Selective memory: The Voice and Anzac Day

The 2019 Anzac Day service in Cloncurry. Photo: Author’s collection

During my time as a journalist across Queensland (2009-22), I attended dozens of Anzac Day services, on and before the day. Whether they were held at cenotaphs, schools, aged homes, churches or cemeteries, they all commemorated Australia’s many war contributions and all followed a similar format: military-style marching, speeches, hymns, prayers, anthems, the ode, a minute of silence, reveille, and the laying of wreaths. I respected and enjoyed the solemnity of these occasions and I’m proud of the service my eldest daughter gives as a member of the Australian Defence Force. But the part of Anzac Day I enjoyed most was the camaraderie after the event, the chatting and catching up with old and new friends. As a journalist I took great delight in finding out news that was often unrelated to the day itself. I’m not alone in enjoying the aftermath of Anzac ceremonies, as packed pubs on the day prove.

In recent years, there has often been a pleasing inclusion of a Welcome to Country at Anzac Day ceremonies. Welcome to Country is performed by a local Indigenous person to acknowledge and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands and has become a staple of many public gatherings. Like Anzac Day itself, Welcome to Country serves as a polite but important reminder of how our past continues to influence the present, a “lest we forget” that wars were things that did not just happen overseas.

But that development is now in peril. Last year Australia held a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first people of Australia and to create a new body subject to parliamentary laws called the ATSI Voice to make representations to parliament on related matters. At the time I outlined my reasons why I was voting “yes”. However there was politicial division and the referendum failed with a 60 percent “no” vote. Only the ACT was in favour and my state of Queensland recorded the highest no vote of 68%. I was disappointed, but it was the will of the people. As someone who has long supported some form of treaty between black and white Australia, I believe we could still achieve Indigenous justice in other ways.

What I failed to foresee was a sullen triumphalism from many in the “no” camp, and demands for more action. Not content with winning the referendum, many now want to shut down any form of Indigenous identity, including the Aboriginal flag, Welcome to Country and smoking ceremonies. I was reminded of this on the first Anzac Day since the referendum. Someone in my social network shared a popular blog post called Welcome to Country violates principles of commemoration by a man named Charlie Lynn. I’d never heard of the 79-year-old Lynn but he has an impressive CV as a Vietnam veteran and a Liberal Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Council between 1995 and 2015. He has received honours in Australia and PNG, chaired many community and business groups, founded the Kokoda Youth Leadership Challenge and was a talented ultra marathon runner.

His opinion on Anzac Day was therefore worth reading and more troubling because of it. Lynn begins uncontroversially by saying that for the previous 32 years he had attended the Anzac Day service at Bomana Cemetery. Situated outside Port Moresby, Bomana is where many Australians were buried from the New Guinea campaign of the Second World War. The cemetery, he said, reflected “principles of equality, uniformity and commemoration in perpetuity.” I imagine it is a beautiful, poignant and highly relevant place to conduct an Anzac Day service.

This year Lynn was in Australia and attended Anzac Day services in his home town of Camden, New South Wales. He said he was proud of its conduct, that was, however, “UNTIL . . . it was hijacked by an aboriginal activist who was not satisfied with the privilege she had been granted to give a brief ‘welcome to country’.” Lynn said the microphone was “captured” by a woman named Aunty Glenda, “who apparently works for Centrelink (and was apparently paid $300) for the occasion, then went into a black-armband rant reminding us that their fathers were ‘invaders’ who had ‘massacred aborigines’, and that we now living on stolen land which ‘always was and always will be’ aboriginal land‘.”

Lynn said “Glenda from Centrelink” was unaware of those who sacrificed their lives to “save her people from the fate suffered by the Chinese population when they were invaded by the Japanese in 1937.” Lynn also claimed she was unaware that thousands of Australians died in the Papuan campaign and many relatives were sitting in the audience “she was berating.” He said that if she had served in the military she “would have learned that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform” and her “intervention” was an insult to her RSL hosts and a proud Camden community. Lynn said he walked out on the speaker. “I did not wait to hear the full extent of her disgraceful rant. I removed my medals from my jacket and adjourned to the Crown Hotel for a quiet beer to settle down.” It’s not clear whether or when he returned to the Anzac Day service.

Lynn now wants to RSL to ban all “‘Welcome to Country’ speeches, ceremonies, and similar tirades from all Anzac Day services as they represent a violation of the principles of commemorations.” He outlined those principles as uniformity, equality, and “commemoration in perpetuity”. Uniformity covered the design of war cemeteries and of Anzac Day ceremonies, roughly the format I mentioned earlier: “prayers for the fallen, hymns, guest speakers, laying of wreaths, Last Post, a Minutes Silence, and Reveille”. Equality meant “no precedence in acknowledging one race above all others.” Lynn did not define what commemoration in perpetuity meant but said that if “aboriginal activists are permitted to infiltrate Anzac services by establishing ‘Welcome to Country’ as a bridgehead to become a norm, our sacred day will surely suffer the fate of Australia Day in years to come.”

There’s a lot to unpack in Lynn’s passionate piece, which I’ll get to in a moment. But almost crowding it out, was the pile-on response I saw on Facebook. A handful of commenters disagreed but they were drowned out. Mostly, there was a torrent of anti-Indigenous sentiment, none of it very new. “Yes they whinge and moan, but are happy to take the coin,” said one. “Scrap this welcome to country crap,” said another. “Im totally over these minority Indigenous who claim to represent the Indigenous Aussies from all over this country who used to regularly massacre each other while stealing the women!” said a third. “They don’t respect our heritage so why should we care about theirs,” said a fourth. “Wake up to fuking reality, every country on the planet has been invaded and colonised in some way. Get over it,” a fifth said.

On it went, a litany of complaints that could have been lifted from Pauline Hanson’s 1996 playbook with a very 21st century addition about “wokery”, the current shibboleth du jour for those detesting any measures towards inclusion. One revealing comment was “This Bullshit was supposed to stop with the NO vote…Aunty Marcia said,” accompanied by a picture of pro-Voice Indigenous academic Marcia Langton with text underneath “vote no and you won’t get a welcome to country again”. What Langton meant was if the Voice failed, non-Indigenous Australians would feel too ashamed to ask traditional owners to do a Welcome to Country. However, opponents treated it as a personal promise and demanded she never conduct another welcome to country again.

I am not blaming Charlie Lynn for the racist nature of these comments. Nevertheless there are several problems with his blog post and I will pay him the respect of addressing them. Firstly the event was not “hijacked” by an Aboriginal activist. As Lynn said, Camden RSL invited Aunty Glenda to speak and possibly paid her for the privilege (I can’t confirm this). It’s also possible her speech was not brief. I have attended many Anzac Day ceremonies where speakers gave long, boring and waffling speeches. Attendees might yawn, look at their watches, and wonder when will this end, but I’ve never seen anyone walk out. Imagine Lynn’s anger if an Aboriginal person had walked out of an Anzac Day service – to the pub, no less – if they were bored or confronted by a white speaker’s remarks. Lynn also queried Glenda’s title of respect, Aunty, by enclosing it in quotes and allowed readers to assume she was a dole-bludger with his repeated “Glenda from Centrelink” association.

As for the Japanese massacres of Chinese people in the Nanking campaign, these did happen. But there is no evidence to suggest that the Japanese would have treated Indigenous people worse than non-Indigenous had they invaded Australia. I don’t know if Aunty Glenda was aware of Nanking, but she would likely aware that more than 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples served Australia in the First World War, more than 4000 in the Second World War, and 300 more served alongside Lynn in the Vietnam War. They were not passive observers dependent on white saviours nor are they now “infiltrators” at Anzac Day services. Indigenous Australians helped protect their country from the fate of Nanking.

Lynn is correct to say Indigenous people in the military would have learned “that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform.” However he neglects to note that they would have been reminded of other things that count as soon as they returned to mufti. Lynn, meanwhile, fails his own three principles of commemorations tests. Far from uniformity, Anzac Day is the classic “invented tradition” which has undergone constant change. In early years it was a purely religious ceremony. No cinemas, racecourse, hotels or sporting venues could open on the day so there was no sulking in the pub if you didn’t like what you heard. As for equality, it did not exist for black people under the law until long past the war that Lynn invokes. The government actively enforced the White Australia Policy in the 1940s. Aboriginal people remained non-citizens, subject to drastic restrictions on their lives and movements, hidden away in poverty-stricken reserves, missions and shantytowns, suffering ill health, and treated with lack of respect and racist condescension whenever they mixed with the white population, with the exception of the sports field. In places near the warfront like Burketown, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homelands without consent. Lynn’s undefined third principle “commemoration in perpetuity” is less preservation of a “sacred day” than an attempt to prevent the future from learning from the past as his lament about “the fate” of Australia Day (another contested invented tradition) shows.

Yet the past is where the hurt lies, something Lynn acknowledges when he described Aunty Glenda’s welcome as a “black armband rant”. The custom of wearing black armbands to denote mourning, grief, and loss comes from the Egyptian era and was passed down through the Romans. Oddly, while this seems an obvious fit for a solemn occasion like Anzac Day, I can’t remember ever seeing them worn on that day. Aboriginal people wore them on the 150th anniversary of colonisation in 1938 and presented a petition to King George VI to “mourn the death of the many thousands of Aborigines who were brutally murdered (and) mourn the loss of our land and the rape of our women by the white invaders.” But its Australian meaning was forever changed 30 years ago, just as Bill Stanner, Lyndell Ryan, Noel Loos, Henry Reynolds and other Australian historians joined a worldwide movement to document the dispossession, exclusion and marginalisation of colonised peoples. Not everyone was happy with this revisionism. Professor Geoffrey Blainey wrote that his generation grew up on the “Three Cheers” view of history which saw Australia largely as a success. He said in 1988 Australia moved “from a position that had been too favourable to an opposite extreme that is decidedly jaundiced’ and ‘gloomy’.” Blainey’s interpretation was a big influence on the Howard government’s approach from 1996 and the culture and history wars that followed.

It is fitting and proper that history should be contested. It is, after all, a matter of perspectives and there is no single right answer. Anzac Day’s “Lest we forget” invites us to remember all perspectives, including that of Aunty Glenda, rant or not. Her full name is Glenda Chalker, a Camden-born Dharawal woman of the Cubbitch Barta Clan. In her speech she probably spoke about the Appin massacre of April 1816 where at least 14 Aboriginal men, women, and children were murdered by British soldiers and the Camden Park area where her ancestors were forcibly removed to. Chalker wants to see a plaque at the site, which she helped preserve from developers. However she acknowledged to the ABC in 2022 that not everyone was “happy with what we have achieved”. Presumably these are the same people that would now demand Chalker and her mob “wake up to fuking reality”. The tragedy of the 2023 Voice Referendum is the stridency of those now who feel emboldened to roll back even those small achievements. Never mind Black Armband, Three Cheers is becoming Three Jeers. I hope the RSL matches the referendum result and treats Lynn’s suggestions with a polite but emphatic “no”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

South-east Queensland places named in the text.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A visit to Sydney

With my partner in Sydney last month for work, I decided to join her for a few days. I had no time off work so each morning during the week I’d walk past Hyde Park on way to my de facto office at the State Library. This particular morning the sun was gleaming off the 309m Sydney Tower, the city’s tallest structure and the second tallest observation tower in the Southern Hemisphere behind Auckland’s tower.

As I walked further north I passed Sydney’s Catholic Cathedral, St Mary’s (and not St Patrick’s as I’d long assumed). Built on the site of an old church which caught fire in 1865 it was dedicated though still unfinished in 1882. The nave was not completed until 1928 while the spires were not added until 2000.

Across the road is a statue to early governor Lachlan Macquarie. Lachlan Macquarie was a British military officer who from 1810 to 1821 was the last governor of New South Wales with autocratic powers. Historians consider his influence crucial on the transition from a penal colony to a free settlement. He has left a large legacy to Sydney and has given his name to streets, towns, rivers, a university and even a dictionary. An inscription on his tomb in Scotland describes him as “The Father of Australia” but there are solid claims he is a mass murderer. In April 1816, Macquarie ordered his soldiers to kill or capture any Aboriginal people they encountered during a military operation aimed at creating a sense of “terror”. At least 14 men, women and children were brutally killed, some shot, others driven over a cliff.

Macquarie’s name appears on the inscription over the Hyde Park Barracks. Macquarie commissioned the convict-built building which opened in 1819 as the colony’s first convict barracks. Previously, convicts were allowed to find their own accommodation, but by housing them in a barracks Macquarie hoped to increase their productivity and improve their moral character. The three-storey building with massive shingled roof and a simple yet striking facade was designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, for which Macquarie granted Greenway a full pardon. From 1830 the Barracks also housed a Court of General Session.

Outside the Barracks is the 1999 Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine. In 1848 Hyde Park Barracks was remodelled as an immigration depot and hiring office for female immigrants. Many women travelled alone to the colony, including thousands of Irish women fleeing the Great Famine. This monument is both a memorial to the famine and a celebration of the contribution of Irish immigrants to Australia. A table cuts through the centre of the wall, representing the famine experience on one side and the colonies on the other. There is also a shelf holding potatoes and a loy, a traditional spade for potato digging, leaning against the wall. On two glass panels are the names of 420 women, sandblasted into the glass, who came to Australia as orphans in the Earl Grey Scheme.

One of Macquarie’s first buildings was a hospital built in 1811. This south wing was one of three buildings. The north wing is now the state parliament while a middle wing was demolished. It became known as the Rum Hospital when Macquarie gave the contractors a monopoly on the import of 45,000 gallons of rum to build it. However the building was deficient and Greenway was called in to fix it up in 1816. The building was the Sydney Mint from 1854 to 1926 and is now a museum.

Il Porcellino, Italian for “the little pig”, is a larger than life-sized bronze wild boar outside Sydney Hospital, facing Macquarie Street. The sculpture is a replica of an original by Pietro Tacca which has stood in Florence since 1633, and shares the Florentine nickname. It was a gift to Sydney from Marchesa Fiaschi Torrigiani in 1968 as a memorial to her father Thomas Fiaschi and brother Piero Fiaschi who both worked as honorary surgeons at the Hospital, Sydney’s oldest.

Further north on Macquarie St is the state parliament building, also part of the original Rum Hospital. When the Legislative Council started in 1824, it did not have a permanent home and met in various locations. In 1829, the Council’s membership increased from five to 15 members, and met in the Surgeon’s quarters of the hospital, gradually expanding to take over what was the largest building in Sydney at the time.

Moving on to my destination at the State Library I pause to admire the statue of Matthew Flinders. Flinders was a Navy captain who charted much of the Australian coast at the turn of the 19th century. In 1798 he sailed south from Sydney in the sloop Norfolk, passed through Bass Strait and circumnavigated Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), proving it to be an island. From 1801 to 1803 he circumnavigated mainland Australia in HMS Investigator. A smaller statue to the rear commemorates Flinders’ cat Trim who accompanied him on the voyage. When Flinders tried to return to England in 1803, he was imprisoned for 10 years in Mauritius by a suspicious French governor. Trim went missing in Mauritius.

The State Library of NSW is the oldest library in Australia first established as the Australian Subscription Library in 1826. In 1869 the NSW Government purchased it to form the Sydney Free Public Library. The library had several locations before moving into a new building in 1845 at Bent and Macquarie Streets. Work on the Mitchell Wing started in 1906 and was completed in 1910. It houses the Mitchell Library reading rooms, work areas and galleries.

In 1922 Matthew Flinders’ grandson Sir Flinders Petrie offered the first Australian state to erect a statue in Flinders’ honour all of his grandfather’s papers. In 1925 Sydney won the honour and the Flinders papers now reside in the Mitchell Library building. This was my magnificent work space for several days, and a great chance to do side research on my own Thomas Francis Meagher project.

At lunchtime I walked across the road to enjoy the fresh air of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens with sweeping views over the harbour. Yet another initiative of Macquarie, the 30-hectare garden opened in 1816. It is the oldest scientific institution in Australia and has played a major role in the acclimatisation of plants from other regions. 

Hidden beside the gardens is Government House, the heritage-listed home of the governor of New South Wales. Construction of the romantic Gothic revival style building began in 1837 though the first resident, Governor George Gipps, did not move in until 1845. It housed the new Governor-General of Australia from 1901 to 1914 before that eminence moved to Yarralumla, Canberra. It has since housed the state governor apart from an interregnum between 1996 and 2011 when premier Bob Carr kicked them out.

Sydney was enjoying the Vivid sound and light festival when we were there. So it was an enjoyable exercise each night to walk around the harbour and enjoy the light show on Sydney’s great civic architecture including the Opera House.

Another pleasing view of Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece was this one from the Domain. It was fitting as Queensland had just beaten New South Wales at rugby league State of Origin in Sydney when I saw this Queensland bottle tree (Brachychiton rupestris) lording over enemy territory. It is a tree I know well from my days in the Brigalow Belt in Roma, Western Queensland.

Mrs Macquarie’s Point is further along the Domain at the north-easterly point of Farm Cove. Mrs Macquarie’s Chair is a sandstone rock formation carved to resemble a bench, named in honour of Macquarie’s wife, Elizabeth in 1810. Elizabeth was said to have sat on the rock to watch for ships sailing into the harbour. Above the seat there is an inscription dedicated to Mrs Macquarie’s Road built between 1813 and 1818 which links Government House and Mrs Macquarie’s Point. The road was Macquarie’s idea to benefit his wife, though the passageway no longer remains.

The escape of the Catalpa

Wild Geese sculpture at Rockingham, WA commemorates the 1876 escape of six Irish Fenian convicts aboard the U.S. whaler Catalpa

Australia’s convict era lasted 80 years from the colonial founding in 1788 to the final ship sent to Western Australia in 1867. East coast transportation lost its lure after the government realised it was assisting passage to the New South Wales and Victorian gold rushes, though WA dragged the chain for another two decades before Britain began to house criminals at home in new prisons such as Dartmoor and Pentonville.

As the Fenians plotted another rebellion in Ireland in 1865, many leaders were arrested under the Treason Felony Act brought in to deal with the Young Irelanders in 1848. Alarmed at a possible conspiracy within the British Army, military police arrested 150 soldiers in Irish barracks believed to be Fenian members in 1866. Remaining leaders organised a rebellion in 1867 but it was quickly put down. Those who took part were tried for treason and after death sentences were commuted most got five to 10 years, though some got lifetime sentences. Three men were hanged for a raid in Manchester where a policeman was killed.

Though most convicted served time in Ireland or Britain, authorities were anxious to send the leaders as far away as possible. Western Australia was the only colony still accepting prisoners though even there resistance to transportation was growing. The last convict ship was the Hougoumont which set sail for Perth on September 12, 1867 with 280 convicts aboard including 62 Fenians. The captain treated the Fenians better than the regular prisoners and called their behaviour “exemplary”. Western Australians were hostile especially after the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred in Sydney by a deranged Irishman with rumours pirates might try to free the Fenians. Perth was guarded with a gunboat for Hougoumont‘s arrival.

The Fenians were dispersed around the colony to stop them conspiring though they still had some freedoms including the ability to get a ticket-of-leave. Some returned hom after amnesties in 1869 and 1871, though the army “mutineers” were not eligible. Just like the Young Irelanders, there were famous escapes including the journalist and poet John Boyle O’Reilly who fled to Philadelphia aboard a whaler in 1868. O’Reilly resumed journalism in Boston and wrote a memoir of his time in WA.

By 1876 there were only seven “lifer” Fenian convicts left, all at Fremantle prison. Army commander the Duke of Cambridge was hostile to any release plan and insisted they should “die in chains”. The desperate men led by James Wilson wrote to John Devoy in America. Devoy had come up with the original strategy of infiltrating the British Army with Fenians and with O’Reilly’s help came up with a rescue plan. They purchased a 200-ton, 27-metre ship called the Catalpa and outfitted it as a commercial whaler under captain George Anthony, a Bostonian Protestant sympathetic to the Irish cause. Only a handful of his crew knew the real reason for the voyage and the Catalpa set sail for Australia on April 29, 1875 as a genuine whaler. They caught a whale in the Mid Atlantic on May 6 and continued to tour the whaling fields as they sailed south to the Cape of Good Hope.

Devoy dispatched John Breslin to Perth where he pretended to be a wealthy Nevada businessman. Breslin fooled local authorities who even gave him a tour of the prison and invited him to dine at government house. Breslin alerted the Fenian prisoners to the plan. In January 1876 the Colonial Office warned WA governor William Robinson of a Fenian plot to rescue the prisoners. Police told Robinson they were watching the men closely.

On March 29, Breslin saw a telegraph at the shipping office announcing the imminent arrival of the Catalpa. However he was alarmed by the sight in Fremantle of the Georgette, a newly arrived government steamship. When Captain Anthony arrived in Fremantle he met Breslin who suggested Rockingham Bay, 32km south of the prison, as the rendezvous. Word went out among six of the prisoners to get ready, the seventh was not informed as he was heavily depressed and a suicide risk.

The escape was timed for Easter Monday, April 17, 1876. Catalpa was 26km off shore beyond territorial waters. The six prisoners left their work groups and joined Breslin in a wagon which made a run for Rockingham beach. Within an hour authorities knew the six had absconded. Fenian agents cut off telegraph wires to delay pursuit. Anthony piloted a whaleboat to shore to rescue Breslin and the prisoners while a small government cutter in the area gave chase. Aided by strong winds Anthony got the men aboard and beat the police vessel back to the Catalpa. Authorities sent in the Georgette and on April 19, it intercepted the Catalpa, firing a warning shot across its bows.

The Catalpa was outgunned but was in international waters. Anthony hoisted the American flag and told the Georgette‘s master Britain had no jurisdiction over his vessel. The British officer replied by loud-hailer with a demand to hand over the prisoners. Anthony denied he had prisoners saying they were all crewmen. ”If you don’t give them up I will fire into you and sink you or disable you,” the Georgette‘s master replied. Anthony pointed to the flag and said “I don’t care what you do, I’m on the high seas and this flag protects me.”

Georgette menaced the Catalpa for an hour but the British were not prepared to provoke an international incident. They backed off and the Catalpa set sail for America and into legend. They arrived in New York on August 18, 1876 to heroes’ welcome. O’Reilly wrote a triumphal article and the press was overwhelmingly on the side of the escapees and their brave whaler captain. All Anthony wanted to do was get home and unload his whale oil.

Three prisoners were still alive for 20th anniversary celebrations in Philadelphia in 1896. By 1920 when president of the unofficial Irish Republic Eamon De Valera toured America on a fundraising drive, he was greeted by 82-year-old James Wilson the only survivor of the adventure 44 years earlier, and the one who wrote the letter to Devoy starting the rescue plan. Wilson died a year later on 6 November 1921, just a month before the Anglo-Irish Treaty made the independent Ireland he fought for a reality.

Thomas Muir and the Scottish Martyrs

Thomas Muir of Hunters Hill by David Martin, 1790. Chalk drawing from life. National Portrait Gallery of Scotland.

To commemorate last week’s Burns Night, Scottish newspaper the National looked at the influences on poet Robert Burns. Burns faced significant risk, the paper said by supporting the seditious cause of liberty, noting he was inspired by the radical politics of fellow Scot Thomas Muir. The experience of Muir is a counter-argument to those who paint Australia as “lucky” to have been colonised by the “civilised” British rather than other European powers.

The idea of English law as a libertarian force has roots in Magna Carta of 1215, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and the 1689 Bill of Rights. But by the late 18th century liberal laws and customs were atrophying in the United Kingdom. Liberty was associated with the American colonies and its republican ideas and the “rights of man”. British conservative leaders were horrified by these seditious notions and quickly stamped it out in the homeland, acting with a wartime authoritarian zeal that Vladimir Putin would admire.

Muir paid a high price for his sedition being transported to Australia in the 1790s. Muir features in Tony Moore’s book Death or Liberty: Rebels and radicals transported to Australia 1788-1868 which also featured a chapter on the 1848 Young Irelanders who suffered a similar fate. Like some of the Young Irelanders Muir made a dramatic escape.

In 1792 Thomas Muir the Younger of Huntershill was a 27-year-old lawyer and vice-president of the Glasgow Associated Friends of the Constitution and the People, which campaigned for reforms including universal suffrage, annual parliaments, fair electoral representation, and fair taxation. They distributed information and held conventions to discuss their demands. At a convention in December 1792 Muir distributed Tom Paine’s outlawed best seller The Rights of Man and made the seditious speech which attracted the ire of authorities, thanks to paid spies at the convention.

Muir and other at the convention were radicalised by the French Revolution which the fall of the Bastille prison ignited three years earlier. The French offered support to “all subjects revolting against a tyrant”. British prime minister William Pitt was alarmed and in May 1792 prohibited “wicked and seditious writings” and suspended habeas corpus.

Muir was arrested in January 1793 but broke parole and fled to France, arriving to see Louis XVI guillotined. France declared war on Britain on February 1. Muir was declared an outlaw and struck off the advocate register. The French granted him a passport to America but he was arrested when he naively went back to Scotland to farewell his family. Westminster decided to teach a lesson to those stirring up rebellion in wartime. The High Court of Scotland in Edinburgh accused him of sedition, “wickedly and feloniously inciting, by means of seditious speeches and harangues, a spirit of disloyalty and disaffection to the King and the established government.”

The trial in August 1793 was presided over by five judges led by arch-Tory Lord Braxfield. Braxfield told the jury Muir’s intention was “to overturn our present happy constitution” and said Paine’s book incited rebellion and made people believe the government was “venal and corrupt”. Another judge called Muir’s actions high treason “which, if proven, must infer the highest punishment the law can inflict.”

Muir’s fate might have been mitigated with a diplomatic barrister and a show of contrition. Instead he defended himself, and entreated people to “connect liberty with knowledge, and both with morality”. In a three-hour oration he claimed to be a loyal defender of customary rights and was an advocate of equal representation, “a good cause – it shall ultimately prevail.”

Muir was found guilty and Braxfield transported him “beyond Seas” for 14 years. The severity shocked Muir’s supporters. Fourteen years in Australia was effectively a life sentence in a prison colony then just five years old. As Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, Australia was as remote and alien in 1794 as the Moon is for us today, except we can see the Moon. Muir took the judgement calmly. “I have acted agreeably to my conscience,” he said.

Britain was fighting a “war on terror” with France and national paranoia allowed for little defence of liberty. Muir was the first of seven political reformers tried in Scotland in 1793-94, inspired by the American and French revolutions. They were called the Scottish martyrs, though not all were Scottish. Robert Watt was hanged for treason, but the others ended up in New South Wales. Besides Muir there was fellow Scots William Skirving and George Mealmaker and Englishmen Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald. All were educated professionals.

The Martyrs were political prisoners accused of “poisoning the minds of the lower orders”. In the colony their social status and celebrity gave them privileges denied ordinary criminals, advantages they shared with upper-class Young Irelanders a half century later. Muir, Palmer, Skirving and Margarot were transported on the Surprize. Palmer was allowed to bring a servant while Margarot brought his wife. As gentlemen they were free to move about the colony though Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose was ordered to keep a close eye on them. Skirving and Gerrald died early but Muir bought a 12-hectare farm at Milson’s Point and his intellectual society was valued, as long as he steered clear of politics.

Muir purchased rum, tobacco and sugar from ships which he used to barter for farm produce and livestock. With free settler John Boston he formed trading company Boston and Co. Remarkably they built their own 30-tonne ship using instructions from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Martha plied the route to Norfolk Island. They also built a windmill, made wine and sold fish from Lord Howe Island. However they ran into trouble with the New South Wales Corps monopolists who cornered the market in rum, making enormous profits.

Exile had not softened Muir’s political views and he plotted escape to America. He made a deal with the captain of American fur trader the Otter which landed in Sydney in 1796. The night the Otter was due to depart, Muir rowed out through the harbour heads and met the ship in the ocean. The Otter visited Polynesia landing at Anamooka, Niue, Tahiti and Motu. In the Cook Islands they landed at a new island they called Muir for their illustrious stowaway, an island now called Pukapuka.

The Otter sailed for North America and Muir was among a landing party at Nootka Sound. Though intending to stay on the Otter till it got to New York, a nearby Royal Navy ship worried him and he swapped to a Spanish naval vessel which took him to Monterey, California. The Californian governor was suspicious of Muir’s intentions and sent him to Vera Cruz under military escort. Muir tried to send a letter to George Washington requesting asylum but Mexico’s governor intercepted it.

When Spain entered the conflict against Britain, Muir became a prisoner-of-war and was sent to Cuba. It was as close as he got to America. Authorities sent him to Europe for trial. Near the Spanish coast of Spain the British fleet intercepted the ship and gave battle. An exploding shell smashed Muir’s face and he lost his left eye. His face was so mutilated a British search party could not identify him.

Muir wrote letters to friends in France from a Cadiz prison hospital. French foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord secured his release and conveyed him to Paris in 1797. Muir was anointed leader of a revolutionary government of Scotland in exile. Wearing an eye patch he was a familiar figure around Paris in his final days. Weakened by injuries he died a pauper in Chantilly on January 26, 1799, which Australians would later celebrate as their national day. Of the Scottish Martyrs only Margarot ever saw Scotland again, and that likely because he was a double agent.

Moore said Muir’s mutilation and death was a metaphor for the fate of the British democratic movement. Ruthless wartime suppression set back the cause of parliamentary reform for a generation. But the sacrifices of the Martyrs sacrifices and their United Irishmen contemporaries, continued to inspire. In his final words in court in Edinburgh, Muir said “the impartial voice of future time will rejudge your verdict.” He was borne out partially by the 1832 Great Reform Bill and 50 years later by universal manhood suffrage (women had to wait until after the First World War). The Martyrs are honoured with a monument on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. In Australia where most of them died, as Moore says, they are “neither mourned nor commemorated”. It is one of our many historical blind spots.

Rebellion at the Eureka Stockade

Eureka Stockade riot, Ballarat, 1854, by John Black Henderson (1827-1918), State Library of New South Wales

The Eureka Stockade rebellion happened 167 years ago in Ballarat, Victoria but its story still has the power to resonate. Recently anti-Covid lockdown protesters waved the Eureka flag as a symbol of their defiance of authority though it is difficult to see how people upset about COVID vaccination can compare themselves with the two-dozen miners killed in a brutal 20-minute attack by 300 colonial soldiers and police on Sunday, 3 December 1854.

The issues at Eureka had been brewing across Victoria since gold was discovered in 1851. Though the colonial government had encouraged the rush it treated the miners as a lawless rabble. Yet the early goldfields were almost crime free, with groups sorting out issues collectively. According to British law, precious metals below the ground belonged to the crown. A law in NSW and Victoria introduced a 30 shillings licence which gave miners the right to extract gold from a small patch of land for 30 days. The government appointed gold commissioners to collect the licence fee, supported mainly by native police, as regular officers left to join the rush.

Those who refused to pay the high fee risked rough treatment by the native police, happy to exert authority over white diggers, encouraged by white officer Captain Henry Dana. Offenders could be chained to logs until the commissioner or magistrate fined them £10 or forced them to forfeit their claim. The cost doubled again in 1852 and was extended to all working directly or indirectly on the mining leases. Thousands attended monster meetings to denounce the tax.

In 1852 there were 2000 diggers at Ballarat looking for quick wealth to take back to the mother country. The government banned alcohol claiming it would increase crime, so sly grog was sold from “lemonade tents”. By 1854 prohibition wasn’t working. Licences were issued to hotels but they were unpopular as they gave favours to commissioners so the sly grog running continued. Diggers wanted the corruption to end and also wanted the right to vote, which had been granted to some in the colony.

Victoria was ruled by Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe who would not relinquish the licence money to the newly established Legislative Council. He ignored petitions from the goldfields for any rights. He believed troublesome Irish and Americans miners were responsible for most of the drunkenness and violence on the fields. When the fields elected a People’s Commission to protest a new excise tax, La Trobe refused to accept their petition signed by thousands because it had too many foreign names on it. Under leader John Harrison, miners embarked on non-violent protest, wearing red ribbons in their hats to signify opposition to the licence.

La Trobe was replaced in 1854 by Sir Charles Hotham who arrived with a good reputation as a distinguished naval officer who fought pirates and broke blockades in South America. Hotham was a reluctant governor who thought Victoria was beneath him. Initially he impressed on a visit to Ballarat as someone who might listen to complaints. The diggers named a 35kg gold nugget Lady Hotham in his wife’s honour. It only confirmed in Hotham’s mind they could afford the licence.

Only half the miners had a licence. Hotham demanded his men to collect more revenue. In September he ordered licence hunts be increased from twice a month to twice weekly. Anyone without a licence was immediately arrested. Police insisted on bribes and there were allegations of brutality and suspicious deaths. Police patronised the hotel of James Bentley and assisted Bentley when he was accused of the murder of James Scobie who had insulted Bentley’s wife. Scobie was beaten to death by men with spades and Bentley told the coroner he had not left his hotel all night. However a boy called Bernard Welch testified he saw Bentley and his wife among those attacking Scobie.

The coroner recorded “death by persons unknown.” After a storm of digger protest the Bentleys were bailed to appear before an October judicial inquiry. The police magistrate trial was a sham and the couple were acquitted. Angry diggers burned the Bentley hotel in protest. Commissioner Robert Rede read the Riot Act before being pelted with eggs. Welsh miner John Basson Humffray told the Ballarat Times that the government was at fault for failing to administer the law properly. Under Humffray’s guidance the miners formed the Diggers Reform Society with Chartist principles. Rede responded with a new detachment of police and soldiers and placed spies among the miners.

Hotham ordered a retrial of the Bentleys in Melbourne under Justice Redmond Barry (who later hanged Ned Kelly). Bentley and his staff got three years while his pregnant wife was acquitted. Hotham ordered a board of inquiry into the riots which found police were negligent and the magistrate was underhand in business dealings. The diggers wanted more. Their charter demanded full manhood suffrage and borrowed the American catchphrase of “no taxation without representation”. Humffray was elected leader of the Ballarat Reform League. Hotham and Rede called it a secret society though they were open in their demands. Rede increased licence hunts but the miners avoided provocation.

Humffray and fellow leaders met Hotham who thought their demands were insolent. The leaders returned to Ballarat empty handed fearing they could no longer prevent bloodshed. Irish priest Patrick Smyth fed a rumour to Rede they were planning an attack on the government camp and had procured 1000 rifles. Humffray advised the diggers of their failed meeting with Hotham. First blood was shed when diggers set upon the 12th regiment. A drummer boy was injured before the regiment escaped to the government camp. Rede was convinced a republican rising led by Americans and Irish was afoot and he had 435 police and soldiers at the ready.

The miners called a meeting for November 29 where the Eureka flag first flew, made by women from available materials. The Reform League was divided on a course of action with Humffray arguing against violence. Most thought it was too late after the attack on the soldiers. The Chartists were no longer in control. A new committee led by Irishman Peter Lalor was planning battle.

To test their resolve Rede ordered another licence hunt on November 30. Police and soldiers set out with bayonets drawn and diggers pelted them with stones, stick and bottles. Rede read the Riot Act and shots were fired from both sides. Eight men were arrested. News of the battle spread around the field encouraging others to come to Bakery Hill. Lalor, brother of Young Irelander James Fintan Lalor, called on diggers to organise themselves and elect captains from their ranks. His friend Raffaello Carboni had experience in Italian wars and he became Lalor’s right hand man, translating messages to European diggers.

Lalor moved his operations from Bakery Hill to Eureka Lead which was less visible from government positions and drew up a council of 13 to plan their defence. Lalor was disappointed the Ballarat Reform League had withdrawn support but 500 defenders built a stockade near the remains of the Eureka Hotel and continued to drill and make pikes. Unruly members harassed shopkeepers which was the excuse Rede needed.

On Saturday December 2, Lalor sent a deputation led by Carboni and Father Smyth to visit Rede with a promise to go back to work if licence hunts were suspended and arrested men were released. Rede refused and said the arrested men would be charged with riot. He claimed their real agenda was revolution, which they denied. Smyth tried again alone later that night without success though Rede took it as a sign the rebels were frightened. He called for another 600 soldiers to back up the 800 already in Ballarat, though they did not make it in time for the attack.

Second-in-command inside the stockade was American Captain James McGill who enlisted the 200-strong Independent California Rangers. He instilled order and posted sentries with a password to get in and out. The password “Vinegar Hill” was a nod to the 1798 United Irishmen and Castle Hill rebellions but it annoyed British miners, many leaving the stockade. When McGill heard rumours more troops were coming, he sent two-thirds of the Rangers to guard the road so they were missing in action the following day.

Rede deployed Captain John Thomas and his men on a surprise attack before dawn on Sunday. Thomas’s 300 men approached quietly via the rear of the camp and were not seen until 150 metres away. Thomas ordered firing to begin and surrounded the stockade with the help of mounted soldiers and police. Diggers hurriedly grabbed weapons. Lalor ordered his men to hold fire till the last moment but they were no match for the military. Spoiling for blood, they bayonetted wounded diggers and pikemen were mown down by mounted men with sabres. Carboni was outside the stockade and tried to assist the survivors before being arrested, freed, and arrested again in the confusion. Twenty-two diggers died as did three soldiers including a captain. They captured 125 diggers, many badly wounded. They did not include a semi-conscious Lalor, unseen while buried under a slab. He escaped later.

A delighted Rede went to the stockade where 11 prisoners proved to him they were not involved and were released. Rede informed Hotham who declared martial law for two days. He ordered Rede to prepare for trials while wanted posters were put out for Lalor and other missing leaders. Lalor was secretly at Father Smyth’s tent and the priest arranged for an emergency amputation of Lalor’s shattered arm. He was then taken to his fiance’s house in Geelong.

Hotham wrote to London blaming foreigners and anarchists for the uprising. Humffray drew up a petition to grant an amnesty to prisoners reminding Hotham they were outraged British subjects not foreign anarchists. Hotham refused requests for an amnesty though he did halt licence hunts. Anger grew in Melbourne as news seeped out from Ballarat. A mob of 4000 called Hotham “despotic”.

Court hearings in Ballarat whittled prisoner numbers down to 13 including Carboni. They were taken to Melbourne Gaol where they were brutally treated by Inspector of Victorian Prisons, former Norfolk Island commander John Price. Newspaperman Henry Seekamp was found guilty of printing seditious articles and was sentenced to six months. In the trials, juries were unimpressed by perjured evidence and government lies. Carboni was found to have arrived late and was only helping the injured escape. All 13 prisoners were acquitted.

The Goldfields Commission handed down its report around the same time. It recommended the licence fee be replaced by a one pound “Miner’s Right”. It also recommended an export duty and the survey of goldfields land at a reasonable price while the Victorian Legislative Council should expand to include representatives of the diggers and the major goldfields. They said serious unrest was usually a sign the government was as much at fault as the people.

The recommendations ended the cumbersome goldfields officialdom and gave Victoria new revenue streams. It also improved suffrage for men, with Lalor and Humffray elected for Ballarat in 1855. Hotham resigned in disgrace and died at the end of the year. The miners had got what they wanted. Writing at the end of the century American Mark Twain hailed Eureka as “a victory won by a lost battle”. Eureka continues to arouse extraordinary passion. One hundred years later NSW Premier Bob Carr dismissed it as a “local tax revolt” and a “protest without consequence”. However an academic in 2013 hailed the Eureka Stockade as “the site where Australian Democracy was born”. As the anti-vaxxers show, it remains capable of being contorted towards any political rebellion, left or right.

Meagher of the Sword: Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland, Australia and America

The statue of Thomas Francis Meagher outside the capitol building, Helena, MT

Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher is fondly remembered on three continents. Meagher is revered locally for first flying the Irish tricolour in Waterford, In Australia he was famous for escaping transportation after his involvement in the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion ​and in America he is an important figure in Civil War era politics and was a early governor of Montana. His statue is outside the state capitol in Helena and last week a Montana theatre group announced a musical on his life and legacy.

Meagher (pronounced MAH-r) was born on August 3, 1823 at what is now the Granville Hotel on the Waterford Quay. Meagher’s father, Thomas Meagher, owned the building and was a prominent merchant and later mayor and MP who traded between Waterford and Newfoundland where his Tipperary-born father, also Thomas Meagher, first made his money in the fishing industry before returning to Ireland. The Meaghers were wealthy Catholics and Thomas Francis was training to be a lawyer when he got involved in Irish independence politics. In 1848 he flew a tricolour (probably in the French colours to celebrate that country’s latest revolution) at the Wolfe Tone Club on the Waterford Mall for seven days before it was pulled down. He was transported to Tasmania the same year for his role in the botched Young Ireland rebellion. He escaped to the US and became a Brigadier General in the Irish Brigade in the American Civil War. He went on to become secretary to the territory of Montana, and acting governor, before disappearing in the Missouri River in 1867 in mysterious circumstances.

Meagher’s time in Tasmania was overshadowed by a more famous Irish rebel, John Mitchel, who eventually became a Westminster MP. At the other end of the earth from Ireland, Meagher and Mitchel were brought together to plot an escape to America. That story was fictionalised in Christopher Koch’s 1999 book Out of Ireland a thinly disguised roman de clef featuring Devereux, the fiery journalist who arrived via Bermuda (mostly based on Mitchel, though with aspects of Meagher) and Paul Barry, the lawyer and orator from Waterford (mostly Meagher). I was reminded of Koch when I read Tony Moore’s “Death or Liberty: Rebels and radicals transported to Australia 1788-1868” which pays homage with his chapter name “Out of Ireland” about the Young Ireland convicts. Moore opens the chapter with a quotation by Meagher (who he calls one of mid 19th century Ireland’s finest orators) from the dock at his 1848 Clonmel trial which begins “I am here to regret nothing I have done, to retract nothing I have said”. The unimpressed judge handed down a death sentence.

Fomenting revolution in the middle of the Irish Famine, Young Ireland paid homage to the ecumenical United Irishmen 50 years after the 1798 rebellion. Meagher was aged just 25 in 1848. He spent six years at Clongowes Wood College, Kildare, and another four years at Lancashire’s Stonyhurst College, both Jesuit schools for wealthy Catholics. In 1843 he returned to Dublin to study law. He developed his patriotism and debating skills in O’Connell’s Repeal Association and quickly became a formidable speaker and ideas man. In 1845 he became disillusioned with pace of Repeal under the influence of the publication The Nation. His 1846 speech against the O’Connellites defending a theoretical armed rebellion in Ireland earned him the nickname Meagher of the Sword.

By 1848 Ireland was wracked by years of famine. The British reacted with coercion driving the Young Irelanders closer to rebellion. Mitchel was charged under the new Treason Felony Act, brought in to deal with Irish wordsmith trouble-makers. Meagher was arrested at home in Waterford by British troops. The official charge was a seditious speech to the people of Rathkeale, Co Limerick. After Meagher was arrested, his police carriage was surrounded on the bridge over the Suir. With supporters threatening to liberate him, Meagher gave a speech asking them to stand down. Writing in The Great Shame, Thomas Kenneally said Meagher was worried three nearby warships could reduce Waterford to rubble but Moore wonders if Meagher squibbed the moment revealing “the reluctance of Young Ireland intellectuals to roll the dice”.

Meagher was allowed out on bail and continued his original plan, riding to Slievenamon mountain to address 50,000 supporters while wearing a tricolour sash. He went on to Carrick-on-Suir where he was shocked by the size of the mob, “whirling in dizzy circles and tossing up in dark waves with sounds of wrath, vengeance and defiance.” He was giddy with the thought of native Waterford volunteers marching triumphantly into Dublin.

However Waterford stayed quiet as it did in 1798 and the revolution was a dismal failure. The excuse for an uprising was the suspension of habeas corpus on July 23, 1848 and warrants for leaders still at large. The hope was the peasantry would rise up but most were too demoralised by Famine to think of revolution. British leaders in Ireland including the Duke of Wellington, still formidable at 80, were determined to stamp it down before it started. William Smith O’Brien rallied 3000 men erecting barricades in Mullinahone Co Tipperary. However O’Brien was indecisive and had no taste for battle preferring to allow undermanned British cavalry ride through than risk arrest.

The revolution was destined to fail as an urban political movement lacking a base in the countryside. It lacked support of the Catholic Church which feared revolution would unleash anti-clerical excesses as it did in France where the 1848 workers’ rebellion resulted in the death of the Archbishop of Paris. The one feeble battle came at Ballingarry on the Tipperary-Kilkenny border on July 29 where 200 rebels with a few guns and pikes chased 46 well-armed police to Mrs McCormack’s farmhouse. Mrs McCormack pleaded with O’Brien her children were inside. He accompanied her to a window via a cabbage patch to secure their release. After rebels threw stones at the house, police replied with rifles killing two. The rebels returned fire but police superior weaponry at close range put them to flight. News of the “cabbage patch revolution” quickly spread and Young Ireland leaders were rounded up and arrested. Meagher was caught at a Tipperary roadblock and sent to Kilmainham jail.

Though Meagher was not present at Ballingarry, he was accused of high treason “levying war on our Sovereign Lady the Queen in her realm” and of “marching in a warlike manner”. Meagher, O’Brien, Terence MacManus and Patrick O’Donohoe faced a special judicial commission in Clonmel within sight of Slievenamon. The jury found all four guilty but asked the judge to show mercy to Meagher given his young age. Chief Justice Blackburn said the Irish knew the consequences of “making war on the Sovereign” and ordered Meagher to be hanged with the others: “afterwards your head with severed from your body, and your body divided into four quarters, and to be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit.” Meagher refused to plead for mercy and looked forward to a “higher tribunal where many of the judgements of this court will be reversed”.

Mindful of turning bumbling rebels into martyrs, Britain commuted their sentences to transportation. They would spend the rest of their lives at Van Diemen’s Land in “gentlemanly obscurity”, as colonial secretary Earl Grey put it. Moore argues their success came after their departure from Ireland. Meagher and others invented a new cultural vocabulary of nationalism, gifting Ireland the idea of an independent nation that Britain could never kill off. They stayed in the news with a series of legal challenges, political lobbying, writing books, articles and pamphlets, and most eye-catching of all, mounting daring escapes.

A year after being sentenced Meagher left Dublin on the Swift with O’Brien, MacManus and O’Donohoe. They arrived in Hobart October 17, 1849. They were joined by John Mitchel, Kevin O’Doherty and John Martin, all victims of the Treason Felony Act. Meagher was impressed by his new surrounds, writing “nothing I have seen in other countries – not even in my own – equals the beauty, the glory of the scenery through which we glided up from Tasman Head to Hobart Town”. The upper class prisoners were offered a ticket-of-leave and could seek work, keep their pay, and arrange their own accommodation (unlike five farm labourer rebels from Waterford involved in the revolution, who got no special conditions when transported to Australia). The only proviso was to promise to stay in their allotted areas. Smith O’Brien refused to accept this bargain and was sent to Maria Island. The rest were allocated to districts away from each other. Meagher was confined to Campbell Town 130km north of Hobart.

Meagher said his new surrounds “consisted of one main street with two or three dusty branches to the left and at right angles with these a sort of boulevard in which the police office, the lock up and the stocks were conveniently arranged.” He moved to nearby Ross which he called “a little apology of a town”. He made friends with Catholic priest William Dunne and courted convict’s daughter, Catherine Bennett whom he married on February 22, 1851. At Lake Sorell he secretly met his comrades Kevin O’Doherty, Martin and Mitchel where the borders of the three men’s areas met.

Despite Meagher’s pregnant wife and the beauty of Van Diemen’s Land, he plotted escape to America. MacManus, Meagher, O’Donohoe and Mitchel all escaped in quick succession between 1851 and 1853. To keep their gentlemenly status intact, the political prisoners formally quit their ticket-of-leave before escaping. Mitchel entered the Bothwell courthouse in great style with a comrade toting a gun before passing his resignation note to the astonished clerk. He eventually escaped to America where he sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Meagher’s path to escape was well trodden, first descending down the mountains to Westbury near Launceston, where there were sympathetic Irish and a Catholic priest who offered shelter in a church cellar. When the coast was clear, Meagher was transported to the Tamar river and rowed 40km out to sea to Waterhouse Island in Bass Strait. There he spent ten miserable days with other escapees until the American whaling ship Elizabeth Thompson picked him up.

After swapping ship in Brazil, Meagher arrived at New York to a huge reception in May 1852. Then-president Millard Fillmore offered the Irish refugees from Australia “safe asylum and full protection”. With the support of the Irish-dominated Democratic Party at Tammany Hall, Meagher became a dashing presence around the city. He inspected military parades, and had a club, military guard and even a polka named for him. He quickly sent word to his wife to join him in America.

Before his letter arrived, Catherine had their child, a son who died of influenza aged four months. Catherine left Hobart for London on February 5, 1853. She went to Waterford where she was met by 20,000 people exalting the wife of a hero of 1848. She went to America with Meagher’s father but was overwhelmed by her husband’s celebrity status and their reunion was not a success. Suffering from ill health and pregnant again, she returned to Ireland to live with her father-in-law. In May 1854 she died aged 22 after giving birth to a second son, also Thomas. He survived into manhood and corresponded with his father but never met him. Meagher remarried in 1855 this time to New Yorker Elizabeth Townsend.

Unlike Mitchel, Meagher offered strong support to the Union. Meagher felt gratitude for his adopted country, renounced his British citizenship in 1853, and worked to instill US patriotism among fellow Irishmen. When war broke out Meagher enlisted in the 69th New York State Militia which fought at the First Battle of Bull Run. When its commander Michael Corcoran was captured, Meagher returned to New York to use his oratory skills to recruit Irishmen and became Brigadier General of the Irish Brigade.

The Irish mostly supported the North but didn’t support the end of slavery, concerned black people would take their jobs. But after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Meagher came off the fence and supported the freedom of the slaves, losing him the support of New York Democrats. In a letter to Lincoln he said “recruits come in slow, though thousands upon thousands cheer me as I entreat and exhort them to rally round and stand to the last by the Glorious Flag of the Union.” A document at Waterford Treasures museum incorrectly said he was a pall-bearer at Lincoln’s funeral and his name is not on the pallbearers’ list maintained by the Library of Congress. He was, however, among the honour guard.

After the war ended in 1865 he accepted the appointment of Territorial Secretary of Montana, and became acting governor. Meagher believed Irish-Americans would thrive in the rural environment, which Lincoln established in 1864 out of Idaho. Meagher had the contradictory mission of civilising the wild west while depriving Native Americans of their lands.

There were other challenges. Montana’s first newspaper editor Thomas Dimsdale was an anti-Fenian and was involved in Montana’s Vigilante Committee with Republican Party stalwart Wilbur Fisk Sanders. Sanders and Dimsdale called Catholics and immigrants “miscreants”. They hated the Irish Democrat Meagher who wanted to populate the region with fellow countrymen and establish Catholic schools. After Meagher granted a reprieve to Irishman James Daniels convicted of manslaughter, Daniels was surrounded by vigilantes and was “hanged with the pardon in his pocket.” Meagher was warned to leave the territory or suffer the same fate.

Meagher died in 1867, aged just 43. He fell overboard from the steamer G.A. Thompson (ironically similarly named to the ship which rescued him in Tasmania) at Fort Benton into the Missouri River and drowned. An acquaintance, Captain James Fisk, wrote Meagher was on board to visit friends but “got on a spree….went to bed…was heard to get up and got out on the guards – a splash was heard – and the once brilliant and brave man was seen no more. Another victim of whisky.” Not everyone believed it was an accident and many pinned the murder on Sanders who was also in Fort Benton that day. Sanders had a political motive holding ambitions of being a Senator and feared Meagher would stand in his way. Sanders said Meagher had committed suicide.

Whether it was an accident, suicide, or something more sinister, Meagher left a big legacy for a short life. Many in the green battalions of the Civil War swore the Fenian oath and became battle-hardened recruits for the Irish Republican Brotherhood which eventually led to the 20th century’s IRA. Both Irish War of Independence leaders Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins used the American diaspora and their money to great effect. As the British commander in the 1798 rebellion Lord Cornwallis predicted, these Irish emigrants “would embark with a spade and return with a musket”.