Melbourne Days

It had been 10 years since I was last in Melbourne and I had an excuse with a COVID-era flight credit that was about to expire. The grid of streets that is now central Melbourne was laid out by surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1837 and are perfect for the wonderful tram network that Melbourne hung onto with prescience while Sydney and Brisbane ditched theirs in the 1950s.

The state parliament in Spring St has always been an important spot for protesters. Palestinian flags were plentiful as anger continues over the Israeli army incursion into Gaza. Many of Melbourne’s great buildings were funded by the 1850s gold rush including neoclassical Parliament House. Built in stages from 1855, the grand front entry stairs was not completed until 1889. A proposal to add a dome was abandoned during the 1890s depression. It was the home of Australia’s federal parliament from its beginning in 1901 until old parliament house was constructed in Canberra in 1927. During this time the Victorian parliament moved to the Exhibition building before returning home in 1928.

Almost directly across Spring St is Princess Theatre, of similar vintage. The original building served gold rush audiences but was demolished in 1885 to make way for the current structure, built in Second Empire (Napoleon III) style. The new theatre opened in December 1886 with a performance of the Mikado, the Age noting that the stage could be seen perfectly from anywhere in the venue. The theatre was a “revelation of artistic possibilities, of luxury and loveliness, in which everything is complete, even to the smallest detail, and forms a tout ensemble having hardly any equal in the world.”

During empire days, Melbourne had little time for Aboriginal people, who were banished to remote settlements like Coranderrk near Healesville and Cummeragunga on the Murray. Douglas and Gladys Nicholls were born in Cummeragunga in 1906. Doug was the pastor of Australia’s first Aboriginal Church of Christ in Fitzroy and in 1957 worked for the Aboriginal Advancement League. Gladys married his brother Howard and after Howard’s death in 1942 she married Doug. She became secretary of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Council and Victorian state president in the 1970s. They were prominent campaigners for Indigenous rights and justice, and the 2007 monument in Parliament Gardens was the first memorial sculpture in Melbourne dedicated to Aboriginal leaders.

Behind Parliament Gardens is the magnificent St Patrick’s Cathedral, the tallest and largest church in Australia. Melbourne’s first Catholic bishop James Goold started construction here in 1851 but it was not far advanced when Goold hired architect William Wardell in 1858. Wardell designed a Gothic structure which remained incomplete when the cathedral was finally consecrated in 1897. In the foreground is a statue of Irish Liberator Daniel O’Connell. Catholic Melburnians wanted to place this 1891 bronze tribute in a prominent position in the city but had to put it on cathedral grounds due to opposition from the city’s Protestant majority.

Another prominent Irish Daniel celebrated in a statue on Cathedral grounds is Daniel Mannix, archbishop of Melbourne for almost half a century. Mannix, who became archbishop in 1917, was determined to finish the cathedral and oversaw the addition of the spires which were taller than Wardell’s design. The cathedral was officially completed in 1939. Born in Co Cork in 1864, Mannix was educated at Maynooth and moved to Melbourne in 1912 as coadjutor bishop. He opposed the First World War and became a thorn in prime minister Billy Hughes’ side. Mannix led the campaign against conscription in two referendums in 1916 and 1917 and the exasperated Hughes considered deporting him. By war’s end Mannix was the established leader of Irish Australian Catholics. British authorities banned him from visiting Ireland in 1920 during the War of Independence. He played an active role in national politics until his 90s. He died in 1963 aged 99 and was buried in the crypt at St Patrick’s.

A short walk north is the Carlton Gardens with the centrepiece Royal Exhibition Building. Cornish-born architect Joseph Reed designed the building drawing on many international styles with the dome inspired by Florence’s cathedral. It opened in 1880 to host the six-month-long Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880–81, a “palace of industry” showing worldwide innovations such as electric lights, lawnmowers and typewriters. It hosted the Centennial International Exhibition in 1888, and was the site of the formal opening of the first federal parliament in 1901 before it moved to Spring St. It was briefly used as a hospital during the 1919 flu pandemic and fell into disrepair, narrowly avoiding demolition in 1948. It hosted basketball and other events in the 1956 Olympics and was used for dances and an exam venue. In 2004 it was the first building in Australia to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status, as one of the last remaining major 19th-century exhibition buildings in the world. It remains in use as an exhibition venue and was a mass vaccination centre during COVID.

Across the road from Melbourne’s Trades Hall is a monument commemorating the Eight Hours Movement which began in gold rush Victoria. On February 26, 1856, James Galloway of the Eight Hours League convinced a meeting of employers and employees to begin implementing the eight hour day. A public holiday was declared and was celebrated annually with processions until 1951. Processions carried banners with intertwined numbers ‘888’ representing English Socialist Robert Owen’s ideal that the workers were fighting for: “8 Hours Work, 8 Hours Recreation, 8 Hours Rest”. The monument with the 888s under a sphere representing the world was unveiled in 1903 in Spring St. It was moved to its current location on Russell and Victoria in 1924.

A jail has been on the Russell St site of Old Melbourne Gaol museum since 1841 and the current building gradually grew during the gold rush era. By completion in 1864 it commanded a whole city block and was one of Melbourne’s most prominent buildings. The most famous of its many executions was that of Ned Kelly in 1880. In 2008 Kelly was one of 32 victims of the gallows uncovered in a mass grave at Pentridge prison in Coburg. Even by Kelly’s time, the Gaol was regarded as a relic of the past and gradually closed down between 1880 and 1924. It was used as part of an education college and again as a military prison during the Second World War. In 1972, it was reopened as a museum, under National Trust management.

The Irishman who sentenced Kelly to death is honoured outside the State Library of Victoria on Swanston St. Co Cork-born Protestant Redmond Barry (no relation) sailed to Sydney after his father’s death in 1837 and was admitted to the NSW bar. He moved to Melbourne in 1839. In 1852, Barry was appointed Supreme Court judge and was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1848), the University of Melbourne (1853), and the State Library of Victoria (1854), Australia’s oldest public library. Joseph Reed, who later designed the Exhibition Building, was the architect for the library, built in multiple stages. The Barry statue was added to the forecourt in 1887. Barry died of “congestion of the lungs and a carbuncle in the neck” in November 1880, outliving Kelly by just 12 days.

Melbourne Town Hall, further down Swanston St, was built the same year as Barry’s monument. It is another Joseph Reed building, completed in 1870 on the site of an older town hall and it was rebuilt and enlarged after a major fire in 1925. The building is topped by Prince Alfred’s Tower, named after the Duke of Edinburgh who laid the foundation stone in 1867. Alfred was Victoria’s eldest son but never became king, dying nine years before her.

Melbourne’s most recognisable landmark is Flinders St station. The second busiest station in the country after Sydney’s Central Station, Flinders St has been a railway hub since 1854 when it was the terminus for Australia’s first railway to Port Melbourne. However the signature building that dominates the landscape has only been in place since the 20th century. Two railway employees came up with the architectural design which won a competition in 1899. Work did not begin until 1905 with the dome added a year later. It was officially opened in 1910. The distinctive clocks showing train departure times pre-date the building. The English clocks adorned the old building in the 1860s and were placed into storage when the old station was demolished in 1904 before being reinstalled in the new station. Though popular with the public, there were plans to demolish the building as part of major renovations until it was protected by the National Trust in 1982. A new Town Hall rapid transit station will open across the road in 2025.

Diagonally opposite Flinders St station is the Anglican St Paul’s Cathedral. English Gothic Revival architect William Butterfield designed and completed the building in 1891, except for the darker Sydney sandstone spires added between 1926-32. Melbourne’s first Christian service was held on this site in 1835 and St Paul’s church was built here in 1852. The city’s cathedral was St James at William and Little Collins Sts. The diocese commissioned Butterfield to build a new cathedral with the foundation stone laid in 1880. When Butterfield resigned after a dispute in 1884 the diocese turned to the dependable Joseph Reed to finish the job. After the central spire was added in 1932 St Paul’s was the tallest building in Melbourne until the arrival of the skyscrapers.

The Moorish revival Forum Theatre on Flinders St was built in 1929, just before the Great Depression. American architect John Eberson designed the heritage-listed building as a cinema in his “atmospheric theatre” style to evoke the sense of being outdoors. It had a huge organ which was transported from the wharf to the theatre in 27 trucks, each bearing a large notice announcing that it contained the Wurlitzer organ for the theatre. They were unloaded together in Flinders St causing traffic chaos. The resulting Melbourne council fines were small change compared to the profits from the huge publicity of the installation. After the 1960s the Forum was used for religious services before being restored as a music venue in the 1990s.

The centrepiece of the Melbourne Arts Centre complex is its spire, one of Melbourne’s three great symbols along with Flinders St station and the MCG. Melbourne architect Roy Grounds designed the arts centre master plan, including a 115m tall copper spire in 1960. The building proved complex due to the geology of the site. After the gallery and theatres were built in the 1970s a lattice-shaped spire was erected in 1981. During the nineties severe deterioration meant the spire was demolished and reconstructed to Roy Grounds’ original design using new technology and lighting. The new spire is 162m tall and is illuminated with 6600m of optic fibre tubing, 150m of neon tubing and 14,000 incandescent lamps.

After checking into my hotel I went for an 8km run along the river and the Tan Track before taking in the Shrine of Remembrance on St Kilda Rd. In 1918 there was a desire to commemorate the 19,000 Victorians who died in the First World War. After an 1923 competition, war veteran architects Phillip Hudson and James Wardrop designed the Shrine based on the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus and the Parthenon in Athens with a ziggurat roof inspired by the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. War hero John Monash led the fundraising for the monument but died in 1931, three years before its completion. A third of Melbourne’s population attended the opening on 1934’s Remembrance Day. The wide forecourt expanse of stone was added to commemorate the Second World War dead and a Remembrance Garden was added in 1985 to honour later conflicts.

After a day of walking and running, it was time to relax and I headed to the Mitre Tavern to meet friends for dinner. Less than five years after Melbourne was founded, a house was built on the corner of Collins St and Bank Place. The two-storey structure was a residence for 28 years before becoming the Mitre Tavern in 1868, likely named after the historic Ye Old Mitre in London. The pub was the haunt of hunting and coursing men and Victoria’s first polo club, established in 1874, held meetings at the Mitre under Redmond Barry’s presidency. Barry also started a tradition of the legal fraternity supping at the Tavern which continues to this day. Melbourne City Council documents the pub as its oldest building.

The following morning I was walking again, first past Melbourne’s former General Post Office on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke. Though no longer used as a post office, the GPO remains the official centre of Melbourne with all distances measured from it. A post office first adorned this site in 1841 and a design for a new building was released in 1861. Construction of the two-level Renaissance Revival building began with Brunswick bluestone and Tasmanian sandstone and a third level with an ornate clock tower was added 20 years later. The building was converted to a fashion precinct in 2001, taken over by H&M in 2014.

I went for a long walk along the Yarra River towards Hawthorn. The river was the life source and an important meeting place for the Wurundjeri people who called it Birrarung, meaning “ever-flowing”. They camped on riverbanks and accessed yam daisies, eels, fish, mussels and waterfowl. European settlers quickly understood the Yarra’s importance with John Batman negotiating a “treaty” for use of adjacent lands with Melbourne established on the lower banks in 1835. Migrant tent cities lined the Yarra during the early years of the gold rush and upper reaches were extensively mined. The West Melbourne Swamp was widened in the late 19th century, to make way for docks as the port expanded. The city reaches are now the domain of pleasure crafts and rowers.

On a cool Saturday morning I went to Jells Park in the eastern suburbs for an obligatory parkun. Jells Park is in Dandenong Valley Parklands, a network of parks running along Dandenong Creek in Wurundjeri country, though it is named for cattle grazier Joseph Jell who worked here in the mid-late 1800s. The park brought back strong memories of when I lived in Melbourne in the early 1990s when we would take our then baby first daughter (now in her 30s) for a walk to the human-made Jells Lake.

Afterwards I caught up with friends and then got the train back to town. I walked through parklands to Jolimont, home of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The MCG is the third building in Melbourne’s holy trinity of icons and one of the most famous sporting venues in the world. I’ve attended many an Aussie Rules and cricket game here but my most traumatic memory is being among the 100,000 for the 1997 Australia v Iran football world cup qualifier in which Australia was coasting to victory until some idiot invaded the field and broke the crossbar. Afterwards Iran came back to draw 2-2 and qualify for the 1998 finals. The monument below celebrates Australian cricketer Dennis Lillee. The Western Australian was probably Australia’s greatest ever fast bowler and was feted every time he walked onto the ‘G, especially in the Centenary Test of 1977, when he took 11 wickets to help Australia defeat England by 45 runs.

Nearby Fitzroy Gardens hosts one of Melbourne’s odder features: the Captain Cook Cottage. Cook never visited Victoria yet Melbourne ended up with a North Yorkshire cottage named for him. The story began in June 1933 when a newspaper article said the Great Ayton cottage where Cook “always went in the intervals between his voyages to the South Seas” was for sale. Melbourne man Hermon Gill visited the cottage in 1929 and proposed that the cottage should be bought and re-erected in Melbourne as the perfect birthday gift for the city’s centenary in 1935. The cottage was packed into 253 cases and 40 barrels, the bricks and stones numbered, and the door head encased in protective concrete. They even took cuttings of ivy from the walls of the home, which were replanted in Melbourne. The connection to Cook is tenuous. He never lived here and it is merely “possible” that he stayed there when he visited Great Ayton in 1772.

The weather was gorgeous on Sunday morning for a long walk to St Kilda along the beachfront. The wide horseshoe-shaped expanse of Port Phillip empties into Bass Strait via the narrow channel of The Rip. Port Phillip formed at the end of the last Ice Age 7000 years ago when the sea-level rose to drown the river plains, wetlands and lakes in the lower reaches of the Yarra. Cherished by native people for its rich seafood, seals and penguins, the bay was not discovered by Europeans until 1802 and was initially named Port King for Sydney’s governor until King renamed it for the First Fleet commander. The eastern side has sandy beaches and as Melbourne prospered, its wealthy classes discovered recreational uses of Port Phillip and established bayside suburbs such as St Kilda and Brighton. Beach volleyball and kite surfing are popular especially on sunny days.

I met friends for coffee and cake on Acland St, St Kilda. In 1834 British politician and philanthropist Sir Thomas Dyke Acland bought a schooner, the Lady of St Kilda, named for the Scottish island he visited many years earlier. In the 1840s the schooner visited Melbourne frequently under master James Ross Lawrence, and moored off what became known as the “St Kilda foreshore”. Lawrence bought the first block in the newly named suburb which contained three roads, Lawrence naming one of them for his old patron Acland, and the other two Fitzroy St and the Esplanade.

The Esplanade is now famously associated with the pub of that name. Four years ago artist Scott Marsh painted this mural of musician Paul Kelly on the side of the Esplanade pub where Kelly has performed many times over the past two decades. Kelly was born and raised in Adelaide but settled in Melbourne in 1976. Kelly recorded tracks for Live at the Continental and the Esplanade (1996) in the Espy hotel’s Gershwin Room.

On the walk back to town, I followed the course of another Melbourne parkrun at Albert Park Lake whose perimeter track is conveniently 5km long. The area was part of the original Yarra delta with lagoons and wetlands and was a corroboree site. After white settlers drained the river, the area became parkland and was officially proclaimed a public park in 1864, named in honour of Queen Victoria’s husband who died three years earlier. The lake was created in 1880 and topped up with diverted Yarra water 10 years later. Albert Park is a sports precinct for motor racing, sailing, golf, and of course, running. It is also an important grassy wetland habitat for 200 bird species, including the signature black swans

I diverted back to the Shrine of Remembrance, this time heading up to its rooftop viewing spot. It was as close as I got to Government House, the King’s Domain home of the Governor of Victoria. Built in Italianate style by St Patrick’s cathedral designer William Wardell in the 1870s, Government House resembles Osborne House, Queens Victoria’s summer home on the Isle of Wight, constructed in stucco-rendered brick on a bluestone foundation. The tower provides a central focus for the three sections: the State Apartments, the Private Apartments and the Ballroom. When Melbourne became Australia’s unofficial capital in 1901 it also housed the Governor-General until the move to Yarralumla in 1930. It remains the largest residential building in Australia.

Exhausted after a long day of walking, I headed to my hotel to prepare for my flight home early the following moment. There was time to appreciate one more part of Melbourne’s architectural heritage. The mid 1850s Victoria Barracks on St Kilda Rd was built to house British troops, including the 12th and 40th Regiment of Foot who put down the Eureka Stockade rebellion in Ballarat. The Barracks housed the Department of Defence following Federation in 1901. It also housed Australia’s war cabinet rooms in the Second World War, under UAP prime minister Robert Menzies and then under Labor’s John Curtin. A plaque notes that of Australia’s seven million population at the time, almost one million were in the armed forces.

The naming of Melbourne’s buildings and institutions show a deep affection for the British Empire, the odd Irish input aside. But modern Melbourne belies this tradition. The weekend I was there, the 21st century Federation Square (named for an Australian achievement) was full of people celebrating a festival of African music and culture and the precinct was alive with African sights, smells and sounds. It speaks to a confident global city, soon about to overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest, and one finally prepared to recognise its ancient Koori history as much as its better-documented British one.

Patrick O’Donohoe: Irish Exile

Young Irelanders Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew McManus, and Patrick O’Donohue receiving their death sentence in their 1848 trial at Clonmel.

In 1837 Patrick Donahoe started a newspaper called the Pilot named in honour of a Dublin O’Connellite paper for Irish Americans in Boston. Thirteen years later his near namesake Patrick O’Donohoe started his own newspaper for the Irish in Hobart. According to Richard Davis, O’Donohoe was an anomaly among the seven Young Ireland state prisoners transported to Australia after the failed Ballingarry rebellion. Unlike the others he was not wealthy, attracted no biographer and he drank to excess. Yet from O’Donohoe’s writings, said Davis, we learn much about the 1848 rebellion and the class tensions in Van Diemen’s Land before the abolition of transportation.

O’Donohoe was born in Clonegall, County Carlow in 1808 which put him in the same age bracket as William Smith O’Brien and older than most Young Ireland colleagues. Possibly educated at Trinity College, he was a law clerk at the Dublin office of his uncle, a solicitor named Dillon, and later at W. McGrath of Gardiner St. He likely contributed anonymously to the Nation and after the Young Irelanders split from the Repeal Association in 1846, “P.O’Donohoe of Sandymount” signed a law clerks’ remonstrance against their disqualification. He supported Young Ireland’s Irish Confederation in 1847 and was elected to its 36-man council. According to Michael Doheny, O’Donohoe was “much relied on” by Confederation friends and proposed radical ideas such O’Brien’s abstention from parliament, a daily national newspaper, and a Irish national assembly elected by all adult men. However he became temporarily disillusioned and disappeared from public view.

After the French revolution of 1848, O’Donohoe joined the Grattan Club, a new Dublin Confederate club, eventually becoming its vice president. As the talk of revolution in Ireland reached fever pitch in July 1848 and Britain suspended habeas corpus, jailed Nation publisher Charles Gavan Duffy asked O’Donohoe to take a message to William Smith O’Brien, then on the run in the south. O’Donohoe went to Kilkenny where suspicious local leader James Stephens arrested him and took him to O’Brien at Cashel. “These damned rascals take me for a spy,” O’Donohoe complained. O’Donohoe and Stephens joined O’Brien’s ragtag army which criss-crossed Tipperary over the following days fomenting rebellion. They found support in mining communities but priests dampened enthusiasm after they left and one refused to take O’Donohoe’s confession. O’Donohoe was unimpressed with the patrician O’Brien’s insistence on property rights. They met Thomas Francis Meagher who failed to get support from north Tipperary radical priest John Kenyon. Meagher recognised O’Donohoe who “peered through the front rank of the guerrillas, his sharp black eyes darting in sparks of fire from him the wild delight excited by the scene and the prospect of a fight.”

Meagher and O’Donohoe attended the council of war in The Commons on July 28 but the following morning they headed south together and missed the failed rebellion in Ballingarry. Now wanted men, they travelled in atrocious weather, sleeping in haylofts and bogs, “the people being all afraid to shelter us,” O’Donohoe said. They were arrested on August 12 near Holycross, Co Tipperary. Both men were tried for high treason in Clonmel with O’Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus. While the prosecution could not prove O’Donohoe was in the rebellion, they had ample evidence he was involved in the lead-up. All four were found guilty and sentenced to death.

O’Donohoe spent eight months in Richmond prison when their sentences were commuted to life transportation in Van Diemen’s Land. On July 9, 1849 O’Donohoe farewelled his wife for the last time and boarded the Swift with the others, bound for Hobart. Though he complained they were “cruelly treated,” they had far better treatment than working class convicts. They arrived in Hobart on October 27 and were offered tickets-of-leave, all but O’Brien accepting. As a law clerk O’Donohoe was allowed to reside in Hobart, the others went to rural districts.

O’Donohoe turned to journalism rather than the law. On January 26, 1850 he produced the first issue of the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate. Fellow state prisoners disassociated themselves from the venture, believing they should not get involved with local politics. When John Mitchel arrived in April he complained the paper “piped its notes under the censorship of a Comptroller-General.” Nevertheless John Martin contributed articles and Meagher obtained subscriptions. The paper supported local demands for a representative assembly but mainly promoted Irish issues and 500 of its 800 subscribers were on the mainland.

Van Diemen’s Land governor William Denison initially believed it was better to allow the paper under his supervision rather than ban it but warned O’Donohoe not to overtly criticise his administration. When O’Donohoe blamed authorities for O’Brien’s ill health, Denison threatened to shut the paper. O’Donohue told readers, “I am fettered but there are free men in this land, who can, if they be earnest and true, find befitting channels through which to complain.” Denison sent a copy to London and Colonial Secretary Earl Grey told him to close it down. These messages took many months to relay and were overtaken by events.

Denison and O’Donohoe were uneasy temporary allies. Other Hobart newspapers were anti-transportation but Denison believed, and was borne out by events, that an abrupt end to convict labour would damage the colony economically. O’Donohoe supported Irish convicts who suffered discrimination and he criticised anti-transportation leaders for “convict hating, white nigger driving principles.” For the most part he favoured the government and he condemned the intransigence of Tasmania’s gentry, believing convicts were the backbone of the economy not “a mob of sheep farmers.” Davis said O’Donohoe anticipated the development of Irish Catholic-led Labor politics.

Denison enjoyed O’Donohoe’s evisceration of wealthy anti-transportationists and did not punish O’Donohoe for his role in the aborted O’Brien freedom attempt from Maria Island. But matters changed towards the end of 1850 when O’Brien accepted a ticket-of-leave and moved to New Norfolk. The state prisoners celebrated by visiting him, which was illegal under their ticket terms. On December 17, O’Donohoe visited New Norfolk with fellow newspaper editor John Moore and brawled with him in the pub. O’Donohoe was charged with drunkenness and breach of parole. He was fined on December 19 for drunkenness and rebuked four days later for the breach. Unhappy with the leniency of the magistrates, Denison ordered O’Donohoe’s re-arrest and sent him to Saltwater River prison, a decision widely condemned in Hobart.

Patrick O’Donohoe.

Denison no longer needed O’Donohoe, who had become unreliable in his support and a less erratic Irishman was a better bet as a propagandist. This was Young Ireland traitor John Donellan Balfe, recently arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with glowing recommendations from Dublin Castle. Balfe was appointed Assistant Comptroller-General of Convicts and wrote pro-transportation articles for local newspapers signed as “Dion”.

Before going to prison, O’Donohoe signed a deed of trust temporarily ceding control of the Exile to Patrick McSorley. He was too weak to work at Saltwater and was transferred to Port Arthur hospital where he did light duties, “making brooms and other menial work”. He was transferred to the Cascades probation station on February 24 while Catholic priest John Therry organised a petition to remit the rest of his sentence. O’Donohoe was released on March 31 and ordered to live in Oatlands in the midlands. He attempted to regain control of the Exile but McSorley refused saying he now had full ownership. McSorley then closed the paper on April 19. With no work in Oatlands, O’Donohoe was permitted to move to Launceston where he survived on donations and charity. He lost his ticket-of-leave in October, possibly for a failed escape attempt. After a brief stint in Hobart jail he was freed again though by February 1852 was re-arrested after pleading guilty to drunkeness and served 14 days on the Launceston treadmill.

Anonymous correspondents outed Balfe as a British spy though Balfe (as “Dion”) rebutted the allegations. In August O’Donohoe wrote to the Examiner calling Balfe a traitor and said the state prisoners were barred from saying more. Denison regarded this as a breach of bail conditions and sent him back to Cascades. When he was released in November, O’Donohoe believed he was free of ticket-of-leave requirements and hid in Launceston. He was smuggled onto the Yarra Yarra ship to Melbourne and nearly suffocated in the coal hatch. He travelled on to Sydney and caught a ship to Tahiti. The American ambassador secured him a berth on a ship to San Francisco where he arrived on June 22, 1853, 185 days after leaving Hobart.

O’Donohoe travelled to New York where his uncompromising lectures were well received. But he struggled to keep his drinking under control. In August 1853 he attended fellow escapee Meagher’s 30th birthday party in Boston and was shouted down by the event’s chairman when he tried to tell his own story, almost dealing to a duel. When Mitchel made his own spectacular escape to New York, O’Donohoe was pushed further into the shadow.

O’Donohoe was expecting his wife and daughter to arrive in New York in January 1854 but they never met. While the women were delayed in quarantine by rough weather, O’Donohoe contracted diarrhoea caused by alcohol consumption and died on January 22, aged 44. As Thomas Keneally wrote “melancholy, alcoholism, Denison and irregular diet had all had a hand” in his death. The Irish American said O’Donohoe was estranged from friends through “nervous irritability and a mind shattered by suffering”. His wife attacked Mitchel and Meagher for not helping her husband. Neither attended his funeral at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery and his grave went missing, though Mitchel’s newspaper advertised a poorly subscribed fund to help her. Donahoe’s Boston Pilot said O’Donohoe was gifted with strong mental powers, and almost herculean physical strength but “the sufferings and systematic tortures inflicted by English officials in Australia, almost, ruined a once vigorous mind, and so impaired his great constitution, that his death is the natural consequence of five years’ hardship.” Richard Davis said O’Donohoe was a wasted talent who alienated friends. His lasting legacy was the Exile which stressed Tasmania’s independence though overestimated its potential for growth. “He deserves to be remembered as one of the founders of the Irish-Australian radical tradition and one of the most interesting Young Irelanders,” Davis said.

O’Donohoe’s grave was rediscovered in 2010. Green-Wood cemetery historian Jeff Richman found a record of the interment and after workers inserted a metal rod into the ground they recovered a large ledger stone engraved with a cross, about six feet long, stamped with the words “Patrick O’Donohue” and “Irish Rebel”. Green-Wood restored the gravestone which is close to the memorial marker for Thomas Francis Meagher, fellow Irish nationalist and Tasmanian escapee who went on to become a Civil War hero.

Port Arthur penal settlement

Port Arthur is a special place and one I hadn’t visited in almost three decades. My previous visit was a horrible rainy day in September 1993 and I was happy to return on a glorious early summer day, 29 years later. Situated on the bottom of the Tasman Peninsula, Port Arthur was founded as a timber station in 1830. It became Tasmania’s longest lasting penal settlement and is now a world heritage site attracting thousands of tourists annually. A massive collection of ruins, Port Arthur is, as Robert Hughes says, Australia’s “Paestum and Dachau…rolled into one.”

Europeans first colonised Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, in 1803. For two decades colonists and natives mostly ignored each other but a rapid expansion of white population after 1820 led to competition for resources. Most Tasmanian Aborigines were massacred in the Black War and those who survived were sent to Bass Strait islands. That freed up Van Diemen’s Land for an economic boom based on rapid population growth and convict labor. In the 1830s the wool price doubled in the English market, and the number of the sheep on the island trebled. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur instituted a graded system of convict assignment. If convicts behaved, they got a ticket-of-leave and limited independence. Those who did not obey the rules were punished with flogging, hard labor in chains, or for the worst, incarceration in penal stations.

Until 1832 the only penal station for serious offenders was Macquarie Harbour on the west coast. It had a fearsome reputation but it was remote, expensive to run, and its harbour entrance was perilous after a sometimes six-week ship journey from Hobart. Arthur closed Macquarie and a secondary station at Maria Island and created this new settlement, named for himself, just one day’s sail from Hobart. Here Arthur believed convicts could more easily “be secured, classified and put to work suitable to their strength and the degree of punishment it is intended to inflict upon each.” First commandant Charles O’Hara Booth believed in iron discipline and unlike Arthur, did not believe convicts could be reformed. Booth used the lash sparingly but it was a fearsome weapon, a hard cord which was like wire, “the 81 knots cutting the flesh as if a saw had been used.” In Booth’s 11-year-reign, Port Arthur held 6000 prisoners, with a peak of 1200 in 1846.

This large population needed a large home. The penitentiary, Port Arthur’s most prominent building, was originally constructed as a flour mill and granary in 1845. Between 1854 and 1857 it was converted to a prison. On the ground floor were 136 cells for “prisoners of bad character under heavy sentence” and above them was a dining hall, chapel and library. The penitentiary was gutted by fire in 1897.

In 1835 Commandant Booth decided the barracks needed extra security and built a strong wall and guard tower. Booth used boys from Point Puer reformatory across the harbour to cut and shape the stones. The tower with its flanking wall and turrets was in place by 1836. A flag flew from the tower whenever “a person of consequence” was at Port Arthur. The guard tower remained when the settlement was closed, survived bushfires thanks to its lead roof, and became a private museum in the 1890s.

This cottage is named for its most famous prisoner, Irishman William Smith O’Brien. O’Brien was transported after the Ballingarry rebellion in 1848 and housed at Maria Island. After a failed escape bid, authorities moved him to Port Arthur in August 1850. He stayed here for three months until he accepted a ticket-of-leave. The cottage was later used as officers’ quarters and a hospital and was sold privately when Port Arthur closed in 1877. It was used as a youth hostel in the 20th century before it was restored in 1984. The cottage now contains exhibits about O’Brien’s life and times.

Port Arthur’s first hospital was a 1830s wooden building, replaced by a sandstone and brick building in 1842. There were separate wings for convicts and soldiers and a kitchen and morgue. After 1877 the Catholic Church bought it for a boy’s home but it was destroyed by bushfires in 1895 and 1897.

The asylum was built in 1868 to house patients designated as “lunatics”. The idea was compassionate and aimed at curing mental disorders through a calm, clean and pleasant environment, kind treatment, exercise and amusement, and other therapies. It became Carnarvon town hall in 1889 and rebuilt after the 1895 bushfire with the penitentiary clock mounted in a new tower.

Off the coast is the Isle of the Dead. The original inhabitants, the Pydairrerme people of the Oyster Bay tribe used the island to gather shellfish and camp and left a large midden. Settlers first called it Opossum Island for a ship that sought shelter here. In 1833 Port Arthur’s first chaplain selected the isle for a cemetery as “a secure and undisturbed resting-place” and renamed it Isle of the Dead. Over a thousand people were buried here in the next four decades.

This was the Commandant’s House, first occupied by Booth and his family in 1838. When the penal settlement closed in 1877, tourists flocked to the area which was renamed Carnarvon. The Commandant’s House became the Carnarvon Hotel. It was used as a boarding house for 70 years and then a private residence.

Governor Arthur laid the foundation stone of the Gothic church on his final visit in 1836. Convicts built the church using stonework prepared by Point Puer boys. The first service was conducted in 1837 however the church was never officially consecrated because of disagreements between the different denominations. The church bells were rung daily to call convicts to work and to announce prayers. The 1847 bells, now in the museum, are the oldest surviving chime of bells in Australia. In 1875 the wooden spire on top of the bell tower was blown down in a heavy gale. Much of the structure was destroyed by fire in 1884. It remained a derelict ruin until 1979, when funding was secured to preserve the site as a tourist destination.

The New Separate Prison built between 1847 and 1852 was modelled on the “separate and silent” treatment of London’s Pentonville prison. It was built in a radial pattern on a rise away from the other buildings. Solitary confinement cells were used as sleeping apartments for dangerous convicts and to confine convicts under punishment. Solitary cells were preferred to flogging because they encouraged docility and made it easier for prisoners to be monitored. Inmates were kept in complete and anonymous solitude and silence. They had their heads shaved and were allocated a number, their names never used. They were not to speak, sing, whistle or communicate except when giving essential information to a guard or when singing in chapel. Outside their cells they wore masks to prevent recognition, maintained distance from other prisoners, and had to turn away from other prisoners when in the corridors. Infractors would be punished in the “dumb cell” where a form of sensory deprivation was practised. The New Separate Prison was a torture of the mind, more akin to Baghram than Dachau.

A modern model now exists on the original semaphore mast site. Commandant Booth developed 3000 codes known only to senior officers and Hobart officials. The codes covered shipping, weather, provisions and prisoner escapes. Another of Booth’s innovations was the railway from Port Arthur to the coal mine on the west of Norfolk Bay. Convicts supplied the power for the 8km line pushing the four-passenger carts against crossbars at the front and back.

In 1846 the Government Gardens were laid out, fenced by young English oak and ash trees. While convicts toiled, officers’ wives, children and nursemaids would walk to the cottage garden and admire the green lawns, flower beds and the central fountain.

The last convict ship arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1853 and the colony was renamed Tasmania three years later. Yet Port Arthur lasted another generation. In 1856 the Separate Prison housed Norfolk Island convicts after its jail closed down. The presence of a large, though declining, population of long-term prisoners close to Hobart was a source of anxiety with “frightful evils resulting from this continued circulation of criminals through the community.” The Colonial Office ignored calls to close it down until 1877 when the last 64 convicts, mostly old and infirm, were moved to Hobart. As James Boyce wrote, Port Arthur’s notoriety had served governor Arthur’s original purpose to compel convict subservience in Van Diemen’s Land.

There is a memorial to a more modern tragedy which occurred a few years after my last visit. On April 28, 1996 a gunman (name deliberately omitted) killed 35 people and wounded 23 others at Port Arthur, in the worst massacre in modern Australian history. Twelve people were killed at the Broad Arrow cafe and another eight at the gift shop next door. Afterwards, the Tasmanian Government dismantled the building leaving only the external remains. It is now a place for quiet reflection with a monument and memorial garden dedicated at the site in April 2000. The names of the victims are on the monument.