Gympie days

Another weekend, another round of parkrun tourism, or so I hoped. This weekend’s plan was to get the Brisbane suburban train all the way to the end of the line in Gympie, stay overnight, do the Victory Heights trail parkrun in the morning and get the bus home (the train timetables did not align for a return by rail). So after over three hours of slow rattling we got into Gympie North station around lunchtime Friday. The weather was overcast with rain forecasted, as I found my nearby Airbnb and walked 3km into town. I crossed fingers the parkrun would not be cancelled.

On the way, I passed Gympie station, which is prettier than the functional Gympie North and much closer to town, but is sadly no longer on the main line. A station first opened here in 1881 to connect Gympie’s goldfields with the port of Maryborough and within 10 years there was a connection to Brisbane. The current building, designed in Pagoda style with multiple layered eaves, dates to 1913 and is the largest timber railway station in Queensland. Gympie’s station became neglected with the rise of car travel and in 1989 Queensland Rail built Gympie North in an 8km diversion on the newly electrified Brisbane-Rockhampton route. Freight stopped coming through Gympie by 1995. The station got a new lease of life in 1998 when QR leased it to the Mary Valley Heritage Railway. The Valley Rattler steam train now plies the route to Amamoor.

Gold was first found 4km south of Gympie in 1867 and Scottish prospector William Ferguson named the area Monkland for a locality west of Glasgow. By 1873, there were shops and four hotels to serve the goldrush and the railway station was added in 1889 on the Brisbane line. Like Gympie station, it was bypassed a century later though the Valley Rattler still trundles through.

Goldrush memories are preserved in the nearby Gympie Gold Mining and Historical Museum. The tagline outside reads “the town that saved Queensland” and that’s not too much of an exaggeration. When Queensland left New South Wales in 1859, the parent colony took the treasury leaving the northerners broke. Unemployment was high, railway works had stopped, and the Bank of Queensland failed, leaving the new colony to survive in hand-to-mouth fashion. Then the Brisbane Courier announced in 1867 the discovery of gold at “Gympy Creek”. Prospectors poured into the region and found large deposits of gold. Within 12 months, Gympie had 30,000 people. Queensland’s unemployment problem vanished overnight.

The Upper Mary River goldfield was officially proclaimed in 1867 in a 25 square mile radius. But the finds were so good, the radius was expanded to 120 square miles in 1877. By then the alluvial gold was exhausted. Shallow and deep reef mining commenced and by 1881 intensive gold mining marked a new era of wealth and prosperity. While payable gold ran out by the 1920s, there is still a fossicking area nearby. The museum’s No 2 South Great Eastern shaft is accessible via a reconstructed gantry. It contains an operational boiler house and steam powered winding engine, air compressor, generator and anciliary machinery.

The museum also features exhibits from the timber industry, dairy, agriculture, gems, transport, and military and social history including the relocated cottage of early Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher. Fisher, aged 10, came to Australia with his Scottish family during Queensland’s goldrush. He moved to Gympie in 1888, worked in the mines and was a trade unionist and Labor party activist. He help found the Gympie cooperative, and in 1891 became secretary of the Gympie Joint Labour Committee. He was elected to Queensland’s assembly as the member for Gympie before winning the seat of Wide Bay in the first federal election in 1901. He became Labor leader in 1905 and served three terms as prime minister in 1908-09, 1910-13 and 1914-15.

Near the museum is Lake Alford, an important bird sanctuary, named for neighbour Frank “Tiny” Alford (nicknamed in Australian fashion because he was very tall) who helped develop the park. This was a swampy area which Gympie Council drained and filled with water. The lake is home to numerous bird species. The signature black swans (Cygnus atratus) are completely black except for the red bill and white flight feathers on their wings while chicks are light grey.

I wandered down a wet track to the Mary River. The river rises at Booroobin west of Landsborough and flows north through Gympie and Maryborough before emptying into the Great Sandy Strait near Fraser Island. The river was important to the Gubbi Gubbi people who called it “Moocooboola” (not to be confused with Mooloolaba which has a different root). The Gubbi Gubbi named a tributary creek for the gimpi-gimpi, the fearsome stinging tree found across the region. Europeans encroached onto Gubbi Gubbi lands in 1842 and found what they called the Wide Bay River. Five years later NSW governor Charles FitzRoy renamed it for his wife Mary. Settlers were attracted to the rich cedar which they threw into the river and exported to Sydney via Maryborough. After gold transformed the region, the Gubbi Gubbi were reduced by massacres and disease and were eventually forced into reservations at Fraser Island and Cherbourg.

The first Gympie Volunteer Fire Brigade was formed in 1876 but lapsed before re-forming in 1901 with a fire station built in 1902. The current magnificent brick and concrete fire station dates to 1940. The station is believed to be haunted by the ghost of a fireman who died in a fall from the lookout on the tower in 1943. In 2023 the state government announced plans to build a new station south of town.

Gympie was gazetted as a town on January 26, 1880 and a reserve for a town hall was soon created. The original town hall and clock tower dates from 1890 and witnessed the creation of Gympie city in 1905. As gold production declined, Gympie transformed into an agricultural service centre. The building received a makeover in 1939 with a post office and reception hall added. It was heritage listed in 2011 for its original structure representing the importance of a highly profitable gold mining town and its 1930s extension reflecting Gympie’s evolution as the service town of an important dairy and agricultural district.

The town centre winds its way up from the river along flood-prone Mary Street. The Cullinane brothers started a drapery business in 1868, a year after the town was founded. They established a large presence on both sides of the street selling everything from dress material and accessories to china, linen and household goods. Gympie’s worst flood was in 1893 with a peak of 25.45 metres, inundating many businesses to the rooftops in lower Mary Street. On November 6, 1939 Cullinanes’ store burnt down with damage estimated at £60,000.

The influx of money and yield of gold was reflected in the redevelopment of upper Mary Street during the 1880s and 1890s. Derry-born architect Richard Gailey built the neo-classical Bank of New South Wales in 1890–1891 to replace a branch on the goldfields. In 1940 the bank sold the building to Widgee Shire Council which administered the rural area around Gympie. In 1993, Widgee amalgamated with the city of Gympie and the building became the Cooloola Shire Council Chambers. In 2008, Cooloola, Kilkivan and part of Tiaro were amalgamated into Gympie Regional Council. The building is now the Gympie Regional Council Chambers. It is heritage listed as “physical evidence of the evolution of Gympie gold mining, a major contributor to the wealth of Queensland”.

Around the corner on Channon St is the original courthouse and now home to the Australian Institute of Country Music. Irish-born Henry Edward King was appointed gold commissioner for Wide Bay in 1867 and conducted business on the Gympie goldfields until a Court of Petty Sessions was established in 1868. A new court was erected on Channon St in 1876 and it became the land office when the court house moved up the road in 1893. It continued to be used by state departments until 2002 when Cooloola Shire took it over and made the building available to the AICM.

Across the road is the old bank building. The Queensland National Bank established a timber branch here in 1872, and enjoyed the gold bonanza, purchasing over 6000 ounces in its first three weeks. Three years later the current brick building was erected. When Gympie’s commercial centre moved to eastern Mary St the bank sold the building. It was used by industries until Widgee Council bought it in 1990. It is now used as council offices.

Further up Channon St is the new courthouse. In the 1890s local MP Andrew Fisher pushed for a larger replacement to the old courthouse. In 1900 colonial architect Alfred Barton Brady, who designed Brisbane’s old Victoria Bridge, selected the site and commissioned fellow architect John Smith Murdoch to design the building in Federation Free style. The building was designed to be seen from across town and the clock tower dominated the landscape. It has been heritage listed as a significant landmark with high quality design and workmanship.

Gympie’s third important colonial-era bank building is the Royal Bank of Queensland. A great fire in 1891 destroyed many timber buildings on Mary St and this neoclassical single-storey building was one of many permanent structures erected the following year. The Royal Bank was established to help Queensland farming and mining investors who could not get loans with other banks. In 1922 the Royal merged with the Bank of Northern Queensland to become the Bank of Queensland and then merged with the National Australia Bank in 1948. NAB closed this branch in 1979 and it became commercial premises, and offices for the Gympie Muster. It is heritage listed as a “good example of a masonry structure in a classical style”.

The following morning I went out to Victory Heights Trail Network, which comprises 60 hectares of eucalypt forest and 25km of mountain biking trails. It also hosts Gympie’s parkrun. While Saturday was perfect for running, the damage had already been done and Gympie Regional Council asked organisers to cancel it to give the course time to dry out. I sadly trudged the 3km back to town to get my bus home.

I had breakfast at a Mary Street cafe and admired the nearby “Lady of the Mary” statue. The statue honours British aristocrat Lady Mary Fitzroy, who moved to Australia when her husband Charles Fitzroy was made governor of NSW in 1846. In 1847 Fitzroy renamed the Wide Bay River and Maryborough in her honour. A few months later, Lady Mary was killed in a carriage accident in Sydney. The 2017 statue imagines her dipping her feet in the Mary river, which she never saw.

The parkrun cancellation gave me more walking time and I checked out St Patrick’s Church. Many Irish Catholics joined the Gympie gold rush and priests followed them, with the first Mass in the new town in 1868. Gympie’s early churches were basic affairs until the massive sandstone St Patrick’s was constructed on a prominent spot on Calton Hill in 1883. The architect was prolific Scottish-born government architect Francis Drummond Greville Stanley, who also built Brisbane’s GPO, Roma St station, Toowoomba’s courthouse and post office, and some of Charters Towers’ grand buildings. Queensland’s first Catholic archbishop Robert Dunne officially opened St Patrick’s in 1887. It is heritage listed as a good example of 1880s church architecture, “influenced by Gothic revival styles and of the ecclesiastical work of the prominent Queensland architect, FDG Stanley.”

It is appropriate that a city associated with country music was once called Nashville. A Memorial Park monument celebrates Wiltshire-born James Nash “who discovered the Gympie Goldfield 16th October 1867.” Nash emigrated to Sydney aged 23 and became a labourer and NSW gold prospector. Nash moved to Calliope, Queensland in 1863 then to Nanango. He was attracted by the news of a £3000 government reward for a new gold field, and set off from Nanango to Gladstone. As he came down from Imbil, he thought the Mary River might be payable. Nash found quantities of gold and reported his findings in Maryborough. Within a month, the port town was full of excited prospectors “off to the diggings” at what was soon dubbed “Nashville, Gympie Creek”. However the miserly colonial government haggled with Nash before granting only £1000 after twelve months’ debate while the field quickly shed his name and became Gympie. Though Nash and his brother earned £7000 from their claims, they lost their winnings in poorly-performing mining stock and an ill-fated drapery store. The government finally helped the near penniless Nash in 1888 it made him the local powder-magazine keeper at £100 a year. He died in 1913 in Gympie, aged 79, suffering from bronchitis and asthma.

The bus back to Brisbane stopped at a service station in Traveston, 20 minutes south of town. In the car park was a glorious piece of 1980s Queensland kitsch. The 13-metre-tall Matilda was the kangaroo mascot for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. Matilda became a favourite when she was wheeled into the opening ceremony, turned her head, wiggled her ears and winked at the crowd. In 1984 Matilda was placed alongside the Pacific Highway at Wet N Wild, Oxenford. Matilda Fuel Services bought the namesake kangaroo in 2009 for their Tugun outlet but the massive marsupial breached Gold Coast planning regulations. The owners moved her to another travel centre at Kybong, 20km south of Gympie. Anticipating the Gympie bypass, the Traveston Service Centre was opened 5km away in 2020 and Matilda made the short hop south down the Bruce Hwy. She gave me a sly wink before sending me on my way home.

Lutwyche Cemetery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Clonmel, a Suir thing

On my final Saturday in Ireland I was determined to do a new parkrun course. One of the nearest was Clonmel in south Tipperary, 50km from Waterford. That meant an early start, jogging to Waterford railway station to catch the 7.20am Limerick Junction train up the Suir valley. Some 45 minutes later I was by the banks of the river in Clonmel on a cool overcast morning, in the shadow of Co. Waterford mountains.

Like Drogheda, Clonmel is a walled medieval town which suffered at Cromwell’s hands. The West Gate is a 19th-century reconstruction of an older structure. A brass plaque at the gate commemorates Laurence Sterne, whose great work Tristram Shandy draws on the first 10 years of the author’s life growing up in the town barracks. Inside the West Gate is O’Connell St (formerly King St) which has been Clonmel’s main street for centuries. Beyond the West Gate is Irishtown where the Normans banished the old Irish.

The Main Guard is the focal point of Clonmel facing the West Gate down O’Connell St and is a fine two-storey symmetrical building with design elements based on works by Sir Christopher Wren. Seventeenth century Tipperary was ruled by James Butler, Duke of Ormond, who erected this building as a courthouse in 1673. Here anti-Penal Laws agitator Father Nicholas Sheehy was found guilty, before being hanged, drawn and quartered. The building was later used as a market house, barracks, public house and is now a museum. Considered one of Ireland’s great tholsels, the building acquired the name “the Main Guard” during its time as a barracks.

Friend of King Edward I and wealthy Clonmel landlord, Otho de Grandison, was reputed to have invited the Franciscans to construct a friary in the centre of town in 1269. Only the tower survives from that era and most of the present structure dates to 1884. Earlier this year the Franciscans vacated the church after 600 years due to “ageing and reducing membership” following a similar closure of Waterford’s friary in 2019. In June Clonmel’s friary re-opened “for limited use as a venue for occasional Mass and Prayer” while the residential part is refurbished to accommodate Ukrainian refugees. 

Narrow Mitchell St links the shopping precincts of O’Connell St and Parnell St. The umbrellas were certainly needed as 2023 was Ireland’s wettest July on record with 215% of expected rainfall due to “a period of low-pressure systems drifting across the country”. Those systems were still active when I arrived in early August. Irish summer, huh?

The original building on this Parnell St site was Hamerton Hall, a 17th century mansion built by timber merchant Richard Hamerton. It was rebuilt in 1881 as Clonmel Town Hall and extended in 1993. According to the NIAH, “the highly ornate facade and large scale of this Dutch Renaissance-style building make it a very notable part of the streetscape.” Outside is a monument to the 1798 rebellion with an inscription from John Kells Ingram’s The Memory of the Dead: “Then here’s their memory – may it be for us a guiding light, to cheer our strife for liberty, and teach us to unite.”

Further along Parnell St is Bianconi House. Daniel Hearn founded the house as a hotel in 1792 but it became famous as the 19th century headquarters of Italo-Irish carriage entrepreneur Charles Bianconi. Bianconi moved to Clonmel in 1809 as a carver and gilder but on his regular trips to Waterford, he realised the need for a cheap and efficient coach system. He began in 1815 with a service from Clonmel to Cahir. His horse-drawn coach service known as “bians” quickly expanded across the south of Ireland, and was cheap and regular, making Bianconi “the Ryanair of the 19th century”. At his peak in 1845, before the coming of rail transport, Bianconi had 1400 horses in 123 towns covering 6000km a day. 

Sir Richard Morrison designed Clonmel Courthouse in the late 1790s to replace the Main Guard. It was heavily influenced by the work of great Dublin architect James Gandon and its plan owes much to Gandon’s Waterford Courthouse. The most famous trial here was in 1848 when Young Irelanders William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew MacManus and Patrick O’Donohoe were tried after the failed rebellion in Ballingarry. All four were sentenced to death for treason though their sentences were later commuted to transportation for life in Van Diemen’s Land.

Old St Mary’s church on Mary St is a Church of Ireland building dating to 1500 though it was severely damaged by Cromwell’s forces. Apart from the base of the bell tower and the 16th century east and west windows, the current building is mainly 19th century additions. The last remains of Clonmel’s town walls adjoin St Mary’s graveyard.

This memorial at Kickham Barracks Plaza commemorates Royal Irish Regiment soldiers killed in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The regiment was based in what was then called Victoria Barracks and was disbanded after independence in 1922. The barracks were renamed for local revolutionary and author Charles Kickham who was involved in the 1848 rebellion before joining the Fenians in the late 1850s. In 1865 Kickham was convicted of treason and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. His great 1873 novel Knocknagow, set in Co. Tipperary, is about the life of the Irish peasantry and the workings of the Irish land system. Kickham Barracks closed in 2012 and a new civic plaza opened here earlier this year.

It was almost 9.30am which meant it was time for parkrun. The course goes along the river down the Blueway towards Carrick-on-Suir. The 53km-long Suir Blueway from Cahir to Carrick-on-Suir opened in 2019 and consists of a walking and cycling trail for 21km from Carrick to Clonmel and 32km of waterway from Clonmel to Cahir which can be canoed or kayaked. Parkrunners (and walkers) were just getting a taste of the Blueway heading 2.5km out east and the same distance back but it was an enjoyable excursion nonetheless.

There was well-earned cake at the end to celebrate one runner’s birthday and another’s 50th parkrun. Of course I had to indulge to celebrate my own 185th (or so) run and my 83rd different course.

After all that history and exercise I walked 15 minutes to Clonmel station and caught the train back to Waterford. The fare is cheap and plenty of day-trippers were heading east for shopping and Waterford’s Spraoi festival. But even in my short visit it was clear that there was a lot to like about Clonmel itself.

Time in Tramore

Situated on the Atlantic coast 12km from Waterford, Tramore has long been the city’s escape valve. The drawcard is the Trá Mhór, the magnificent 5km-long “Big Strand” that gave Tramore its name, where visitors flock in the warmer months, even though like the 2023 summer, the weather is not always kind. A sleepy little village until the late 18th century, Tramore became popular thanks to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) whose patronage of Brighton made sea bathing all the rage. A Waterford banker named Bartholomew Rivers built a hotel (likely the Grand Hotel) and assembly rooms for wealthy city folk, and had a Tramore suburb named for him. By early 19th century Tramore was home to 3000 people.

The arrival of the Waterford railway in 1853 allowed people of all classes to visit the seaside. For the next century, day trippers took the train from the city to enjoy the beach, and it was even used to escape conflict when the civil war came to Waterford in 1922. The railway was unceremoniously removed and ripped up at the start of 1961 and replaced by buses. Tramore’s imposing but sadly disused old railway station is one of the few reminders of the line’s glory days.

The township extends up a hill behind the seafront with the Tramore back strand and the sand dunes in the distance. This shallow intertidal area is enclosed by a substantial spit called Tramore Burrow. The fragile dunes are among Ireland’s largest and are the result of the growth of a spit of shingle and sand across a shallow bay. The back strand dries out at low tide and is connected to the open sea by narrows at Saleen, also known as Rinneshark.

At the top of the hill is Tramore’s imposing Catholic Church of the Holy Cross. The church quickly followed the railway, built between 1856 and 1860. Its imposing spire, visible from Waterford, was added in 1871. As Andy Taylor wrote in Waterford’s historical journal, Tramore’s Gothic-revival church was not only an assertion of Catholic presence in the post famine period, but a symbol of prosperity dominating the town and giving it an air of permanence.

One of my favourite buildings in Tramore is the cosy Ritz bar on Newtown Road, with its magnificent thatched roof. Originally built as three fishermen’s cottages in the 1870s, it was renovated around 1920, with openings remodelled to accommodate the pub and it was fitted with new windows in 1995. According to the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the cottage is part of an increasingly rare vernacular tradition in County Waterford, with much of the original form and early fabric intact and a frontage concentrated around a door opening of “some artistic design quality (which) enhances the visual appeal of the site.”

Behind the Ritz is the road to Tramore Pier, a sheltered pier on the west side of Tramore Bay. A small pier existed on this site in the 19th century but was washed away by storms in the 1880s. A sturdier replacement of grey limestone slabs with concrete capping was built in 1907 and a north wall was added to block the backwash from the cliff face. Fishermen used the pier for many years though these days it is the home of pleasure crafts.

I continued my cliff walk past the pier looking out at the ocean with Brownstown Head in the distance. Its two pillars were added in 1823 to warn shipping of the dangers of Tramore Bay, which in a storm was easy to confuse with the entrance to Waterford Harbour on the other side of the Head.

Next up is the sheltered deep water swimming spot at the Guillamene and on a lovely morning I’m regretting not bringing my bathers. I’ve seen two explanations for the meaning of Guillamene, either Irish for “little fish” or French for “resolute protector”.

There has been swimming at the Guillamene since the 1880s though as this quaint sign hints, it was the preserve of men until the 1970s. According to one member of a local swimming club the sign is “a relic of old decency” from the days when the men swam nude. These days bathers are compulsory.

In men only times, women could still swim at nearby Newtown Cove. A Newtown and Guillamene Swimming Club started officially in the 1940s. The club has around 100 members and a hardy core group of 10 to 15 swim all year round. You don’t need to be a member to swim here and visitors are always welcome. However newcomers should take care. One man died here after getting into difficulties in the water, barely a week before I arrived.

The photo below was as close as I got to the Metal Man statue and his two sentries on the headland (frustratingly out of reach on private property). The pillars date to 1823, thanks to a tragedy seven years earlier. In January 1816 three ships were caught in a gale in these waters. The Sea Horse was in convoy with the Boadicea and Lord Melville carrying the second battalion of the 59th Regiment of Foot and families from Ramsgate home to Cork at the end of the Napoleonic War. The weather deteriorated as they approached Ireland and the Sea Horse’s mate, John Sullivan, the only officer familiar with the south Irish coast, fell from the foremast and died. Captain Gibbs attempted to reach Waterford harbour, but the ship ran aground in Tramore Bay. Only 30 men, including the captain and two seamen, survived from the 394 people on board. The other two ships also foundered near Cork with great loss of life. Though Gibbs did not mistake Tramore Bay for Waterford Harbour as is commonly believed, Lloyds of London installed the Metal Man (dressed in a Royal Navy petty officer’s uniform) and his sentries as well as the two towers on Brownstown Head as a warning for shipping to stay out. The metal man has an identical twin in County Sligo.

I walked back via the delightful Doneraile cliff walk. Lord Doneraile, from the St Leger family of County Cork, was the original owner of Tramore and he laid out the walk as a private promenade for his family and friends in the early 19th century.

This 64 pounder gun at the Doneraile Walk was part of a Naval Reserve battery erected in 1891 and was originally located closer to the cliff edge at the site of the original battery.

Several people had taken to the town beach as the day warmed up, taking life saving and surfing lessons. Though the ocean was glassy today, people have surfed at Tramore Bay since the 1960s when Irish surfing pioneer Kevin Cavey first came to work with local lifeguards. Thanks to the knowledge Cavey gained at the 1966 World Championships, the Surf Club of Ireland held the first National Championships in Tramore a year later. That same year the South Coast Surf Club was formed. Now called the TBay surf club, it remains the oldest in Ireland.

My next stop was the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens. I’ve written about these gardens before, but this was my first visit since they opened in 2014. Hearn spent many childhood summers in Tramore and the gardens follow his life journey from his birth in Greece, his early years in Victorian Ireland and England, his work as a journalist in America, and his life in Japan, where he married and became an English teacher. The gardens are a peaceful oasis and a great tribute to a man whose writings remain a rare western window on 19th century Japanese life.

My final stop was a few kilometres out of town on the road to Waterford to look at the Pickardstown Ambush memorial. The memorial is dedicated to a 1921 incident in the Irish War of Independence where two IRA men were killed. An original shrine was erected here in 1922 but fell into disrepair. The Waterford Graves Association erected the current memorial on the Dunmore Rd in 1947. I’ve written in more detail about the ambush here.

Waterford Greenway and Dungarvan days

On my recent visit to Ireland I realised a six year ambition to cycle the Waterford Greenway. The 46km Greenway opened in 2017, but has a 150 year history. The Waterford, Dungarvan & Lismore Railway was built in the 1870s during the heyday of Irish rail travel and linked Waterford to Cork via the Lismore-Fermoy and Fermoy-Mallow lines. The 43 miles long WD&LR was a difficult engineering project and costly to build with three viaducts, a long tunnel and a long level-crossing across a causeway. The route struggled to make a profit and though taken over by the Great Southern & Western Railway and later nationalised as part of CIE, it was closed to passenger traffic in 1967 (seven years after the standalone Waterford-Tramore line was also tragically closed). It continued to move freight from Waterford to Dungarvan until the Quigley Magnesite plant closed in 1982. There’s a poignant 15-minute video showing the last train to run the route.

The line was partially reopened in 2003 by the registered charity Waterford & Suir Valley Railway operating a three feet (914mm) gauge railway along 10km of track from Kilmeadan to Waterford. The re-laid WSVR single track line uses the original railway station at Kilmeadan with volunteers operating three diesel locomotives and two purpose-built semi-open bogie passenger carriages. The heritage railway was an immediate hit with local families and tourists alike.

After the successful re-opening, the question became what to do with the rest of the line. The idea emerged of turning it into a rail trail, particularly after the success of the Great Western Greenway on the former Westport to Achill line, which opened in 2011. Studies found that 500 people used that rail trail every day bringing life, tourism and much-needed revenue to the Mayo region. Could a “Déise Greenway” do the same for county Waterford?

After negotiations with line owner CIE, Waterford Council commenced work on a €15m project to build the 46km track. Ireland’s longest greenway, officially called the Waterford Greenway, opened in 2017, linking Waterford with Dungarvan. With stations at Kilmeadan, Kilmacthomas and Durrow as well as 11 bridges, three viaducts and a 400m tunnel, the greenway was marketed as part of Ireland’s Ancient East, though this was a very modern offering. We hired bikes for two days to check it out.

Like the Western Greenway, Waterford Greenway was an instant success. Kilmeadan was the home of a well-known co-operative creamery which became part of Waterford Co-op in 1964. But it lost its award-winning cheese-making plant in 2005 and as well as being a dormitory suburb of the city, the village has been rejuvenated with the WSVR and now the Greenway.

The old WD&LR had 53 level crossings all operated by hand. At each crossing was a house where a railway employee manually opened and shut the gates. Above is an example between Kilmeadan and Kilmacthomas. Greenway users must take care crossing the road, but usually there is little traffic apart from the occasional horse rider.

Like Kilmeadan, Kilmacthomas has been rejuvenated by the greenway. The village is halfway between Waterford and Dungarvan, allowing boutique establishments like the Coach House to cater for the growing traffic of cylists next door to the obligatory bike hire. The Coach House is on the grounds of the old Kilmac workhouse. Waterford’s Poor Law Union built the workhouse in 1850, one of 163 workhouses in Ireland dealing with famine suffering. It contained a fever hospital and mortuary. The workhouse closed in 1919, just before the Irish war of independence.

Kilmacthomas station towers over the village on the banks of the River Mahon. Kilmac is the home of Flahavan’s cereal factory where Thomas Dunn began milling Irish oats in the 1780s powered by the fast flowing river. Dunn’s grand-daughter Ellen married Tom Flahavan in the 1840s and their son Edward Flahavan, born 1850, took over the running of the mill and gave it his name. Kilmacthomas prospered in the 1900s. Many families were employed by the mill which used the railway in its supply chain for its Progress porridge oatlets. Nowadays Flahavan’s makes oatmeal and other cereal products for the international market. The seventh-generation family business still uses clean energy and is mostly powered by wind turbines.

The railway reached Kilmacthomas in 1878 and required an eight-arch curved stone viaduct to span the Mahon River. The bridge was built by Smith Finlayson and Company, Glasgow to designs of Dublin and Waterford architect James Otway. Otway was appointed engineer of the Tramore Railway in 1877 and of the WD&LR in 1878. He was also engineer to the Waterford Harbour Board, the Waterford Lunatic Asylum and the Fishguard and Rosslare Railways.

I cycled off the Greenway to view Otway’s magnificent arches from below. According to the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the significance of the Kilmac bridge is in the form and construction of the arches, which have retained their original profile, together with the central span incorporating early cast-iron work. “The construction in squared rubble limestone attests to high quality stone masonry, and produces an appealing textured visual effect in the landscape,” the NIAH says.

After Kilmacthomas we got our first view of the Comeragh mountains, where Mahon Falls descend into the Mahon River. The highest peak, Fauscoum (also called Kilclooney Mountain) reaches 792m, the 11th tallest mountain in Ireland. The Comeraghs is a rugged area beloved of climbers and cyclists such as Carrick-on-Suir’s Sean Kelly, winner of four Tour de France green jerseys and the 1988 Vuelta a España. A “very challenging” 160km circuit of the mountains is named in his honour.

We were content to stay on the not-quite-as-challenging Greenway and got another mountain view from the top of the Durrow viaduct. Like its Kilmac counterpart, the Durrow Viaduct is a seven-arch rubble stone railway viaduct over road and river (Tay), also opened in 1878. I was unable to get the view from below.

We stopped at a pop-up cafe at Durrow railway station with its derelict remains of the station office and signal cabin. Durrow was the site of a railway ambush during the War of Independence. On March 3, 1921, the IRA’s Waterford flying column held up a train of jurors bound for the Dungarvan assizes. After British troops arrived by train from the garrison town of Fermoy, there was an exchange of gunfire lasting most of the day. The British were reinforced by truck-loads of troops from Waterford and the heavily outnumbered IRA men escaped in darkness with no casualties though two British soldiers were reportedly killed.

Past the station is the most famous feature on the Greenway, the 400m Ballyvoyle (or Durrow) tunnel. According to the NIAH, the tunnel under a hill contains “elliptical-headed openings…with cut-stone voussoirs, and squared rubble stone soffits forming barrel vault to tunnel with remains of lime render over”. Built in 1878 and lit with oil lamps and candles, it was equipped with electric lights in 2016 for the new Greenway. Also in this area is the Ballyvoyle viaduct, a four-span bridge over the Dalligan river. The bridge was blown up during the Civil War in 1922 and a train crashed into the valley. The viaduct was rebuilt and reopened in July 1924.

After Ballyvoyle, we came into view of the sea. Above is the view towards Clonea Beach and Dungarvan out to Helvick Head and the Gaeltacht area of Ring. Clonea in Irish is Cluain Fhia which means the Meadow of the Deer, which seems less appropriate for a seaside village than it is for Waterford’s other Clonea (sometimes Clonea Power) in the Comeraghs. I did entertain the idea of cycling out to Helvick but the weather worsened and we were content to walk around Dungarvan instead.

To get there we crossed the Barnawee causeway linking Abbeyside with Dungarvan. The causeway straddles two large tidal estuaries crammed with birdlife. The 500m causeway shared traffic with road users and was reputedly the longest gated crossing in Europe. These days cyclists need only contend with pedestrians and birders with long zoom lenses.

At Abbeyside we get our first close-up of Dungarvan harbour on the banks of the Colligan River. In the third century Dungarvan was the home of the Deisi tribe, which gave Waterford its enduring nickname. Dungarvan got its own name from St. Garvan, who founded a monastery in the seventh century. It became an important mediaeval town when the Normans arrived in the late 12th century. In 1463 Edward IV granted Dungarvan to Thomas, Earl of Desmond. He also gave it a daily market from which the customs profits was spent on building and repairing town walls and defences. During the 1640s wars, Lord Inchiquin attacked Dungarvan, an Irish Confederate stronghold, and the town surrendered to Cromwell’s forces. By the 1870s Dungarvan was a popular holiday destination, favoured by wealthy Tipperary farmers who came every autumn to take in the sea air.

Grattan Square is Dungarvan’s town centre. In my childhood, the main road from Waterford to Cork used to run through the square and though the through traffic is now diverted, the square is still clogged with cars. That’s a shame because it is otherwise a pleasant pedestrian space with plenty of pubs, cafes and shops. Eighteenth century Irish parliamentarian Henry Grattan had no connection to Dungarvan, but the square was named for him when local landlord the Duke of Devonshire instigated its construction between 1806 and 1826.

Behind the square is the imposing Dungarvan castle. The Normans built this stronghold around 1210 to defend Dungarvan Harbour and it contains an unusual polygonal shell keep. There is also an enclosing curtain wall, corner tower and gate tower. Inside is an 18th century military barracks used by the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary until 1922. During the Civil War, Anti-Treaty forces destroyed the castle but it was refurbished and served as Garda headquarters. Though now open and free for visitors, it closes every Monday and Tuesday so we were unable to view it from the inside.

The lovely Old Market House is now the Dungarvan arts centre. A deed of 1641 refers to “the courthouse” in this area, which may be a reference to this building. However it was more likely built around 1700 as a butter market, with council chambers overhead and markets in front of the building at Market Place. When Inchiquin occupied the town in 1642, he executed the parish priest and his curate, and other prominent citizens here. Local man Edmond Power was also hanged from a window of Market House in 1799 for his involvement with the United Irishmen rebellion of the year before. A Celtic cross was erected to Power’s memory in Gibbon’s Park.

That evening we ate early at the Anchor Bar and enjoyed a beer at the bar of the cosy Local pub on Grattan Square (pictured above) before retiring to Lawlor’s Hotel for the night. Everywhere was packed as Dungarvan, like all other spots on the Greenway, enjoys a renaissance.

We left our bikes overnight in the Dungarvan hire shop which did not open until 9am so I went for an early morning walk at the Augustinian abbey across the Colligan in Abbeyside. The abbey dates from 1290 and was built by monks from Clare Priory in Suffolk, invited by their patron Lord Offaly, Justiciary of Ireland. The tower was a 15th century addition. Inside the ruined chancel is the tomb of Donald McGrath dating to 1470. The McGraths migrated from Thomond (Limerick) to Dungarvan and were church benefactors. The church was ruined in the Cromwellian attack.

After we picked up our bikes for the return trip, we had an unscheduled stop. Barely 7km in, my partner suffered a puncture, reckoning she ran over oyster shells dropped by birds on the causeway (apparently there were several punctures in that area). Luckily the bike hire company provides free service along the Greenway. We rang them up and went back to the nearest roadway. Expecting a significant delay I went into the lovely Railway Cottage for coffee and was surprised to find my partner ready to ride when I came out. They simply swapped one bike for another and did the repairs later.

We stopped again at the Coach House for lunch and approached the River Suir shortly after Kilmeadan station. On a bend of the river is the long established Mount Congreve gardens which re-opened earlier this year after a €6 million investment by Waterford Council which acquired the gardens in 2018. The Gardens were the work of British banker and Tory politician Major Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, who also created Exbury Gardens in the New Forest, Hampshire. Rothschild was a friend of the Waterford garden’s owner and creator Ambrose Congreve, who worked in Air Intelligence for Plans and in Bomber Command and then in the Ministry of Supply during the Second World War. The estate and gardens were familiar to young Raymond Chandler when he holidayed in Waterford with his local-born Quaker mother.

We arrived back in Waterford shortly after lunch just as the pleasant morning weather gave way to clouds and the threat of rain. We enjoyed the last few kilometres on the extension from Gracedieu to the Quay which had opened a month earlier. The plan is to link it with the South East Greenway, the first section of which – 6km from New Ross – has also recently opened. Along with the planned Waterford North Quay development, and a proposed Dungarvan-Mallow Greenway, it is an exciting time for active transport in South East Ireland. The future of the WD&LR promises to be as interesting as its past.

Meagher travel diary Part 10 – Fredericksburg

Site of First Bull Run battlefield with the rebuilt Henry House, near Manassas, Virginia.

After an overnight stay near Harpers Ferry, I drove back to Virginia to see more battlefield sites associated with Thomas Francis Meagher. First I visited the site of First Bull Run, the 1861 battle that was the first major engagement of the war in the Eastern Theatre. War was so novel and so exciting that spectators came out from Washington to enjoy the spectacle. After an early Union success, the Rebels turned the tide at the Henry House (where Thomas Jackson earned his Stonewall nickname) and won the day, sending the Union army and its hapless spectators fleeing back to the capital. The outcome shocked the north and Meagher, then part of the 69th New York regiment, returned home to raise 3000 troops for what would become the Irish Brigade.

Fredericksburg before the civil war.

My next stop was Fredericksburg, Virginia halfway between Washington and Richmond. At this town of 5000 people on the Rappahannock River, the Union and Rebels fought a battle between December 11-15, 1862, mainly on Saturday, December 13. It was among the ten bloodiest battles of the entire war but was disastrous for the union which suffered enormous casualties in the one-sided battle. Like at Antietam three months earlier, the Irish Brigade was in the heart of the action and suffered grievous damage with profound consequences for the army career of its leader, Brigadier General Thomas Francis Meagher.

Army engineers move pontoon boats towards Fredericksburg.

Apart from its tactical value and its road and rail links, Fredericksburg was important symbolically as a colonial settlement where many grand Virginians traced their lineage – including Robert E. Lee and presidents George Washington and James Monroe. Lincoln sacked army leader George McClellan after Antietam and new leader Andrew Burnside’s plan was sound, but complex in timing. Its success would depend on perfect execution – something missing from union assaults so far in the war. The plan relied on bridging the river with pontoon boats which were delayed a month allowing Lee time to fortify his defences overlooking Fredericksburg, on the hill called Marye’s Heights.

Army formations ahead of the battle.

Bridge building began on December 11 interrupted constantly by shells from Rebel artillery. That night Union forces crossed the river to seek shelter in the town centre. The Irish Brigade crossed under bombardment on December 12 and slept an uneasy night near the town docks under heavy artillery fire. The Confederates waited above on the high ground. Just like at Antietam the Irish Brigade would have to contend with a sunken road. The sunken road at Marye’s Heights was concealed by a stone wall and behind it were Confederate infantry who told commanders “a chicken could not live in that field once we open up on it.”

Some of the reconstructed stone walls of Fredericksburg’s sunken lane.

Union forces were ordered to undertake a suicidal charge of the Heights. The first wave was cut down by repeated rifle volleys 100m from the stone wall. A second and third wave charged across the field strewn with the injured and dying. They met a similar fate, with 50 percent casualties. Meagher sent his men on next. The Brigade’s Derry-born private William McCarter said they were within 200 metres of the rebel rifle pits at the stone wall “where a blinding fire of musketry met them in the face”. The Irish rushed forward through a fence past the bodies of dead Union soldiers but were still 50 metres below the stone wall. As Thomas F. Galway of Ohio said the “poor glorious fellows” got no further. “They try to go beyond, but are slaughtered.”

Graves in the Fredericksburg battlefield cemetery.

McCarter said Meagher was severely injured by a cannon ball and “carried off the field”. Meagher’s own report said it was a flare-up of an earlier injury. Meagher complained of an ulcer of the knee joints “trudging up the ploughed fields as well as my lameness would permit me”. He retreated to get his horse, against General Hancock’s order for the assault to proceed on foot. Meagher could no longer be with his men as he promised when the “battle was the fiercest”.

Cannon looks down on the battlefield from the top of Marye’s Heights.

Up ahead Captain Robert Nugent took command as the 69th and 88th reached a house in front of the wall. They were mown down as they climbed into the field beyond it. “It was a living hell from which escape scarcely seemed possible,” Nugent wrote, before he too was wounded and carried off. Survivors of the 69th and 88th retreated as the 28th Massachusetts and 63rd New York came forward into the melee. They were beaten back by intense small arms fire described as a “withering sheet of flame”. Men lay piled in all directions. What was left of the Irish Brigade began to retreat.

Stone wall and Fredericksburg town as seen from the top of Marye’s Heights.

Meagher remounted and started back when he ran into remnants of the 63rd and 69th fleeing the field. They held their spot until ordered to fall back towards a field hospital in town. His remaining men were still badly exposed and Meagher decided to take them out of the city. Meagher admitted he exceeded his orders because of the “terrible accidents to which the wounded of my brigade, lying bleeding and helpless there in those menaced hospitals, were exposed.” His superior General Hancock was initially furious but was later satisfied with Meagher’s explanation. 

The Brompton House on top of the hill was the headquarters of the 3rd South Carolina Infantry during the battle and in 1864 became a union hospital.

There were 14 assaults against the wall that day and all 14 failed. None got closer to the wall than the Irish Brigade. Illustrated London News correspondent Frank Vizetelly was an awestruck observer of the battle on the Confederate side. “From where I stood, with General Lee and Longstreet, I could see the grape, shell and canister from the guns of the Washington artillery mow great avenues in the masses of the Federal troops rushing to the assault, while the infantry, posted behind the breastwork, just under the battery, decimated the nearest columns of the enemy,” Vizetelly wrote. The 28th Massachusetts carried the Irish Brigade’s distinctive green and gold flag which made its charge easy to follow from start to terrible finish. 

Remaining sections of the original wall looking east.

That day, the Union suffered 13,000 casualties, 6000 in front of the wall, while the rebels lost only 4000. Before Fredericksburg, the Irish Brigade had 1200 men. After the bloodbath, it had less than 300 active soldiers. All night the moaning and cries of the wounded rang across Fredericksburg. Captain David Conyngham said it was not a battle but “a wholesale slaughter of human beings – sacrificed to the blind ambition and incapacity of some parties.” The following morning a Rhode Island soldier observed shattered elements of the Irish Brigade wandering about the streets and saw Burnside himself clasping the hand of a weeping Meagher. A day later a new flag arrived for the Brigade giving Meagher the excuse to host what became known as the “death feast” amid continuing bombardment. Though his speech at the banquet was never published, his biographer Cavanagh said Meagher was bitter about the sacrifices his men made.

Site of the Chancellorsville battlefield, May 1863.

After I finished at Fredericksburg I stopped in at nearby Chancellorsville site of a May 1863 battle which was Meagher’s final battle as leader of the Brigade. After Fredericksburg Meagher tried in vain to get furlough for his battered Brigade as he rested in hospital with own injury. He came back to his troops who suffered again at this battle, which was another triumph for Lee (though he lost Stonewall Jackson, accidentally killed by his own side). The defeat and more heavy losses left the Brigade with barely a couple of hundred men and Meagher handed in his resignation. It was surprisingly accepted and Meagher almost instantly regretted it. His men also regretted it calling him their greatest leader, maintaining affection for him for the rest of the war. Though the Brigade stayed intact and saw action at Gettysburg and back at Chancellorsville for the bloody battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in 1864, it never recovered its pre-Fredericksburg strength. Arguably the same is true for Meagher. Although he got a command in Tennessee in late 1864 he had mixed success and he never led his beloved Irish into battle again.

Detail of the Irish Brigade charge at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

See part 9 here.

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.