wages in three months. He contacted local Fenians and within 12 months knew most of the local leadership. James Stephens, who served with William Smith O’Brien at Ballingarry, had turned the Fenians into a significant underground movement and in 1864, founded the Irish People newspaper, with John O’Leary as editor. O’Brien was a notable contributor writing as “De L’Abbaye”. Despite his Catholicism, he often took issue with the Catholic clergy when they condemned Fenianism. He helped O’Donovan Rossa expand the movement in Dungarvan. When police swooped on the Irish People in 1865, O’Brien went to Dublin and avoided arrest.

Like most Fenian leaders, O’Brien argued for an immediately uprising with the help of 3000 civil war veterans but Stephens vetoed the idea. The transatlantic movement split on the idea of a revolution in Ireland or attacking Canada. O’Brien condemned Stephens’s “inaction and procrastination.” Many leaders were arrested including Stephens, though he later escaped to Paris. When the Irish rising finally occurred in 1867, O’Brien opposed it saying they were unarmed and not ready. But a vote of members went against him. He was among 1500 Fenians assembled outside Cork on the night of March 5. Between them they had two shotguns, one rifle, five revolvers and eight pikes. Despite his reservations, O’Brien’s natural leadership skills emerged and he became the de facto commander in the capture of Ballyknockane police barracks. He ordered the men to disperse when faced with a strong military column near Mallow. He was captured near Kilmallock and charged with high treason.

Because of O’Brien’s low profile before the Rising there was little police evidence against him. The prosecution relied on witness testimony of his participation in the police barracks attack. He was found guilty and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered – the last person to be so condemned in the United Kingdom. However, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After a month in Dublin’s Mountjoy prison, he was among 30 Fenian prisoners chained together and transferred to London’s Millbank prison. He declined the offer to transfer to Western Australia in 1867 and moved to Portland prison where he renewed acquaintance with O’Leary and Luby.

In 1869, O’Brien benefited from Gladstone’s Amnesty Act and was released from prison. He returned to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, becoming president of its Supreme Council in an anti-Stephens faction, using his job as a commercial traveller to rouse the organisation across Ireland. In the 1870s, he became disillusioned with the use of physical force and with separatism. “We were paying too high a price in money and energy for such work,” he wrote. In 1882, he moved to Dublin where he became a partner in the tea and wine business of W. H. O’Sullivan.

He was drawn into parliamentary politics. His wife was related to Fr John O’Malley who was prominent in the Land League. Aware of O’Brien’s belief in the possibility of Home Rule, Charles Stewart Parnell nominated him to stand for the seat of South Mayo in the general election of 1885. Despite concerns he was a “blow in”, his Fenian past counted in his favour. O’Brien was elected Nationalist MP and he represented South Mayo until 1895. when he became MP for Cork City. He retained that seat until his death in 1905. In the Parnellite split, he followed the majority, unlike most Fenians, and opposed Parnell, despite Parnell’s earlier help.

O’Brien did not make a major impact as a parliamentarian and he never felt at home in the House of Commons. According to Pat McCarthy, O’Brien’s most valuable work was behind the scenes. From 1888 until his death, he was treasurer of the Irish National League of Great Britain, and from 1890, he was also its secretary and treasurer of the Parliamentary Party. “It is perhaps typical of the man that he engrossed himself in the minutiae of organisation and left platform rhetoric to others,” McCarthy wrote. “With his help, the League became an important factor in English politics; helping to decide marginal constituencies.” In 1888, his wife and three young daughters joined him and he lived the remainder of his life in London.

O’Brien announced his intention to retire in early 1905. While preparing to hand over his duties he contracted pleurisy and died of heart failure on May 28. Dungarvan councillor Thomas O’Connor led the tributes. “O’Brien stood in the dock in 1867 for one of the noblest acts that an Irishman could be guilty of; he offered to open arms against Her Majesty the Queen,” O’Connor said. “The only thing he said he regretted in the transaction was that it was not on the battlefield and that place he was giving his life for Ireland.” James F. X. O’Brien was buried in Glasnevin on June 1, 1905.

The evolution of American gun laws

Photo by Maria Lysenko on Unsplash

Yet another school massacre has turned American focus on its free-for-all gun laws. Last week a shooter fired 152 rounds and killed three children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville last week after planning the attack “over a period of months” and studying other mass murderers. Some Democrats are using the massacre to try to get Congress to pass tougher laws but it remains an uphill battle. Texas lawmakers investigating the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde have released a 77-page report that said law enforcement officers who responded to the 2022 rampage “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.” The problem remains that Republican legislaters continue to support the all-powerful National Rifle Association. Texas governor Greg Abbott responded to the report’s recommendation saying that it would be unconstitutional to increase the minimum age to buy assault-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old, while the NRA have claimed the Nashville shooting meant more guns were needed to protect schools, not less. Yet it wasn’t always this way. Loose laws are an invention of the 1980s and before that there was consensus on the need to control firearms, much like most other countries in the world.

Americans have always owned guns but states have always regulated manufacture, ownership and storage. Kentucky and Louisiana prohibited carrying concealed weapons as far back as 1813 and many other states passed similar laws in the following decades. It’s hard to imagine Greg Abbott saying like his 19th century counterpart as Texas governor did that the purpose of concealed weapons was murder and “to check it is the duty of every self-respecting law abiding man.” In the west sheriffs routinely collected the guns of visitors and the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizone occurred when Wyatt Earp confronted a man violating the city ordinance to leave his guns at the sheriff’s office.

In 1871 a former reporter at the New York Times founded the National Rifle Association as a sporting and hunting organisation and its main concern was sponsoring target-shooting competitions. The NRA supported and even sponsored firearms regulation, lobbying for new state laws in the 1920s and 1930s. With concerns rising about urban crime, it supported the first federal gun control legislation, the 1934 National Firearms Act and then the 1938 Federal Firearms Act which put a prohibitive tax on ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns” in that age), mandated licences for gun dealers, introduced waiting periods, required permits for concealed weapons, and a licence system for dealers. Both laws were uncontroversial and had bi-partisan support. In 1939 the US Supreme Court upheld the laws agreeing with president Franklin Roosevelt’s solicitor general that the second amendment was restricted to “the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defence and security.” The right was not there for private purposes, the solicitor general successfully argued, but for arms “borne in the militia or some other military organisation provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.”

When the NRA moved into new headquarters in 1957 the building entrance displayed its motto, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship, Training, Shooting for Recreation.” After Lee Harvey Oswald shot president Kennedy six years later with a gun he ordered from an NRA magazine, the NRA supported a Congress plan to ban mail order gun sales. The NRA supported the 1968 Gun Control Act as a measure “the sportsmen of America can live with.”

The idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right was first promoted not by the NRA, but by black nationalists. Malcolm X said in 1964 the article promoted “you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun” and the argument was central to the founding of the Black Panthers. Republicans were not interested with Nixon going to the 1972 election calling guns an abomination and the idea of gun ownership as a constitutional right absurd.

The position of the NRA began to shift in the 1970s as a backlash against growing immigration. In 1975 the NRA created a new lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, headed by Harlon Bronson Carter, a well-known marksman and former chief of US Border Control. After the NRA leadership objected to Carter’s political aims, they decided to force him out and move the organisation to Colorado Springs. However at the 1977 annual meeting Carter and his allies rebelled and ousted the old leadership, re-writing the by-laws and keeping the headquarters in Washington DC. They put a new motto on the entry door which read “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

After Carter was elected executive vice president, newspapers revealed he had been convicted of murder in Texas in 1931, aged17, though an appeal judge overturned it on his instructions to a jury. With Carter at the helm, the NRA endorsed its first ever presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though the mentally-ill John Hinckley shot Reagan a year later, the new president resisted legislation to ban semiautomatic weapons or prevent purchase by people with a history of mental illness. Instead Reagan advocated for the abolition of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which enforced gun laws.

As historian Jill Lepore wrote in These Truths, the arguments to limit gun laws and reproductive rights rest on weak constitutional foundations but their very shakiness is what makes them useful for partisan purposes because gains always seem in danger of being lost. The conservative position on these issues rose to become Republican doctrine partly because of the role they played in the strategy to take over the judiciary and to institutionalise a new way of reading the constitution.

In 1982 Utah Senator Orrin Hatch became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on the constitution and he commissioned a history of the second amendment in a report called The Right To Keep and Bear Arms. Hatch’s committee concluded that the second amendment had been misinterpreted for two centuries. The report said it had uncovered proof that the second amendment “was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for the protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The research relied less on the Federalist papers than it did on recent NRA research. Of the 27 law review articles written between 1970 and 1989 favourable to the NRA position, 19 of them were paid for by the NRA itself or other gun rights groups. The report succeeded its work. By 1991 a poll found more Americans were familiar with the second amendment than the first.

The idea that the right’s positions on reproductive and gun rights were found in the original constitution became known as “originalism“. Thanks to funding from the Federalist Society founded at the University of Chicago and Yale in 1982, originalism flourished in law schools. Although liberal justices complained that the idea that modern judges could discern the constitutional framers’ original intentions as “arrogance cloaked as humility”, Reagan’s Justice Department adopted originalist positions as official policy. Nearly every federal judge appointed by Reagan’s three Republican presidential successors – the two Bushes and Trump – were members of, or approved by, the Federalist Society.

The originalist position spread through direct mail, talk radio and cable television and many Americans believed it was a position that dated to the 1790s rather than the 1980s. Irrational arguments prevailed. Many gun owners believed the government was coming to take their weapons away. Liberals called for impossible-to-pass gun control measures whose consequences the NRA gleefully exaggerated. Guns became an emotionally charged matter of constitutional guarantee and individual rights with which parties could get voters to the polls, because as Lepore wrote, “the constitutional guarantee was no guarantee at all.”

The 21st century NRA now publishes an A-F rating of lawmakers that grades elected officials on their second amendment voting record. Supporting looser gun regulations earns a higher grade, whereas making it harder to access guns earns a lower grade. For Republicans from conservative districts, where guns are embedded deeply into the culture, any grade below a perfect A+ can hobble a politician’s electoral prospects. They will also pour money into primary campaigns where gun control becomes an issue and their lobbying arm has deep pockets to pressurise Congress to resist any legislation that might be construed as even mildly anti-gun. In the first quarter of 2022, the NRA spent well over US$600,000 on lobbying.

During president Obama’s second term, a movement began to fight gun violence but it was a movement for racial justice not a gun control movement. Black Lives Matters called attention to state-sanctioned violence against African Americans but did not make gun control a priority, a fact Lepore found unsurprising, given its forebears included the Black Panthers which advised blacks to arm themselves. And any hope of effective action disappeared after the 2016 election of Trump. The NRA enthusiastically endorsed the new president who rewarded them by “systematically gutting existing laws in ways that make kids and communities less safe.” The mutual love affair continues to this day, with Trump and his former vice president Mike Pence set to headline the NRA’s annual conference this month. At least it will be a safe place. Secret Service will control one of the halls in the convention center where the meeting will take place and firearms, firearm accessories, knives and other items will not be allowed in the hall.