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THE ASSASSIN

3

Henry,

the would-be priest

The display of Master O’Farrell…surprised me…the educated class of Australia Felix will therefore borrow an example from the St Patrick’s Society of that day…and try if they can conduct themselves as…consistently.

— John Pascoe Fawkner, founder of Melbourne.

Henry O’Farrell was born on a level of Empire very different to Prince Alfred, but he too would voyage to the other side of the world and struggle with his destiny and moral compass.

He was only a baby when he left his Irish homeland, too young to understand the passion and pain of his countrymen striving to overcome poverty and British subjection. And too young to know he was leaving Ireland, but Ireland would not be leaving him.

In 1836 his father William, a butcher, and mother Maria took their family from Arran Quay on the Liffey River in Dublin, to sail across the Irish Sea, another ordinary family among tens of thousands seeking something better in Liverpool, Glasgow, London or Manchester.

Capitalising on cheap fares—as low as 10d in steerage and 3d on deck—William O’Farrell chose Liverpool, the Merseyside city which by 1841 had the highest percentage of Irish-born, about one in six, of any English city. Here he renewed his butchery trade in Edge Hill, not far from the thriving docks where some 40 percent of world trade was now passing and where the world’s first inter-city passenger railway station had opened just six years before.

Irish migrants did much of the construction and labouring work of the rail revolution, including the Liverpool–Manchester Railway and Grand Junction Railway workshops, where William O’Farrell met their appetites with sausages and steaks. He did well, a ‘butcher boy of Arran Quay’ who became ‘tolerably successful’ as a butcher and ‘saved a considerable sum of money’.1 But all was not tolerable. Local English Protestants feared for their jobs, with political and religious leading to physical clashes with Catholic workers. Preachers castigated ‘the evil of Popery’ and a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow the Church of England. Hugh McNeile, an Irish-born Anglican cleric, declared:

The time has come when everybody must choose between God’s side and the devil’s. We must fight unto death. We must lay down our lives rather than submit. The struggle has to end only in the subjection of either Catholics or Protestants.2

Protestants like McNeile saw Roman Catholicism as threatening ‘Britain’s providential mission to defend and propagate reformed Christianity’, a mission based on a strong notion of national supremacy reinforced by biblicality and royalty. Queen Victoria herself said her duty was to:

maintain the true and real principles and spirit of the Protestant religion; for her family was brought over and placed on the throne of these realms solely to maintain it; and the Queen will not stand the attempts [that are being] made to…bring the Church of England as near the Church of Rome as they possibly can.3

Young Henry O’Farrell was not to know the choice between God and Devil would become his own, and that leaving Ireland was not the family’s escape from the British–Irish struggle. But William O’Farrell had felt the tumult and bloodshed of the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, when republican-minded Irishmen, influenced by the American and French revolutions, engineered an uprising against British rule, which under Elizabeth I, Charles I, Cromwell and William III had seen the best land confiscated by English and Scottish Protestants, and Irish society divided into the ascendant Protestants and the Celtic Catholic minority.

And while the ‘98 Rebellion resulted in an 1801 union whereby King George III ceased being King of Great Britain and King of Ireland to become the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, there was little unity. The Protestant and Catholic tension and violence of Dublin had travelled to English soil.

William O’Farrell had lived his whole life hearing and seeing Irish Catholics painted as an evil threat to an empire and its religion, the enemy of its moral well-being. The Liverpool Mail even slated O’Farrell family heroes like Daniel O’Connell: ‘One of the many obnoxious vices of popery is that where it prevails, it generates hosts of filthy and importunate mendicants, the vermin of the human race.’4

In 1841, hopeful he and his family could do better in a new land far away, William O’Farrell sailed with his wife, two sons, Henry and older brother Peter, and nine daughters to the Empire’s newest outpost on the other side of the world.

This was as far away from the troubles of Ireland and England as could be, but the O’Farrells would soon discover great oceans were no barrier to old troubles.

The colony of Port Phillip had been founded only six years before they arrived, not from an official colonial expedition but the opportunistic John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner venturing across Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land in search of pastoral land, which they purchased from eight Aboriginal chiefs. They declared Birrarung, as the ancient Wurundjeri people called it, ‘the place for a village.’ The village became ‘the settlement’ and ‘the township’ under various names before becoming Melbourne in 1837 when Queen Victoria, who had just acceded to the throne as an 18-year-old, honoured the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, her Prime Minister and political mentor.

In 1839 the first immigrants from Britain sailed direct to Port Phillip. It was an arduous and sometimes perilous journey, lasting up to 17 weeks, but by the time the O’Farrells arrived a British ship was berthing every week, and they were now among nearly 17,000 people in the province of Port Phillip.

The collection of small clusters of houses, sheds and tents beside the Yarra Yarra River, surrounded by a few low-lying hillocks known as Batman’s Hill, Flagstaff Hill, Eastern Hill and Emerald Hill, was nothing like Dublin or Liverpool, as eight-year-old Henry O’Farrell could readily see.

Most buildings were of ‘wattle and daub’, roofed with coarse shingles or sheets of bark. Bullock-drawn drays and horses battled mud or dust and tree stumps in the so-called streets, with laundry strung up between trees, mostly tea-tree and gums, as strange birds and wildlife screeched and hopped. The summer heat, flies and grasshopper plagues, and the silence of the surrounding bush, was a new experience. And amid the new settlers were about 700 members of three clans of the Aboriginal people who had been there for more than 50,000 years.

There was some English familiarity in a handful of more substantial buildings, the uniformed presence of 10 constables and 25 soldiers, clothes of the fashionable, musical entertainment, and cricket games and horse-racing on the Maribyrnong River flats, where a few bullock drays were lashed together to form a grandstand and the seeds of the first Melbourne Cup to come.

Pubs were also numerous, sometimes rudimentary structures with names reflecting their owner’s origins and clientele, like the Victoria and the Shamrock. But the alcoholic constitution was something else: public houses opened from 4am to 9pm, fuelling rampant drunkenness among men and women, such that in the O’Farrell family’s first summer the Port Phillip Patriot headlined ‘Something remarkable’: there had not been a single charge of drunkenness at the police office the previous day and ‘such a fact is worthy of record for its singularity.’

And what was a young lad like Henry to make of the sight of several hundred men, women and children ‘dressed for the occasion’ to follow two Aboriginals, the condemned Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, as they were driven through the township on a cart to Tyburn Hill, named after London’s execution place, for the colony’s first public hanging? Hundreds ‘most disgusting (in) spirit…(were) scrambling for places; several jumped upon the coffins’5 while ‘about 20 of the Aborigines were observed witnessing the execution from the branches of neighbouring trees.’6 Or then seeing the men convulse for 30 minutes as they slowly strangled to death due to a botching by the volunteer hangman? Or the sights and tales of Aborigines carrying and throwing spears, escaped convicts, bushrangers, treadmills, stocks, duels, whippings, prostitutes, drunks and dandies.

For young Henry, this new world was a mind-spinning alchemy of the familiar and unfamiliar, freedom and violence. Georgine McCrae, wife of a solicitor, said Melbourne was a place which ‘requires a constitution of Indian rubber elasticity to sustain it’.7 She was talking of the climate, but her point was more universal. In the emerging society the ‘gentlemen’ of English birth and title found themselves competing with the ‘gentlemen’ of a transported polite society—Church of England clergy, barristers, university graduates, army and navy officers, and former civil and military officers of the East India Company—and in turn with the new riche of colonial merchants, squatters, bankers, and land agents.

New arrivals like the O’Farrells could never completely forget the 1690 Battle of Boyne, when William of Orange’s crushing victory secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland for generations, but they could sense this was a new frontier of potential for those wanting improvement and independence, or escape financial loss, debt or disgrace.

A woman wrote to Caroline Chisholm in 1846: ‘Oh what a difference there is between this country and home…Old England is a fine place for the rich, but the Lord help the poor’8 and another told her children, ‘we have brought our manners, our education and our individuality with us, but left conventionality behind.’ Some optimistically declared ‘this place is perhaps the most rising settlement in the world’9 and a land dealer declared ‘there is no doubt Melbourne will yet surpass London’10 but there was a broad optimism that one’s birth, background or religion might not matter so much in a new world where men cherished freedom and adventure, and could forge new definitions of merit, character, respectability and wealth.

The clash of English gentility and high-spirited men in pursuit of commercial and personal opportunity meant society was quarrelsome, especially over money, honour, politics and religion. The Port Phillip Gazette observed the settlement ‘boils over like a bush cauldron with the scum of fierce disputes.’11 ‘Gentlemen’ fought the ‘respectable’. Overlanders from Sydney and Adelaide fought over-straiters from Van Diemen’s Land. Port Phillip fought Sydney. Townsmen fought squatters. Convicts fought settlers. Aborigines fought pastoralists. English fought Irish. Orange fought Green. Protestants fought Catholics.

William O’Farrell and his family were among more than 2000 Catholics: freed convicts, pioneering settlers, and a rising number on the back of bounty and assisted passage schemes. But even 10,000 miles from home, Port Phillip was an English settlement with English/Protestant rule set against what was seen as inferior, ignorant, violent or seditious Irish Catholics.

Catholics and Protestants favoured their own when it came to doing business with butchers, bakers, pubs, clubs and drapers. Many immigrant Irish moved to the western side of Melbourne, amid emerging livestock sale yards, horse bazaar, slaughter-houses and nearby Flemington racecourse. Butchers wanted to be close to stock, which they slaughtered on their shop premises, rather than public slaughterhouses because, they argued, shops needed to be supplied quickly with fresh meat because of the warmer Australian climate.

It was here O’Farrell resumed his butcher’s trade in Elizabeth Street, near the corner of Victoria Street. One of the ‘wretched apologies for streets’, it was more a gully in summer and a creek in winter, when so much water gathered at the intersection with Collins Street it was known as Lake Cashmore.12

He also resumed his interest in Irish affairs, one of the emigrants to advertise a meeting at which ‘all true sons of the Emerald Isle are expected to be in attendance’ to form an association to ‘promote the education of Irish children and the cherishing of Irish patriotism’.13 Five hundred Irishmen formed the St Patrick’s Society of Australia Felix, the Latin name for ‘fortunate Australia’ or ‘happy Australia’ coined by New South Wales surveyor Thomas Mitchell after an exploration of Port Phillip pastoral lands.

O’Farrell spoke at the meeting, whose principal resolution was ‘for the encouragement of national feeling, the relief of the destitute, the promotion of education and generally whatever may be considered by its members best calculated to promote the happiness, the honour and the prosperity of their native and adopted lands’.14

Rule 1 of the new society was designed to curb the sectarianism and feuds they wanted to leave behind, declaring membership to be open to any person ‘of whatever political creed or religious denomination, being a native of Ireland or descended from Irish parents.’

William O’Farrell joined the committee, along with Belfast-born schoolmaster David Boyd, who was now teaching his young son Henry. Rev. Dr Boyd had distinguished himself in classics and mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, before deciding in 1838 to pursue the adventure and opportunities of colonial Australia. Aged just 27 he began an ‘academy’ in Queen Street, impressing his young charges with his manly and intellectual qualities. One student recalled:

He was an accomplished person. A first-rate classical scholar, with a fair knowledge of French, German and Italian, possibly Hebrew, for he knew pretty well everything, from astronomy to single-stick, fencing to comparative philosophy. He rode, drove, shot, fished, painted, was musical, mathematical, a mesmerist doubtless.15

O’Farrell was determined his sons Henry and older brother Peter would never be dismissed as ‘mere Irish’, seeking to give them the best possible introductions to education, church and society, or as the Ballarat Star later reported, ‘educated in a manner to fit them for positions higher than the trade followed by their father.’16

But just as Henry was finding his feet in his first year in the new world of Melbourne he lost his mother. Just 46, the cause of her death was not recorded, but emigrant ships carried numerous diseases. In the streets of Melbourne, stagnant water and human and animal waste also fuelled dysentery, cholera, scarlet fever and ‘colonial fever’, later known as typhoid. An epidemic of ‘colonial fever’ in the 1841/42 summer killed 20 people each week.

The year 1842 also saw Port Phillip fall into several years of depression after the free-spirited pursuit of fame and fortune led to excessive and unsustainable land speculation, sharp deals and bank loans on questionable security. The problems were accelerated by a government decision to sell outlying land for only £1 an acre, collapsing livestock prices and causing widespread insolvency.

Without his wife and facing economic challenges, William O’Farrell wrapped himself and his sons in the arms of the Catholic Church and the new St Patrick’s Society, the heartland of Irish Australian consciousness.

William’s plans for his sons were based on faith, family and finance, a trinity that would change the lives of the whole family.

The O’Farrells were among the first to attend a rudimentary small Catholic chapel, built of old floorboards and salvaged building materials on what had been a treed site at the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale Streets. Called to St Francis by a bell hanging from a large gum tree, Henry listened to the preaching of the settlement’s first priest, Father Patrick Bonaventure Geoghegan, and attend the first christenings, including Mary MacKillop, a future saint.

The Dublin-born Fr. Geoghegan, a chubby little man known for his liberal mind and tolerance, had been an orphan, spending five years in a Protestant ‘proselytising institute’ before he was ‘rescued’ by a Catholic priest and admitted into a new St Bonaventure’s Charitable Institution in Dublin for a Catholic education before becoming a priest.17

He had been appointed by the colony’s Sydney-based Archbishop, John Bede Polding, an English Benedictine monk with a vision for a Catholic Church founded on monastic ideals. He believed scholarship and sublime liturgy, accompanied by Gregorian chant, would, as in earlier centuries in Europe, civilise and convert this new country.

But most of Polding’s priests, the first of whom came out as convicts, and their congregations, were, like Fr. Geoghegan, more Irish than English, and did not embrace his vision. Irish Catholics wanted the Church to take a more aggressive stand against inequalities, which Fr. Geoghegan experienced when he first went to pay his respects to Melbourne’s first Anglican Bishop, Charles Perry. When presented with the priest’s calling card he ‘recoiled from it as if it were a snake (and) returned it with a caustic note, a freezing intimation that he could not recognise the Rev. P.B. Geoghegan in any shape or form, officially or otherwise, in fact conveying the idea that he wished to shun the card-sender as though he were an emissary from the Evil One’.18

Protestant–Catholic tensions also surfaced within the new St Patrick’s Society. This came to the fore at the society’s inaugural St Patrick’s Day procession in 1843, when young Henry would have trotted happily behind a throng of men and women, dressed in green and wearing green and white rosettes and scarves. With a band playing cherished tunes such as St Patrick’s Day and Faugh-a-Ballagh and behind a banner featuring a gilt emblem of an Irish harp, they proudly marched, some twirling a fighting shillelagh, and most ‘liquoring up at frequent short intervals’.

At the rebuilt St Francis, Fr. Geoghegan delivered the first High Mass in Port Phillip, angering Protestant Irishmen who felt it undermined the society’s non-sectarian principle. And more substantial tension was simmering. The St Patrick’s Society met at the Builders Arms Hotel, a ‘groggery’ owned by an O’Farrell family friend, Timothy Lane. William Kerr, editor of the Port Phillip Patriot derisively nicknamed the hotel as ‘the Greek and Co stables’. Influenced by anti-Catholic rhetoric of clergymen like the Scot, John Dunmore Lang, Kerr fuelled the Catholic–Protestant feud as journalist and as provincial grand master of the Orange Association, which asserted St Patrick’s was ‘a religious and political brotherhood, which under a pretence of nationality was fomenting sectarian strife and animosity.’

Irish interests were promoted by the rival Port Phillip Herald. Under the masthead motto ‘impartial not neutral’, owner-editor George Cavenagh allowed an Irishman, Edmund Finn, to write freely to balance the ‘foul-penned ribaldry, unprecedented in the annals of decent or undecent journalism’.19 Finn had arrived from Tipperary the same year as the O’Farrells. He was destined to be a priest but at 22 he migrated to Australia where he initially taught the classics but then achieved writing fame as the writer ‘Garryowen’, the name of a Limerick neighbourhood and popular Irish drinking tune. He became secretary of the St Patrick’s Society when John O’Shanassy, a former squatter and founding spirit of the society became president.

Notwithstanding colonial challenges and tensions, it was an improvement on the sectarian violence of Liverpool and misery of Dublin. William O’Farrell would have felt both sadness and vindication when newspapers reported the Irish Famine as making his birthplace like a city of the plague, burying ‘poor creatures in a large pit’ and ‘women children and infants of the tenderest age—all huddled together, like so many pigs or dogs, on the ground, without any other covering but the rags on their person’20 and described an estimated 300,000 starving and destitute Irish men, women and children descending on the docks of Liverpool in just five months in 1847.

His butchery was surviving well enough, helping sustain the colonial boast of ‘meat three times a day’, and his sons, especially young Henry, were being embraced by a rising Catholic Church. After his wife’s death he placed Henry as a boarder at the Melbourne Analytical Seminary for General Education run by an elocutionist, Mr James McLaughlin, to learn the classics, theology and elocution.

Henry was impressing influential men within the Catholic fraternity and beyond. A few days after the 1846 St Patrick’s Day parade and patriotic banquet, the Port Phillip Herald received a letter from ‘Pascoeville’, the home of pioneer John Pascoe Fawkner, in which he said ‘the display of Master O’Farrell, though a youth of sixteen (sic) years, actually surprised me…the educated class of Australia Felix will therefore borrow an example from the St Patrick’s Society of that day.’ Applauding what he had seen and heard at the dinner, he forwarded £1 for the St Patrick’s Society school, and £1 for the society.

He had never been so pleasantly excited ‘since I founded this Town of Melbourne in August 1835’ as when he looked around the banquet and saw ‘clearly manifest the true spirit of freedom, as displayed by the yeomen of Australia Felix…so many well-dressed, well-informed men united in the bonds of good fellowship’.21

In a banner-festooned marquee erected alongside the Builders Arms Hotel, president O’Shanassy said his first duty to the 300 guests was to pay ‘undivided homage to her most gracious Queen Victoria’, Prince Albert and their family, including princes Alfred and Edward, the latter ‘destined, we fervently hope to be our future Sovereign.’22

Henry O’Farrell heard O’Shanassy, who would later become Premier of Victoria, declare that those who attacked the ‘mere Irish’ wanted to deprive them of religious and civil liberty, notwithstanding that Irishmen had long supported a monarchical form of government ‘as the best safeguard for the happiness and liberties of people’, and had ‘left their bones to whiten on many a hard fought field, unwept, unhonoured and unsung…proving to the world their devoted adherence to the King.’

Irishmen would rally, he said, to any threat to the throne from a foreign foe, ‘or a more insidious enemy, a domestic faction…likely to subvert the ancient equipoise of Queen, Lords and Commons’.

Fr. Geoghegan also proposed a toast to the clergy of all denominations and the inalienable right of free worship. But in the hearts of Irish Catholics like the O’Farrells, loyalty to the monarchy ought not be at the expense of loyalty to their homeland, and free worship ought to come with other freedoms and fairness.

‘When an Irishman forgets his country he forgets himself’,23 Edmund Finn told the dinner, saying love of country increased in proportion to its impoverishment and trials. Irishmen might seek exile but this love ‘hovers round him like a guardian angel…whispers to him…a gentle monitor warning him through his future career in life’.24

This ‘guardian angel’ hovered around Henry O’Farrell. He had left too young to have an Ireland to forget, but his mind had been shaped by continuous whispers, the stories of how oppression had forced his family and people to the other side of the world, where the battle continued.

Now he heard speakers, including his teacher, James McLaughlin, talk of a ‘revolution’ in the colony, a time in history when the colonist would ‘not be respected by the weight of his purse, or by the number of his sheep and cattle stations…but by the good he confers on mankind by example and precept…there is a great revolution at hand—not of the sword for that has been too much already—but a revolution of the mind.’

William O’Farrell delivered a toast to the banquet stewards, but it was his son’s address on behalf of the ‘juveniles’ which warmed John Fawkner and the St Patrick’s audience.

‘I have never before addressed a public assembly, and therefore it is probable that I shall require your indulgence,’ the teenage O’Farrell said, ‘and I know that you will grant it because you are of the generous and brave sons of the beautiful Green Isle’.

He spoke of the value of sound education, which could bring ‘civilisation to the uncivilised, industry to the indolent, unity and peace to the fierce and intractable, and a knowledge of divine truth to all’.

Those who were educated and did not use it for a good purpose were worse than the most ignorant, ‘for he abuses the gift of Providence, and sets a bad example to his less favoured brethren’.

He could not understand those parents and guardians iron-hearted to misery and degradation. ‘Are they not warned almost every day of their existence by fresh proofs of the lamentable consequences of ignorance and early mismanagement?’ He hoped the ‘supreme dispenser of all events’ would ‘abolish this pernicious apathy’ and inspire all minds with a desire for improvement and happiness, the path for ‘peace, order and elegance’ in the Australia Felix.

The passionate speech demonstrated an intelligence and confidence to hold the attention of others, although it also hinted at patriotic intensity and distaste for those in power and influence seen to be part of the Irish problem, not the solution. A mind that was perhaps capable of bringing anything but peace, order and elegance in the Australia Felix.

To his newspaper’s report, the editor of the Port Phillip Herald appended: ‘This speech, from the youth of the speaker, excited much admiration—ED.’ It called him ‘Master Daniel O’Connell O’Farrell’ while the Ballarat Star referred to him as ‘Master Henry James Daniel O’Connell O’Farrell’ and Edmund Finn as ‘D.O.C.’ referencing Daniel ‘The Liberator’ O’Connell for his battle for Irish Catholic emancipation.

Three months later at a St Patrick’s Society theatrical benefit, the first item was a verse recital by ‘a show scholar’,25 the young O’Farrell ‘of the Melbourne seminary, the youth who so creditably acquitted himself at the Hibernian Festival.’

The Herald reported that O’Farrell demonstrated a ‘manifestly considerable presence of mind’, the crowd so impressed that ‘feelings of acclamation…accompanied him through its different stages.’26 But the reality of Irish–Protestant tension was driven home to the O’Farrells the following month on the anniversary of the Battle of Boyne. The Orange Society of Melbourne celebrated by unfurling orange flags from the windows of the Pastoral Hotel, which excited ‘all the prejudices, and all the animosities which have…been in existence for so many years between the Orangemen and those professing the Catholic Faith.’27

In what Edmund Finn described as ‘a day of terror…the town looked as if in a state of siege’,28 an angry mob of Catholics demanded the removal of the banners and hurled stones. Despite the efforts of the mayor, ‘the report of a piece (gun) was heard inside’, and some of the mob rushed the Pastoral while ‘the parties outside who were armed fired at the windows of the house, and were quickly replied to from within’.

Despite ‘the continual fire kept up from the windows’, Fr. Geoghegan tried to persuade his Church members to leave, while John O’Shanassy, who the anti-Catholic press described as a ‘notorious ring-leader of the Irish rabble in civic matters’,29 tried to move the priest away from danger.

Several men were shot before the police eventually managed to disperse everyone, but tensions simmered. Superintendent Charles La Trobe and Town Magistrate William Mair ordered all pubs to be closed for the day, and went to the rival gatherings with mounted police. They found the Orangemen at a pub in Flinders Lane ‘armed to the teeth’ with 200 pistols and 70 muskets, and the Irishmen on the green facing Lonsdale Street prepared for ‘war to the knife’ with their own arsenal of guns, pistols and blunderbusses. The Mayor ‘read the Riot Act’ to each party and ‘in the Queen’s name’ commanded them to disperse.30

The Argus gave full vent to anti-Irish Catholic sentiment, publishing a special report on the ‘Popish riot’ to be sent to the mother country on the next mail ship. It denounced the ‘Popish rabble’ and ‘Popish murderers’ for reducing Melbourne to the most unsettled districts of Ireland, ‘the nest from which these birds of ill-omen were set loose on the province’.

An accompanying verse by ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’ said those Melbourne Orangemen who dreamed the law in Australia would be ‘strong enough at least to clip the Papist rabble’s claws’ had to realise they must emulate what their fathers had done in the 1798 Rebellion lest ‘A Romish mob, uncheck’d, work out their Church’s vile decrees’.31

While Orangemen and Protestants evoked Cromwell’s maxim of ‘put your faith in God, my boys, but mind to keep your powder dry’, an undaunted Fr. Geoghegan convened a public meeting in the St Francis school-room to ‘raise a fund for the relief of the poor Irish now suffering under the visitation of an almost unparalleled famine’. The ever critical Argus said it could not provide details because it ‘could not reasonably be expected to adventure our own life, or ask a reporter to peril his, by attending such a meeting’.32 Its editor claimed some society members had intimated their intention ‘to assassinate him whenever opportunity offers.’33

Following the ‘Popish riots’, NSW Governor Charles FitzRoy prohibited party processions in Port Phillip, still run as an extension of New South Wales, with an exemption for English fraternities, the Freemasons and Odd Fellows. The St Patrick’s Society suspended its annual march for several years, although 500 gathered on St Patricks Day in 1847 to lay a foundation stone for one of Melbourne’s first halls, St Patrick’s Hall, ‘dedicated to the memory of Ireland’, and attend a banquet at Queen’s Theatre, where William O’Farrell was one of many speakers.

It was an auspicious day for the O’Farrells the following year when they welcomed the first Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, James Alipius Goold. The son of a prosperous family in Cork and Augustinian missionary, Goold was consecrated in 1848 in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, at the age of 35, before leaving immediately on a ground-breaking 600 mile coach journey to Port Phillip, arriving in 19 days despite heavy rain.

Escorted into Melbourne by more than 100 horsemen and 50 carriages, Goold enthused Irish Catholics as he quickly set out to make the church a more recognised influence. He fought with the Anglican Bishop about the use of the title ‘Bishop of Melbourne’, opposed Anglican claims of precedence at government functions, and defended Irish immigrant orphans being attacked by administrators because of their difficulties assimilating into a township environment.

The ambitious Bishop Goold, who inherited just two buildings and four priests, saw the need for an enhanced physical and fiscal Catholic presence. He created a new seminary attached to St Francis, which became the de facto cathedral church before determinedly beginning what became an 80-year project, the grand and gothic St Patrick’s Cathedral on Eastern Hill in East Melbourne.

In addition to the cathedral project and securing 64 church buildings in his first 13 years, Goold also sought more clergy to meet the rapidly growing population. He particularly wanted some home-grown priests, especially as he found some of the colony’s imported priests were ‘bad and faithless’, their example and scandal nearly destroying the ‘faith of the people, as they had ruined their morals.’34

For William O’Farrell this was all a heaven-sent opportunity: his eldest son Peter had become a solicitor and was handling the growing legal issues and property profits of Dr Goold and senior clergy, and institutions such as the Bank of Victoria. Henry had been confirmed into the church by Archbishop Polding and was now a candidate to make his mark in matters of prophet, having been educated and mentored within leading Catholic ranks. He had made an impression on Archbishop Goold who now admitted Henry into his new seminary for theological education.

A father’s prayers looked like being answered, but while his sons were making progress, William O’Farrell was too easily branded a ‘mick shin-boner’ or ‘bog-Irish butcher’. This wasn’t going to optimise life for himself or aid his sons’ potential, so he successfully applied in 1848 to become a council rate collector in the Gipps ward, the area around west Melbourne where he had worked as a butcher, and then took on the role of Town Auctioneer of seized property.

The following year, 1849 William O’Farrell and ‘O’Farrell Junior’ addressed 400 Irishmen at the new St Patricks Hall on the sensitive issue of emigration from Ireland, questioning why Irish numbers were disproportionately less than Englishmen and Scots, and whether eligible Irishmen were being refused bounty passages because English emigrants were preferred.

The Argus said ‘Mr O’Farrell, junior’ strongly pressed the St Patrick’s Society role to cherish Irish patriotism, noting the Irish were known to demonstrate ‘justifiable ardour’ and be ‘most tenacious of their rights when those rights have once been clearly established’.

As England ‘cannot find food for her starving subjects, but more particularly those of Ireland’, there should be no hesitation in advising people to ‘leave that country which is no longer their own, which has ceased to be that happy land’.

‘Tyranny had grown strong’, he said, and it was, ‘notorious that offences are committed by individuals impelled to do so by want, and (now) being sent out as prisoners here, have that wish afforded them as felons which was denied them as freemen! Irishmen endure much from poverty, before they are betrayed into a dishonourable action…the Irish behold their more favoured countrymen in opulence, they are called upon to starve in the sight of plenty…perpetually in view whom they consider were the originators of all their misfortunes’.35

Instead of spending millions of pounds to transport convicts to Australia, it would be cheaper and more beneficial for both England and Australia if some of those funds assisted more settler migration.

O’Farrell also said: ‘With regard to Ireland we may exclaim: Bleed, bleed, poor country! Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dare not check thee!’ and while other nations would gladly populate ‘for such a prize as Australia. I shall not pursue the current of…free thoughts, they are too high and daring to be uttered by Irish lips in these times.’36

Around the time Henry O’Farrell was talking of tyranny and daring, the St Patrick’s community was absorbing the news that a young unemployed Irishman, William Hamilton, had aimed an improperly loaded pistol at Queen Victoria during a carriage ride, the fourth attempt on her life. Hamilton was not represented at trial, and only had to wait a few minutes before the Chief Justice sentenced him: seven years exile for his bid for ‘notoriety’, to be transported to Melbourne.

While the assassination attempt was the talk of the town, the O’ Farrells were all being embraced by the Catholic Church. William O’Farrell had become a property agent and dealer, while Peter advised and managed land deals for the Catholic hierarchy. After being tutored in the new seminary the Bishop conferred ‘minor orders’ on Henry in a three-hour ceremony at St Francis Church, one of the first ordinations in the colony.

In the ceremony, just before Christmas 1850, the crowded church was reminded of the custom of taking those ‘who were fitting and had an inclination for spiritual calling in order to advance them to that holy state’, and putting them on the path to priesthood.

A few months later, the Bishop, mitred and in pontifical robes, ordained Henry as sub-deacon,37 and presented him with his own robe and empty chalice—‘see what kind of ministry is given to you’—and blessed him. Then in 1852, having met the pre-requisites of church knowledge and age, Henry was ordained as deacon.38

A deacon’s role included preparing and presenting bread and wine and sacred vessels for the Holy Sacrifice and Eucharist, solemnly chanting the Epistles, and helping minister Mass to prisoners in Melbourne’s new Pentridge Stockade.

Henry was now also bound to celibacy, the renunciation of marriage ‘for the more prefect observance of charity’. Bishop Goold would have given the traditional warning at the ceremony about the gravity of the obligation: You ought anxiously to consider again and again what sort of a burden this is which you are taking upon you of your own accord. Up to this you are free. You may still, if you choose, turn to the aims and desires of the world. But if you receive this order it will no longer be lawful to turn back from your purpose. You will be required to continue in the service of God, and with His assistance to observe chastity and to be bound for ever in the ministrations of the Altar, to serve who is to reign.

Following ordination, Henry’s next step on his pathway to priesthood was to travel to the Continent to further his education with visits to centuries-old Irish colleges and seminaries in France, Italy and Belgium as well as visits to England and Ireland.

Just as Queen Victoria and her government hoped Prince Alfred’s travels would ‘complete’ his development as a more bona fide royal, so William O’Farrell and his Catholic Church hoped Henry O’Farrell’s travels would ‘complete’ his development as a bona fide priest.

Selected References

The Australasian, (15 February 1842); Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868); Melbourne Daily News, (13 September 1849); Port Phillip Patriot, (30 December 1841)

endnotes

1 Complete Report Attempted Assassination of HRH Prince Alfred, Together with a Biography and Portrait of the Assassin O‘Farrell, (Sydney: Gibbs, Shallard and Co., 1868), p. 8.

2 Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence in the Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 58.

3 George Buckle, The Letters of Queen Victoria Second Series, (London: John Murray, 1926), p. 877.

4 Neal, Sectarian Violence in the Liverpool Experience, p. 58.

5 The Australasian, (15 February 1842).

6 Geelong Advertiser, (24 January 1842).

7 Paul de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne Before the Gold Rushes, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 35.

8 Margaret Kiddle, Caroline Chisholm, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), p. 195.

9 de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen, p. 37.

10 Robyn Annear, Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2005), p. 232.

11 de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen, p. 42.

12 Edmund Finn, (Garryowen) The Cyclorama of Early Melbourne, an Historical Sketch,(Melbourne: Robert Brain, Government Printer, 1892), p. 15.

13 Melbourne Times, (25 June 1842).

14 Port Phillip Gazette, (2 July 1842).

15 Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate, (9 April 1892).

16 Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868).

17 Advocate, (18 March 1948).

18 Edmund Finn, Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835–1852 by ‘Garryowen’, (Melbourne: Fergusson and Mitchell 1888), pp. 125.

19 ibid., pp. 647, 652, 650.

20 Port Phillip Patriot, (21 September 1846).

21 Port Phillip Herald, (24 March 1846).

22 ibid., (18 March 1846).

23 ibid., (19 March 1846).

24 Edmund Finn, St Patrick’s Societies, Their Principles and Purposes, (Melbourne: Walker May and Co, 1860), p. 4.

25 Finn, Chronicles of Early Melbourne, pp. 637, 652.

26 Port Phillip Herald, (5 June 1846).

27 Port Phillip Gazette, (15 July 1846).

28 Finn, Chronicles of Early Melbourne p. 684.

29 Argus, (24 July 1846).

30 Port Phillip Gazette, (15 July 1846).

31 Argus, (24 July 1846).

32 ibid., (14 August 1846).

33 ibid., (25 August 1846).

34 Brian Condon (transcr.) Diary James Alipius Goold, April 26, May 25 1853, (Adelaide: University South Australia, 2000), www.library.unisa.edu.au/condon/Goold

35 Argus, (13 September 1849).

36 Melbourne Daily News, (13 September 1849).

37 Condon, Diary James Goold, 11 April 1851.

38 Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868).