Sons Of The Southern Cross

DEDICATION

For Jim Ramage

(1897–1975)

my grandfather, who told me stories of

Eureka and The Great War

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

PICTURE SECTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ENDNOTES

SEARCHABLE TERMS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

1

We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.

Oath of allegiance stated by Peter Lalor and sworn by miners underneath their rebel Southern Cross flag at Ballarat, 30 November 1854¹

I have never seen anything like these wounded Colonials in war before. Though many were shot to bits, and without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night … They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting.

War correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett on the Anzac landing at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915²

It is a bitterly cold Sunday morning, 25 April 1915, three hours past midnight, and the bright half-moon sinks heavily into the inky blackness of the Aegean Sea. Four thousand Australian soldiers are about to lead the greatest sea invasion in history, on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. One of them, Captain Joe Lalor, a small, 30-year-old professional soldier with a sharp, intelligent face, gazes at the sinking moon from the deck of the British destroyer HMS Chelmer just offshore. He draws a deep breath as he watches the moon go down and down, its faint light breaking through the clouds here and there to shine on the silky water. Lalor’s keen eyes study the waning glow as it flickers like a dying candle until finally it surrenders to the cold, ominous darkness and is snuffed out. The sky becomes intensely black and in the invisible, treacherous world that remains, Lalor cannot distinguish between the beauty and the terror that lie just ahead. He knows for certain, though, that beyond the placid water, as smooth as a fish pond, beyond the thin stretch of pebbles known as Z Beach and up into the rocky outcrops that loom 200 feet (60 metres) above, Turkish soldiers are waiting to defend to the death the barren piece of earth their god has given them. Beyond the gently lapping water, the Turks are up there, up there in numbers, somewhere in the cold, deathly silence of night.

Lalor is waiting as the first wave of 1500 soldiers heads for shore. They have carefully rehearsed their formation in ‘tows’ of three rowing vessels tethered behind steamboats as they snake their way through the eerie stillness.

Close to the beach the steamboats will depart and the men will charge onto land with bayonets fixed to their .303 Lee-Enfield rifles. They have been told to kill the Turks quietly until the sun comes up; run as many through with cold steel before shots alert the nearby Turkish garrisons.³

Lalor is known to his men as ‘Little Jimmy’, for they reckon he must have been standing on tiptoes to be anything close to the five foot six and a half inches (168 centimetres) it says on his army papers. He is waiting anxiously to join his comrades in chancing his fate. By his side he has an old sword, a family relic, and he wraps a piece of hessian rag around the gilt handle so the shine will not be a marker for Turkish snipers. Lalor has been ordered to leave the sword behind but, as he prepares to face death head on, he wants a trusted companion for battle.⁴

Standing on the deck of the Chelmer, staring into the darkness as the first boats push off toward land, Lalor’s legs quiver from the cold and the fear.

His surname is a byword for courage back home because six decades earlier his Irish-born grandfather, Peter Lalor, led Australia’s most celebrated armed insurrection before becoming a prominent politician in the colony of Victoria. Underneath a great blue Southern Cross flag with its Christian cross linking the silvery-white stars of Australia’s cherished constellation, Peter Lalor had stared down death on his own patch of earth, rallying the Ballarat miners around him to fight against oppression.

Now Joe Lalor is about to invade a foreign land on behalf of the nation his grandfather helped form and his stomach twists and turns and heaves as though it is full of blind spiders racing about in maddened confusion.

Joe’s young wife Hester has gone to England to wait for his return from battle. She’s there with their little boy, a toddler named Peter. Like all the other soldiers preparing for battle, Joe wonders if he will ever see his family again.

Joe’s life already has been an endless series of cliffhangers but nothing in the pages of his adventure story since he left Melbourne’s Xavier College has prepared him for the bloodshed he knows is coming. Not his time in the Royal Navy before deserting, not his two years in Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, nor his sojourn as a mercenary in two South American uprisings.

Joe is always up for a fight, always ready to put his wiry 125 pounds (57 kilograms) on the line. And always telling those he encounters that his name is pronounced ‘Law-ler’ not ‘Lay-lor’.

‘Wherever trouble and fighting were to be found,’ a Melbourne newspaper once said, ‘Captain Lalor was to be found.’⁵

Joe is part of a force called the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs), which, along with the British 29th Division, the French Oriental Expeditionary Force and the Royal Naval Division, is about to storm the steep ridges and gullies surrounding a stretch of water crucial to the Allies’ supply chain from Russia to the Mediterranean. This morning’s assault is the first in a plan to land 75,000 men on the Turkish coast.

Joe Lalor has escaped death many times but now, as the first wave of soldiers sets off for the headlands of Ari Burnu, the northernmost point of a beach that will soon be called Anzac Cove, he suspects that many of his comrades will not live through this morning.

British general Sir Ian Hamilton, a lean and wiry cavalry veteran overseeing the operation, has told his troops that before them ‘lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war’. He says they are about to force a landing upon an open beach in the face of positions that have been vaunted by the enemy as impregnable. But he assures them the landing will be ‘made good by the help of God and the navy’: the positions will be stormed, and the war brought one step nearer to a ‘glorious close’.⁶ In the veiled secrecy of his own heart, though, he knows it will be a slaughter. In his diary, the 62-year-old writes:

Death grins at my elbow, I cannot get him out of my thoughts. He is fed up with the old and sick – only the flower of the flock will serve him now, for God has started a celestial spring cleaning, and our star is to be scrubbed bright with the blood of our bravest and our best.⁷

Joe Lalor is about to risk his life in a bloodbath pivotal to the story of Australia and its people, just as his grandfather did underneath the Southern Cross banner on another cold Sunday morning at the hastily erected Eureka Stockade.

Joe and the men fighting beside him will enter the pages of history as ‘diggers’, a term coined for the revolutionaries who rallied beside Peter Lalor on the diggings of the Ballarat goldfields on the morning of 3 December 1854. There, outnumbered by a more powerful army, Peter and his troops fought for the principles Australia would come to hold dear, for a land where every man could have a voice in government. Where mates would stand by each other and fight shoulder to shoulder to defend their rights and liberties. The same principles that will see more than 300,000 Australians fight, like Joe, in a war that is supposed to end all wars.

As the Anzacs begin to make their move on Gallipoli in a bid to thwart the Kaiser’s march through Europe, they are representing an Australia whose identity owes much to the original diggers of Ballarat, who fought to the gory end in their ramshackle fortress under their hand-sewn flag on that dark December morning. An Australia that is young and bold and free.

The larrikin Anzacs represent a new egalitarian democracy, free of pomp and class divides, a country whose national ethos owes much to the events surrounding the battle at the Eureka Stockade.

Three days before that brief but bloody skirmish, Peter Lalor stood with a rifle in his hand and looked around at thousands of his fellow diggers. They were ‘brave and honest men’, he would recall, ‘who had come thousands of miles to labour for independence’.⁸ He knew many of them had suffered all sorts of privations to become new Australians and that many now struggled in great poverty because of a bad government. He also knew they could prosper if only given the chance by a fair and just regime in a land where there was bounty enough for all.

On 30 November 1854, with a battle between diggers and government forces imminent, Peter Lalor looked up at the great blue and white Southern Cross flag flying above him at a place called Bakery Hill. Three young Irish women had painstakingly pieced the huge banner together over several weeks. All of them had seen children starve in Ireland because of unjust laws. They had wept for the hungry young men in chains sent thousands of miles away from their families. They had seen famine and massacres and subjugation and were determined not to live under the same conditions in their adopted home of Australia.

By lamplight, and with an eye out for troopers marching about the diggings looking to trample any sign of uprising, they sewed the white stars onto the blue cloth as an enduring emblem of their quest to live a better life in a new land.

The flag those Irishwomen created, and which the young Irishman Peter Lalor used to rally his forces at Ballarat, was to become a symbol of Australia’s fighting spirit. An anti-establishment banner that still resonates today as a powerful image of all Australians’ right to stand up for themselves. It would spark the nation’s first armed civil disobedience and push the cause of Australian democracy. It would inspire the country’s two most celebrated poets. It would be adopted by the working man and the highwayman; endorsed by politicians such as Ben Chifley and ‘Doc’ Evatt; and would influence generations of outlaws from Johnny Gilbert and Ned Kelly to the motorcycle gangs of the 21st century. It would also rally a new generation of diggers in the Great War. But in the course of its history it would suffer bastardisation and misrepresentation. Like the Confederate Flag of old Dixie, America’s south, it would become a symbol of racial superiority, a rallying standard for rednecks, a symbol of fascism and a beacon for communist agitators.

Mostly, though, it would be a continuing badge of Australia’s freedom.

At Ballarat, three days before a massacre that would change the way Australians lived forever, Peter Lalor stood underneath the flag of the Southern Cross, raised his rifle to the cheering crowd, climbed upon a tree stump and in a thick Irish accent shouted to his fighting diggers a single word.

A word the first Anzacs and all Australians would come to hold dear.

Liberty.

2

I have been for upwards of 40 years struggling without ceasing in the cause of the people.

‘Honest’ Pat Lalor, Irish MP and father of Peter Lalor, 1853¹

This island is ours, and have it we will, if the leaders be but true to the people, and the people be true to themselves.

Fintan Lalor, brother of Peter Lalor, in a letter to the Irish Felon newspaper,28 June 1848²

The story of the Southern Cross flag and of its more than 160 years of influence on Australia has its roots in the centuries of hunger and cruelty that ignited countless bloody Irish rebellions. Often the uprisings featured members of the Lalor family.

According to their family history, the Lalors were a well-established clan by the time St Patrick drove the serpents out of the Emerald Isle in the fifth century AD and introduced the Celtic cross as he converted sun worshippers to Christ.

The O’Lalor family – O’Leathlabhair in Gaelic – was one of the Seven Septs of Leix, ancient rulers of Laois County who survived the arrival of the Anglo-Norman knight Strongbow and his invaders of the 12th century. They were always up for a fight, especially those who lived beyond the Pale, the fortified areas under British protection.

The O’Lalors, though, were more than mere fighting men. For as long as there had been written records, the family had campaigned for social justice and a fair deal for their people, who were more often than not captive to British rule. It would be the same on the Victorian goldfields.

Henry Lalor is still revered for his heroics at the massacre of Mullaghmast in 1578 against the forces of Queen Elizabeth I, whose scorched-earth policy against Catholics spared no one.³ Henry, suspicious after seeing that many of his kinsmen lured into the fort of Mullaghmast for peace talks failed to return, rode in to investigate, saw the bodies of his slaughtered companions lying about like refuse, drew his sword and led the survivors to safety.⁴

Elizabeth’s successors destroyed the old Gaelic order, confiscated land and turned Irish Catholics into tenant farmers and labourers for the ruling Protestants. Fields were given over to the cultivation of a new delicacy for the English gentry: the potato, which came to Ireland from the New World across the Atlantic.

Peter Lalor’s grandfather, Patrick Lalor, is born in 1732 at a time when those of the ‘popish religion’ are excluded from land ownership, public office, the judiciary and teaching professions. They are also barred from intermarriage with Protestants and from owning a horse worth more than £5.⁵ But magistrates in Queen’s County are lax about such things, and by the time he is 35 Patrick Lalor is leasing a small farm at the village of Tinnakill near Raheen, midway between Tipperary and the Irish capital of Dublin, 120 miles (195 kilometres) to the north-east. With his wife Mary, from nearby Doon, Patrick builds a grand two-storey brick and render house on the road to her village in 1771. With typical Lalor stubbornness, Patrick rejects the accepted spelling of Tinnakill and names his home Tenakill House, from the Gaelic Teach na Coillte, meaning ‘house in the woods’.

Over time Patrick and Mary have eight children. Their son, who becomes known as Honest Pat or ‘Patt’, is born in the big house in 1781. During the frequent times of famine Mary Lalor runs a soup kitchen for the hungry and weary.

Uprisings against the British flare regularly and May 1798 sees the start of a four-month Irish insurrection inspired by the revolutions in America and France, which are changing the shape of the world. In June at Enniscorthy in County Wexford, 15,000 British troops put down a poorly equipped Irish rebellion. Local peasants, armed with steel-tipped poles called pikes, are cut down by well-drilled British Redcoats armed with muskets. The revolt is called the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Many of the captured rebels are burned alive.⁶

Six years later, on 5 March 1804, at Castle Hill, west of Sydney, Phillip Cunningham, a veteran of the 1798 rebellion at Vinegar Hill, leads a breakout of 233 Irish convicts with the intent of gathering a convict force of 2000 and commandeering ships in Port Jackson. Scottish major George Johnston puts down the rebellion, which beomes known as the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill.⁷ Cunningham and eight other ringleaders are hanged. Seven other convicts receive between 200 and 500 lashes, a flogging so vicious they wish they were dead.

Back in Ireland, though, land ownership laws for Catholics are being relaxed⁸ and by the time Patrick Lalor dies in 1805, Honest Pat and his wife Anne Dillon control 1000 acres (405 hectares) and are preparing for the arrival of James Fintan Lalor, the first of their 12 children. Better known as Fintan Lalor, their son is born into far more comfortable surrounds than most of Ireland’s Catholics but will become one of the loudest and most enduring voices for Ireland’s poor and downtrodden.

Fintan is a sad and sickly child, pale and delicate, asthmatic and stooped. The Irish rebel leader James Connolly, executed by a British firing squad in 1916, will call him ‘a strange, bitter-tongued hunchback of genius’.⁹ Fintan’s contemporary Charles Gavan Duffy, who will become premier of the Australian colony of Victoria, later remembers him as ‘deaf, nearsighted, ungainly, and deformed’ and writes that his ‘deficiencies cut him off … even from social intercourse except with his nearest kin’.¹⁰

By the time the twelfth and youngest Lalor child, Peter Fintan Lalor, is born at Tenakill House in 1827, Irish patriotism is being taken to new heights by Daniel O’Connell, a tall and charismatic County Kerry barrister that history will label the Great Emancipator and the Liberator. He will often stay with the Lalors at Tenakill House as he goes about Ireland rallying huge crowd support for his proposed reforms. Six million Irish Catholics bristle at laws requiring all citizens of Ireland to pay tithes to support the Church of Ireland – an Anglican branch they do not attend, with absentee rectors they never see.

Young Peter Lalor’s earliest education will not just be in reading, writing and arithmetic but also in how to fight for social justice. He watches with a mixture of adoration and wide-eyed wonder as O’Connell and Honest Pat organise protest meetings all over Ireland. The fervour and resolve of the two men will shape Peter Lalor’s life and have a direct bearing on events under the Southern Cross flag at Ballarat.

On 10 February 1831 Pat stands to vent his spleen seven miles (11 kilometres) from Tenakill House, in the bustling town of Maryborough, a town that was called Portlaoise until Queen Mary’s forces stormed in. Pat Lalor is furious that the Reverend John William La Touche has been appointed as the Church of Ireland’s absentee rector of nearby Clonemagh and is increasing his annual tithes from £500 to £1500.

As the big crowd in the Maryborough market square roars approval in a scene that will be repeated in Ballarat two decades later, Honest Pat Lalor declares that the time for paying an unjust tax is over. The Irish will never again pay tithes.

‘The bloomin’ Tithe Men can come and confiscate ma property,’ he says, ‘but not one Catholic will pay so much as a blessed farthin’ for it. Not one. The British tithes will be useless.’

Pat’s supporters, who include most of Maryborough, hang a banner declaring ‘No Tithe’ outside Maryborough Courthouse. The Irish constabulary soon cuts it down but by then ‘No Tithe’ banners are springing up in town squares all over Ireland.¹¹

A few days after the meeting Reverend La Touche sends his bailiff to Tenakill House to take 25 sheep as Pat’s contribution to his fees. Before reluctantly handing them over, Pat brands each of the sheep with the word TITHE. As the flesh of the sheep sizzles, Pat’s resolve to overthrow an oppressive regime is seared into Peter Lalor’s memory.

A few weeks later on a wet March day, with the roads ankle-deep in mud, Reverend La Touche has the bailiff take the 25 sheep to nearby Mountrath for auction. But no one will purchase them. Like Pat has predicted. Not a single, solitary bid. Not a brass farthing for the reverend’s collection plate. The angry bailiff drives the sheep to market 50 miles (80 kilometres) away in Dublin, but friends of the Lalors, some of Pat’s older sons and some workers ride ahead carrying protest banners declaring ‘PAY NO TITHES’. No one will provide food or shelter for the bailiff or the unfortunate, weary sheep.

When the flock reach Dublin they are in a pitiful state and with the brand TITHE prominent there are still no takers. The distressed sheep are shipped to Liverpool for sale but the Lalors have friends there too. The staggering animals are driven on to Manchester before finally perishing on the road to Leeds.¹² Pat’s TITHE brand is soon in constant use as other farmers join his protest. Tithes remain unpaid and Honest Pat Lalor becomes the most respected man in Queen’s County.

Peter Lalor is just five and taking his first school lessons at Tenakill House when Pat is elected to the British Parliament in 1832, the first Catholic to represent the Irishmen in Westminster in 200 years.

Despite the work of Pat Lalor and Daniel O’Connell, the Irish peasants remain a desperately poor and pathetic lot. Absentee landowners from Britain force many into sharecropping on small parcels of land, rented at exorbitant prices and good for little more than growing potatoes. Larger tracts of the finer soil are taken up to grow grain for export and fatten sheep and cattle for slaughterhouses in England.

Peter has to cope with the death of his mother, Anne, and two brothers, Joseph and Patrick, in 1835, and as he grows into a tall and handsome youth with a clever mind and a mild disposition, Ireland faces tragedy after tragedy. It is as though Armageddon strikes while Britain stands by with hands in pockets.

By 1840 Ireland has a population of more than eight million and 40 per cent of all Irish houses are one-room mud cabins with earth floors, no windows and no chimneys. The largest workforce in the country spends most of its wages on rent.

Fintan Lalor, passing most of his time in seclusion in an attic of Tenakill House, is always at his desk, surrounded by stacks of dusty books and papers and, hunched over like Nosferatu, his quill drips with acid. He urges the violent reclamation of Irish land from the British.¹³

Among the desperately poor farm labourers is 20-year-old John ‘Red’ Kelly, so named for his reddish hair and whiskers. Baptised on 20 February 1820, the first child of Thomas Kelly and Mary Cody of Clonbrogan, in County Tipperary, his harsh treatment in Ireland and subsequent battles with authorities in Australia will nourish the seeds of rebellion in his offspring, one of whom will become Australia’s best-known bushranger.

On the evening of 17 November 1840, Red Kelly, now a gamekeeper on Lord Ormonde’s Killarney estate and according to the Tipperary constabulary ‘a notorious character’,¹⁴ is stealing what police later describe as ‘seven fat cows’ from James Ryall in Moyglass. Helping him is another ne’er-do-well named Pat Regan and an unnamed accomplice. The police are well aware of what the local villains are doing and a Constable Perry and two other officers lie in wait. Regan is walking ahead of the cows being driven by Kelly and the third man when police pounce. Constable Perry tackles Regan, who draws a pistol, puts it against Perry’s chest and pulls the trigger. It misfires. Regan breaks free and runs, using the cows as cover, but Perry and another officer open fire and hit him in the side and hand. He escapes but, badly wounded, is arrested the next day.¹⁵

Red Kelly and his accomplice make a clean getaway but with the police seeming to have prior information, suspicion falls on the young gamekeeper.

Just two and a half weeks later, with South Tipperary deep into winter and covered in a veil of snow, Red tiptoes through the white groundcover at four o’clock one Saturday morning to steal two pigs worth £6 – about four months’ wages for an Irish farm labourer on a shilling a day. The pigs belong to James Cooney, a peasant sharecropper in Ballysheehan.

A few hours later Cooney’s wife Mary walks to the Newpark Police Station to report the theft. By that time Red has driven the pigs through the freezing night and breaking dawn to sell at the Cahir market 12 miles (19 kilometres) away. Police arrest Red that night in a Cashel boarding house.¹⁶

He goes on trial with Pat Regan, in the shadow of the great grey Rock of Cashel, the 900-year-old fortress looming over the town. On 6 January, Regan, growing weaker by the day from the bullet wound in his side, is sentenced to ten years’ transportation. A day later Red Kelly is sentenced to seven years’ transportation for the theft of the pigs, with the Clonmel Herald hinting that he received a lighter sentence because ‘it was he that gave information respecting Regan’.¹⁷

Six weeks after sentencing, Regan dies in Clonmel Gaol and Red Kelly becomes known as a traitor and police stooge. He will be glad to leave Tipperary, even if it means sailing in a convict ship to Van Diemen’s Land, a place so remote to an uneducated Irish peasant that it is as foreboding as Mars.¹⁸

The transportation of convicts from Ireland begins in 1791, and as many as 50,000 of the 165,000 eventually sent to Australia are Irish. Many of them are political prisoners, members of not-so-secret Irish societies – the Whiteboys, the Whitefeet, the Blackfeet, the Ribbonmen, the Molly Maguires and the Terry Alts – arrested for agitation, often violent, against landowners and the government. Most of the Irish convicts, though, are guilty of petty crimes, committed in poverty.¹⁹

Red is first kept in prison at Clonmel and then transported to the brutal Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. Six months later he is marched in chains along with 180 other wretches onto the barque Prince Regent II, berthed in Dublin’s Kingstown Harbour.

Peter Cunningham, Surgeon Superintendent of Convict Transports, later remembers the prisoners’ sleeping quarters as being in two rows, ‘one above the other … each berth being six feet square, and calculated to hold four convicts, everyone thus possessing 18 inches [46 centimetres] of space to sleep in’.²⁰ There is the constant, sickening stench of animal and human excrement and foul water from the bottom of the ship. Many convicts have never seen the ocean before and are terrified and bewildered by the voyage.

Prince Regent II sets sail on 7 August 1841, with Cape Town the only stop. The ship’s doctor, Phillip Toms, does a sterling job limiting the deaths to just three before the prisoners sail up Hobart Town’s Derwent River on 2 January 1842.

Red Kelly is listed as prisoner No. 3248, five foot eight and a half inches (174 centimetres) tall, with fresh complexion, large head, long visage, blue eyes, large nose, and a scar on his chin.

A long way from Tipperary, Hobart is a strange new world, with its grand sandstone buildings erected on the back of convict sweat and blood; the imposing Mount Wellington on one side and the wide expanse of the cold Derwent on the other. It is a world where the British still rule with the whip, the gun and the noose, and where strange creatures the size of deer hop about on their hind legs past things called devils that look like big, fat, savage rats. Many Irish convicts are flogged by the jailers for speaking their native tongue, regarded now as the language of conspiracy.²¹

Prisoners are put to work in large gangs around the island. Red is sent to Browns River, now the Hobart suburb of Kingston. His hatred for British authority festers but he does as he is told, keeping his hands dirty and his nose clean as he breaks rocks and clears forests.

Back in Ireland Daniel O’Connell travels throughout the country creating a messianic following with a series of ‘monster meetings’, drumming up huge support for his campaign to repeal the Act of Union that tethers Ireland to Britain. Just like the rest of Ireland, Peter Lalor, now 16, watches transfixed at the way his father’s friend inspires a crowd under banners and flags proclaiming liberty.

At Mallow in County Cork on 11 June 1843, O’Connell stands tall before a sea of humans, a crowd estimated at 400,000.²² Four days later another huge crowd assembles at a racecourse outside Ennis displaying banners with such slogans as ‘Make the Saxon tyrants fear you’ and ‘Ireland for the Irish’.²³

The Times reports that on 15 August a million people, the greatest crowd ever seen in one place in Ireland, descend on the Hill of Tara, the seat of the ancient Irish kings. Peter Lalor is agog. A new London newspaper called the News of the World reports that ‘fear, terror or alarm would be created in the minds of many of her Majesty’s subjects by reason of the assemblages of enormous masses and multitudes’.²⁴

British Prime Minister Robert Peel sends warships to the Irish capital and O’Connell is arrested along with his son John, two Catholic priests and three newspaper editors, including Charles Gavan Duffy, the co-founder of The Nation. They are charged with conspiring to undermine the Constitution and stir unrest. O’Connell is relieved that he will not face the hangman for treason but he is fined £2000 and sentenced to a year in jail. The House of Lords orders his release after three months.

Politics is a brutal game and Peter Lalor has no inclination to play it. Instead he leaves Tenakill House for Fintan’s old school at Carlow College. He is 17. He does not want to be a revolutionary; he wants to be an engineer like another brother, Richard.

Meanwhile, in Van Diemen’s Land, Red Kelly shows enough good conduct at Browns River to be moved to a workstation at Morven (now called Evandale), about 12 miles (19 kilometres) south of Launceston, and then to a station on the South Esk River near Perth. On 11 July 1845 he is given a ticket of leave, allowing him to move freely around the island and earn wages. He has never been flogged but once when he left his workstation without permission he was found in a potato field belonging to a Mr O’Connor and received two months’ hard labour in leg irons.²⁵

Perhaps the potatoes reminded him of Tipperary, where half of the population, including his parents and six siblings, now depend on the vegetable as their primary food source.

Conditions are ripe for a bumper potato crop in Ireland in 1845 and growing potatoes is now the only way many tenant farmers can exist on their tiny pieces of rented earth.

But in September one grower reports that ‘a queer mist came over the Irish Sea’²⁶ and that ‘the potato stalks turned black as soot’. Next day the fields all around ‘were a wide waste of putrefaction giving off an offensive odour that could be smelled for miles’. The potatoes are blackened and withered with potato blight, an airborne fungus that has its origins in Mexico and has travelled across the Atlantic in the holds of ships.

The Great Famine sees families scavenge to stay alive on boiled nettles and grass, seaweed, seagulls, fox soup, blood from the landlords’ cows and an occasional stolen sheep or pig. Some eat dogs and rats that have been feeding off corpses.

Yet, in Melbourne, the principal town of the Port Phillip District in the colony of New South Wales, the Irish immigrants’ new surrounds do not assuage the old enmities between Catholics and Protestants, among both freed convicts and free settlers. They have endured months at sea, sometimes in chains, only to resume hostilities in this new land. On the afternoon of 13 July 1846 a group of Catholics – which the fledgling Argus newspaper describes as ‘an armed rabble of the lowest description of the Irish papists’ – attacks a gathering of 13 Protestants (Orangemen) at the Pastoral Hotel near the corner of Queen and Little Bourke Streets. The Orangemen are commemorating the brutal 1690 triumph of Protestant King William of Orange over Ireland’s Catholics.

Melbourne’s Catholics arm themselves with muskets and shotguns, or with sticks and clubs. They march on the hotel and demand the Protestants take down their Orange banners. The Catholics shoot out a hotel window and try to force their way inside, only to be met by gunfire.

The battle in the middle of Melbourne lasts half an hour, and two of the Catholics, including ‘the notorious Martin McGlyn’,²⁷ the principal agitator, are badly wounded. Another man, just arrived from Geelong and enjoying a refreshing ale in nearby St John’s Tavern, is shot in the face by a stray pistol ball. Eventually the military arrives, four men are arrested, the mob disperses and the hotel is temporarily shut down.²⁸

But there is more trouble the next morning as about 100 Catholics, with their firearms exposed for all to see, rush across Melbourne’s dusty thoroughfares to gather in Lonsdale Street at the newly built St Francis’ Church. Down at the Bird in Hand Hotel in Little Flinders Street, 60 of the Protestants load their pistols and muskets. Police close every pub in Melbourne and only after many hours of mediation is the crisis averted.

But all around Melbourne there is still violence in the air. John O’Shanassy, a 28-year-old Catholic draper from County Tipperary, newly elected to the Town Council and on his way to becoming the second premier of Victoria, pleads guilty to a charge of striking a young man who was quietly passing by. The young man had in his possession a yellow handkerchief that in the wrong light might have looked orange. It was like a red rag to a green Catholic bull. O’Shanassy threw punches until his victim drew a pistol. A magistrate fines O’Shanassy sixpence.

The Irish winter of 1846–47 is unusually savage and thousands freeze to death in freakish blizzards. Sixty agricultural advisers are sent from England but in some of the remote farming areas they find no survivors to advise.

Typhus and dysentery prosper in the absence of food. In the Times on Christmas Eve 1846, Magistrate Nicholas Cummins writes of visiting Skibbereen, County Cork:

I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey … In the first hovel, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive – they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail: suffice it to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, either from famine or from fever. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands, which was observed shut for many days, and two dead corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats. A mother, herself in a fever, was seen the same day to drag the corpse of her child, a girl about 12, perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones.²⁹

Otherwise law-abiding citizens deliberately commit crimes so they will be transported to Australia, where, even if their legs are chained and their families left behind, they will be fed. Insane women eat the flesh of their own dead children as troops guard grain and livestock exports bound for England. Food riots erupt.³⁰ At Dungarvan in County Waterford, British troops are pelted with stones. They fire 26 shots into the crowd, killing two people and wounding several others.

An estimated 800,000 peasants unable to pay their rent are evicted from their homes, often by force, as landowners, backed by constables, burn their cottages. Some will carry these memories to Australia to fight government forces under the Southern Cross.

Between 1845 and 1849 more than a million Irish die of starvation and fever. About a million more will leave the country. Many landlords ship unwanted tenants overseas because it is cheaper than trying to keep them alive in Ireland.

Thus the Great Diaspora begins, with emigrants leaving for England and further afield to the teeming metropolises of the United States and the prairies of Canada. Some even receive backing to reach the great south land of Australia.

The migrant vessels become known as coffin ships: below deck hundreds of men, women and children, many ravaged by disease, huddle together in the claustrophobic dark for weeks on bare wooden floors with no ventilation and little water.

All around the country young men like Peter Lalor are appalled at Britain’s apparent indifference to Ireland’s woes. Fintan Lalor, part of a growing band of confederates called Young Ireland, bubbles with rage.

Fintan’s health is in sharp decline but in 1846 he is still determined to organise rent strikes and fight against the mass evictions. From his desk in Tenakill House he incites rebellion and calls for a new Irish Constitution through the pages of Charles Gavan Duffy’s newspaper The Nation and in the Irish Felon, published by his Presbyterian friend John Martin.

Fintan writes to his brother Richard urging him to form ‘Felon clubs’ – ‘no fee required, nor subscription’ – and engage a blacksmith to make pikes for the peasants. He cannot trust the post so his letters are hand-delivered by a sympathetic priest, the newly ordained Father Patrick Dunne of Kildare, a former Carlow College student whose niece, Ellen Dunne of nearby Mountrath, has married another Lalor brother, John. Ellen’s sisters, Margaret and Alicia, are sweet on Richard and Peter. Father Dunne risks his own neck delivering Fintan’s call to arms.

‘Have you been able to engage a smith and set him to work?’ Fintan asks of Richard’s efforts to make weapons. ‘Every club formed and every pike forged has its effect here.’³¹

On 17 July 1848 Fintan asks Richard to take Peter, now a strapping man of 21, to join the revolution in the Irish capital. ‘Will you start for Dublin immediately on receipt of this? Don’t be asking foolish questions about What good can you do? etc. Am I to tell you through the Post office? You are wanted here – that is sufficient. If you can bring Peter do so. But not one word of this to anyone else. Come – even if Father is dying.’³²

In his last article for the Irish Felon, on 22 July 1848, Fintan writes ‘… a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green forever?’

Just six days later Fintan is arrested and for six months will languish without trial – first at the jail in Nenagh, Tipperary, and then at Newgate Prison in Dublin.

While Fintan is locked up, Young Irelanders go into action in the Tipperary village of The Commons. On 29 July, a small army of miners, tradesmen and small tenant farmers, who haven’t had a decent feed in years, set up barricades to prevent the arrest of their leaders. The angry mob turns on a party of 47 policemen marching to arrest them and forces the police into a large two-storey Ballingarry farmhouse, about ten miles (16 kilometres) from Red Kelly’s old home. Fearing for their lives, the lawmen take the five children of Mrs Margaret McCormack, the widowed owner of the house, as hostages.

A shootout lasts for several hours and two of the local men are killed before police reinforcements arrive. Among the young radicals to go on trial at Clonmel, County Tipperary, are an eloquent budding lawyer named Thomas Meagher, shipping agent Terence MacManus and journalist Patrick O’Donohue. The charge is high treason.

Peter Lalor listens intently to details of the trial.

On Monday, 23 October 1848, in a packed Clonmel courtroom surrounded by British troops, an eerie silence falls over the court as Lord Chief Justice Doherty clears his throat.

‘The awful sentence of the law is that you, Terence Bellew MacManus, you Patrick O’Donohue, and you Thomas Francis Meagher, be drawn to the place of execution, and that each of you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead; and that afterwards the head of each of you be severed from his body, and the body of each divided into four quarters, to be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit; and may God Almighty have mercy upon your souls.’³³

3

We have adopted a principle and have a definite object and every step in our progress will bring us sensibly nearer to the hour when the Australias shall be freed from the stigma of British crime.

Reverend John West, speaking underneath a flag bearing the Southern Cross, to supporters of the Australasian Anti-Transportation League in St Patrick’s Hall, Melbourne, 13 February 1851¹

Some said there was a wild strain in her. She loved to be free and hated restraint. She was sent to school but was often missing from her class when she would roam over the bogs or the woods after bird’s nests or wild berries.

A family friend describing Ned Kelly’s mother as a small girl in Ireland²

In the depths of Ireland’s Great Famine Peter Lalor’s family is being scattered to all parts of the world. The death sentences handed down to MacManus, O’Donohue and Meagher are commuted to transportation for life and they will be joined in Van Diemen’s Land by Margarett Lalor, the eldest of the Lalor daughters and 19 years Peter’s senior. Margarett has gone to Van Diemen’s Land to be with her husband, James Bergin, transported for seven years for possessing implements used to forge coins.

By 1848 Peter Lalor’s brother John has sailed across the Irish Sea to Kent with his wife, Ellen Dunne. Peter’s sisters Mary and Catherine will move to America with three of his surviving brothers, William, Thomas and Jerome. Private Thomas Lalor will be killed in the Civil War fighting against slavery for the Union Army in the Battle of the Wilderness.³

Honest Pat is about to marry Ellen Loughnan and only three of Pat’s sons, the feeble but still acerbic Fintan and the two