Even though it was midnight, they hurried off to the house of Edward Dillon, who had the dual distinction of being a senior executive of the Union Bank and of having a brother, Brian, Kenealy’s Cork friend, still serving a prison sentence in England. There were huge embracings, and then Dillon roused from their beds, to meet the midnight hero, the three Dillon children, Tone, Emmett and Fitzgerald! Kenealy was delighted to see that the Irish could prosper in Melbourne as they had, and his new friends further cheered him with news that a Released Irish State Prisoners Fund had been started in Sydney and that a Melbourne committee was put together by the editor-owner of the Melbourne Advocate, Australian born Samuel Winter. Money came to the committee even from New Zealand, addressed in care of such prominent Victorian politicians as Charles Gavan Duffy and John O’Shanassy.
The next day’s papers carried the news of his arrival. ‘Amongst the distinguished visitors from the Geelong was Mr John Kenealy, one of the lately released Fenian prisoners. We would wish to know the destiny and destination of this gentleman.’ But though some collectors found that the Irish prosperous classes were dubious about helping the Fenians, one collector writing that many Irish believed ‘that the surest and quietest way to social equality with their English friends’ was to eschew Irish causes, when Kenealy met Sam Winter, the Advocate editor, on his first morning in Melbourne, all he was aware of was enthusiasm. Winter, child of an English father and Irish mother who had both come to Melbourne by assisted passage in 1841, called a public meeting that very night. Many Irish on the gold-fields of Victoria and New South Wales had sent substantial amounts to the fund, and the meeting agreed that £250 would be sent at once both to settle debts and enable the freed prisoners to travel eastwards. Since there was no telegraph between Melbourne and Western Australia, the bank draft for £250 had to be remitted by ship. Sending it off, Kenealy suggested that after paying Maloney, the generous hotel-owner, and squaring other debts, the departing prisoners might buy Mrs Maloney some valuable article for her kindness.
One of his visits in Melbourne was to the home in the suburb of Hawthorn of Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland hero, who in 1855 had decided to become a free emigrant to Australia. Kenealy, like other young Fenians, held against him his famed parting aphorism which had likened the Irish Cause to a corpse on the dissecting table. Kenealy admitted that ‘several of us were not quite in love with Duffy.’ But meeting him at home, Kenealy felt at once ‘a sense of his own littleness’ compared with the former editor and proprietor of the Nation. Duffy surprised Kenealy by speaking highly of the Fenians. When he asked Kenealy about Ireland, Kenealy said, ‘She is not dead yet.’ Duffy assured Kenealy that ‘he had been misquoted and misunderstood.’ He generously poured a fine colonial claret for Kenealy.
The Melbourne Argus began drawing to the attention of the authorities Victoria’s Influx of Criminals Prevention Act. But the government seemed unwilling to make a martyr out of Kenealy. In the hiatus, Kenealy spent his time ‘visiting friends not only in Melbourne and Ballarat but in Castlemaine, Kyneton and other towns.’ Kenealy and Winter spoke at a meeting called on the goldfields of Ballarat, and there were pledges for £1,000 by the people of that wealthy mining community. Altogether the pledged amounts from the Victorian and New South Wales funds would be £5,000, which in modern terms was probably the equivalent of $1,000,000, and gave the prisoners a basis on which to make serious decisions.
In Ballarat, Kenealy had met ‘one or two old Cork chums,’ who offered to raise £20,000 to set him up in the dry-goods business in a corner store in a building on the goldfields. Kenealy said he could not accept. He was there as a representative of his comrades, not to scout opportunities. And the Influx of Criminals Prevention Act also hung over all business proposals. Kenealy was interviewed while in Ballarat by Captain Frederick Standish, the Chief Commissioner of Police, and asked to state definitely to Standish how much more time he needed to complete his business in Victoria. But when Kenealy’s determined belief in his political status prevented him from fixing a date, Standish announced that his instructions were to order the arrest of the Fenian. He desired to know where Kenealy could be found at twelve o’clock that day. Kenealy said he would be in the library of St Patrick’s Hill, Ballarat. Before the appointed hour, accompanied by Winter and others, he was in place. An inspector of police came in amongst the bookshelves and made the arrest. Conveyed to court, however, the prisoner was released on £1,000 put up by Winter and a Ballarat businessman.
Kenealy had to face a panel of thirteen magistrates in a packed court in Melbourne on 10 August. Kenealy’s defense was that the Influx of Criminals Prevention Act had been outmoded by Victoria’s new, more liberal constitution. The Irish community in Victoria certainly saw the case as a chance of winning ground, and when the case was lost, Kenealy’s supporters wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court. ‘Irish blood was up.’ Duffy himself showed Kenealy letters and petitions from the local Irish. ‘From these messages here,’ Duffy told Kenealy, ‘you can see that our countrymen are very excited, and I fear if you leave them now … they might think you ungrateful.’ The appeal was at last heard in the august Supreme Court, before the Chief Justice of Victoria, Redmond Barry, an impressive Cork-born jurist, socially engaged, a powerful Orange sympathiser, who—as Kenealy seems to have anticipated—proved predictably to stretch the law for a Cork Fenian.
Kenealy had served to the full local Victorian-Irish purposes. Departing for King George’s Sound and the port of Albany, he carried an immediate £950 to be distributed equally amongst the pardoned Fenians. On top of that, tickets would be provided free of charge to any who wanted to leave Western Australia and to go by steamer to New South Wales, since that colony had no explicit law restricting the entry of former convicts. For his own journey back to Western Australia, his Melbourne friends had bought a ticket under the name of O’Sullivan, the latter his mother’s maiden name. Just the same, several detectives were on the wharf to see him off, ‘one of whom I knew when we were boys together learning the dry goods business in Cork.’ When his steamer Rangatira docked in Adelaide, Kenealy was met by a detective who told him that if he landed the police would be obliged to arrest him and he would be fined £500. The master of the vessel, Captain MacLean, overheard this and told the detective warmly that ‘his ship was no prison, and I was at liberty to do as I pleased.’
The captain called a steward and instructed him that all the refreshments of the ship were to be available to Kenealy and Kenealy’s guests. One of the latter was a dear friend of Kenealy’s, Tim Lonergan, whom Kenealy had sworn into the IRB. Lonergan had sought Stephens’s permission to emigrate and take over his uncle’s extensive dry-goods business. The next morning, as Rangatira was about to depart, the new governor of Western Australia, Mr Weld, came on board. He treated Kenealy with great courtesy and asked him a considerable number of questions about Western Australia.
Twenty-five of the State prisoners, having received the initial money sent by Kenealy, decided to travel from Perth for Albany in King George’s Sound, and meet Kenealy on his return. The departure on Sunday 11 September was quite ceremonial, a parade of horsemen and women, followed by a horse drawn bus containing the departing exiles. ‘The whole company,’ wrote Casey, the Galtee Boy, ‘reached a wayside inn some 20 miles from Perth, where an excellent dinner had been prepared.’ Mounted police travelled with them on their journey to King George’s Sound, to stop them fraternising with convict parties. Despite this, the group somehow managed to converse with and bid ‘a sorrowful adieu to the cheerful, and much persecuted, victims of English court-martials.’
Their journey through the ‘immense heaths’ and ‘hopeless barrenness’ of the road to Albany took ten days. The little port itself had a population of just 500 persons, one of them the agent of the P&O Company, whom they immediately visited. He told them a letter had arrived from the Colonial Secretary of Victoria instructing him that any captain who conveyed them to Melbourne would subject himself to
a fine of £100. There was a chance, though, that the captain of the Rangatira would take them to Sydney. That same evening, they saw the white funnel of the Rangatira, and its ornate figurehead of a Maori chief, approaching. It was captained by the spiky Captain MacLean, and on the deck was Kenealy, ‘his pleasant countenance beaming with delight and good humour, as he conveys the joyful intelligence that the Rangatira will convey us to Sydney.’ Kenealy sought out Father Delany and repaid the £5, and the whole pardoned company of Fenians, who had planned to spend the night in a roofless barn, went to Albany’s one hotel. So the party boarded the Rangatira on 21 September, and one hour later in bewildered elation were on their way along a shoreline of desert cliffs to Sydney via Adelaide and Melbourne. They made Adelaide the following Sunday and anchored opposite what Casey describes as ‘the little village of Glenelg.’ A detective boarded and demanded their papers, which they refused to give since they had no intention of landing in South Australia. When the steamer touched the wharf, men and women streamed aboard, some of them weeping. For the four days they were in Adelaide the ship was guarded by policemen, ‘No doubt with the intention of arresting us should we dare to pollute the immaculate South Australia with our unhallowed footsteps.’
Newspapers picked up in Adelaide indicated that the Victorian government had so yielded to public opinion as to permit the approaching Fenians to land. But ‘in consequence of the barbarous treatment Mr Kenealy received on his first visit,’ the group determined not to disembark there, as much as they wanted to thank the people who had subscribed to the Melbourne committee. And so similar scenes as those in Adelaide occurred in Port Melbourne. Crowds formed at the gangplank, and cheers broke out, including some for O’Donovan Rossa, not amongst the amnesty list of Gladstone’s government and now serving in his fourth prison, Pentonville. ‘Hats, caps and handkerchiefs were waving in dozens. Green streamers encircling the swanlike necks of Erin’s fair and lovely daughters, fluttered on the breeze.’ The authorities came aboard and told MacLean that he would have to cast off for Sydney during that night. On the next day, Sunday, some thousands of people assembled on the quay from all parts of the colony of Victoria, only to find that the Rangatira had departed.
By now most of the prisoners had decided to embark either for Ireland or the United States, so they would be in Sydney only for a week or two. But in squally rain, the welcome was prodigious, a crowd gathering to meet the ship as it put into Circular Quay in Sydney Cove. A Sydney committee made up of four Irishmen, including the editor of the Sydney-based Freeman’s Journal, were there too, and so were hostile presences, what Casey called, ‘several notorious ultra-montanes,’ by which he probably meant members of the Orange Lodge. The prisoners marched to five carriages, which were waiting to take them to their hotel (according to Casey, the Swiss Hotel) in North George Street. For days the press of people outside was so great ‘that it was utterly impossible to have one moment to ourselves.’ Some travelled 300 miles or more from the bush to point out the Fenians to children ‘as a pattern for their future conduct.’
Now, without apparently consulting the Fenians, the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, Richard O’Sullivan, the radical of the reception committee, persuaded some of his fellows to proclaim a grand welcoming picnic for Tuesday 19 October at Clontarf, the same picnic area at which Henry O’Farrell had shot Prince Alfred. O’Sullivan’s announcement produced loyalist rage in Sydney. The proposed Clontarf picnic was, said the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘one of those insolent outrages on public decency … where the apotheosis of O’Farrell was to be celebrated on the scene of his crime, and those who had lately experienced the mercy of the Queen are to participate in the orgies.’
The Galtee Boy warned Richard O’Sullivan that insistence on the picnic might lead to hard treatment of Fenians still in Western Australia. But O’Sullivan was determined. In the end, Jack Robertson, the Colonial Secretary, a sympathetic Scot, prohibited the proposed meeting at Clontarf, and hoped the committee would forgo any demonstration altogether. Robertson and Lord Belmore, governor of New South Wales, handled the Fenians and their support committee with a calmness which some of their more rabid loyalist constituency objected to. And though, in bringing about the cancellation, the Fenians themselves acted as moderators, Kenealy wrote: ‘All the bigotry and anti-Irish hatred of the Orange and Seoinin were aroused, and it looked for a while as if there might be some senseless and useless blood letting.’
Before the end of October, Sam Winter arrived from Melbourne for a settling up and disbursement of all relief funds. In addition to the £950 Kenealy had already taken to Western Australia, £1,500 was split up amongst the twenty-five Fenians in Sydney at the rate of £30 each, and £300 set aside for ten pardoned comrades who had remained in Western Australia. £400 was also forwarded to Perth in care of Hugh Brophy, Joseph Noonan and Cornelius O’Mahony in trust for the soldier Fenian prisoners. Hundreds more were spent on ships’ tickets for the released men.
In Sydney on 21 October, the Fenians bound for San Francisco boarded the Baringa, a sailing ship; Kenealy was a little surprised to report that there were no steamers to California. Amongst those travelling to America was O’Reilly’s friend from Hougoumont, Cashman, who hoped to find a career in journalism. Ten others were to return to Ireland by way of Melbourne, their terms being already expired or due to expire. These included the Galtee Boy, John Sarsfield Casey.
As the California-bound Baringa cleared Sydney Cove and the point where now the Opera House stands, the Fenians raised a green silk flag and exchanged three cheers with a large crowd on the wharf.
In the new year, on 27 January 1870, the Anglo-phobic New York Tribune gave the Fenians newly arrived in California the status of escapees—‘Fifteen political prisoners … have escaped and arrived in San Francisco.’ As soon as the Baringa entered the Golden Gate, Captain Smith, the Fenian head centre who had accompanied MacManus’s body to Ireland, was notified of the fact and sent the accustomed group of Irish worthies to escort the former prisoners around the city. Those who wished to go east, it was made clear, could comfortably do so on the Central Pacific railroad.
In the same season in Dublin, a crowd gathering in early morning on a mere rumour to meet the Holyhead steamer Countess of Erne as it entered the Liffey, brought to the ten homecoming Fenians the gifts of enthusiasm reserved for the deaths or resurrections of Irish heroes. ‘On the quarterdeck stood the ten confessors,’ said the Irishman. That night the Lord Lieutenant attended the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. As the third scene of the pantomime began, a party of the released Fenians entered one of the private boxes. The entire audience, with the exception of a few people in the circle, rose and set up ‘a deafening round of cheers which lasted for several minutes.’ Casey watched astonished as people stood on their seats. Children were held in parents’ arms. Here were bourgeois Irishmen and women who would not themselves have thought of taking the Fenian option, but who admired the sacrifices of those who had.
As those like Casey whose homes were in Munster returned home, the Cork Herald reported that a line of police with fixed bayonets outside Cork Railway Station could not be maintained, and the crowd swarmed the train, climbing onto the coaches. Cork city men, Eugene Lombard and Morgan McSwiney, went straight to their homes, which were on Coalquay. When called on to address the crowd, the Fenians asked people to behave themselves, ‘as any disturbance would only fasten the chains of the men in prison.’ A connector train which took released prisoners to their homes in the country was mobbed at every station, and when John Sarsfield Casey emerged gleaming-eyed and elegant at Galtee, the whole town went into a shouting delirium.
But for the former Fenian prisoners in the United States, San Francisco proved a rigorous test. Young John Walsh wrote nostalgically to John Boyle O’Reilly on the other side of the country about good times he had enjoyed in Sydney. ‘Had we stayed in Sydney we would have all got first-class situations from the wealthy Irishmen there; but like fools, as we were, n
othing would do us only to come to this place, where we are loafing about for the last six or seven weeks and can’t get employment. Were it not for the money we got in Australia … some of us would be off soldiering for Uncle Sam.’ Kenealy was launched, however—he took a job with a San Francisco Fenian dry-goods dealer named Talbot, and had ideas of starting his own business as soon as the expiration of his sentence in six years time enabled him to make buying trips to Ireland, England and Scotland.
The pardoned Fenians who had stayed in Western Australia would live orderly and, by the standards of the time, generally satisfactory lives. Former convict constable Hugh Brophy, who was in partnership with Noonan and had built the bridge across the Swan, became a building contractor in the Melbourne of the great boom times of the 1870s, and, living until after World War I, died in the flu pandemic of 1919. Some of the others had shorter lives. Brophy’s partner Noonan married the daughter of a respected Western Australian Irish family and died in Perth in 1885. The two oldest Fenians were Tom Duggan and Luke Fullam. Duggan, after tutoring privately for a time, became a teacher in a school near the Western Australian town of Northam and had a long life, but Luke Fullam and his brother Lawrence, both of them suffering from tuberculosis, did not long survive. They worked at their trade of shoemaking and, after Luke’s death in 1870, Lawrence married an Irish woman, but died while his son was still an infant. The brothers were buried side by side in Fremantle Cemetery.
The first writing assignment which brought O’Reilly to prominence in the eastern United States was his coverage of the Fenian invasion of Canada in late May 1870. By the spring of 1870, it had become clear that yet another Fenian invasion was in planning by certain members of the Roberts wing. ‘It is the fact that “experienced military men” are now found among the leaders,’ wrote the New York Times on 4 May, ‘which makes it so easy to persuade Bridget and Patrick that with one dollar more the green flag may be hoisted on the Plains of Abraham, and a Fenian navy launched on the track of British commerce.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 72