On this weekend when the citizens of the United States celebrate the foundation of their country with Thanksgiving Day, I would like to point out some little-known connections between our small polity and their great state. I’m also talking about the Irish in Tasmania, who were linked to American democratic and republican ideas.
In the late 1890s, a Tasmanian lawyer, Andrew Inglis Clark, travelled to the US to investigate the political system which had been set up there. He came back with a report which, fundamentally, became the basis for our Federal legislature. We set up a Senate that would respect state rights, but a lower house that was completely democratically elected. One man, one vote – quite swiftly translated to one person, one vote when women got the Federal vote in 1905. So our political system owes a lot to the Tasmanian, Clark, and to the US model.
Let us give thanks that we have modified and extended it, to the extent that we, in Australia, have. Thanks to the Australian Electoral Commission (and compulsory voting) we have possibly the most fair and transparent election system in the world. And it all goes back to the Tasmanian lawyer, Andrew Inglis Clark.
But I have another, older, story to tell.
In 1848, as the Irish Famine reached one of its dreadful peaks, a rebellion was mounted against the English rule of Ireland. Some English politicians and thinkers were actively promoting the famine – they saw it as an “ethnic cleansing” of the “degraded” people of Ireland. They really saw them as not fully human. But the 1848 revolt of the “Young Irish” did not go anywhere. You can’t blame them for trying – the death toll was huge – but the revolt was ill-conceived and led by well-meaning toffs with no connection to the starving peasants.
The Young Irish revolt is often connected to other “Young” revolutions of 1848 in many countries of Europe, but I struggle to see how the concerns of the workers in Paris conflate with the famine of the Irish peasants. However, as said, a rebellion was mounted in Ireland, and swiftly put down. Two of the leaders of the revolt were Thomas Meagher and William Smith O’Brien. There was also a writer, John Mitchel, who had already been transported to Bermuda for sedition when the rebellion broke out. Smith O’Brien was an MP, and Meagher was an impossibly glamourous lawyer and partisan speaker.
The “Young Irish” rebellion was a flop. When it was over, some people were hanged and, in all, eight were transported to Van Diemen’s Land and Mitchel was transferred from Bermuda to this Fatal Shore.
The leader of the group, Smith O’Brien, refused to give his parole (would not promise to not try to escape), and so was held at penal stations, though in congenial conditions and with servants. The other seven prominent exiles were allowed their liberty, but only in different police districts of the island (the size of the Ireland they had come from) and forbidden to meet.
Despite bewailing the tyranny they were under, they seemed to have enjoyed considerable freedom. Two of them, Kevin O‘Doherty and Thomas Meagher, used to meet and dine at a table set up by the local inn-keeper on the mid-point of a bridge over the river which divided their respective police districts, thus thumbing their noses at their “tyranny”.
The glamorous Meagher even married, in captivity, Catherine Bennett, the beautiful daughter of a freed convict. He met her when she and her father had been tumbled in a ditch when their pony trap overturned. Meagher was the knight errant to her damsel in distress. A romantic beginning, but it didn’t go smoothly: the enormous social gulf between the couple proved unbridgeable. Unmatched in anything but looks, it ended in tears when Meagher left his bride literally holding the baby when he escaped the island with the help of an extraordinary character by the name of “Nicaragua” Smyth who was sent out by the New York Irish to rescue the rebels. I stress that I am not making this up.
My personal connection with the story is that John Mitchel was housed on a property called “Nant” (Scots for valley) 5km out of Bothwell in the Central Highlands. I spent a year on Nant when I was a child in 1958 and my parents were overseas. (Nant was still, then, owned by Campbells – it was a very Scottish district.) And I spent much more time there later. The “big house” on Nant is one of the beautiful Georgian-style mansions (actually built mainly in Victorian times) which dot the Tasmanian midlands – the huge grasslands usurped from their Aboriginal occupants. Mitchel, of course did not live in the big house but in a weatherboard cottage. He called Tasmania “The Gardens of Hell”, because he should have been miserable, but found it hard to be, because of the natural beauty of the country; although separated from his beloved wife, Jane.
The great historian – almost the progenitor of Aboriginal history in Australia – Henry Reynolds, points out that if you arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (say, around 1825) with sufficient capital, the government would give you land and the (convict) labour to work it. All you had to do was plug the sheep in to the extensive grasslands conveniently created by aeons of fire-stick farming by the Aboriginal people and watch your investment mature. But, you had to “disperse” the Aborigines. In this process, the Irish were rarely the land-holders, more often the convict shepherds. And in the 1820s and 30s, they were not the colonels but the foot-soldiers and the casualties of the guerrilla Black Wars which destroyed traditional Aboriginal society (and most of the Aboriginal people) in this island. One third of all convicts sent to Australia were Irish.
But the Irish didn’t stay in Tasmania. Tasmania became just a way station in the Irish diaspora. When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851, they left in droves and established a very strong presence on the goldfields, in the Catholic Church and, eventually, the Labor Party. And in the police. The famous outlaw, Ned Kelly (whose father had been a convict in Tasmania), his gang and the troopers he killed at Stringybark Creek were mostly Irish. Ned also made claim to being part of an Irish uprising against English oppression. Whilst he came from an arguably deprived, even oppressed, minority, there was no political movement behind the outlaw Kelly Gang; they were just criminals.
Having successfully escaped Tasmania, Meagher and Mitchel arrived in New York to a hero’s welcome. Mitchel and his wife, Jane, went south and he, after a period as a proto-hippy (to Jane’s great discomfort), became the editor of the Savannah Times, and a supporter of the south in The War Between the States. Meagher, by contrast, rejected his low-born wife who came to him in New York. She had lost their first child, and, although fathering another on her, Thomas sent her off to Ireland and never saw their second child, or her, again. After poor Catherine conveniently died in Ireland, Meagher married money, became a success at the Bar and raised a brigade of New York Irish to fight, with varied success, on the northern side in the Great Divide. After the war he was appointed the governor of the (then) territory of Montana, but drowned after falling from a steamboat on the Missouri River after a card game – he did drink a bit.
To finish on a light note. When Nicaragua Smyth arrived at Nant to liberate Mitchel, John insisted that he must go in to Bothwell to formally withdraw his parole – it was the honourable thing to do. So they rode the 5km to Bothwell, and Smyth held the horses while Mitchel went into the police station and informed the – presumably bemused – constabulary that he no longer felt constrained to remain in the district. With that he marched out, he and Nicaragua mounted up, and off they galloped down the main street of Bothwell. The great Irish Australian writer Tom Keneally reports that as they thundered past, a gutter urchin yelled out, “Three to one the grey!” The Irish – and the Australians – do love their horses, and a punt.
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
