members of three clans of the Aboriginal people who had been there for more than 50,000 years.
There was some English familiarity in a handful of more substantial buildings, the uniformed presence of 10 constables and 25 soldiers, clothes of the fashionable, musical entertainment, and cricket games and horse-racing on the Maribyrnong River flats, where a few bullock drays were lashed together to form a grandstand and the seeds of the first Melbourne Cup to come.
Pubs were also numerous, sometimes rudimentary structures with names reflecting their owner’s origins and clientele, like the Victoria and the Shamrock. But the alcoholic constitution was something else: public houses opened from 4am to 9pm, fuelling rampant drunkenness among men and women, such that in the O’Farrell family’s first summer the Port Phillip Patriot headlined ‘Something remarkable’: there had not been a single charge of drunkenness at the police office the previous day and ‘such a fact is worthy of record for its singularity.’
And what was a young lad like Henry to make of the sight of several hundred men, women and children ‘dressed for the occasion’ to follow two Aboriginals, the condemned Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, as they were driven through the township on a cart to Tyburn Hill, named after London’s execution place, for the colony’s first public hanging? Hundreds ‘most disgusting (in) spirit…(were) scrambling for places; several jumped upon the coffins’5 while ‘about 20 of the Aborigines were observed witnessing the execution from the branches of neighbouring trees.’6 Or then seeing the men convulse for 30 minutes as they slowly strangled to death due to a botching by the volunteer hangman? Or the sights and tales of Aborigines carrying and throwing spears, escaped convicts, bushrangers, treadmills, stocks, duels, whippings, prostitutes, drunks and dandies.
For young Henry, this new world was a mind-spinning alchemy of the familiar and unfamiliar, freedom and violence. Georgine McCrae, wife of a solicitor, said Melbourne was a place which ‘requires a constitution of Indian rubber elasticity to sustain it’.7 She was talking of the climate, but her point was more universal. In the emerging society the ‘gentlemen’ of English birth and title found themselves competing with the ‘gentlemen’ of a transported polite society—Church of England clergy, barristers, university graduates, army and navy officers, and former civil and military officers of the East India Company—and in turn with the new riche of colonial merchants, squatters, bankers, and land agents.
New arrivals like the O’Farrells could never completely forget the 1690 Battle of Boyne, when William of Orange’s crushing victory secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland for generations, but they could sense this was a new frontier of potential for those wanting improvement and independence, or escape financial loss, debt or disgrace.
A woman wrote to Caroline Chisholm in 1846: ‘Oh what a difference there is between this country and home…Old England is a fine place for the rich, but the Lord help the poor’8 and another told her children, ‘we have brought our manners, our education and our individuality with us, but left conventionality behind.’ Some optimistically declared ‘this place is perhaps the most rising settlement in the world’9 and a land dealer declared ‘there is no doubt Melbourne will yet surpass London’10 but there was a broad optimism that one’s birth, background or religion might not matter so much in a new world where men cherished freedom and adventure, and could forge new definitions of merit, character, respectability and wealth.
The clash of English gentility and high-spirited men in pursuit of commercial and personal opportunity meant society was quarrelsome, especially over money, honour, politics and religion. The Port Phillip Gazette observed the settlement ‘boils over like a bush cauldron with the scum of fierce disputes.’11 ‘Gentlemen’ fought the ‘respectable’. Overlanders from Sydney and Adelaide fought over-straiters from Van Diemen’s Land. Port Phillip fought Sydney. Townsmen fought squatters. Convicts fought settlers. Aborigines fought pastoralists. English fought Irish. Orange fought Green. Protestants fought Catholics.
William O’Farrell and his family were among more than 2000 Catholics: freed convicts, pioneering settlers, and a rising number on the back of bounty and assisted passage schemes. But even 10,000 miles from home, Port Phillip was an English settlement with English/Protestant rule set against what was seen as inferior, ignorant, violent or seditious Irish Catholics.
Catholics and Protestants favoured their own when it came to doing business with butchers, bakers, pubs, clubs and drapers. Many immigrant Irish moved to the western side of Melbourne, amid emerging livestock sale yards, horse bazaar, slaughter-houses and nearby Flemington racecourse. Butchers wanted to be close to stock, which they slaughtered on their shop premises, rather than public slaughterhouses because, they argued, shops needed to be supplied quickly with fresh meat because of the warmer Australian climate.
It was here O’Farrell resumed his butcher’s trade in Elizabeth Street, near the corner of Victoria Street. One of the ‘wretched apologies for streets’, it was more a gully in summer and a creek in winter, when so much water gathered at the intersection with Collins Street it was known as Lake Cashmore.12
He also resumed his interest in Irish affairs, one of the emigrants to advertise a meeting at which ‘all true sons of the Emerald Isle are expected to be in attendance’ to form an association to ‘promote the education of Irish children and the cherishing of Irish patriotism’.13 Five hundred Irishmen formed the St Patrick’s Society of Australia Felix, the Latin name for ‘fortunate Australia’ or ‘happy Australia’ coined by New South Wales surveyor Thomas Mitchell after an exploration of Port Phillip pastoral lands.
O’Farrell spoke at the meeting, whose principal resolution was ‘for the encouragement of national feeling, the relief of the destitute, the promotion of education and generally whatever may be considered by its members best calculated to promote the happiness, the honour and the prosperity of their native and adopted lands’.14
Rule 1 of the new society was designed to curb the sectarianism and feuds they wanted to leave behind, declaring membership to be open to any person ‘of whatever political creed or religious denomination, being a native of Ireland or descended from Irish parents.’
William O’Farrell joined the committee, along with Belfast-born schoolmaster David Boyd, who was now teaching his young son Henry. Rev. Dr Boyd had distinguished himself in classics and mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, before deciding in 1838 to pursue the adventure and opportunities of colonial Australia. Aged just 27 he began an ‘academy’ in Queen Street, impressing his young charges with his manly and intellectual qualities. One student recalled:
He was an accomplished person. A first-rate classical scholar, with a fair knowledge of French, German and Italian, possibly Hebrew, for he knew pretty well everything, from astronomy to single-stick, fencing to comparative philosophy. He rode, drove, shot, fished, painted, was musical, mathematical, a mesmerist doubtless.15
O’Farrell was determined his sons Henry and older brother Peter would never be dismissed as ‘mere Irish’, seeking to give them the best possible introductions to education, church and society, or as the Ballarat Star later reported, ‘educated in a manner to fit them for positions higher than the trade followed by their father.’16
But just as Henry was finding his feet in his first year in the new world of Melbourne he lost his mother. Just 46, the cause of her death was not recorded, but emigrant ships carried numerous diseases. In the streets of Melbourne, stagnant water and human and animal waste also fuelled dysentery, cholera, scarlet fever and ‘colonial fever’, later known as typhoid. An epidemic of ‘colonial fever’ in the 1841/42 summer killed 20 people each week.
The year 1842 also saw Port Phillip fall into several years of depression after the free-spirited pursuit of fame and fortune led to excessive and unsustainable land speculation, sharp deals and bank loans on questionable security. The problems were accelerated by a government
