By mid-April, Martin, jobless but reunited with Mitchel, thought his friend’s health good enough to take him on the exciting ride to a Lake Sorell meeting. On the appointed day Martin had his grey pony, but Mitchel set out on a horse rented from a man in the village. It rained, and Mitchel soon found that the autumn weather of Tasmania could resemble that of Ireland. The rain changed to snow, but Mitchel insisted they ride on, and so they passed through ‘a scene of such utter howling desolation,’ amongst rocks and trees. High up they came across open country, a plateau between the two lakes. With snow coming on again, they reached the small hut of round logs, thatched with grass, of a former convict Cooper. Cooper told them that Meagher and a reinvigorated O’Doherty had been up to see him that day and were now at Townsend’s, another, more commodious hut 4 miles further on. Mitchel was too exhausted to ride any farther; ‘so Cooper took one of our horses and set off to Townsend’s.’ In the last of the light, Martin and Mitchel heard three horses outside, and Meagher’s unique laughter. ‘We laughed till the woods rang around; laughed loud and long, and uproariously, till two teal rose, startled from the reeds on the lake shore, and flew screaming to seek a quieter neighbourhood.’
Mitchel had barely met Kevin O’Doherty in the past but found him a noble-looking young man, his face bronzed. Cooper provided a splendid meal of damper and mutton chops, as the other Young Irelanders told Mitchel more distressing news—Smith O’Brien had been deprived of his usual supply of cigars, sent him from Hobart Town. ‘To a man all alone, and already goaded and stung by outrage and wrong, even such a small privation as this may be a serious grievance.’ The next morning they all rode along the peninsula which ran out into Lake Sorell, the Dog’s Head Peninsula. Snowy mountains lay beyond the western side of the lake, and here Mitchel felt his soul breathe. He returned to Bothwell from the ride delighted to have found that all his friends were ‘unsubdued.’ Now he became a devout excursionist. Exploring to the west of Bothwell, he met families of Scots Highlanders, Erse-speakers, refugees from the same potato blight that had descended on Ireland. He and Martin also enjoyed the ‘pleasant parlour of Ratho, the home of a most amiable and accomplished Edinburgh family.’ Their name was the Reids, and Ratho a fine stone house of the kind successful settlers built early in Tasmania, structures very different from the ones occupied until recently by New South Wales pastoralists such as Brodribb. Mr Reid’s widowed daughter, Mrs Williams, whose officer husband had died in India soon after her marriage, was personable, of lively intelligence, and barely twenty years old.
Mitchel had on his travels begun to notice the impact the Australian wilderness had upon the convicts. ‘The best shepherds in Van Diemen’s Land are London thieves—men who never saw a live sheep before they were transported; and what is stranger still, many of them grow rather decent—it would be too strong to say honest—by their mere contact with their Mother Earth here.’
One of his rides took him illegally to the homestead of Mr and Mrs Connell, Gaelic-speaking Irish settlers of Glen Connell in the foothills of the Western Tiers. They were generous and expansive hosts, and Meagher himself often went hunting and riding in the wild country above with their Australian son. Martin liked them so thoroughly that he sent them books—in his opinion, the highest gift of all.
In the Sydney Morning Herald early in April 1850 appeared a letter, painful to O’Donohoe, signed ‘A Friend to Erin’s Exiles’:
I beg to assure those who feel an interest for the ‘Irish state prisoners’ now in Van Diemen’s Land, that those gentlemen endeavoured to dissuade Mr O’Donohoe, one of their number, from the publication of his newspaper … the other State Prisoners are much displeased with Mr O’Donohoe’s conduct … the character of some of his ‘new associates’ make his ‘compatriots’ blush for him and wish that HE had never been amongst THEM.
We can merely guess at who might have been the Hobart associates who made his compatriots blush.
O’Donohoe gamely republished the hurtful sentiments in the Exile. Driven by the need to show public loyalty for their fellow rebel, three of the State prisoners wrote a letter of support for him, though each danced round the point of applauding O’Donohoe’s Irish Exile. From the town of Bothwell, Mitchel chose to attack the anonymous writer for claiming that O’Donohoe’s fellow felons were ashamed ‘of being associated with you in our pious Felony. I know not one amongst us who engaged in it with truer and more disinterested devotion than you.’ John Martin followed the same line: ‘You have sacrificed your property and your family affections, and you offered your life in that cause.’ Meagher, who was probably the best friend O’Donohoe had, declared, ‘Never have I blushed for the brave, generous, devoted friend—the sharer of my watchings and my wanderings—the sharer of my anxieties, privations, and calamities.’ O’Donohoe, touchingly pleased, enthusiastically published all three letters, and fought on.
On Maria Island, after the triangle of iron was rung to signify lock-up time for O’Brien and convicts in the long barracks further down the square, the nights were now lengthening. Dr Hampton of the Convict Department had notified O’Brien he would be allowed to buy clothing, but only if he endorsed a letter of credit the registrar would send him, the registrar being thereby authorised to honour drafts in payment of O’Brien’s bill. O’Brien did not acknowledge the registrar’s right to have any management of his money. ‘I wrote in answer to say that I must decline to endorse the order.’ He may have been as stimulated as exhausted by these arm-wrestles with the administration, and understood that Hampton’s bureaucratic procedures could be made to seem like tyranny when conveyed to sympathetic listeners in Europe. ‘What will be the next move?’ asked Smith O’Brien with a trace of relish. But the little fights diminished him too, and he had reached the stage of composing, whether in daydream or despair, an inscription for an urn, containing his heart, which was to be deposited in the Church of Ireland Cathedral of Limerick after his death. ‘Cor patria moriens exsul commisit O’Brien / Quod fuit et fidum patria dum vita manebat.’ (‘Dying, the exile O’Brien committed to his homeland a heart which, while life remained, kept trust with the nation.’)
The northern hemisphere’s reaction to his imprisonment on Maria Island, inevitably delayed, was by now potent. The revivified Nation announced on 1 June 1850: ‘They are killing Smith O’Brien by slow murder on Maria Island.’ That utterance in itself ensured O’Brien’s victory in the Irish mind. ‘He is caged in the closest solitary confinement. His food is scanty and loathesome … He never sees the face, or hears the voice of a friend. He is denied the common requisites of decency. For months he has not been allowed a change of raiment, or permitted to cleanse his dress.’ Irish Members in the Commons would ask questions. On 22 June, reaction to the treatment of O’Brien was quoted by the Nation from the Irish regional papers. The Sligo Champion asked: ‘Who can contemplate unmoved this descendant of a line of kings … this man of warm and loving heart, subjected to such vile torture?’ The Cork Examiner had to defend Sir Lucius from those who thought he was not exerting himself enough on his brother’s behalf. ‘I am in a position to know that the fate of his brother has preyed on his mind to such an extent that his health is giving way under it.’
The Nation reprinted a letter O’Brien wrote to Isaac Butt from Darlington Penal Station: ‘An amiable Catholic clergyman inhabits the adjoining cottage, and though his garden is separated by a low fence from mine, he is not allowed to exchange a syllable with me.’ Against such heart-breaking assertions, the Denison couple had no answer. Meetings of protest and support were held in London, Cork, Limerick, Dublin, Ballyhaunis and Kerry. A group of a thousand met in New York with newspaperman Horace Greeley in the chair. Michael Doheny, the Young Ireland escapee, struck a militant attitude for his old friend. ‘If you wish to send comfort to Smith O’Brien,’ he cried, ‘tell him there are a hundred thousand Irishmen in America ready to fight the battle of freedom.’ This myth of an Irish-American army ready to apply themselves at once to the old b
attle took no account of the claims the new battle made on the Irish, as they applied their immigrant skills to the mills and mines and navigation canals.
Against the wall of his cottage O’Brien had tacked a view of Dromoland Castle sent to him by his eldest son, Edward, now an adolescent. O’Brien was if anything more anxious than he would have been at home to ensure Edward got the education he, Smith O’Brien, considered appropriate. O’Brien wanted him to attend St Columba’s, the school of the Protestant establishment, founded in Dublin since the time O’Brien himself had attended the Sassenach school of Harrow. And Edward was not to slack: ‘you may acquire before the age of 23 a competent knowledge of 7 languages.’ He listed them—Irish (that was essential), English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian. And then a proficiency with abstract, experimental and natural sciences. He was concerned that his entire family should see Ireland as the central location of their souls and schooling. ‘Your education would be completely stopped if you were to come to this country,’ he warned his daughter Lucy.
And his wife too was so instructed, now that Hampton had given an official guarantee that his letters to her would not be opened. He had a chance to praise her resignation and fortitude, but they were to go on being exercised at home.
I sometimes feel not a little melancholy when I think that our young rebel Charles Morrough will not know his father when he sees him, and I feel that Charlotte and Donough will also have forgotten me, but painful as are these feelings I cannot in the least agree to consent to the removal of my children to Australia—I wish you to consider Ireland as your home and the sphere of your duties and of your affections.
The botanical friendship between O’Brien and the young Lapham women flourished. Anne Lapham, fifteen years, gave O’Brien a cutting for his garden, for which he recompensed her with the expected verse.
Take back this stem its flower is thine
Though nurtured by my care
For gladly I thy gift resign
That thou its bloom may’st wear.
Smith O’Brien considered this verse innocent enough to have a place in the journal he was preparing for his family to read at a later and happier date.
Not long after midday on 18 July, a Convict Constable Hamerton was playing with a 6-inch telescope in front of the coxswain’s cottage on the hill a little to the south of Darlington. He was in the company of the coxswain Griffiths and of another constable, Rogerson. Constable Hamerton would later claim to have seen through the telescope, from a distance of 400 yards, O’Brien and the younger Miss Lapham, Susan, twelve or thirteen ears of age, embracing in an enclosed back garden on the sea side of the Lapham residence. Hamerton would swear before Dr Smart.
I saw Smith O’Brien reclining on a garden seat and Miss Susan was close to him. I positively declare I saw O’Brien’s flies open in front and that I saw Miss Susan’s hand in his trousers. Smith O’Brien had on his cloak and tried to conceal himself by drawing it around him … I have seen them kissing. I have repeatedly seen them together after dark.
Hamerton passed the telescope to Coxswain Griffiths. Griffiths would claim to have seen what Hamerton saw, and so the telescope was passed to Convict Constable Rogerson. Rogerson claimed he rushed down the hill to alert Mrs Lapham, who was resting in a front room of the Lapham house. ‘I told her to call her daughter from O’Brien immediately from the Garden or she would be ruined and I would tell Mr Lapham all about it when he came home … Mrs Lapham made me promise I would tell no one and I did so.’ She summoned Rogerson back later in the day. ‘Mrs Lapham said now I depend on you for Mr Lapham has an appointment at Port Arthur and if the Comptroller General was to hear anything of this the family would be ruined for life.’
Convict Constable Hamerton also paid Mrs Lapham a visit, was seen near the Lapham house by Dr Smart and, questioned by him, was forced to make a sworn statement. The doctor confronted O’Brien with this affidavit, and the two exchanged a number of angry letters across the little Darlington station square. Smart, said O’Brien, had ‘brought into question the name of a young lady … by giving countenance to the reports of a mischief maker who I understand states that he saw through a telescope doings which he could not have seen had he been within ten yards … but as this want of prudery arose from a kindly desire to mitigate the loneliness of my solitude you ought to be the last person to condemn it.’ Smart answered that unless the imputation was withdrawn, he would authorise a public inquiry. Smart read both his own letters and O’Brien’s to Mrs Lapham, including the one in which O’Brien withdrew any sentiment which might hurt Smart’s feelings, since ‘it will be an act of wanton cruelty towards as amiable and excellent a girl as ever existed to make it a matter of public investigation.’
So the matter seemed settled, though the shame did not give O’Brien, guilty or innocent, much rest. Dr Smart did not take an affidavit from Rogerson and Griffiths until 12 September, nearly two months afterwards, when the Convict Department happened to see the affidavit he had taken from Hamerton, and demanded more information, plenty of time if necessary for Rogerson and Griffiths to ensure their stories did not clash with Hamerton’s.
Smart’s ultimate report to Comptroller-General Hampton had it that a very ill and fraught Mrs Lapham admitted that O’Brien had ‘taken liberties with her daughter … A great part of Mrs Lapham’s anxiety was to keep all knowledge of the affair from Mr Lapham,’ who was ‘subject to violent attacks of illness.’ Smart, only thirty-four years old and with a career to make—he would ultimately become mayor of Hobart—deflected blame from himself to Lapham by claiming Lapham had said ‘that the Comptroller General was perfectly aware of all the liberty Smith O’Brien enjoyed here, and he was perfectly pleased with all parties.’
In summary Smart, though guilty of being indulgent himself, made Mrs Lapham seem a very strange mother, Mr Lapham a perverter of Hampton’s orders, and Smith O’Brien a perverter of the young. But neither Hampton nor Denison used the incident against O’Brien. Possibly this was from sensitivity towards the girl’s reputation. Possibly it was because the governor and comptroller suspected the affidavits and the reliability of Dr Smart’s self-serving report.
A defender of O’Brien could of course argue that twelve years was Ireland’s marriageable age. But if the thing happened, quibbles of this nature could barely lessen the guilt and betrayal. There were never, however, any further accusations of such abuse at any other time of O’Brien’s life, and at first hearing it was hard to believe that a man of such punctiliousness and stubbornness of will could have so betrayed the Laphams. Yet O’Brien confided to his journal: ‘It is beyond measure painful to one who is sincerely desirous to do right … to feel that he has been led by the frailties of his nature into acts which have brought with them consequences not only disastrous to himself but most detrimental to others.’ Those who choose to could read this ambiguous statement as an admission.
After the event, Smart chastised O’Brien’s minder, Miller, and ordered Constable Hamerton ‘never to lose sight of Smith O’Brien.’
In the Australian winter of O’Brien’s supposed fall from grace, Terence Bellew MacManus, former wool broker, had been permitted to move from New Norfolk north to Van Diemen’s Land’s second port, Launceston. Here he took up residence at the home of Dean Butler, an Irish priest, found work as a clerk in a warehouse, and settled urbanely into the life of the little port. Southwards, in wilder terrain, Meagher meant to build a Gaelic refuge on the Dog’s Head Peninsula on Lake Sorell. He was given land for it by a friend he had made in Ross, a middle-aged English settler named William Clarke, to whom Meagher seemed colourful and amusing. Clarke, who would found a politically powerful Tasmanian clan, already possessed extensive pastoral leases in Victoria and New South Wales, Bradley-style, and was known as ‘Big Clarke,’ or ‘Moneyed Clarke.’
Meagher and his assigned Irish convict Egan now moved up into this high, cold, grand country on the lake-shore, and built a timber cottage on a stone foundation. Near the ma
keshift pier Meagher built, the oared skiff he had ordered from Hobart, Speranza, was moored. By Speranza, Meagher and Egan, antipodean Noahs, transferred a small quantity of livestock to a grassy and wooded island offshore, 70 acres in extent.
Kevin O’Doherty was more mundanely stuck in his little stone cottage in Oatlands, waiting for a disapproving brother in Dublin to send on his Irish medical certificates so that he could sit for the Van Diemen’s Land Medical Board examination. In fact he had not heard at all from his family, and his chastising mother and two brothers might have been punishing him by not writing and by withholding funds. O’Doherty wondered too whether the Medical Board’s fussiness was a hint ‘to attempt no further intrusion.’ But Kevin resented the fact that in the region around Oatlands, living with a convict midwife, there was a ‘self-styled Doctor’ whose qualifications were much shakier than Kevin’s.
In August 1850 O’Doherty’s superior, Dr Hall, was transferred from Oatlands to Ross. In a panic, without a job or money, O’Doherty believed he must surrender his ticket-of-leave and go to prison, where he would be fed and lodged by the Government. By the time Dr Hall was packing, a further mail ship had arrived from Ireland without letters or money, not even from Eva. Saint Kevin felt he was lost at the bottom of a pit. But Bishop Willson urged him to apply for a transfer to Hobart or Launceston where he could at least work as a pharmacist. Bishop Willson and Patrick O’Donohoe both now promoted to Dr William Crooke of the Tasmanian Dispensary in Hobart the idea that O’Doherty’s presence as a pharmacist would bring in Irish customers. Kevin received approval for a transfer to Hobart.