In 1965 the Reverend Francis Shaw SJ, Professor of Early and Medieval Irish at University College, Dublin, was invited by the editor of Studies to contribute to a special edition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising. His article, nearly twice as long as that requested, was not used - being judged too controversial for the celebratory theme. Two years after his death, and in the wake of the events of Bloody Sunday, the article was published. What may have been controversial in 1966 was prophetic by 1972. Shaw's careful exposé of the bloody themes in the philosophy of Padraic Pearse and the uncritical worship of ancient heroes like Cú Chulainn began a long revision in Irish historiography of the link between present ugly realities and the imagined heroic past.1

Roy Foster is a recent contributor to that revision, and in the introduction to his book of essays, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History, he notes that the most vigorous challenge to the revision comes from emigré historians:

Guarding historical memory is a strong theme in the retelling of the Kelly story, and no more than in the trial before Sir Redmond Barry. For many writers and historians the confrontation is emblematic, symbolic and profound. Redmond Barry represents the Irish-Protestant, landed ascendancy: Ned Kelly the Irish-Catholic dispossessed, with the overlay of a convict exile. Even the publishers‘ graphic designers have caught on - each chapter in Ian Jones’ account of Ned Kelly's life is headed by a shamrock, while the Barry Coat of Arms heads each chapter of Ann Galbally's biography of Sir Redmond.3

Viewed through green tinted glasses, Ned Kelly can be seen playing a familiar role in a long Irish saga: he who against all odds raises revolt at an unjust oppressor, the glory of the cause and the magnificence of the heroic death excusing the blood shed along the way - precisely the hero of the canonical Irish history challenged by Francis Shaw. Such a telling clouds the judgement of the place of the Irish in the establishment of Victoria, and if we listen to other voices a different story is heard.

On the evening of Saturday the 22nd of July 1854 a group of Melbourne's prominent Irishmen met at the Criterion Hotel to welcome back from exile William Smith O‘Brien, John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty. The three leaders of the Irish rebellion of 1848 had won a partial reprieve from their sentence of transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land and were making their way back to Europe.

Feted to a dinner and long speeches, the heroes were welcomed by the Chairman for the evening and member of the Legislative Council, John O‘Shanassy, to the’…first free soil they had trodden on since their partial restoration to freedom…‘ O’Shanassy had come to the Port Phillip District in 1839, and after failing in his attempt at farming returned to his family trade as a draper, profiting from the rapid growth in the new Colony following the discovery of gold. O‘Brien responded to O’Shanassy's welcome with a long address recounting his continuing faith in the Irish cause and concluding with a toast to the prosperity of Victoria. In reply O'Shanassy said:

After several more speeches O‘Brien proposed the health of the Chairman, to which O’Shanassy responded:

The editor of the Melbourne Morning Herald was concerned at the length to which the Argus had reported the dinner, and the potential message of a Colony seeking independence that this might send to Home. Under his banner of Impartial not Neutral he set out to reassure English readers that in elevating Smith O‘Brien from rebel to hero the speakers on the evening had simply taken’…the last resort of the panegyrist when all they could plead for their hero was the goodness of his intentions. ’In his view there was little to justify the‘…solid pudding and empty praise so bountifully bestowed.’5

As William Smith O'Brien was preparing to return from exile, his old ally in Young Ireland, Charles Gavan Duffy, was growing weary of the struggle to hold together a League of North and South in Westminster in pursuit of Irish land reform. Duffy's conviction that land reform was an answer to the Irish question was born from the squalor and starvation of the tenant classes during the famine and the opportunity presented by the economic ruin of the landlords. In a pamphlet presented by Duffy to the Melbourne Public Library in 1874, and most probably written by him in 1848, he expounded his Proposal for a Small Proprietors Society of Ireland. Noting that a ‘…yeoman proprietary has long been recognized as the chief social want of Ireland’ he described how bankrupted estates could be held in trust and purchased by tenants paying their rent as instalments. In this way the land would be owned by those who worked it and

Despite endorsements from John Stuart Mill and John Bright, Duffy's dream foundered on too many ifs, and the caution of a Catholic hierarchy nervous of their hard-won political freedoms. Duffy stayed long enough in the House of Commons to join the debate over the Constitution Bills for the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. He formed part of the last line of opposition to the property qualifications for membership of the Victorian parliament which he informed the house would ‘…throw the whole government of the Colony into the hands of a small class, against whom there was a violent and popular prejudice.’7

In November 1855 Duffy set sail with his family for a new life in Australia. Welcomed to Melbourne by a deputation led by John O'Shanassy and feted to yet another grand dinner by Melbourne's leading Irishmen, Duffy told his enthusiastic audience that

After exploring his options for a career as a lawyer in Melbourne and considering Sydney as a place to settle, Duffy gave way to the ‘…old passion for public life…’ and accepted support for contesting a seat in the newly formed Legislative Assembly of Victoria. This required meeting the property qualification - £5,000 was quickly raised for him through appeals to the Irish of Victoria and New South Wales. Duffy accepted this support as a ‘…noble retaining fee…’, and at the inevitable dinner at which the title deeds of a house and the balance of the money was presented to him, he expressed his appetite for the ‘…new social experiment of adopting whatever is best in the habits of kindred nations and rejecting what has proved dangerous and deleterious.’ Unfortunately he was forced to spend the rest of his speech defending himself against attacks made by his opponents under the banner of No Popery - the rebel was forced in his new land to fight old battles.9

Duffy's first act in the new House was to successfully sponsor a bill abolishing the property qualification, but it was his work on a more radical distribution of real estate that defined his political career. Given responsibility for the Lands Department in the first and second O'Shanassy ministries, Duffy successfully sponsored a Land Act in 1862 that challenged the squatter's control of Victoria's agricultural lands, and in theory allowed a large class of small farmers to take up holdings, eventually securing title to their own domain. The Act was a response to popular agitation for land reform which had led to a riot and attempted storming of parliament in 1856. It was promoted by Duffy in Australia and in England as the economic and moral base of a new society, and he returned again and again in his speeches to the purity of the vision, despite the largely successful undermining of the Act by established squatters, and the spectacular lack of success by so many selectors.10

Thus in an election speech in Kyneton in 1868 to voters in the seat of Dalhousie, Duffy insisted that ‘…the large runs must be cut up; the right of actual settlement must be extended over all the agricultural lands of the Colony; and the rents of selectors must be credited, as it was in the land act of ’62, as instalments of the purchase money.’ And again on the hustings in 1872 in a speech in Castlemaine, this time as Prime Minister of Victoria fighting to keep his Ministry alive in the superheated sectarian bitterness unleashed by the Education Act, he returned to the theme:

Near the end of his parliamentary career, contesting in 1877 what would be his last seat in Parliament, Duffy drew a picture of pastoral peace for the electors of North Gippsland:

If Victoria was in Charles Gavan Duffy's view a ‘Small Proprietor's Society’ writ large, then it was also the best example for Ireland. In 1865 on his first visit back to England Duffy told guests at a grand dinner that drew together the remnants of the Irish National party of 1848 and the Irish Tenant Right Party of 1852 that

And in a speech in 1870 at the Polytechnic Hall in Melbourne entitled Why is Ireland Poor and Discontented? he drew this analogy:

There is a strange lack of irony in Duffy's contemporary speeches and later reflections. Faced with the threat of transportation to Australia in 1848 he voluntarily chose exile in 1855. Rejecting imperial politics in 1855 he gladly entered the colonial parliament in 1856. Opposed to the property qualifications in the Victorian Constitution Bill as a member of the House of Commons, he freely accepted a huge gift to meet this requirement, and having successfully moved for its abolition, kept the benefit.14

The lack of irony shows a supreme confidence in his abilities and his causes. Duffy had no need for sentiment in drawing the link between the desire for Irish land reform and that reform achieved in Victoria, and while his use of the term ‘yeoman’ reveals an English notion of independent land-holders, he was quick to use his Irish rebel reputation to appeal to his constituency. Patrick O‘Farrell, commenting on the role that the Land Acts played in giving rise to the Kelly gang, has noted that Duffy ’…was the centre and foundation on which were based illusory hopes of Arcadia for the Irish in Victoria: the more extravagant the hopes, the more confident the expectations, the more bitter the disillusionment.' Subsequent research by Douglas Morrissey has shown that such disillusionment was not a prime cause of the Kelly outbreak, rather a narrow culture of stock theft. Yet there is still a link - it was easier to make ready money stealing stock than to break your pick or bruise your back clearing the land.15

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy left the colony as soon as he could without risk to his parliamentary pension of £1000 per annum, and settled in the South of France to pursue from a warm climate the cold Irish cause. He is perhaps the archetypical Australian radical-politician - one who begins with the intention of doing good for others and ends doing quite well for himself.

The Land Act gave Constable Thomas McIntyre the two happiest years of his police experience. Transferred in 1875 to Alexandra in the Upper Goulburn Police District, he found very little crime to occupy his attention, instead the duties assigned to police were

McIntyre was ultimately the sole survivor of Stringybark Creek, famously described in the long coda to Ned Kelly's account of that event as one of the

As the sole survivor McIntyre was and is plagued by guilt. His courage was questioned at the time and historians have scoured prosecution briefs, accounts of his evidence, and his memoirs for inconsistencies that might support Kelly's claim of self-defence. McIntyre's defence is his memoir, written at the time of the South African War, and therefore twenty years after the events it describes. It was never published and exists in a typescript in the archives of the Victoria Police Historical Unit. The memoir is really a testament and McIntyre begins with part of the oath taken by a witness - ‘The evidence you shall give in this case shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Commenting on this, he craves from the reader an indulgence not allowed in a court of justice

McIntyre is acutely aware of being not just a witness, but one of the accused. Sent with Kelly to Beechworth for the arraignment, McIntyre was lodged for his own protection in the same gaol that confined Ned. As a courtesy McIntyre was given the largest cell, which happened to be adjacent to the scaffold and the one reserved for condemned prisoners before execution

McIntyre joined the Victorian Police on the 23rd of December 1869. His personnel file reveals that he was born in 1846, that he was a member of the Church of England, and that his prior occupation had been as a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. In his memoir McIntyre says he spent three years in Ireland as a policeman before migrating to New South Wales, where he worked as a school teacher before joining the Police.20

McIntyre makes much of the fact that he and his colleagues had very little experience with firearms. Along with Sergeant Kennedy, who had served in the Dublin Police, he had no firearms training in Ireland and the absence of effective training in Victoria was noted in the Royal Commission that followed the Kelly Outbreak. Police were expected to be civil and polite upholders of the law, fulfilling a wide range of roles from guarding the Public Library to providing directions and aid to travellers. Reflecting on this, McIntyre questioned whether ‘…Governments depend too much on the moral effect of their Constabulary.’21

An example of McIntyre's moral effectiveness is recorded in the pages of the Melbourne Punch. While stationed in Swan Hill in 1872, McIntyre rescued a young girl from an attack by a vicious pig. Punch recorded in verse how McIntyre pelted the pig with bricks before catching it by its tail. For Punch McIntyre's skill with pigs was due to his being Irish:

Faced in Kelly with a much more dangerous foe than a rogue pig, McIntyre sat in the little camp at Stringybark Creek as bait in a trap waiting for the return of Sergeant Kennedy and Trooper Scanlon. Thomas Lonigan lay dead on the ground, Dan Kelly, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne had taken up positions around the camp, and Ned Kelly engaged McIntyre in conversation. In the course of this, McIntyre made a ‘strong appeal’ on behalf Kennedy and Scanlon:

Here is a powerful contrast. McIntyre, the Irish born, Protestant policeman failed to convince Kelly in an appeal to Irish Catholic sentiment. Kelly, the Australian-born son of an Irish convict, later justified his actions in the Jerilderie Letter in a barely coherent appeal to a mythic Irish Catholic cause. McIntyre understood the power of myth. In a cool assessment of Kelly's enduring appeal he acknowledged that there were some people who believed Kelly

Peter Ryan, in a preface to the special edition of his pamphlet on the life of Redmond Barry, describes the preference for Kelly as hero as a perversion and one which ‘…betrays the corrosive envy, the black defeated nothingness that lie somewhere near the heart of our national character. The choice of Barrabas reveals more about the voters than about the candidate.’25 Like Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth, Redmond Barry and Ned Kelly had a famous conversation in the courtroom. As in that earlier trial the words of one have been given more notice than the words of the other - yet Barry's words reveal a consistency in his view of social order and social cohesion. In his address at the opening of the Circuit Court in Portland in 1852 at the very beginning of his judicial career, Barry reminded the jurymen that society was a Burkean contract of interlocking obligations and not

Barry returned to this theme in reminding Ned that in a new community where ‘…society is not bound together so closely as it should be…’ making heroes of criminals required society to condemn felons as beasts of the field with nowhere to lay their heads.27

Barry's use of biblical imagery emphasises the moral challenge posed to the new society by Ned Kelly. Barry is not looking backwards to Ireland, but looking forward to a new community and, in this purpose, he is closely aligned in his thinking to the more radical Charles Gavan Duffy. For Duffy, creating a class of independent, small farmers was a way to create a contented, orderly and moral community, while for Barry, provision of a free library would help achieve the same end. These common interests met in the Public Library where both Duffy and John O'Shanassy served terms as trustees - a small fact that underscores Barry's disinterest in sectarian or political differences when pursuing great projects of social improvement.

Barry's sense of the social purpose of the library is evident in many of his published utterances. In the preface to the Catalogue for the Melbourne Public Library of 1861, Barry praised Governor La Trobe for making provision for the Library and described him as being

And in explaining the policy of free, unimpeded access to the Library collections for all those over 14 years of age, Barry wrote:

Barry's passion for free access to knowledge for the purpose of self-improvement is given full voice and scriptural symbolism in his address at the opening of the Free Public Library of Ballarat East in 1869:

Shining light on sentiment in Victoria's history challenges our judgements of people in the past and challenges a continuing refrain in our political discourse. In Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Don Watson gives an account of Prime Minister Keating's visit to Ireland. Watson recalls how Keating in a radio interview and a speech in his great-great grandfather's town of Tynagh in Galway, attributed his hatred of class distinction and his republicanism to his Irish, and specifically Irish Catholic, ancestry. Like Charles Gavan Duffy, Keating claimed his radicalism from Ireland, and like Duffy he gave voice to this in a political process conducted within the language and customs of a Westminster parliamentary tradition.29

Questioning Keating's sentimental attachment to Irish Catholic ancestry and a sentimental interpretation of Ned Kelly's trial before Redmond Barry does not reveal‘ black defeated nothingness’ feared by Peter Ryan. Instead it shows that sentiment allows the sober business of constitutional reform to be dressed in the bright clothes of Irish radicalism, and criminality to be disguised as Irish rebellion. Sentimentality represents a desire to be owned by another history and to attach ourselves to the romantic notion of an idealised home other than England, and in doing so it denies the many different Irish histories that have helped to form us. Ned Kelly, in myth and whatever reality we can interpret, represents one voice - John O'Shanassy, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas McIntyre and Redmond Barry represent others. Listening to these voices and reclaiming their stories from the mist of sentiment will help us understand the enduring significance of the institutions and the society that these Irishmen helped to build.