Meagher made a more discreet but equally dangerous visit with a young Irish friend named Keane. The hotel-keeper Elwin interrupted the visit to warn O’Brien that police were advancing on the hotel, someone having spotted Meagher as he rode through the town. When the police arrived in the hotel hallway, a waiter went up and told the three men that Mr Meagher was to report downstairs. It was Keane who presented himself and was arrested, putting himself in a position afterwards to claim false arrest. Ten minutes after the police went off with Keane, a New Norfolk Irishman brought a horse to Elwin’s Hotel to allow Meagher to escape. Keane returned home to Ross only two hours after the Young Tribune. This had been a delicious trick.
O’Donohoe returned to Hobart from his New Norfolk fracas in poor health, caused by alcohol and the damaged ribs suffered during the brawl at Elwin’s Hotel. He was placed under armed guard until fit to appear again before Mr Mason on the more serious charge of being outside his district. O’Doherty and MacManus—who had less eventful, if equally illicit, visits to O’Brien—were also summoned to appear before Mason. But on the day of their hearing, Mason reprimanded them and sent them home again. He knew there was sympathy for the exiles even amongst some of the English and Scots gentry of the region. Perhaps this encouraged his lenient judgment. But it did not endear him to Denison.
Overriding Mason, Denison revoked the tickets-of-leave of O’Donohoe, O’Doherty and MacManus. The decree went out to the men on Christmas Eve: MacManus was to serve three months’ hard labour at the Cascades, O’Doherty three months at Impression Bay, O’Donohoe at the Salt Water River. For O’Donohoe this was a disaster—he would have to close the Irish Exile, or transfer it by deed to others. A deed was being prepared, he told Meagher, assigning interest in the newspaper to two Hobart businessmen.
For overriding the magistrate’s decision, Sir William Denison was, to his wife’s amazement, ‘very much abused in the colonial papers.’ Even the Courier asked, ‘Can we be surprised that any of them should have felt a wish to visit Smith O’Brien for a few hours, after a long captivity?’ On Christmas Day, Meagher wrote to O’Brien asking for guidance on whether he too should abandon his ticket-of-leave ‘to a government capable of acting in so coarse, so imperious and brutal a manner?’
He hoped the answer would be ‘No!’ for at the time, he had good reason not to surrender his parole. He had fallen in love with a young Australian woman of Irish parentage. It had happened thus. Walking in the countryside near Ross one day, Meagher had come across a broken-down carriage around which stood in bewilderment Dr Edward Hall, the recent mentor of O’Doherty, Mrs Hall, their six children, and their governess, Catherine Bennett. Catherine was barely nineteen years old, daughter of an Irish emancipist, Brian Bennett. Meagher repaired the broken wheel and from then on began to visit the Hall regularly. The governess was not of Meagher’s background—her father was closer to the Hugh Larkin end of the Irish spectrum. In his twenties, Bennett had held up the mail coach in Trim, County Meath, and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1818 on the Minerva, prior to the policy, operating in the 1820s and 1830s, of excluding Irish felons from VDL. By Christmas 1850 he, his wife and his large Australian brood, who lived on 100 acres at New Norfolk, had the exhilaration of knowing that the Young Tribune was contemplating marriage with their Kate. Not only that, but over the next few years the greatest Irishman, Smith O’Brien, occasionally walked down from Elwin’s Hotel to their place for tea.
An Irish band performed outside the Hobart Prisoners’ Barracks every night for MacManus, and also played outside the recuperating O’Donohoe’s lodgings in Collins Street. An unrepentant Terence MacManus, waiting for transport to the penal station, refused Meagher’s offer of surrendering his ticket-of-leave in protest. ‘I am off in the morning by 7 o’clock, per steamer,’ he told Meagher, ‘to the “Cascades” convict station. You’d laugh, my dear fellow, to see me in my grey uniform, with a little bundle already tied up, containing a few pairs of socks and a flannel shirt—all other necessities supplied by the Government.’
When Patrick O’Donohoe reached Salt Water River on 8 January, he was too weak for hard labour and was taken on to the hospital at Port Arthur for two weeks. One traveller reported seeing him there, ‘lying on his iron pallet in the common ward, and in the ordinary blue flannel hospital dress.’ The Hobart journalist ‘Veritas,’ noticed him later, a little recovered. ‘I never saw a man in more cheerful spirits—when he sits down to his scanty repast of brown bread and skilly, he has all the convicts round him in roars of laughter.’ Recuperating from his broken ribs, O’Donohoe was placed on relatively light duties. ‘Making brooms and other menial work, getting up at four in the morning; and occupied in many ways until half past eight at night. When he was locked up with the vilest of the vile,’ a brutal overseer named Booth, three times convicted, harassed him at every opportunity. On 24 February he was happy to be sent now to the Cascades probation station.
Earlier at the Cascades, MacManus felled timber and dragged it to the saw-pits. He assured his friends that he was becoming a true ‘backwoodsman’ and that he was already anticipating his release on ‘1st April, quail-shooting day.’ In fact, he envisaged a much earlier date.
Meagher had the easiest job: wooing Catherine Bennett, even though the idea drew the disapproval of John Martin. Catherine, though literate herself, was the child of parents who came from the semi-literate Irish masses for whom John Martin, like the rest of the Young Ireland leaders, was willing to risk death, but whom he could not contemplate a friend’s marrying. For Martin and the others might at the sharp edge of their politics be rebels, but in their social dealings their manners were those of British gentlemen. ‘I am unable to discover any grounds of confident hope that any of his sanguine expectations from the marriage project will be realized,’ wrote Martin. But Meagher felt reinvigorated by his love for the governess. Catherine had awoken in him ‘the proud and generous nature that was sinking, coldly and dismally, into a stupid and sensual stagnation … I am myself again.’
O’Brien was still concerned about repaying debts and being a financial drag on his family, and so accepted a job offer from Dr Henry George Brock, an Irish naval surgeon who had settled in a remote valley in north-east Tasmania. O’Brien was to tutor Brock’s sons in return for £60 per annum plus board and lodging. His plan was to live off his tutoring fees and use the money his family remitted to pay off to Dr McCarthy £200 outstanding from the failed escape. He was perhaps not aware that Meagher had undertaken to pay the owners of the Victoria for their loss, a total of £550. ‘The adventure in which you risked so much had been excessively improvident and fruitless,’ wrote Meagher senior to his son, but, as ever, covered the bill.
When the Launceston coach carrying Smith O’Brien to his new teaching post called in at Ross, O’Brien was welcomed by Meagher, who took him into the coaching inn and introduced him to Catherine Bennett. The daughter of an Irish highwayman might have been thought to be a romantic figure, but O’Brien saw her as a muted presence. ‘She is in person and manner very pleasing but in a worldly point of view the connection cannot be considered advantageous for him.’ Arriving by way of the town of Avoca at Brock’s remote wing of the country, O’Brien faced up to the healthy and active 13-and 10-year-old sons of Dr Brock, future colonial men of action, unreceptive to the classics. It was ‘not a little humiliating to think that … after having acquired experience which ought to enable me to rule nations, I am reduced to a position in which nearly my whole time is consumed in teaching two boys the elements of languages which they could learn with equal advantage from some pedagogue.’ He found it ‘not a little provoking to think that I am drawing a salary little exceeding that which is paid to the governess of my daughter.’
Before being shipped off to the Cascades to haul logs, MacManus had employed a young solicitor, Adye Douglass, to try to have him released on Habeas Corpus. Douglass in turn commissioned the barrister Knight. Knight issued a challenge to the very transpor
tation law itself, as it applied to all Irish convicts in Van Diemen’s Land, and to Terence Bellew MacManus, prisoner at the Cascades. Lady Denison was flabbergasted: ‘The lawyers have set up the most extraordinary pleas on this occasion: first, that the Government has no right to subject an Irish convict to the same treatment to which the English convict has to submit; second, that … the Queen herself, has no right to coerce, or compel to work, any convict here at all.’ To Denison’s chagrin, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the Convict Department was thrown into a panic after a writ of Habeas Corpus was granted for MacManus. The demented government lawyers found they did not have on file certificates of conviction for MacManus and thousands of other Irish convicts, and that they did not possess copies of any of the Irish statutes on transportation. If MacManus were discharged, every transported offender from Ireland for whom there was no certificate could also demand discharge!
MacManus was brought back by steamer from the Cascades and escorted into court in Hobart in his grey penal uniform. Friends crowded in to shake his hand as he entered the Supreme Court, a short march from the docks. The arguments were put, and while MacManus waited at the convict depot, the judges took a week to consider their decision. At last, on 21 February, the Chief Justice announced, ‘We are of opinion that T. B. MacManus cannot be remanded and that we have no power to detain him and he is now free to go out of this court.’
‘I am not, I think, in a fit state to write to you to-day,’ Lady Denison told a friend, ‘for I am in a tumult of evil passions … whereas he [MacManus] is known to have been sentenced to death, they have no legal evidence that he was pardoned … They have no legal evidence that he was not hung!!’ Denison blamed the home government for the missing documentation and statutes, and issued an order for MacManus, who had already caught the coach to Launceston, to present himself to the barracks there for rearrest. Lady Denison feared that her husband ‘may be incurring a great responsibility; and yet in truth the state of things seems so desperate that one does not know what he can do better, for he cannot leave all his prisoners at large.’
MacManus’s coach stopped in Ross, where a bearded Meagher, dressed as a bushman in large hat, flannel shirt and strapped trousers, handed him a note. ‘On Sunday the wedding takes place. No gloves, no cards, no cake. Everything very quiet.’ MacManus was able—illicitly—to attend in the home of Dr Hall the marriage of Meagher of the Sword and Catherine Bennett, a ceremony performed by Dr Willson, Catholic Bishop of Tasmania. With glittering eyes, Bryan Bennett committed the care of his eldest daughter to Meagher. He did not sense as clearly as some of the gentlemen prisoners or as Dr Hall that it was an improbable marriage. Now the Meagher couple intended to live on the shores of Lake Sorell, an idyll which would be easier for Catherine, with her bush-born hardiness and higher tolerance of rural tedium.
The Monday after the wedding, MacManus travelled on and reached Launceston, where a number of sympathisers briefly celebrated his release with him. According to a report spread about the town, ‘he sank on his bed in a state of high fever.’ In fact, parole conditions had not been reimposed on MacManus since he left the Supreme Court, and an elegant escape was in progress. He went into hiding in the home of Dean Butler, while an Irishman named John Galvin, a gentleman farmer who came from the same vigorous genetic stable as MacManus—long face, lean frame, curly hair—took to MacManus’s bed in the home of a sympathetic Launceston merchant named George Deas. Galvin acted out the symptoms of fever so well that Dr Grant, a private physician, and Dr Gavin Casey, government surgeon from the Royal Hospital at Launceston, were both convinced that he could not be moved. Dr Grant ‘had found it necessary to bleed him copiously, and adopt other treatment.’ A more sceptical Denison asked the Chief Medical Officer of Van Diemen’s Land, Dr Dawson, to call in at Launceston and report on the illness of MacManus. On 28 February, Doctors Casey and Grant obtained from the pseudo-MacManus a ‘distinct and solemn promise that he would not, whilst under our … charge make any attempt to escape, or act in any way tending to compromise us.’
Meanwhile, the true MacManus, supplied with money, had already rushed down the Tamar River estuary to George Town, a village from which he was smuggled by rowboat aboard the Elizabeth Thompson after the ship had been searched. The Elizabeth Thompson sailed towards Hawaii and San Francisco. MacManus gone, Galvin sat up and confessed the imposture. It was useless to bring him before a magistrate, for he would be defended by passionate counsel. Lady Denison remarked on ‘what a mistake it was to treat these men so differently from ordinary convicts.’
Hard labour at Impression Bay had been trying robust Kevin O’Doherty also, but he sustained himself with readings from and meditations on the mystic Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Patrick O’Donohoe at the Cascades might equally have been sustained by thought of what his penal experience might add to his editorials in the Exile. But in his absence that journal had continued its decline, which had begun before he was imprisoned. It published a notice: ‘The late proprietor of this Journal, Mr P. O’Donohoe, being now a Probationer Prisoner of the Crown, it is hoped that all persons indebted to the Exile … or otherwise, will forthwith discharge the same.’ Returned to Hobart, O’Donohoe was not permitted to stay in town but sent on to Oatlands. He asked the current manager, Mr McSorley, and the current editor, Mr John O’Donnell, bootmaker, for any income due him, but they could offer him nothing; ‘O’Donohoe had the honour of being the owner of a journal for three months, without deriving the slightest benefit from it.’ Ownership of the Exile was still in dispute when McSorley unilaterally closed down the paper, its last issue appearing on 19 April 1851. O’Donohoe was to stay in Oatlands and—as he put it himself—‘starve at leisure.’
Kevin O’Doherty gave an indication of what O’Donohoe had been through, saying of his own time at Impression Bay, ‘I was treated with more vigour and harshness than the worst amongst them, having been put in the hardest labouring gang on the station, and refused the poor privilege of obtaining credit (that is, shortening my time by increased industry).’ Transferred to shingle-cutting, he ‘worked like a Trojan and speedily became a professional hand at the art.’
As it happened, his sentence was shortened as a result of a petition, so he returned to Hobart much sooner than O’Donohoe and began working in the dispensary again. But he wanted to practise medicine, to escape the tedium of the pharmacy. Soon he gave up work in Dr Crooke’s dispensary—it was said he had got word of an inheritance from an uncle in Ireland. Though his brothers would try to block his access to the money, he planned, Medical Board-certified or not, to go into a practice of his own in some small town.
In Bothwell, John Mitchel had long since decided to bring out his family, and had written to Jenny about it the previous July. ‘Pray God, I have done right.’ He was influenced by ‘my experience of the good-breeding and intelligence and honorable character of many Colonial families … in this remote, thinly-peopled and pastoral district, engaging in some sort of farming and cattle-feeding, and mingling in the society of the good quiet colonists here, we might almost forget at times, the daily and hourly outrage that our enemies put upon us.’
For whether by the appearance of a platypus in a stream on one of his rides, or by the shrill call of kookaburra or laughing jackass—‘a noisy bird so named by profane colonists’—he was perpetually reminded that this beautiful place was not Ireland and rather the home of strange fauna, ‘profane colonists,’ and worse. ‘We overtake on our track homeward, a man and woman—the woman, a hideous and obscene-looking creature, with a brandy-bloated face, and a white satin bonnet, adorned with artificial flowers. She is a passholding servant, just discharged from some remote settler’s house, and she is going to Hobart Town in custody.’
Jenny Mitchel and the children were on their interminable way to John when in May 1851 he was permitted to go to Hobart to await his wife’s ship. While in town, he was able to meet up with O’Doherty. ‘St Kevin is sometimes gloomy and de
sponding.’ The problem was the thought of Eva: ‘a fair and gentle lady, with hair like blackest midnight; and in the tangle of those silken tresses she has bound my poor friend’s soul; round the solid hemisphere it has held him, and he drags a lengthening chain.’
For Mitchel, even waiting for Jenny and the children became a complicated matter. After some days in Hobart, he had a letter from Adelaide. Mrs Mitchel, her five children and a servant had arrived there in the ship Condor from Liverpool. They had not known till the ship was at sea that she was to touch first at Adelaide in South Australia and discharge cargo, which would take an extra month. A ship’s captain who had just come from Adelaide, found Mitchel in his lodgings and told him Mrs Mitchel meant to take passage on a brigantine for Launceston. But after ten days’ waiting at Launceston, most of it with a schoolfriend from Newry, now a flour miller, he received a letter from O’Doherty; the brig Union had arrived in Hobart Town with Jenny and his family. So he turned south, sending a message that his adored Jenny and the family should catch the stage north. He would meet them at Green Ponds, where the road to Bothwell left the main stage route.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 34