The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
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