Fenians In Australia 1865-1880, The

The Battle of Vinegar Hill in New South Wales (1804) and Eureka Stockade Rebellion in Victoria (1854), saw many Irish take-up-arms in endeavour to overthrow their colonial masters, while in the Hawkesbury region of New South Wales during the Black Wars period (1795 – 1816), some Irish emigrants joined with Australian aboriginals in what was to become a long and protracted bloody war with English colonists over land rights, while across the length and breadth of Australia, private wars between Irish Catholics and English Protestants were daily played out in communities who still had strong allegiances to their country of origin and religion. And while the Catholic Church’s role in Australia was to reach out to those Irish Catholics disfranchised by the Irish famine, to some it didn’t go far enough, and that force was now needed to ‘right the wrongs’ of Ireland.

Also disillusioned with the Catholic Church reluctance to throw its weight behind a political push for Ireland to achieve ‘Home Rule’, other famine survivors would look to Fenianism as a possible physical force to help them achieve something they’d been fighting for over 600 years: freedom from the shackles of the English Crown.

By the mid 1800s, Fenian societies had sprung-up in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Tasmania, while across the continent in Western Australia; the port town of Fremantle would become an enclave for Fenians and their sympathisers.
When it was announced in England that 62 Fenians arrested in the 1866-77 Irish uprising were being transported to the Swan River Penal Colony of Western Australia on the convict ship Hougoumont in Oct of 1867, Fenian Fear began to spread amongst colonists still loyal to the English Crown. Perhaps their fears were well founded, because of the 62 Fenian political prisoners to be transported, 17 of them happened to be military men who’d fought for the British Empire in India, China and the Crimea, while the rest were civilian Fenians; men well-versed in guerrilla warfare.
Fearing that these Fenian prisoners would overtake their captors and along with local Fenian sympathisers, ransack the colony of Western Australia, several well-heeled colonists would plead with the Governor to request a ‘Men O War’ vessel be sent from their sister colonies on the eastern seaboard to protect them from annihilation.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland and England, Fenians had organised themselves into ‘secret cells’ and had carried out attacks on British military installations in Dublin, Cork, Tipperary, Chester and Clerkenwell resulting in casualties on both sides including innocent civilians, while across the Atlantic came news that anti-Fenian campaigner and Irish born Canadian politician Darcy McGee had been murdered by an alleged Fenian assassin in Ottawa. These guerrilla attacks would send a message to the British Empire: Fenianism was a force to be reckoned and that this would be a dirty war until the issue of Home Rule was resolved.

Back in Australia, another rebellious conspiracy was about to unfold. Irishman and alleged Fenian, Henry James O’Farrell, would in March of 1868 at Clontarf, Sydney, attempt to murder Queen Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Fenian Fear was now part of the Australian psyche.

O’Farrell’s attempted murder of Prince Alfred, while helping stir religious sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants, and responsible for introducing some of the most authoritarian laws into Australia’s fledgling democracy, would in many decades to come, be subject of controversy; especially O’Farrell’s state of mind when he committed his crime.

Insanity in Australia during the nineteenth century was seen by law enforcement authorities, judiciary and the medical profession as somehow intertwined with criminal behaviour. Those who committed a criminal offence and thought to be insane would more than likely find themselves incarcerated in many of Her Majesty’s colonial prisons, with some being placed in solitary confinement for long periods. Such cases often highlighted problems associated with defining boundaries and categories within which people operating outside the norm were to be labelled. Then there was the dilemma in deciding what appropriate form, or type of punishment should be dished-out by the judiciary to those pronounced as being criminally insane. Rarely was there a case where a person who threatened or attempted to commit murder or took the life of another and later found to be criminally insane, given a life sentence or executed. O’Farrell however, according to the New South Wales government (of that time) would be an exception.

During O’Farrell’s trial, it was claimed by his prosecutor that his murderous act was, “Work of a Fenian killer” while his defence counsel claimed his actions was, “Carried out by a man bereft of any legal or moral responsibility.”

Once O’Farrell had paid the ultimate price for his murderous act, much evidence of his true state of mind when he committed his crime would surface later; albeit far it too late to save his neck. And while much has been said and written on an incident that would shake the very foundation of the British Empire, very little is still known about Henry James O’Farrell and his true motivation for wanting to murder a member of the Royal family. O’Farrell, it is said was ‘highly intelligent’ yet he suffered greatly from epilepsy, delirium tremens, paranoia, hallucination, delusions and heard voices in his head. He was also committed to a number of mental asylums, and for his own safety (and others) restrained in a strait-jacket.

Was O’Farrell part of an orchestrated Fenian conspiracy to murder a member of the Royal family and ransack the Colony of New South Wales, or was he the fall-guy for a larger conspiracy yet to unfold? And was his trial a miscarriage of justice?