William H. Seward: In praise of folly

William H. Seward, American Secretary of State 1861 to 1869. Library of Congress

In 1860 William Henry Seward was supposed to be president. It was the job the celebrated New York senator and former state governor had been training for all his life. Favourite to win the Republican nomination, the flamboyant Seward had cannoneers in place in his upstate home town ready to announce his successful candidacy and had prepared his victory speech to the Senate. But he was outmanoeuvred. At the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago the home state “rail splitter” Abraham Lincoln got the nomination. Devastated, it seemed Seward’s illustrious career was over. But his best days were still ahead.

Born in 1801, Seward had a wealthy and privileged childhood, thanks to his slaveholding father, as slavery was not fully abolished in New York until 1827. He graduated with first class honours from prestigious Union College, Schenectady, and trained for the bar, practising law with judge Elijah Miller. He married Miller’s brilliant daughter Frances, and she would be his intellectual equal for the rest of their lives. Another key partner was New York political boss Thurlow Weed, who would manage all Seward’s campaigns and become his closest ally. Seward was becoming bored with the law and was drawn towards politics. Weed shaped public opinion through his Albany Evening Journal which promoted Seward’s campaign for a seat in the New York Senate. Seward was elected in September 1830, aged 29. In 1834 Thurlow groomed Seward for New York governorship as the candidate of the new Whig Party, but he narrowly lost the ballot. “What a demon is this ambition,” the crushed Seward wrote as he returned to legal practice. He found success as a partner in a land-developing business until the Panic of 1837. The silver lining was that people blamed the Democrats for the financial crash. With Weed’s help, Seward succeeded in his second bid to be governor a year later. The youthful new Whig governor wanted to expand canals and railways, and wanted better schooling, including for the black and Irish population. He formed an unlikely alliance with Irish Catholic bishop of New York John Hughes to reform the school system, angering nativists who claimed Seward was “in league with the pope”. Having witnessed ill-treatment in the south, he was also strongly anti-slavery. The South branded him a “bigoted New England fanatic” when he refused to surrender fugitive slaves who arrived by ship in New York. Seward was re-elected in 1840 with a much smaller majority. Reading the signs, Seward decided not to run a third time and returned to law practice. He turned down an invite to be the new Liberal Party’s candidate for president in 1844. He defended black man William Freeman, charged with murder in Seward’s home town, Auburn. When Freeman was threatened with lynching, Seward vowed to remain his counsel “until death”. Even Weed doubted his wisdom but Seward persisted with a defence of insanity. The jury ignored his plea and sentenced Freeman to death. Seward was hated in Auburn, but the case made him famous nationally.

Seward first met Abraham Lincoln in 1848 after the Whigs nominated Mexican war hero and slaveholder Zachary Taylor for president. Both Seward and Lincoln spoke at a Boston rally. Seward demanded a Northern non-slaveowner be elected while Lincoln’s speech attacked Democrats. Seward said Lincoln’s speech was funny, but had pointedly avoided the slavery issue. They stayed the night at a hotel and had a long and thoughtful conversation. Lincoln admitted he was a “hayseed” and Seward had made him think about slavery issues.

Taylor’s election win helped Weed to convince the New York state legislature to put Seward in the Senate. Once elected, the celebrity Seward became part of Taylor’s inner circle. Weed remained worried about Seward’s outspoken support for black rights, as slavery bubbled to the top of the agenda. Seward was disappointed in the compromise of 1850 which admitted California to the union at the cost of strengthening the fugitive slave act, which he bitterly opposed. Then Taylor died suddenly and the new president was Seward’s New York political enemy, Millard Fillmore. The Whigs split north and south over the issue of slavery. They were badly beaten in the 1852 presidential election, and would never win another. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 was a further disappointment, allowing new territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.

A new political force emerged, the nativist Know Nothings who had not forgiven Seward for funding Catholic schools. Seward was up for re-election in 1855, and he needed all of Weed’s powers to cobble together a narrow majority in the state legislature relying on Seward’s anti-slavery credentials. Seward pledged allegiance to the new Republican Party in 1856 and considered running for president that year. Weed counselled against it saying the party was not yet organised enough to win. He was right. Eventual candidate John Fremont won much of the North but Southern votes helped elect Democrat James Buchanan. In 1857 Seward condemned the Supreme Court Dred Scott decision blaming Buchanan for the ruling which denied blacks basic rights. Six months later Seward made an even more incendiary speech saying that an “irrepressible conflict” between north and south was inevitable. He was proved right, but the polarising speech put off Republican moderates. They would eventually get behind Lincoln, who attracted wider notice in his spirited 1858 Illinois debates with Democrat Stephen Douglas.

As the 1860 election approached, Weed made a costly misstep. Certain that Seward had the nomination sewn up and fearful he might antagonise moderates further, Weed advised him to go on a European tour. Seward enjoyed meeting Queen Victoria, Palmerston, Gladstone, King Leopold of Belgium and the pope. He returned in early 1860 to tell the Senate only he could hold the union together. But other candidates had used his absence to advance their positions. There were three other strong contenders; Lincoln, Ohio governor Salmon Portland Chase and Missouri judge Edward Bates. Chase was so sure he would win, he did not even campaign. Bates was the oldest candidate at 64, but had a lifetime of distinguished service and was backed by the powerful Blair family of Maryland, who believed the westerner Bates alone could quell the southern secession movement.

There was also influential New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Greeley long wanted political office but Weed and Seward offered no help. Greeley’s grudge against them increased in 1856 when they supported his rival, New York Times editor Henry Raymond, as governor of New York. In 1860 Greeley listed his grievances but Seward assumed his anger was temporary and ignored him.

In May 40,000 people attended the Republican Convention at the Chicago “Wigwam”. Seward had the most pledges and a change of rules strengthened his position as he now only needed a majority, not two-thirds of the delegates. Recognising Seward’s commanding lead, Lincoln’s strategy was to offend no-one. He courted conservative states worried that Seward’s candidacy might hurt their chances in state elections. Greeley added to the doubts, supporting Bates, and saying Seward could not carry key states including Pennsylvania. On the day of the ballot, Seward’s supporters chanted loudly when his name was read out. But Lincoln’s name got an even bigger hometown reception in this “trial of lungs”. In the first ballot Seward had 173½ votes, Lincoln 102, Chase 49 and Bates 48, with 233 needed to win. After two ballots it was Seward 184½ to Lincoln’s 181. The Blairs got behind Lincoln and he won on the third ballot.

Seward believed his shock defeat was “final and irrevocable” but pledged to support the Republican ticket. Weed went to Lincoln’s home in Springfield to plot strategy. Hopes of a win were increased as the Democrats split into northern and southern camps. Seward went west on tour to stump for Lincoln. Reporters marvelled at his ability to make speeches seem spontaneous. He met Lincoln in Springfield, one observer noting the president-elect was shy and awkward with a sense “the positions should be reserved.”

But they were not and on November 6 Weed’s organisational skills got New York’s pivotal 35 electoral college votes to ensure a Republican victory, causing seven southern states to secede from the Union. Lincoln’s thoughts turned to a cabinet and he offered Seward the chief role of secretary of state. Seward baulked. He wanted a cabinet of former Whigs which he could dominate. Lincoln needed a broader coalition and knew he could not allow Seward to “take the first trick”. Lincoln also offered cabinet positions to fellow candidates Chase (Treasury) and Bates (Attorney-General). Like Chase and Bates, Seward eventually accepted, telling Frances “I will try to save freedom and my country”. With the new administration unable to take office until March 4, Seward established secret contact with outgoing attorney-general Edwin Stanton who was exasperated with Buchanan’s refusal to take the crisis seriously.

On January 12, Seward made a major Senate speech defending the union but offering compromise with the south. The seven confederate states elected Jefferson Davis as president but Seward hoped his conciliatory speech would keep Virginia in the union. It only increased his enemies among hardline radical Republicans. Lincoln travelled to Washington in March after a long tour of northern states. Seward warned him of an assassination threat as they passed through southern-sympathising Baltimore, Maryland, a threat also recognised by detective Allan Pinkerton (whose unblinking eye logo earned his profession the nickname “private eye”). Lincoln travelled incognito through the night to Washington, though critics accused him of cowardice.

Seward attempted to control Lincoln on arrival, taking him to see Buchanan at the White House, congressmen at the Senate, and top general Winfield Scott, with dinner that first night at Seward’s house. Seward almost threatened to resign when he heard Chase would be treasurer. When a reporter asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet of enemies and rivals, the president replied: “We needed the strongest men of the party in cabinet…I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” As Doris Goodwin wrote in Team of Rivals, Seward, Chase and Bates were indeed strong, but “the prairie lawyer from Springfield would emerge as the strongest of them all.”

But Lincoln’s inauguration speech leaned heavily on Seward and was conciliatory to the south, calling on “the mystic chords of memory” to touch “the better angels” of the nature of all Americans. It was well received in Virginia, though further south was more belligerent. Lincoln pledged to defend South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, while Seward secretly negotiated to surrender Sumter to keep Virginia in the union. The South attacked the fort on April 12, triggering the civil war and the departure of Virginia to the Confederacy. Secretary of State Seward had to convince Britain not to back the south to feed its Manchester and Leeds cotton factories. He threatened war but Lincoln softened his message to London. Nevertheless Washington would not tolerate the British breaking the southern blockade.

Like all Northerners, Seward was devastated after the Union’s shock defeat in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. But like Lincoln, he believed that organisation and experience would improve matters and their firm resolve was critical in restoring hope. Lincoln and Seward spent much time together and enjoyed each other’s company telling stories and jokes, though Mary Lincoln resented the relationship and distrusted Seward. Others had similar views believing Lincoln was dominated by Seward, not realising the president was his own man, something Seward himself grew to appreciate. Nevertheless Seward’s influence was shown in late 1861 when a Union vessel intercepted the British ship Trent on the high seas and arrested two Confederate envoys. Though Lincoln and most Northerners feted the Union captain, Seward realised an outraged Britain was serious about retaliation. Not wanting a second war, Lincoln endorsed Seward’s diplomatic strategy of surrendering the envoys without apology.

The first war was going badly in 1862 as top union general George McClellan habitually overestimated Rebel forces and was “outgeneraled” by Robert E. Lee. Lincoln made the decision to emancipate the slaves, but in cabinet deferred to Seward who thought it might seem like an act of desperation. He advised Lincoln to wait for a Union victory. Though the September 1862 battle of Antietam in Maryland was as best a very bloody stalemate thanks to McClellan’s timidity, it forced Lee to abandon his invasion of the north. It gave Lincoln the excuse to issue the proclamation, again accepting a Seward proposal to maintain black freedom beyond the war. The Antietam “victory” was temporary with Lincoln sacking McClellan and Lee regaining the initiative with a crushing defeat of Union forces at Fredericksburg in December. Political recriminations followed with many Republicans scapegoating Seward as “a paralysing influence” on Lincoln and the army. A powerful Senate delegation was urged on by the scheming Treasurer Salmon Chase who was plotting his own path to presidency in 1864. Lincoln soothed the delegation by telling them that decisions were unanimously agreed, and forced an embarrassed Chase into a public defence of cabinet. Lincoln rejected the resignations of Seward and Chase and scored a massive political win, saving his friend Seward from an attack that was really directed at him while solidifying his own position as master of cabinet and the party.

But the war remained stalemated in the east in 1863 despite a great victory at Gettysburg. There was also trouble on the home front. Peace Democrats, called Copperheads by opponents, were furious after Congress passed the Conscription Act for a mandatory draft. The act was flawed as draftees could be exempted if they paid $300 or found a substitute. Poor Americans, many of them Irish, believed this proved it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”. In July New York erupted into five days of draft riots with over a thousand deaths. Irishmen threatened to burn down Seward’s home in Auburn, where Frances still lived. She hid treasured possessions as a precaution but told Seward she was more worried about “poor coloured people…they cannot protect themselves and few are willing to assist them.” The ever buoyant Seward correctly believed the riots would pass and the country would not support the Copperheads. The Peace Democrats lost out in elections that year.

As the 1864 presidential elections approached, many still believed that Seward was the real power behind the throne. Supporting the abolitionist Chase, newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison worried that a “vote for Old Abe” would see Seward returned as acting president. Seward knew that was absurd having accepted Lincoln’s control of the cabinet. Seward’s son and secretary Fred said the two men had “grown very close and unreserved”. Their mutual faith helped sustain them through attacks from radicals and conservatives. Western hero Ulysses Grant came east to lead the attack against Lee’s forces unleashing a hideous struggle with 86,000 casualties in seven weeks but the front stalled in front of Richmond. Despite the poor battle news and Chase’s relentless backstabbing, Lincoln regained the Republican presidential nomination on June 7. The favourite for vice president had been New Yorker Daniel Dickinson but if nominated Seward would have had to resign because of the unwritten rule that two significant posts could not be allocated to one state. Weed and Seward threw their support behind Tennessee governor Andrew Johnson. No-one understood how fatal that decision would become.

Chase was forced out of cabinet, and the inner sanctum was Lincoln, Seward and Edwin Stanton, Buchanan’s attorney-general now turned Lincoln’s indefatigable war secretary. “The two S’s” developed an understanding to work together to support Lincoln to win the war and along with Chase’s Treasury replacement William Fessenden, were “the stronger half of the cabinet” according to Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay. Yet Lincoln’s hopes of winning a second term remained in the balance until September when Sherman captured Atlanta. Afterwards Seward paid tribute to the “wisdom and energy of the war administration” and said nothing was more important than Lincoln’s re-election. “If we do this, the rebellion will perish,” he said. The Democrat candidate was Lincoln’s former top general George McClellan but with the North finally winning the war, the opposition looked foolish for demanding peace. On November 8 Lincoln won all but three states though the popular vote was much closer. Soldiers voted overwhelmingly for their commander-in-chief. “To them he really was Father Abraham,” one corporal noted. Seward said Lincoln would take his place alongside Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and Jackson “among the benefactors of the human race”.

The North celebrated in early April 1865 when Rebel capital Richmond fell. But Seward could not join the celebrations, having been almost killed in a carriage accident when a horse bolted. He caught his heel on the carriage when jumping off, smashing his face on the pavement. Doctors diagnosed a broken jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder. When his condition worsened with fever, Lincoln rushed to his bedside. Wife Frances said Seward looked bad, but his mind was “perfectly clear”. As the secretary of state continued his painful recovery, the war ended with the surrender at Appomattox on April 9. Stanton woke Seward up to tell him the news. “You have made me cry for the first time in my life,” Seward told him.

Though Seward was still incapacitated five days later, Lincoln was in high good humour at a Good Friday cabinet meeting. “Didn’t our chief look grand today?” Stanton asked a colleague afterwards. Even Mary had never seen her husband so cheerful as they prepared to attend Ford’s Theatre that night. Meanwhile, Confederate-supporting actor John Wilkes Booth met with three conspirators to plot an audacious assassination of Lincoln, Seward and vice president Johnson. George Atzerodt, assigned to kill Johnson, became drunk and wandered off but fellow conspirator Lewis Powell came closer in his attempt to kill Seward.

Seward’s three-storey house was full of people that night. The bed-ridden secretary of state was on the mend and listened with pleasure at Fred’s account of the cabinet meeting. Seward’s daughter Fanny noted he fell asleep around 10pm and she turned down his lamps and kept a bedside vigil. Powell knocked on the front door and told a servant he had medicine for Seward. He pushed past the servant and met Fred on the stairs. Fred refused to let him pass. When it seemed the intruder was about to leave, he lunged at Fred with a revolver and pulled the trigger. It misfired but Powell savagely brought the gun down on Fred’s head, crushing his skull and leaving him unconscious. A soldier that Stanton had assigned to Seward’s bedroom heard the commotion on the stairs. As the soldier opened the door, Powell slashed him with a knife and rushed towards Seward. Fanny begged him not to kill her father. Seward woke to see Powell plunge the knife into his neck and face, knocking him to the floor and severing his cheek. Fanny’s screams brought another brother Gus into the room. Powell struck Gus on the forehead and hand though Gus and the injured soldier managed to pull the attacker away. Powell ran down the stairs, stabbing an incoming State Department messenger, before fleeing into the night.

Dr Tullio Verdi was first to tend to Seward and assumed his jugular was cut. However the knife was deflected by the metal contraption holding the patient’s broken jaw. Bizarrely, the carriage accident had saved his life. No sooner had Verdi dealt with Seward when Frances directed the doctor to Fred, who looked even closer to death. He then attended to the soldier and asked Frances, “any more?” Yes, she replied and took him to the messenger who suffered a deep gash near the spine. “All this the work of one man!” gasped Verdi. By now word spread that assassins had also attacked Lincoln. Booth used his knowledge of Ford’s to locate him in the state box. He shot from behind, jumped to the stage and escaped while shouting “Sic semper tyrannis”, Virginia’s motto, meaning thus always to tyrants.

Crowds were massing in the street. Despite fears for his own life, Stanton went to Seward’s and was shocked by the bloody scene. He then went to a house next to Ford’s where Lincoln lay dying, placed diagonally across a bed to accommodate his large frame. Stanton took control, taking witness testimony and orchestrating the search for the murderers. By the time Lincoln died at 7:22am on Saturday, newspapers had identified Booth as the assassin. Doctors withheld the news from Seward fearing the shock would kill him. On Easter Sunday Seward looked out the window to see flags at half mast. “He gazed a while,” a witness said, “then turning to his attendant, he announced. ‘The president is dead’.” The attendant denied it but Seward said in tears, “if he had been alive, he would have been the first to call on me.” Lincoln’s secretary John Hay said rarely was there a friendship in government “so absolute and sincere as that which existed between those two magnanimous spirits.”

Seward, seated second left, signs the Alaska Treaty of Cessation on March 30, 1867. Son Fred is farthest right.

Booth was killed in a shoot-out and Powell was caught and hanged. Against all odds, Seward and Fred both made full recoveries but the night of family horrors took its toll on Frances Seward. She collapsed and died barely six weeks later. Though disconsolate, Seward remained secretary of state for the full term of Johnson’s presidency. Seward failed to mediate the impeached union Democrat Johnson in his struggles against a Radical Republican Congress but he took great pride in what was originally lampooned as Seward’s Folly, the $7 million purchase of “Icebox” Alaska from Russia. Others would not see the sparsely populated 1.5 million sq km territory’s worth until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896. Seward was long dead by then. After retiring when Grant became president in 1869, he travelled the world accompanied by the faithful Fred. Seward died peacefully in 1872, aged 71, surrounded by family. His deathbed advice was “Love one another”. Pallbearer Thurlow Weed wept bitterly as his great friend was laid to rest at Auburn’s Fort Hill cemetery. On Seward’s gravestone was written “he was faithful”, his final words to the jury in the 1846 William Freeman case. Seward would have been delighted that fellow great abolitionist Harriet Tubman was buried here in 1913. Both were deeply committed to political equality and liberty.

Lutwyche Cemetery

I decided this week to cast my Brisbane city council vote in advance of polling day and that meant a long walk to the pre-poll office in Kedron Heights. It was an excuse to go somewhere new in my neighbourhood. I’d often passed Lutwyche Cemetery while driving up Gympie Rd but had never visited it. Though the graveyard has had no interments in three decades and is mostly ignored apart from the occasional dog walker, it remains a beautiful place, rich in history.

The cemetery and nearby suburb are named for 19th century politician and judge Alfred Lutwyche. Lutwyche was a NSW attorney-general who became Queensland’s first resident judge after it became a colony in 1859. He became the colony’s first supreme court judge two years later. Lutwyche lived in a grand house on Nelson St in my own next door suburb of Wooloowin and died in 1880. He was buried in St Andrew’s Anglican churchyard, though the cemetery named for him had just opened. Brisbane Cemetery (now Toowong Cemetery) had opened a few years earlier, but was already overcrowded and the growing city needed a second cemetery. In 1877 the Courier reported a council debate where “citizens of the village of Lutwyche” were lobbying for a public hall and reading room, and there was also “a sum on the estimates for a cemetery at Lutwyche”. Building began in the new year and by April the Church of England portion was consecrated. Five-year-old Walter Silcock was the first burial on August 4 that year.

During the Second World War, authorities built a War Graves section to bury 389 soldiers, both identified and unidentified. The remains of nine servicemen from the First World War were also moved to this section. The Imperial War Graves Commission erected the Cross of Sacrifice in 1950 using Helidon freestone.

The most famous of the First World War graves is William Edward Sing’s. Billy Sing was a sniper at Gallipoli who killed up to 300 Turkish soldiers. Born in Clermont to an English mother, he suffered racial prejudice on account of his Chinese father. He kept his head down, becoming a stockman and became an expert shooter. Recruiters agonised over his “unsuitable background” before accepting him into the army in 1914, aged 30. The rugged Gallipoli terrain was made for snipers such as Sing whose spotter was the later best-selling author Ion Idriess, and he quickly became deadly. The Turks assigned their best marksman against him in vain. Fellow soldiers witnessing Sing’s marksmanship dubbed him “The Assassin”. Later in the war he moved to the western front where he was not as effective, and was wounded in the trenches before gas exposure ended his military career. Suffering from injuries, he failed at farming and mining and remained in poverty after the war. He died in obscurity in Brisbane in 1943. This large memorial was unveiled for him at Lutwyche in 2016.

James Brennan was a little known Queensland politician who served in turbulent times. Brennan was born in Scotland and emigrated to Australia in his 20s, taking up mining at Gympie. He later worked for a meat export company in Brisbane and Townsville, and from 1902 managed a Rockhampton meatworks. In 1907 he stood for election as a Kidstonite for the seat of North Rockhampton. Former Premier William Kidston had left the Labour Party and formed his own party with support from moderates including fellow Rockhampton man Brennan. The election left Kidston as a minority premier but within a year he merged with Robert Philp’s conservatives, Philp briefly replacing him as premier. Brennan joined their new Liberal Party which held government under Kidston and later Digby Denham. Brennan resigned in 1912 when the seat of Rockhampton North was abolished. On retirement he moved to Wooloowin. He was buried here in 1917 next to his son William who died at Gallipoli.

Charles Moffatt Jenkinson (1865–1954) was a political contemporary of Brennan. Born in Birmingham, England in 1865, Jenkinson emigrated to Australia in 1883 and worked as a sports journalist before becoming proprietor at the South Brisbane Herald. In 1902 he was elected to Wide Bay as an opposition MP and year later moved to the seat of Fassifern. Though dismissed as a “sanctimonious job hunter” by the Brisbane Worker, he refused ministerial office. The highlight of his parliamentary career was an eight-hour filibuster, though he later voted for time limits to deny this expedient to others. In 1912 he became a Brisbane city alderman and was elected mayor in 1914. He immediately set out his vision for a new city hall at Albert Square (now King George Sq) and the foundation stone was laid in 1917. Jenkinson retired from council in 1916 and helped establish the large wartime Queensland Patriotic Fund for army wives and children. He returned to the Herald and in 1922 was described as “one of the regulars at Ascot and Albion Park racecourses”. He died aged 94 in 1954.

One of Lutwyche’s better known graves belongs to musician Harold “Buddy” Williams. Country and western music emerged out of the Appalachian mountains in the 1920s and singers like Jimmie Rodgers became popular with the rise of radio. Born in Sydney in 1918, the young Williams heard Rodgers’ music at a Dorrigo dairy farm and started busking illegally on the NSW North Coast as “the Clarence River Yodeller”. He enlisted in the Second World War and was seriously wounded at the battle of Balikpapan in Borneo. After the war Williams toured with the rodeo circuit and took his own variety show across Australia. He achieved lasting fame when fan Bert Newton had him on his TV show in the 1970s. Williams died of cancer in 1986. He was regarded as Australia’s first country star influencing those who followed including Slim Dusty. Williams was buried next to his daughter Donita who was killed in a traffic accident in Scottsdale, Tasmania in 1948, aged just 21 months. His grave contains a drawing of a guitar and words from his song Beyond the Setting Sun.

Buried in the Catholic portion is Patrick Short, Queensland’s first native-born police commissioner. His Irish parents Patrick and Mary Keogh emigrated to Ipswich in 1855. Patrick senior ran an engineering and blacksmith’s works though he died in 1862 when his son was three. Starting in the building trade, Patrick junior worked in south-west Queensland before joining the police force in 1878 and was posted to St George. He married Irish Catholic Eleanor Butler in 1880 at Roma. There were rumours that year that members of the Kelly gang had escaped Victoria so Short was assigned to border patrol. Though talk persists to modern times that Steve Hart and Dan Kelly lived out their lives in southern Queensland, Short found no trace of them and went back to regular duties. In almost half a century of service, he rose through the ranks becoming chief inspector in 1916 and commissioner five years later. He retired to Clayfield in 1925. A horse lover, Scott helped develop the police stud at Springsure and like Jenkinson, was often found at Brisbane racecourses. He died in 1941, aged 81.

Though the war had ended, there was tragedy on February 19, 1946 when an RAAF Lincoln bomber crashed at Amberley Airport near Ipswich killing 16 airmen. The plane was flying RAAF men home from Laverton near Melbourne but overshot the landing strip. Witnesses said the pilot retracted the under-carriage and attempted to lift the plane for a second circuit but it failed to respond and crashed before bursting into flames. The sixteen are buried together at Lutwyche. “Individual identification was not possible”, according to the grave plaque.

Lieutenant George Witton was a Boer War veteran, and a co-accused of Harry “Breaker” Morant. Witton was born to a Warrnambool, Victoria farming family in 1874. When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, patriotic Australian colonies including Victoria rushed to send troops to fight in the conflict on the side of the British Empire. Witton served as a gunner before the war before enlisting in the Victorian Imperial Bushmen. In South Africa in 1901 he was recruited for the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular mounted infantry regiment, reporting to fellow lieutenant Morant. After the Boers murdered a captured British officer, Morant and another lieutenant Peter Handcock found Boer soldier Floris Visser with the murdered officer’s papers. Though Witton objected, they killed Visser after a de facto court-martial. That was one of six “disgraceful incidents” including the shooting of six surrendered Afrikaners cited in a letter signed by 15 Carbineers, which led to charges of several officers. Morant, Handcock and Witton were all charged with Visser’s killing. Morant infamously testified they shot him under “rule 303” referring to the 0.303 inch cartridge used in British Army rifles. Morant and Handcock were sentenced to death for murder. Witton was convicted of manslaughter and released in 1904 after Australian government intervention. In later life he was a succesful pastoralist and director of a Biggenden cheese factory. He died of a heart attack, aged 68, in 1942. He published his version of events in Scapegoats of the Empire: the true story of Breaker Morant’s Bushveldt Carbineers in 1904, though the book was hard to get, with many believing it was deliberately suppressed. In 2010, the British Government rejected a petition to review of the convictions of Morant, Handcock and Witton.

James Stephens: Fenian Chief

James Stephens “Head Centre”. Courtesy: Library of Congress

English-born Irish revolutionary and writer Desmond Ryan took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence. He was horrified by the civil war that followed and retired to England, where his books on Pearse and Connolly did much to humanise the 1916 leaders. As Ryan’s friend Patrick Lynch said, the Fenian tradition was a great influence and it was appropriate that Ryan’s final great book should be The Fenian Chief: a Biography of James Stephens. Stephens lived from 1824 to 1901 and grew up under the influence of the Nation and the Famine. Having taken part in the unsuccessful 1848 Young Ireland rebellion, he led his own revolutionary movement before being forced out and living most of the remainder of his long life in exile. The Fenian movement survived him and was Stephens’ outstanding legacy to Ireland and America.

Stephens was born in Kilkenny, the son of a Catholic auctioneer’s clerk. His mother disappeared from his life early on. Educated as a civil engineer, he got a job in the construction of the Limerick and Waterford Railway, aged 20. The growing famine from 1845 radicalised Stephens and he was attracted to Young Ireland and its Kilkenny leader, former city mayor, Dr Robert Cane. Stephens promised Cane to support “any serious call” but informed by his reading of the 18th century French and Irish revolutionaries he believed Young Ireland was wrong in its open methods and should have organised as a secret society. In the summer of 1848 Stephens and friends drilled with pikes until they were stunned by the news that Britain had suspended habeas corpus in Ireland. William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher and fellow Young Ireland leaders went on the run, arriving in Kilkenny on July 24. Cane told them the city was too poorly armed to support rebellion and they marched on to south Tipperary. Stephens attended a Kilkenny Tholsel meeting on July 26 to pledge support and made a well-received speech. “Treasure your arms as if they were the apples of your eyes,” he said.

There was a rumour of a police spy in Kilkenny and when Stephens challenged him, the man said he was Patrick O’Donohoe with a message for O’Brien from the Dublin clubs. Stephens was suspicious but resolved to take O’Donohoe to O’Brien. Dubliner P.J. Smyth recognised O’Donohoe and told them O’Brien was now in Cashel having failed to rouse Carrick-on-Suir. Stephens and O’Donohoe went to Cashel and found O’Brien but no revolution there either. Stephens remained hopeful and O’Brien appointed him his aide de camp. They detoured through small Tipperary mining communities, rousing the population before priests would emerge to dampen their enthusiasm. The aristocratic O’Brien was a poor revolutionary and failed to act on practical suggestions. According to Stephens’ later comrade Charles Kickham, who joined them at Mullinahone, O’Brien was “moving through a dream”.

The dream ended in the collieries of Ballingarry on July 29 when O’Brien’s ragtag army chased a 47-strong police force to Widow McCormack’s house and laid siege for several hours. The police were well armed and had five young children as hostages. O’Brien refused a plan to smoke them out. Panicky police killed two men and rebels returned fire. The exchange continued until they heard more police were coming. Stephens helped O’Brien escape and the Kilkenny man led the last of the firing against reinforcements before he was injured. Stephens dived into a ditch and escaped towards Urlingford. He was almost undone by a priest who stirred up an angry mob before someone recognised him. It left a lifelong distrust of the Catholic clergy, and the feeling became mutual.

Stephens headed towards John O’Mahony’s forces in Munster, which were still preparing for revolution. He found O’Mahony in Co Cork, their first meeting and they would become lifelong comrades. They found another ally, Michael Doheny, in Rathcormack Co Cork. While Doheny went in search of the missing Meagher and O’Mahony roused his men for one last failed battle, Stephens sheltered in safe houses. Doheny returned to say Meagher had been arrested and he and Stephens set off on the journey Doheny described in The Felon’s Track. Stephens covered his tracks by getting his friends to pronounce him dead. The Kilkenny Moderator had an obituary on August 19 announcing he had died of his Ballingarry wounds. A coffin filled with stones was buried at St Canice’s Cathedral graveyard. When Stephens returned to Kilkenny in 1856 many believed he was an imposter or a ghost.

Stephens and Doheny faced many difficulties as Crown forces crowded around the south of Ireland. They parted in September and Doheny escaped by boat from Cork to Bristol and on to France, eventually settling in America. Stephens also made it from Cork to Bristol after slipping on board a ship in the guise of popular poet Christabel’s servant. The Kilkenny Moderator spread the rumour he had escaped as a lady’s maid, which Stephens denied. Maid or not, he escorted Christabel to London before getting a passage to France. He would spend seven years in exile in Paris.

The penniless Stephens was joined in Parisian poverty by O’Mahony who fled Ireland after a failed attack on Portlaw barracks, Co Waterford. They lived together in a ramshackle boarding house near the Sorbonne, an unofficial embassy where other Irish rebels including John Mitchel, John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty would later stay. Stephens attended lectures in the Sorbonne, and found income as an English teacher and later a translator and journalist, while O’Mahony survived on family remittances and jobs at the Irish College.

They remained committed to armed revolution in Ireland. Paris was full of secret political societies which enrolled members into “brotherhoods”, a model which Stephens and O’Mahony later adopted. In Ireland in 1849 Fintan Lalor and others formed a secret society to plan another revolution. O’Mahony and Stephens refused to support it, believing it would fail. They proved correct but that rising supplied two future Fenian leaders in John O’Leary and Thomas Clark Luby. They also watched on in despair as Napoleon III seized power in 1851 signalling the end of the 1848 revolutions.

O’Mahony emigrated to America in 1854 where he founded the Emmet Monument Association with Doheny. Stephens got a job at Parisian paper Moniteur Universel where his column “Faits Divers” was an account of British intelligence. He could not get Irish revolution out of his mind and in 1856 he returned home. It seemed a country devoid of hope after ultramontane archbishop Paul Cullen hounded Duffy out of the country and Sadleir and Keogh destroyed an Irish political alliance in Westminster. Stephens was depressed by the lethargy he saw in Dublin and returned home to Kilkenny where he found his father and sister had died, the household “ruined and broken up”. He went on a long walking tour of Ireland to gauge support for revolution. In Limerick there was a cordial reunion with his Ballingarry boss Smith O’Brien, released from Australia. Stephens believed exile had sapped O’Brien’s constitution and when they reminisced O’Brien blamed the priests for the failure of revolution and believed he had been betrayed by Meagher and Mitchel. O’Brien said “respectable people” were antagonistic to Irish nationality, and Stephens would win his main support from the working class, unlike the more patrician Young Ireland. Despite O’Brien’s pessimism, the 3000-mile walk convinced Stephens of “the possibility of organising a proper movement” for independence. He acquired the nickname An Seabhach Siúlach, Irish for the The Wandering Hawk, anglicised as Mr Shooks.

In Dublin, Stephens met the dying 1849 veteran Philip Grey and through him, Thomas Clarke Luby, who would rank second in importance in the Fenians. Luby thought Mr Shooks looked seedy and he did not like his French socialist ideas. Nevertheless he was impressed by Stephens’ self assurance and saw him as “an able organiser”. By January 1857 they were friends and attended Grey’s funeral together where Luby made a halting speech. Both men’s lives were changed by an autumn 1857 letter from American exiles O’Mahony and Doheny. The letter expressed confidence in Stephens asking him to establish an Irish independence organisation. Fellow Kilkenny man Joseph Denieffe returned from New York with a vague commission from O’Mahony and Doheny’s Emmet Monument Association to seek Irish allies for a promised invasion force of 30,000 men. Stephens gave his reply to Denieffe to take to America. Stephens promised to organise a 10,000-strong army in three months with 1500 firearms but demanded £100 a month in return.

But America was in a recession and the Irish-American press was hostile to a new movement in Ireland. Doheny and other Irish leaders agreed to Stephens’ proposal, but Denieffe raised only £80 to take back to Ireland. Though Denieffe warned Stephens that American support was loose at best, Stephens and Luby founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day 1858. Members had to take an oath and there was an alphabetic scheme of organisation. Centre A led a circle, and under him were nine sub-centres led by B’s or captains. Each B had nine C’s or sergeants and each C had nine D’s or privates. The rule that members should only be known to their sections quickly broke down.

Stephens, Luby and Denieffe set off on a recruitment drive. Their biggest success came in Skibbereen, West Cork where they won over 100 members of O’Donovan Rossa’s Phoenix Society, and Rossa became an enthusiastic recruiter. Stephens had less success sounding out former 1848 man John Blake Dillon (Stephens tutored his children) and they also attracted the suspicion of the Catholic Church and Dublin Castle, both suspecting the existence of a new secret organisation. Wanted posters appeared for Luby and Denieffe and the Phoenix Society was also betrayed with Rossa and many of his men arrested.

Stephens decided to visit America, leaving the fugitive Luby in charge. While Stephens managed to convince O’Mahony and Doheny, he had little success with 1848 leaders Mitchel and Meagher. Stephens wanted them to approve access to Irish Directory money from 1848 fundraising. Doheny warned Stephens not to trust them though Stephens believed he could convince Mitchel, and especially Meagher whose heart was more “generous” and “noble”. Stephens did not have a high opinion of either but believed that if they held out they would be exposed as shams.

In New York he met Meagher who was “greatly struck” and promised to help release the funds though he warned Mitchel’s support was also crucial. They travelled to Washington together, Stephens unimpressed by Meagher’s “gourmandising”. Meagher introduced Stephens to President Buchanan whom he dismissed as “a Yankee development of the Artful Dodger”. Stephens went to Tennessee to visit Mitchel and told him he had 15,000 armed men in Ireland. Like Meagher, Mitchel was initially supportive and wrote letters to Directory members asking to give release funds. However, Mitchel said he and Meagher eventually “saw through” Stephens, possibly under Dillon’s influence. News of the Phoenix Society arrests did not help. Stephens ends his American diary in January 1858 with a cold letter from Meagher withdrawing support.

Nevertheless, Stephens’ trip to America was successful. He raised £600 and a new American wing which became known as the Fenian Brotherhood. The word Fenians came to describe both the Irish and American organisations. In America it was spearheaded by O’Mahony with support from Doheny and New York 69th Regiment leader general Michael Corcoran from Co Sligo. Concerned about capture in Ireland, Stephens returned to Paris in 1859 while Luby widened the recruiting net to Dublin. There was little sign of action and Irish Americans began to think the IRB was moribund. Relations between Stephens and O’Mahony became frosty as the former was frustrated by the lack of American funds while envoys from the latter got short shrift in Ireland. They met in Dublin in late 1860 where Stephens was unhappy with O’Mahony’s answers and blamed him for the organisation’s failures. O’Mahony returned to America, humiliated. Their organisation was saved by a spectacular turn of events in 1861.

Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus had, like Stephens, fought with O’Brien in Ballingarry. Like Mitchel and Meagher, he had escaped from Tasmania and lived out his life in obscurity in San Francisco. He remained an unrepentant revolutionary and when he died, aged 50, in January 1861 Fenians proposed to send his body to Ireland for burial with full honours. The hostility to this idea from secret society-hating Dublin Archbishop Cullen was initially matched by Stephens and Luby. They believed the occasion might be dominated by 1848 men such as Father Kenyon and John Martin who might be unwilling to link Young Ireland and the Fenians. But the IRB-dominated National Brotherhood of St Patrick organised the funeral and overrode a proposal for Kenyon to do the eulogy. No such problem existed in America, and McManus’s body was feted as it crossed the continent. In New York the non-Fenian Meagher had convinced New York’s Archbishop Hughes to conduct Mass in MacManus’s honour, something Cullen refused in his cathedral. Instead the body lay at the Dublin Mechanics Institute before 50,000 marched to the funeral at Glasnevin, with hundreds of thousands more lining the streets. The Fenian-inspired eulogy called for “faith and sheer resolve to do the work for which MacManus died.” Stephens was ecstatic. American delegates believed he had command of the country.

Though the civil war promised new opportunities, support for Fenianism in America waned after the funeral. Doheny’s death in 1862 was a blow and most Irish Americans preferred to fight for the Union rather than for Ireland. With little to do, Stephens tended his gardens in Sandymount and courted Dublin publican’s daughter Jane Hopper. His Fenian comrades saw this as hypocrisy as Stephens frowned on followers marrying while the revolutionary struggle went on. They married in a mostly empty church in November 1863, with John O’Leary as best man. Even O’Leary noted “a certain grotesqueness in the whole surroundings”. Nevertheless they remained together until her death in 1895. Stephens found new energy and started a newspaper in 1864, The Irish People, though after his opening article was panned as “all dashes, commas, and bosh” he passed editorship to O’Leary assisted by Luby and Kickham with Rossa as business manager. They quickly made the paper a force with the help of American money.

O’Mahony was unhappy with the subsidiary position of American Fenians and announced he would no longer be accountable to Stephens’ “dictatorial arrogance”. Stephens rushed across the Atlantic in March 1864 leaving an executive note naming Luby, O’Leary, and Kickham as leaders in his absence. This note became crucial evidence when later discovered by British authorities. Like the earlier tour, Stephens raised much money in America. But instead of healing the breach, Stephens watched on as dry-goods merchant William Roberts led what became known as the Senate Wing, to eventually displace O’Mahony and push for a Fenian invasion of Canada. Denieffe blamed Stephens and O’Mahony for failing to work “in harmony” though he held O’Mahony primarily responsible for his “imbecile pack” of hangers-ons. These included “Red Jim” McDermott who sold Fenian secrets including ciphers and the location of arms stores to the British consul. McDermott’s actions were matched in Ireland by Fenian informer Pierce Nagle.

With a potential army of battle-hardened post-war Irish Americans behind him, Stephens returned to Ireland promising that 1865 would be “the year of action”. Luby said it proved true, except it was the British who acted. In September they arrested Fenians in Dublin and Cork on Nagle’s advice, shut down the Irish People and found Stephen’s incriminating 1864 executive note. They were helped by O’Mahony’s hapless envoy to Ireland P.J. Meehan who lost introduction letters at a Dublin railway station toilet cubicle. The letters fell into the hands of authorities. Stephens was betrayed in November 1865 and arrested at his Sandymount home. He stunned a courthouse by refusing to recognise “British law in Ireland” (tactics since often repeated by extremist Republicans) and was imprisoned at Richmond Jail. Ten days later he was sprung from jail in an audacious move masterminded by Fenian John Devoy, and using a rope ladder escaped into the night. While his escape was celebrated in Irish songs and ballads, embarrassed authorities offered a thousand pounds for his capture.

Yet Stephens was depressed in hiding. The American split worsened and Roberts’ Senate Wing took control diverting Irish funds into a Canadian invasion. Stephens wrote to O’Mahony saying the Irish cause was “in serious peril” thanks to the “traitorous” Senate Wing but now that he was free again he promised to “hold our forces together”.

But Stephens was undermined by his own actions in Ireland. According to Denieffe (who was arrested but released without charge) Stephens called a meeting of Irish and American Fenian centres in Dublin two days after the escape to discuss when to begin revolution. Denieffe said everyone present except one was in favour of immediate action but Stephens endorsed the exceptor’s stance. “Stephens plainly did not want to fight,” Denieffe said. “I concluded then and there that Stephens’s work was done, and his usefulness ended.” Ryan says Devoy mentioned no such meeting and heavy police activity would have kept Stephens very quiet in this period. But Denieffe was not alone. John Mitchel was acting for the Fenians in Paris and frustrated at Stephens’s failure to set a date for revolution. Devoy pressed on with his work of subverting 8000 Irish soldiers in the British Army, planning to capture a Dublin barracks and swoop on Dublin Castle and Pigeon House Fort. He too was frustrated as Stephens counselled for delay because the American split had interrupted supply of funds.

Time ran out and in February 1866 the British suspended habeas corpus in Ireland, like they did in 1848. Many military Fenians were arrested, including John Boyle O’Reilly. Devoy held an urgent meeting with Stephens demanding action but again, the meeting decided on postponement. The city’s 8000 Fenians had only 800 rifles between them. Devoy was arrested a day later, and hopes of an 1866 rising disappeared.

Stephens escaped by ship to Scotland and went on to Paris where he met Napoleon III. French newspapers reported Stephens was heading to America where a 250,000-strong army would free Ireland “from the British yoke”. He arrived in America in April 1866 determined to end the Fenian split. But he was appalled by O’Mahony’s decision to embark on on his own Canadian invasion to head off Roberts. McDermott betrayed the plan and though 700 Fenians crossed the border to Campobello Island, New Brunswick they were easily repelled by the British Navy.

Undeterred, Roberts’ wing launched its invasion on June 1. A thousand Fenians crossed the Niagara under Colonel John O’Neill and ambushed Canadian militiamen at Ridgeway. They fought another skirmish at Fort Erie but were forced to retreat across the border after they were cut off by the US Navy. American president Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation requiring enforcement of the neutrality laws and the army was instructed to prevent border crossings. The failed invasions served only to galvanise Canadian confederation later that year.

Few Irish Americans would support insurrection in Ireland after the Canadian failures and Stephens was booed at meetings. A New York Times letter accused him of cowardice. A disappointed Stephens summoned New York Fenians to a December meeting to discuss rebellion in Ireland. He infuriated officers who demanded an immediate insurrection saying the Americans had not provided enough guns and money. One even threatened to kill him and they deposed Stephens as military chief of American Fenians. Thomas Kelly, who helped Stephens escape from jail, was now in charge. Stephens fled to Paris and would play no further part in the revolution. “Little Baldy has at last given up the ghost,” Kelly wrote derisively.

The new leadership failed in a forewarned bid to steal arms from Chester Castle. In the subsequent March revolt in Ireland there were brief skirmishes in Dublin, Tipperary and Cork. It was so ineffectual MPs worried more about a revolution in Crete than a domestic uprising. In America Kelly’s men had one last throw, a ship called the Jacmel Packet they renamed as Erin’s Hope. It had 40 Fenians and 5000 arms aboard and planned to land in Sligo. Unable to track IRB men on arrival, they aroused British suspicions and left south before putting the Fenians ashore without weapons at Helvick Head near Dungarvan, Co Waterford on June 1. They were all arrested within a day but became nationalist heroes for being American citizens detained in Waterford jail without having committed any crime. The ship sailed towards England and running low on food eventually returned to America. The last gasp occurred in late 1867 when the three Manchester Martyrs were hanged for murder after an attack on a police van in which a police officer was accidentally shot dead.

Stephens watched it unfold from afar in Parisian poverty. He abandoned a plan to write a book about his experiences and remained silent. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 he left Paris on the last train before the Germans invaded. He arrived in America a year later for another doomed attempt to regain leadership of the Fenians and its successor group Clan na Gael. Even old friends O’Leary and Luby told him a return to one-man rule was undesirable. He tried a commercial venture importing French wine but that failed and he returned to France in 1874, relying on the generosity of his dwindling supporter base to survive. Though destitute and in ill-health he continued to sign his letters “Chief Organiser, Irish Republic”. In 1882 the Dublin Irishman serialised his account of the 1848 rising and a year later another paper published his account of the 1856 Irish tour. Enemies were still at work. Devoy castigated his refusal to thank him after his prison escape saying he lost faith in him that night.

In 1885 Stephens was arrested in Paris as an accessory to Rossa’s dynamite campaign in England, though he opposed the campaign. There was protest in Ireland, worried that the French would hand him over to British authorities. Instead France expelled him to Belgium where he lived for two years until a change of government brought him back to Paris. Eventually on the intervention of Charles Stewart Parnell, the British government allowed Stephens and his wife to return to Ireland in 1891 after a 25-year exile. The Parnellite split that year prevented any thoughts of a parliamentary career and they lived in retirement in Sutton. Jane died four years later of pneumonia, aged 52. Stephens, aged 76, followed her to the grave six years later on March 29, 1901 following “an attack of weakness”. The wandering hawk was laid to rest in Glasnevin, his coffin draped in what Ryan incorrectly calls “the Fenian Tricolour“. Twenty years later that flag would become the flag of the Irish Free State, after a revolution Ryan took part in, and Stephens’s IRB, led by Michael Collins, did much to inspire. Stephens was proven correct in death. Ireland’s right to independence could only be won by armed revolution.

Toowoomba days

Once a month I try to attend a new parkrun venue. The original idea for March was a train to the Sunshine Coast and cycle to Caloundra for an ocean swim before doing the run on Saturday morning. However early in the week, my bike played up and the bottom bracket broke, a part my local shop said would take a fortnight to get. Cooling my heels I decided on plan B, a bus to Toowoomba for a run in the Garden City. And so an hour and a half after leaving Roma St station we were trundling up the range 700 metres above sea level, on the road shown below. Toowoomba was a few minutes away at the top of the hill. This was the main Warrego Highway west until the Toowoomba bypass was built to the north in 2018.

Emerging from Neil Street bus station on a gorgeous Friday afternoon I pass by the heritage-listed old court house. As the sign on this classical building states this was Toowoomba’s court house between 1878 and 1979. Toowoomba was surveyed in 1852 as a replacement for the settlement of Drayton as it was closer to the edge of the range. Toowoomba is thought to be named either after a property in the area in the 1850s, or from an Aboriginal word meaning “place where water sits” or “place of melon” or “place where reeds grow” or “berries place” or “white man”. Whichever it was, Toowoomba became the main town on the Darling Downs when Queensland became a colony in 1859. A small court opened in Margaret St in 1863 but wealthy Downs citizens commissioned this imposing replacement of locally-quarried stone in 1876 designed by prolific Scottish-born government architect Francis Drummond Greville Stanley, who was also responsible for Brisbane’s GPO, Roma St station and some of Charters Towers’ grand buildings. When Toowoomba’s court moved to a new building in 1979, it was used as government buildings before being sold privately in 2000.

Nearby is Toowoomba’s former post office. The post office was also designed by Stanley in classical revival style and complements the Court House in form and material. The post office opened in 1880 as a major staging point on the intercolonial telegraph and operated for 120 years before Australia Post moved to a new building in 1999. It functions now as a cafe and offices.

The third major heritage-listed building in the Margaret-Neil St precinct is Toowoomba’s police headquarters. This Raymond Nowland designed-building is of later vintage than the other two, dating to 1935, replacing an earlier timber structure. There are four parts to the complex: a police station, garage, watch house and keeper’s residence. The Heritage Register says the impressive form is indicative of Toowoomba’s importance as “Queensland’s second city in the urban hierarchy of the state.”

I decided on a long walk from the city to Picnic Point. I passed Queens Park where I would be doing the parkrun in the morning. The 25-hectare park was gazetted as a public reserve in 1869.

I then took the long walkway besides East Creek. There are a number of parks along the creek, all with unimaginative numerical names. Below is East Creek Park 2 between Margaret and Herries St, a pretty and popular lunch destination for city workers with barbecue and picnic facilities. The park is the start of the East Creek cycle route to Spring St, Middle Ridge.

A feature of Park 2 is the Mothers Memorial Garden. The Mothers` Memorial (rear of image below) was the site of military recruitment during the First World War and where Toowoomba’s Anzac Day commemoration has been held since 1916. After the war bereaved mothers sold flowers to raise funds for a Mothers’ Memorial which was originally at the corner of Margaret and Ruthven St in 1922. Calls to move it away from its busy location began in the 1960s and after much controversy it was moved to its present peaceful location in 1985. The trachyte stone memorial is unique in Queensland.

I followed the East Creek path to Long St then diverted up the hill to Picnic Point. These lovely parklands are at the top of the range looking east towards the Lockyer Valley. It is the home of many native birds including the red-browed finch, striated pardalote and pale-headed rosella.

Carnival Falls is an artificial waterfall below the Bill Gould lookout (where the first photo in this blogpost was taken). A bluestone quarry was established here in 1890 to provide stone for roads and buildings including the post office and court house. The quarry closed by the 1940s. The Carnival of Flowers Association built the falls in 1965 in the disused quarry as a planned beautification to attract more carnival visitors. Nearby a Camera Obscura was erected in 1967 with two six-inch lenses offering views of the city and the valley below. It was closed in 1990 and demolished three years later.

Along the path are markers for a scaled model of the solar system. I first spotted Neptune (4.4 billion kms from the sun) and gradually passed most of the remaining inner planets in the next few kilometres. The only sign I missed was the one for Uranus. Perhaps the model had taken Neptune’s elliptical orbit into consideration and Uranus was hidden somewhere beyond it. The marker for Mars (213 million kms from the sun) was just around the corner from Earth, Venus, Mercury and the sun.

Below is the view from the Tobruk Memorial Drive Lookout. On the right is Sugar Loaf and left centre is Table Top Mountain. Over millions of years Table Top eroded leaving only the flat-topped basalt plug and scree slopes. Local tribes knew the mountain as Meewah and in 1840 a white land overseer shot dead Aboriginal men dancing on the mountain peak. The incident unleashed attacks between white and black. By 1843 an alliance of south-east Queensland tribes tried to starve white colonists out. Multuggerah led 100 warriors to ambush a convoy of drays up the Range from Grantham. Angry settlers followed them to Table Top but wandered into a trap of hurled boulders and stones in what became known as the Battle of One Tree Hill. Clashes persisted until 1850 when superior weaponry and the introduction of native police turned the tide.

Walking back to town, I diverted again to Queen’s Park’s Botanic Gardens. Every September the gardens are a centrepiece of internationally renowned Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers. Each year, thousands of seedlings are planted in attractive geometric-shaped garden beds to ensure their blooms peak in time for the Carnival.

A short walk from the Botanic Gardens is “Whyembah” on Campbell St, Toowoomba’s “Grand Lady”. Built around 1896 for commercial traveller John Rosser, the weatherboard house is heritage-listed because it “demonstrates the principal characteristics of an 1890s ornate timber house in Toowoomba”. Rosser was a first class cricketer for Victoria in the 1880s. He also enjoyed lawn bowls and installed a bowling green on the property, though this is now long gone. Rosser died in 1925 and his widow Margaret continued to live there until her death in the 1940s.

As the evening closed in, I passed more heritage-listed buildings. The Strand Theatre on Margaret St was built as a cinema in 1915. Toowoomba councillor James Newman commissioned Brisbane architect George Addison to build it on the site of picture gardens. The American-derived design with its large semi-circular glazed arch was similar to cinemas from the same era in Brisbane and Melbourne though the top level was designed as additional accommodation for Newman’s next door Crown Hotel. Pioneering movie exhibitor Mary Stuart “Señora” Spencer (billed as “The Only Lady Cinematograph Artist in the World”) leased the theatre and named it the Strand like her theatres in Brisbane and Newcastle. The April 5, 1916 Darling Downs said “SEÑORA SPENCER seeing no reason to doubt that the high class features, style, and novelty, that characterise the enormously successful Cinematograph Exhibitions conducted by her at the Strand Theatre, Brisbane, would prove immensely popular with the Toowoomba public.” Though Spencer sold up in 1918, the Strand flourished through the golden age of cinema and still shows movies. Its heritage listing hails its demonstration of “the emergence of cinema as a 20th-century social phenomenon.”

On Neil St is the art deco Empire Theatre. Like the Strand, the Empire was built as a cinema by Brisbane entertainment promoter EJ Carroll in 1911. Although destroyed by fire, substantial sections were included in the 1933 rebuild. Brisbane’s TR Hall & LB Phillips was architect for the new building which accommodated 2500 people, the second largest venue in Queensland. The cinema declined with the advent of television and the local council bought it in 1997 and restored it as a performing arts venue. Its heritage listing calls it “rare and important evidence of the increasingly sophisticated expectations of interwar cinema audiences”.

St Luke’s Anglican Church on Herries St is another heritage-listed building. A primitive church was established on the site in 1857 as Toowoomba began to replace Drayton as the leading town on the Downs. The foundation stone for the current bluestone structure was laid in 1895 and the church opened two years later. St Luke’s was designed in traditional Gothic revival style though it took several phases to complete. A stained glass window is a replica of one at Chartres Cathedral and the church retains a magnificent Norman and Beard pipe organ from 1907. The heritage listing hails St Luke’s as a major work of 19th century English-born ecclesiastical architect John Hingeston Buckeridge, who built 60 churches in Queensland.

The first elected Toowoomba Council in 1861 petitioned the new colony of Queensland for a land grant to build a town hall, originally on the corner of James and Neil Sts. The city expanded greatly that decade with the arrival of the railway from Brisbane and the founding of the Chronicle newspaper. In 1898 the School of Arts on Ruthven St burned down and Council hired English architect Willoughby Powell to design a new city hall on the site in 1900. The new building also incorporated a school of arts, a technical college and a theatre. It opened late that year with the clock added in 1901, which remains a focal point of Ruthven St. The building was heritage listed in the 1990s as its “generous size and grand character provide evidence of the prosperity and importance of Toowoomba as a major regional centre at the turn of the century.”

The White Horse Hotel on Ruthven St is also heritage-listed. The July 7, 1866 Chronicle reported that the hotel “lately opened by worthy Boniface Daniel Donovan” was “capacious” with 19 rooms and built of brick on stone foundations. The hotel changed hands a number of times and in 1912 new owners decided on an ornately detailed rebuild including a new facade and remodelled wings. The pub closed in 1986 and the ground floor is now shops. Its heritage listing promotes its importance as an early 20th century hotel, “in particular the flamboyant facade and interior elements such as the main stair, pressed metal ceilings, doorways, and fanlight.”

I was up early on Saturday morning for my run. I wandered across to Queen’s Park, just 10 minutes away, accompanied only by occasional pedestrians and four-legged friends.

There were a lot more people at the Margaret St end where the parkrun begins. Toowoomba is one of the biggest parkruns in the world and there were over 800 participants the prior week. For reasons unknown, there were a “mere” 550 runners this week but it still made for a crowded start line.

The course is two laps around the park, including the scenic Botanic Gardens. My efforts in my 217th parkrun and 93rd course were captured in this grimacing photo as I cross the finish line in a time of 24:30. Having freshened up and then enjoyed breakfast, I went to the station to get the bus down the range to Brisbane. But I’ll be back. T-Bar has plenty to offer – not least two other parkrun courses to conquer.