an amiable woman of stupendous proportions, and proportionate loquacity. Her husband is Wesleyan too, a shoe-maker by trade, and a spectre in appearance; so much so, indeed, that the wife may be styled, with the strictest geometric propriety, his ‘better half’ and three-quarters.
‘Sir,’ said Mrs Anderson, sticking a pin into the sleeve of her gown, and spreading down her apron before her … ‘You see as how it is, me and my husband be Wesleyans, and we don’t like a’cooking on Sundays …’ [Meagher told the husband he didn’t mind cold meat, but] ‘Potatoes, you know, Mr Anderson, are very insipid when cold.’ … A moment’s consultation sufficed—a new light descended on Mr Anderson and, yielding to the inspiration, he pronounced it to be his opinion that a boiled potato would not break the Sabbath.
The evening of the same day of Meagher’s journey to Campbell Town, MacManus was landed from Swift with orders to travel a little north-west of Hobart to the town of New Norfolk, on the banks of the same Derwent River, and O’Doherty and Martin were landed from Emma with orders to catch the Launceston night coach to Oatlands. This was to be O’Doherty’s area; for the immediate future he and Meagher were to be neighbours without rights of visit. Martin was to continue on north-west from Oatlands to a village named Bothwell. The Irish editor of the Hobart Guardian, John Moore, promised O’Doherty and Martin a dray to bring on luggage behind the coach. Now, before departing Hobart, they went to the post office in Moore’s coach to make arrangements for the redirection of their mail, and then on to the Albion Inn, terminus for the New Norfolk coach, where they were excited to find MacManus waiting for transport. A crowd of sympathisers gathered, and took the three Irish heroes to a reception room in the inn, where they were called on to make speeches. MacManus, O’Doherty and Martin had landed to an ’82 Club kind of warmth in the capital of their province of exile.
When the coach delivered Martin and O’Doherty that night at the Oatlands Inn, they discovered that it was owned and operated by a Tipperary man, John Ryan. Ryan provided O’Doherty with a rent-free stone cottage, Elm Cottage, which still stands. After their first breakfast on land ‘St Kevin’ O’Doherty and ‘John Knox’ Martin reported to the Oatlands magistrate, and then Martin climbed aboard a gig belonging to a settler, and set off to pick up the westward road to Bothwell.
It had been decided between Governor Denison and the Comptroller-General of Convicts, Dr Hampton, a youngish man with a specialty in tropical diseases, that O’Donohoe be permitted to live in Hobart Town. O’Brien had generously forced five sovereigns into O’Donohoe’s hands before he landed. For a while he lived in a hotel, but his resources were so restricted that at last he rented a back room from a Mrs Ludgater. The priests of Hobart opened their homes to him. Bishop Willson, the Catholic bishop, a former Nottingham farmer and friend of O’Connell, who had devoted himself particularly to care of the insane, of whom there were many amongst convicts, also offered open house to O’Donohoe. O’Donohoe was, however, spiky about accepting charity.
Smith O’Brien’s immediate destiny was the most dramatic of all. He was taken from Swift at seven o’clock on the morning of 31 October, and was rowed across the port of Hobart to the Kangaroo, a neat little 52-ton steamer. He found the journey out of the Derwent and up Van Diemen’s Land’s east coast impressive—Cape Pillar in particular reminded him of the Giant’s Causeway. ‘The outline of this coast resembles much some parts of the highlands of Scotland and the mountain regions of Ireland.’ Maria Island itself looked nearly as mountainous as the mainland coastline it echoed. By nightfall the Kangaroo dropped its anchor off Darlington Probation Station on the north shore of the island, and Mr Lapham, the superintendent, a Kildare Irishman ten years younger than O’Brien, came aboard with the visiting magistrate to call on their famed prisoner. O’Brien took a liking to Lapham, and Lapham in turn showed the awed respect the son of a middling Irish Protestant farmer should to the descendant of Irish kings and huge landowners.
By the light of next morning, O’Brien saw the white-lined settlement of Darlington, standing on a spit of land beneath its twin mountains primly named the Bishop and the Clerk, and noticed a substantial prison. ‘To find the gaol in one of the loveliest spots formed by the hand of nature … creates a revulsion of feeling which I cannot describe.’ There were about 130 convicts in Darlington, some of whom, O’Brien noticed, wore grey, and others yellow chequered with black—the magpie suit reserved for second offenders. Lapham’s instructions were that O’Brien was not to be subjected to ‘coercive employment’ nor to be made to wear prison clothing. He should have ‘a little house’ to himself. Brought ashore now, Smith O’Brien was greeted on landing by Patrick Lynch, a young Irish convict, assistant to the Catholic chaplain, who had worked for his father on the Dromoland estate. O’Brien then walked up the small hill into the shallow protected valley where the settlement lay, and was introduced to his convict overseer, a former soldier named George Miller.
The main settlement was laid out to make an oblong with administrative buildings at either end, and the long sides made up of the chapel, a series of convict and military barracks, and a row of connected cottages, each with a little garden behind it. One of these cottages O’Brien was given, ‘about the size of one of the smallest bathing lodges at Kilkee surrounded by a few borrowed articles of the rudest furniture.’ It had two rooms, and an attic which had a chimney opening to serve as a midget fireplace. Here, as sub-Antarctic winds combed the island, he could write his letters and his journal.
Things did not at first look utterly dismal. Given that Captain Bayly, visiting magistrate, and Lapham and his deputy were all Irish, and considered O’Brien distinguished company to be enjoyed, there were reasons for comfort. Lapham permitted O’Brien to make excursions—he ‘rode with Captain Bayly and some of the other residents to Long Point,’ a probation station about 6 miles south of the main station. He was also allowed to walk around the northern end of the island, an area of open grassy shore, populated by Cape Barren geese, and dotted with the huts of the storekeeper and religious instructor. On this slope above the sea he could visit the cemetery, the graves of soldiers’ wives and children, and that of a Maori chieftain, Hehepa te Umoroa, who had died on the island after offering too good a resistance to Governor FitzRoy and sundry British regiments in New Zealand.
He began writing verse again, his first Australian poem being dedicated to a walking-stick Captain Aldham had given him, made of a vine branch cut on the Elysian Fields near Naples. It was such a twig which enabled Aeneas to climb out of the underworld.
Say—to this rod is equal power given?
Say shall this rod uphold my faltering steps
Whilst I retrace the path to Liberty?
Letters to Lucy he would not write while they were subject to official scrutiny.
13
BY ORDER OF GREAT DENISON
This attempt to mortify my vanity and to degrade me from a position in society which the officials of Hobart Town can neither give nor take away has been as unsuccessful as was their attempt to vex my corporeal organs by withholding from them the fare to which they have been accustomed.
Smith O’Brien, to Thomas Francis Meagher,
Maria Island, December 1849
Dr John Stephen Hampton, Comptroller-General of Convicts, believed that if O’Brien had too sociable a time on Maria Island, he would find it easy to avoid giving his parole. Until that parole was extracted, O’Brien would have the twin-benefit of appearing a martyr to the larger world, while enjoying the congenial company of Mr and Mrs Lapham, their charming daughters, Captain and Mrs Bayly, the Catholic chaplain Father Woolfrey and Surgeon Smart, the island’s physician. During a brief visit to the island soon after O’Brien arrived, Dr Hampton made it clear to Lapham that not only was O’Brien forbidden to enter the house of any official, but they were not to speak to him except in performance of their duty. ‘The system of petty persecution which I have been led to expect has commenced,’ wrote Smith O’Brien in his
cottage. He had been receiving the hospital ration, but was now to receive the regular convict ration of flour, meat and vegetables with small amounts of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, soap, vinegar, and milk. It was enough to live on, but monotonous and less in quantity than Captain Aldham had allowed him on board the Swift.
Even on Maria Island, and in something like solitary confinement, O’Brien knew how to use his world audience, writing after lock-up to former friends, telling them of the tyranny under which he was being held. His regular correspondents included his friend Chisholm Anstey, middle-aged Irish Member of the House of Commons, who had lived in his youth in Tasmania, and the Reverend Charles Monsell, the Church of Ireland minister married to O’Brien’s sister, Harriett. Both Anstey and Monsell were friends of a rising Whig politician, William Gladstone, and Hampton—perhaps for fear of questions in the House of Commons—let those letters through. In the minuscule upper room of his hut, while Tasmanian gales nudged his windows, O’Brien, who had never in his crowded life been so lonely, also favoured his brother Sir Lucius with mail. ‘Every human being—man, woman, and child—is forbidden upon pain of instant removal from this Island to hold any intercourse with me,’ O’Brien told Lucius.
But letters to the other prisoners and citizens within Van Diemen’s Land were easier to seize or censor without having to face complaints in the House of Commons. Part of a confiscated letter to Meagher enclosed a whimsical poem.
By order of Great Denison
To solitude consigned
I’m learning now a lesson
That will instruct my mind.
Letter-writing was O’Brien’s release as well as his strategy. He wrote to Archdeacon Marriott of New Norfolk, a friend of his mother. Marriott—something of a High Church, Romish-ritual rebel—was no approver of seditionists and urged O’Brien to accept the parole. With better results, O’Brien communicated with Mr Reeves, a Hobart hat merchant who had offered his services. Meanwhile, Hampton removed the convict Patrick Lynch, once a kitchen servant at Dromoland, in the hope of coercing O’Brien further to take parole. The nobleman O’Brien nonetheless was strangely proud of his new skills in domestic matters. He told his brother Robert, who was running Cahirmoyle, ‘I am becoming very skilful in washing plates, cups and saucers and other earthenware. I make my own bed and perform other unmentionable duties.’ That is, he was required to get rid of his own night waste, a job reserved in Cahirmoyle and Dromoland for lowliest servants. His chief indulgence was that his shoes were polished for him once a week, his room was cleaned, and his rations were sent in already cooked.
In mid-November O’Brien was moved to a slightly more commodious house next door to the one he had been occupying. His morale still seemed robust, for he had time to set down in the journal for Lucy’s ultimate information a complete summary of Tasmania from the Tasmanian Kalendar of 1849. It covered everything: the seasons, the officers of colonial government, courts, imports, exports, shipping, post office, newspapers. He was interested in questions of land tenure, since they had lain at the base of all Irish discontent. But as convict work gangs went forth past his front windows to garden, fell timber, work on the breakwater, or scrape out rudimentary tracks along the coast, he envied their activity and apparent camaraderie. He possibly heard Gaelic conversations which evoked the image of harvesters walking to work at Dromoland or Cahirmoyle. He lived hardly more than 200 yards from the barracks of many of them, but they received little mention in his journal or letters. They were on another penal planet.
He tried to vary his rations, and wrote in November 1849 to Mr William Carter in Hobart, with whom he had already deposited money, to send him 7 pounds of rice, a bottle of curry powder ‘of moderate size,’ 3 pounds of coffee and 7 pounds of lump sugar. Carter wrote back and said that sadly the government would not authorise such a purchase. This limitation also drove him to mock-heroic verse:
Such is the system of Control
In Mary’s Isle applied
Thus the Comptroller daunts a soul
And lames a rebel’s pride.
Christmas approaching, O’Brien marked his letters ‘6/7 week of my solitary confinement.’ Some of these were apparently smuggled off the island in Father Woolfrey’s mail, or else the Convict Department was sloppy in its censorship, for he sometimes got away with criticising the administration. ‘While one eye looks towards home, the other must be directed to Hobart Town and when I desire to express the sentiments of my heart to those whom I love I am compelled to frame my diction in such a manner as to avoid giving offence to the official inspectors.’
Some letters got through to O’Brien from the other prisoners. Meagher, in his spiky handwriting, detailed how in and around Campbell Town he was enjoying ‘a delightful solitude.’ He was a source of reading matter too—he sent O’Brien his History of Germany by Kohlrausch, a History of Switzerland by Vienssent, Carlyle’s Miscellanies, a book of Irish Jacobite poetry. In one of his rides in the bush near Ross, Meagher told O’Brien, he had met a settler named Adam Robinson, a comfortable, wealthy farmer who always asked after Mr O’Brien. Robinson’s father had been steward to Sir Edward for many years. To read of such familiar names was balm to an isolated prisoner.
Questions on his health had begun to be asked in London and in Ireland, and ten days before Christmas, Denison sent Dr Dawson, chief of the Medical Department, to visit Maria’s most famous felon. Dr Dawson, whose manner seemed confiding, gave the Denisons a ‘rather amusing account’ of his meeting O’Brien. O’Brien, thought Lady Denison, ‘is evidently under the delusion that his case is exciting great interest and sympathy here.’ Some modern commentators have joined Dawson in taking a slightly derisive view of Smith O’Brien’s attempts to enlist influential allies. What else was a revolutionary leader, trying to turn political imprisonment to advantage, to do? Denison was playing the propaganda game just as energetically as O’Brien, and wanted an obeisance from him. O’Brien was surely justified in enlisting the world’s help to avoid such a genuflection?
The Scots Dr Smart, Maria Island physician, who had been given permission to raise O’Brien’s ration if there seemed to be any decline in his health, did so almost as soon as Dawson left the island. But Christmas Day saw O’Brien’s struggle unresolved. His solitary Christmas and his plain dinner contrasted sadly with the imprisoned Christmas dinner of the year before, which he had spent in Richmond bridewell with his mother, his wife, and five of his then six children. By 4 January he again confessed, ‘I feel that Dr Hampton’s recipe for extinguishing an Irish patriot is beginning to do its work.’
The other prisoners, meanwhile, are … setting up a newspaper here,’ wrote Lady Denison in Hobart, ‘to be called “The Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate.” ’ In fact, the paper was to be all Patrick O’Donohoe’s work. Meagher sold some subscriptions in Ross, Martin contributed a series of letters, ‘The Case for Ireland,’ but apart from that the other Young Irelanders kept remote from it. And Denison might have been secretly tolerant of O’Donohoe, despite his publishing the standard Irish rhetoric, because of certain remarks he made soon after landing about the hypocrisy of the free-settler gentry. They, he would say, condemned the baseness of convicts yet were willing to impregnate convict women, and to deny land and opportunity to emancipated felons. Their opposition to transportation was duplicitous.
Consoling his wife Anne by letter in the weeks before the Exile was published, O’Donohoe gave an unflattering view of Hobart, the target of his proposed journal: ‘I suppose the earth could not produce so vicious a population as inhabits this town; vice of all kinds, in its most hideous and exaggerated form, openly practiced by all classes and sexes.’ It was a place where people ‘think nothing of hanging 5 or 6 people of a morning; some of them, if old offenders, on very trifling charges.’ Yet it was a city of plenty: ‘Why, the greatest wretch in a chain-gang gets beef and mutton to eat every day, while the purest and most virtuous of the Irish race rot in the ditches.’ In a letter to his friend O’Doher
ty, Martin reported that at a recent picnic—Hobart abounded in lovely picnic spots—O’Donohoe (nicknamed ‘Denis’) ‘got lost in the bush; and, by a remarkable coincidence, the hostess of the party got lost too, at the same time. Now the lady, by Denis’ own account is very pretty. Hem! Well, the “Tasmanians have it as table-talk that one of the Irish rebel rascals, vampire-like, took that woman into the bush and there by force of arms, pikes and so forth, illegally and unconstitutionally detained her.”’ Martin was quoting from a letter from O’Donohoe, who seemed perversely proud of his picnic assignation.
The next time Denison sent off dispatches to Earl Grey, he enclosed a copy of the first issue of the Irish Exile—significantly dated for the anniversary of European occupation of Australia, 26 January. The founding circulation of O’Donohoe’s ardent, quirky little paper was 800, of which 300 subscribers were in Van Diemen’s Land, and the rest of the mainland, in Sydney, Maitland, Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide. The Exile was ironically well supported by those advertisers of Hobart who disliked Denison. Hats! Hats! Hats! cried the advertisement of P. O’Reilly’s Hat Warehouse, just as Marsden the Butcher’s cried Meat! Meat!! Meat!!!
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 30