Two days later, his journal entry was uncharacteristically succinct. ‘Today I met my wife and family once more. These things cannot be described. Tomorrow morning we set off through the woods for Bothwell.’ Their ride was joyous, though rain mixed with snow was falling across their track. Thirty-year-old Jenny enjoyed a sense of solid arrival and the promise of normality. His younger daughter Minnie had been alarmed at the isolation of the bush, the narrow, bushy trail, but was quickly reassured. Mitchel rode Fleur-de-lis, a horse he had stabled at Green Ponds for the past two weeks precisely for this last leg of the journey. Beside him, the family travelled in a spring cart, ‘to the comfortable hotel of Mrs Beech—incomparable cook of kangaroo. Knox was waiting for us; and we spent such an evening as seldom falls to the lot of captives.’
The few rooms Mitchel and Martin had shared in Bothwell were inadequate for the family. By the end of August, they had all moved 3 miles from Bothwell to a more spacious though far from palatial house, Nant Cottage. It sat, and still sits, on a 211-acre farm Mitchel and Martin intended to work. From its upper windows, the Mitchel family and their closest friend enjoyed a noble view stretching for 3 miles north to Quoin Hill. In theory at least, Mitchel adored the rural life, and began stocking the farm with sheep and cattle.
Mitchel heard from Jenny how John and James and Willie had loved the crowded passage out and had spent their evenings at Irish parties in steerage. They took to the bush with the same enthusiasm. ‘Four hours every day are devoted to the boys’ lessons,’ said Mitchel, ‘then riding, or roaming the woods, with the dogs.’ Later events would cast a poignant light over the image of these three boys in hallooing chase after wallabies in the Australian bush, at play in the valley of the Clyde at the world’s end. Jenny Mitchel wrote enthusiastically about the farm near Bothwell to her childhood friend Miss Mary Thompson. ‘I am now perhaps happier than I would have been had I never known trouble.’ Two months of seasickness on her way to Mitchel, her recuperation lying on a mattress on the poop deck, were all but forgotten. She now had the normal pleasures of gossip. ‘You will have heard before this of Mr Meagher’s marriage to one of the beauties of this country. It is a pity on the whole (between ourselves). I fear his father will be very wroth with him.’
Jenny, a Van Diemen’s Land householder now, employed convict servants, including a Tipperary woman convicted at Clonmel at the time of O’Brien’s trial. But despite her own willingness to become a colonial wife, Jenny would later have to tell Miss Thompson that John insisted on calling their house a ‘lodging … for John will not have me use the word “home” in this country. But the sweetest little spot it is you ever saw.’ So she was willing to cry Home! and raise her children there. She visited and liked a number of the local families—the Reids of Ratho, the McWilliamses, the Pattersons, the Wilkinsons, the McDowells. ‘Not an Irish family among them,’ said Jenny with a trace of her father’s Orange-ism.
In Dr Brock’s house the VDL winter laid up O’Brien with lumbago. Kept awake at night by pain, he distracted himself by reading My Prisons, Le mie prigioni, an account by the Piedmontese poet Pellico of his imprisonment under the Austrians. He left his lessons with the Brock boys to weep secretly in his room at news that his cherished brother-in-law the Reverend Charles Monsell, husband of Harriett, had died in Ireland—‘perhaps the most amiable man whom I have ever known.’
As he travelled into Avoca in the rain to report to the police magistrate, he became aware that a huge Australian shift had developed. Gold had been discovered outside Melbourne, and many men of capital were rushing there. Australian colonial governors were believed to have quashed many other earlier gold discoveries, understanding the impact a gold rush would have on the stability of the convict system and of society generally. Count Strzelecki and the other Polish explorer Lhotsky had encountered auriferous rocks on their explorations in the 1830s. A boy named Chapman had turned up in a jewellery store in Melbourne in 1849 with 35 ounces of gold found in the bush. A clergyman found alluvial gold outside Melbourne, but kept quiet about it for godly reasons. But a man called Hargreaves, who had mined in California, chose not to be quiet when he found gold in June 1851 near Bathurst, where John Hessian, former Ribbonman, had served out his time. Gold made further transportation to New South Wales or the Port Phillip area absurd. The British poor might seek transportation for a minor crime, achieve an early ticket-of-leave and become miners, all at government expense!
In another golden venue, San Francisco, Terence MacManus landed at Front Street on 5 June 1851, to a raucous welcome amidst the civic stench of stagnant water, tar and sewage. The population of San Fastopolis, as wits called it, had trebled since 1849. Around the old Plaza, saloons and casinos operated twenty-four hours a day to serve gold-diggers. MacManus himself, for whom every Irishman wanted to buy a drink, was not immune to the crass charms of the Plaza, although he seemed to be less readily attracted to women than Meagher and O’Brien. Sentimentalists said that he would never marry because he was wed to Ireland. His chief vice, encouraged here more even than in VDL, seemed to become drinking, the sin most easily forgiven in mad San Francisco where, it was said, one fourth of the population drank to celebrate luck and three fourths to comfort themselves for its lack.
In the week of MacManus’s arrival, an Australian—perhaps an escaped ticket-of-leave man or a discharged felon—was hanged by a mob for trying to steal a safe. A gang of former convicts—the Sydney Ducks—were of particular concern to citizens. So a publicly proclaimed Committee of Vigilance was formed to regulate punishment for crime. Some order was needed in a town where 500 or 600 ships cluttered the waterfront, and hotels slept eight people in an 8-by-10-foot room, behind walls of flammable canvas painted brick. Although MacManus saw the results of a massive recent fire in the centre of the city, the San Franciscans took these disasters with composure, and had time to plan a number of public receptions to greet ‘Brave MacManus.’ On the night after his arrival, a levee was held at the Union Hotel. MacManus, no Meagher when it came to oratory, said he found it difficult to express his exhilaration when three months earlier he had been wearing grey felon’s clothing and chains. He knew with delight now that he would live the rest of his life under the American flag. Ecstatic applause greeted his short oration.
The following night, at a committee meeting and further reception for MacManus at the Union, the crowd was so thick that the floor gave way and the entire assembly fell into the cellar in a state of what MacManus called ‘beautiful confusion.’ Picking its way good-humouredly out of the Union’s cellar, the meeting now moved out into the old Plaza of San Francisco, where, on the permanent rostrum, MacManus said that wherever the StarSpangled Banner needed a soldier, there he would be found.
Official America (including two US generals present) rejoiced in the escape of a Young Irelander. The extradition treaty between Britain and the United States was considered by American judges not to apply to political prisoners, and rejoicing was not restrained by transatlantic diplomacy.
MacManus’s arrival was celebrated not only in San Francisco but in every Irish centre of influence throughout the United States. He was given a dinner in absentia in Boston, and an Irish-American militia regiment in New York was named the MacManus Invincibles. As the fury of welcomes diminished, MacManus tried to come to terms with a mercantile life in San Francisco, setting up as a shipping agent, a task at which he was no rival for the Yankees.
The escape of MacManus had produced joy amongst British liberals and ecstasy in Ireland itself. On the Australian mainland, amongst those who rejoiced in MacManus’s feat were those humbler Irish ex-prisoners such as Hugh Larkin and his wife to whom such a resurrection was improbable and glorious. So it was also to Irish free immigrants with whom Hugh did business. There was much delighted counter-thumping in Hugh’s store. The Goulburn, Braidwood and Yass areas were full of Lord Monteagle’s former tenants from Limerick—Culhanes, Ezburys, Quiltys, Kenellys and Kenealys, Connells, Daltons, Sheahans, Burkes, a
ll discreetly congratulating themselves on MacManus’s adroit flit.
But there was no flitting for Hugh. Another child, John, had been born in 1850. As a small trader and paterfamilias, he saw his town grow by several thousand settlers, particularly after the gold discoveries at Turon Creek in 1851. By now, Michael O’Flynn, Mary’s first son, was a robust young man of sixteen, working as an agricultural labourer in the high-priced labour market around Goulburn, or else trying for gold. For the same fervours which had earlier seized San Francisco now marked the bush. There was a sense of movement and spaciousness.
For the Larkins, it was a cause of pain to think that the demigod O’Brien had been subjected—as many Irish and anti-transportation newspapers implied—to the same indignities as they had. But new heroes in New South Wales politics claimed their attention as well. A New South Wales Constitution was about to be framed. There had been argument about whether it should contain a hereditary House of Lords, a concept the Australian populace mocked, and there was already intense debate on the connection to the British monarch. One of the leading republicans, an ‘extreme Liberal’ activist, had moved to Goulburn to work as a journalist and barrister. His name was Dan Deniehy, and he was the sort of fellow who would have fitted very well into the ’82 Club and Young Ireland. In his early twenties, he was a dishevelled but handsome little man and a dazzling orator. Dan Deniehy’s father Henry had been one of the humblest of felons, transported to Australia for seven years for vagrancy, but had become a produce merchant in Sydney. Dan’s mother Mary McCarthy had also received seven years for some minor crime. Larkin saw in Deniehy a man of similar background to his own who yet spoke and wrote with all the vivacity and scholarship of a Meagher. Deniehy wrote in the Goulburn Herald:
I have adjourned to this good town, a remarkably thriving place, for the purpose of recruiting my health, of scraping together a little of that prime element of social and political power—money … This, even partially done, my eye is fixed on one point—the doing my duty in establishing Republican institutions and advancing in every genuine method, my native land.
This young man of great gifts, speaking for the democratic, anti-squatter elements, would in early 1854 mock Sydney’s narcissistic fear that Russians would seize the colony once the threatened war between Britain and Russia broke out in the Crimea.
I can only say that if that Roosian Ketchikoff does land, I only hope he may try travelling upon the Goulburn road. I have a notion that he would undoubtedly regret such a step; and further, if the few gentlemen that are studded here and there about our district (like ornaments on a twelfth-cake) be a sample of what is really understood to be the genuine article, why rather than thirty of ‘such gentlemen,’ I vote for Ketchikoff.
One can without too much effort imagine Larkin and Mary, listening to such pungency, doubled over in laughter.
It does not appear that in between children, the store, and watching Deniehy grow in grandeur, Hugh went looking for gold in any permanent way. He stuck to commerce, such as it was, to home, and to Goulburn’s familiar pubs, probably avoiding Mandelson’s, the swankiest, the least like a shebeen—unless, of course, brilliant Dan Deniehy was orating there. He might still have been remitting money to Esther, but whether Esther knew of his Australian family there is no way to tell.
The authorities had had the good grace now to give Mitchel and his family total liberty within Van Diemen’s Land—the sort of liberty enjoyed by all other ticket-of-leave men other than O’Brien, Meagher, O’Donohoe and O’Doherty. Under this impetus, Mitchel decided to visit O’Brien, and set off with Mrs Jenny Mitchel on horseback cross-country towards Oatlands. This is even now hard, hilly terrain, and the journey stands as a tribute to Jenny’s sturdiness as well as Mitchel’s. Jenny, letting her horse drink in the Jordan River, was full of enthusiasm for this country her husband would not let her call home. ‘Anything to exceed the beauty of our drive that day through the bush I never saw.’
In Oatlands they boarded the coach northwards, Mitchel still taking a sour view. ‘Every sight and sound that strikes eye or ear on this mailroad, reminds me that I am in a small, misshapen, transported, bastard England; and the legitimate England itself is not so dear to me that I can love the convict copy.’ As they travelled, they sensed the excitement of Van Diemen’s Land’s first election under the new Constitution. Political rosettes were attached to the ears of coach horses. Denison did have some supporters, most notably the proprietor of the Hobart Town Advertiser, John Donnellan Balfe, a former infiltrator of Young Ireland, who had been rewarded for his spying with a post and land grant in Van Diemen’s Land. Balfe and the rest of the pro-transportationers wore red ribbon as their emblem, but the coach the Mitchels travelled on was full of blue ribbon wearers, supporters of a Mr Kermode, the anti-transportation candidate in north-east VDL. At a hotel in Avoca, the five-starred flag of the Australian League was flying, and Mitchel noticed that Mr Kermode had used Meagher to write his election address. ‘The sharp pen of the hermit of the lake pointed every sentence: in every line I recognised the “fine touch of his claw.” ’
Mitchel and his wife were in the hotel parlour taking refreshment when they saw Smith O’Brien pass by on the street. ‘We met him at the door as he entered; and our greeting was silent … his form is hardly so erect, nor his step so stately; his hair is more grizzled, and his face bears traces of pain and passion. It is sad to look upon this noblest of Irishmen.’ They finished breakfast together, and Smith O’Brien suggested a stroll up the valley of the South Esk. They wandered for hours, talking of ’48. With Mitchel, Smith O’Brien felt thankfully free to attribute failure in great part to the behaviour of the priests. O’Brien said he had by now despaired of any revolutionary action in Ireland; Mitchel would never do so.
When the Mitchels and O’Brien parted on 16 October, the eve of O’Brien’s birthday, Jenny cried. ‘We stood and watched him long, as he walked up the valley on his lonely way.’ Seeing Jenny had made O’Brien yearn for his own family, but he still resisted the idea of ‘placing my wife and children under the control of the brutes who govern the prisoner population.’
On the way back to Bothwell, Mitchel and his wife travelled a little way up the Macquarie River to that point called the Sugarloaf, the home of John Connell and his wife. Connell had already fetched their horses for them from Oatlands and he and his wife diverted Mitchel with stories of their early life as settlers: ‘A wild forest to tame and convert into green field—wilder black natives to keep watch and ward against—and wildest convict bushrangers to fight sometimes in their own house.’ Mrs Connell, who had a thick Munster accent, seemed to be the characteristic Irish Vanithee, or woman of the house, and was locally famous for having once defeated four bushrangers in an exchange of fire.
John and Jenny now turned west, towards Lake Sorell. Mitchel was leading the horses up a sharp slope ‘when we suddenly saw a man on the track above us; he had a gun in his hand, on his head a cabbage-tree hat, and at his feet an enormous dog.’ This man and Mitchel exchanged Australian ‘cooees,’ a bush-dweller’s yell. The bushman above was Meagher. ‘The next minute, instead of commencing our descent into a valley on the other side, we are on the edge of a great lake.’ They followed a path cut amongst the trees, ‘at the head of which, facing one of the most glorious scenes of fairy-land, with the clear waters rippling at its feet, and a dense forest around and behind it, stands our friend’s quiet cottage.’
‘I must say,’ Jenny wrote of Catherine Meagher, ‘that his wife seems a handsome, nice, amiable girl.’ The Meaghers’ ticket-of-leave man, To m Egan, offered to sail the Mitchels across on the skiff Speranza towards that large island in the middle of the lake, where oats and potatoes had now been planted. But the wind became contrary, and they were pleased to get ashore and indoors. ‘Pleasant evening, of course; except when we spoke of Ireland and the miserable debris of her puny agitators.’ The fire gleamed red on gaily bound books cramming the shelves. The Mitchels rode home carrying
in a burlap bag a small kangaroo, a present to his children from the Connells.
The elections proved a triumph for the Australian League. ‘There is a large majority of anti-transportation returned,’ Jenny wrote. ‘Would that our poor brethren at home could be induced to unite for their rights—it does seem there is some spell over them which they cannot overcome.’
A sad William Smith O’Brien renewed his parole and engaged not to escape between 7 November 1851 and 7 May 1852. Throughout October and November there was continual rain, and he felt his low spirits dragging his physical health down. His efforts to be tutor to Brock’s sons still suffered from a certain futility. He and his friend Brock agreed the arrangement was not working, and O’Brien sought leave to return to New Norfolk. Ten days before Christmas, he left the Avoca area ‘without experiencing the slightest desire ever to return to it.’ At Campbell Town, travelling south, he was met by Meagher, apparently settled, but with a firm intention to escape. Marriage had failed to provide him with a focus for his energies. There was every indication that, as other Young Irelanders had said, he and the 20-year-old colonial Catherine were ill-matched.
The next evening, O’Brien caught the night coach to Hobart, where he was permitted to do two days’ business before returning drearily but comfortably to his old home, Mr Elwin’s Hotel in New Norfolk. But from Major Henry Lloyd of Bryn Estyn estate, an excellent stone house and even more excellent English-style stables, he received a welcome invitation to spend Christmas. He stayed on in comfort until the New Year, and then moved downriver to Fenton Forest, home of his friend Captain Michael Fenton, newly elected member of the Legislative Council. As for his Australian-born daughters, O’Brien confessed he delighted in their singing. But he told Lucy he was reluctant to praise them ‘lest you may imagine that I am desirous to comfort myself for the loss of your society by that of other daughters of Eve.’