his wife and facing economic challenges, William O’Farrell wrapped himself and his sons in the arms of the Catholic Church and the new St Patrick’s Society, the heartland of Irish Australian consciousness.
William’s plans for his sons were based on faith, family and finance, a trinity that would change the lives of the whole family.
The O’Farrells were among the first to attend a rudimentary small Catholic chapel, built of old floorboards and salvaged building materials on what had been a treed site at the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale Streets. Called to St Francis by a bell hanging from a large gum tree, Henry listened to the preaching of the settlement’s first priest, Father Patrick Bonaventure Geoghegan, and attend the first christenings, including Mary MacKillop, a future saint.
The Dublin-born Fr. Geoghegan, a chubby little man known for his liberal mind and tolerance, had been an orphan, spending five years in a Protestant ‘proselytising institute’ before he was ‘rescued’ by a Catholic priest and admitted into a new St Bonaventure’s Charitable Institution in Dublin for a Catholic education before becoming a priest.17
He had been appointed by the colony’s Sydney-based Archbishop, John Bede Polding, an English Benedictine monk with a vision for a Catholic Church founded on monastic ideals. He believed scholarship and sublime liturgy, accompanied by Gregorian chant, would, as in earlier centuries in Europe, civilise and convert this new country.
But most of Polding’s priests, the first of whom came out as convicts, and their congregations, were, like Fr. Geoghegan, more Irish than English, and did not embrace his vision. Irish Catholics wanted the Church to take a more aggressive stand against inequalities, which Fr. Geoghegan experienced when he first went to pay his respects to Melbourne’s first Anglican Bishop, Charles Perry. When presented with the priest’s calling card he ‘recoiled from it as if it were a snake (and) returned it with a caustic note, a freezing intimation that he could not recognise the Rev. P.B. Geoghegan in any shape or form, officially or otherwise, in fact conveying the idea that he wished to shun the card-sender as though he were an emissary from the Evil One’.18
Protestant–Catholic tensions also surfaced within the new St Patrick’s Society. This came to the fore at the society’s inaugural St Patrick’s Day procession in 1843, when young Henry would have trotted happily behind a throng of men and women, dressed in green and wearing green and white rosettes and scarves. With a band playing cherished tunes such as St Patrick’s Day and Faugh-a-Ballagh and behind a banner featuring a gilt emblem of an Irish harp, they proudly marched, some twirling a fighting shillelagh, and most ‘liquoring up at frequent short intervals’.
At the rebuilt St Francis, Fr. Geoghegan delivered the first High Mass in Port Phillip, angering Protestant Irishmen who felt it undermined the society’s non-sectarian principle. And more substantial tension was simmering. The St Patrick’s Society met at the Builders Arms Hotel, a ‘groggery’ owned by an O’Farrell family friend, Timothy Lane. William Kerr, editor of the Port Phillip Patriot derisively nicknamed the hotel as ‘the Greek and Co stables’. Influenced by anti-Catholic rhetoric of clergymen like the Scot, John Dunmore Lang, Kerr fuelled the Catholic–Protestant feud as journalist and as provincial grand master of the Orange Association, which asserted St Patrick’s was ‘a religious and political brotherhood, which under a pretence of nationality was fomenting sectarian strife and animosity.’
Irish interests were promoted by the rival Port Phillip Herald. Under the masthead motto ‘impartial not neutral’, owner-editor George Cavenagh allowed an Irishman, Edmund Finn, to write freely to balance the ‘foul-penned ribaldry, unprecedented in the annals of decent or undecent journalism’.19 Finn had arrived from Tipperary the same year as the O’Farrells. He was destined to be a priest but at 22 he migrated to Australia where he initially taught the classics but then achieved writing fame as the writer ‘Garryowen’, the name of a Limerick neighbourhood and popular Irish drinking tune. He became secretary of the St Patrick’s Society when John O’Shanassy, a former squatter and founding spirit of the society became president.
Notwithstanding colonial challenges and tensions, it was an improvement on the sectarian violence of Liverpool and misery of Dublin. William O’Farrell would have felt both sadness and vindication when newspapers reported the Irish Famine as making his birthplace like a city of the plague, burying ‘poor creatures in a large pit’ and ‘women children and infants of the tenderest age—all huddled together, like so many pigs or dogs, on the ground, without any other covering but the rags on their person’20 and described an estimated 300,000 starving and destitute Irish men, women and children descending on the docks of Liverpool in just five months in 1847.
His butchery was surviving well enough, helping sustain the colonial boast of ‘meat three times a day’, and his sons, especially young Henry, were being embraced by a rising Catholic Church. After his wife’s death he placed Henry as a boarder at the Melbourne Analytical Seminary for General Education run by an elocutionist, Mr James McLaughlin, to learn the classics, theology and elocution.
Henry was impressing influential men within the Catholic fraternity and beyond. A few days after the 1846 St Patrick’s Day parade and patriotic banquet, the Port Phillip Herald received a letter from ‘Pascoeville’, the home of pioneer John Pascoe Fawkner, in which he said ‘the display of Master O’Farrell, though a youth of sixteen (sic) years, actually surprised me…the educated class of Australia Felix will therefore borrow an example from the St Patrick’s Society of that day.’ Applauding what he had seen and heard at the dinner, he forwarded £1 for the St Patrick’s Society school, and £1 for the society.
He had never been so pleasantly excited ‘since I founded this Town of Melbourne in August 1835’ as when he looked around the banquet and saw ‘clearly manifest the true spirit of freedom, as displayed by the yeomen of Australia Felix…so many well-dressed, well-informed men united in the bonds of good fellowship’.21
In a banner-festooned marquee erected alongside the Builders Arms Hotel, president O’Shanassy said his first duty to the 300 guests was to pay ‘undivided homage to her most gracious Queen Victoria’, Prince Albert and their family, including princes Alfred and Edward, the latter ‘destined, we fervently hope to be our future Sovereign.’22
Henry O’Farrell heard O’Shanassy, who would later become Premier of Victoria, declare that those who attacked the ‘mere Irish’ wanted to deprive them of religious and civil liberty, notwithstanding that Irishmen had long supported a monarchical form of government ‘as the best safeguard for the happiness and liberties of people’, and had ‘left their bones to whiten on many a hard fought field, unwept, unhonoured and unsung…proving to the world their devoted adherence to the King.’
Irishmen would rally, he said, to any threat to the throne from a foreign foe, ‘or a more insidious enemy, a domestic faction…likely to subvert the ancient equipoise of Queen, Lords and Commons’.
Fr. Geoghegan also proposed a toast to the clergy of all denominations and the inalienable right of free worship. But in the hearts of Irish Catholics like the O’Farrells, loyalty to the monarchy ought not be at the expense of loyalty to their homeland, and free worship ought to come with other freedoms and fairness.
‘When an Irishman forgets his country he forgets himself’,23 Edmund Finn told the dinner, saying love of country increased in proportion to its impoverishment and trials. Irishmen might seek exile but this love ‘hovers round him like a guardian angel…whispers to him…a gentle monitor warning him through his future career in life’.24
This ‘guardian angel’ hovered around Henry O’Farrell. He had left too young to have an Ireland to forget, but his mind had been shaped by continuous whispers, the stories of how oppression had forced his family and people to the other side of the world, where the battle continued.
Now
