stations…but by the good he confers on mankind by example and precept…there is a great revolution at hand—not of the sword for that has been too much already—but a revolution of the mind.’
William O’Farrell delivered a toast to the banquet stewards, but it was his son’s address on behalf of the ‘juveniles’ which warmed John Fawkner and the St Patrick’s audience.
‘I have never before addressed a public assembly, and therefore it is probable that I shall require your indulgence,’ the teenage O’Farrell said, ‘and I know that you will grant it because you are of the generous and brave sons of the beautiful Green Isle’.
He spoke of the value of sound education, which could bring ‘civilisation to the uncivilised, industry to the indolent, unity and peace to the fierce and intractable, and a knowledge of divine truth to all’.
Those who were educated and did not use it for a good purpose were worse than the most ignorant, ‘for he abuses the gift of Providence, and sets a bad example to his less favoured brethren’.
He could not understand those parents and guardians iron-hearted to misery and degradation. ‘Are they not warned almost every day of their existence by fresh proofs of the lamentable consequences of ignorance and early mismanagement?’ He hoped the ‘supreme dispenser of all events’ would ‘abolish this pernicious apathy’ and inspire all minds with a desire for improvement and happiness, the path for ‘peace, order and elegance’ in the Australia Felix.
The passionate speech demonstrated an intelligence and confidence to hold the attention of others, although it also hinted at patriotic intensity and distaste for those in power and influence seen to be part of the Irish problem, not the solution. A mind that was perhaps capable of bringing anything but peace, order and elegance in the Australia Felix.
To his newspaper’s report, the editor of the Port Phillip Herald appended: ‘This speech, from the youth of the speaker, excited much admiration—ED.’ It called him ‘Master Daniel O’Connell O’Farrell’ while the Ballarat Star referred to him as ‘Master Henry James Daniel O’Connell O’Farrell’ and Edmund Finn as ‘D.O.C.’ referencing Daniel ‘The Liberator’ O’Connell for his battle for Irish Catholic emancipation.
Three months later at a St Patrick’s Society theatrical benefit, the first item was a verse recital by ‘a show scholar’,25 the young O’Farrell ‘of the Melbourne seminary, the youth who so creditably acquitted himself at the Hibernian Festival.’
The Herald reported that O’Farrell demonstrated a ‘manifestly considerable presence of mind’, the crowd so impressed that ‘feelings of acclamation…accompanied him through its different stages.’26 But the reality of Irish–Protestant tension was driven home to the O’Farrells the following month on the anniversary of the Battle of Boyne. The Orange Society of Melbourne celebrated by unfurling orange flags from the windows of the Pastoral Hotel, which excited ‘all the prejudices, and all the animosities which have…been in existence for so many years between the Orangemen and those professing the Catholic Faith.’27
In what Edmund Finn described as ‘a day of terror…the town looked as if in a state of siege’,28 an angry mob of Catholics demanded the removal of the banners and hurled stones. Despite the efforts of the mayor, ‘the report of a piece (gun) was heard inside’, and some of the mob rushed the Pastoral while ‘the parties outside who were armed fired at the windows of the house, and were quickly replied to from within’.
Despite ‘the continual fire kept up from the windows’, Fr. Geoghegan tried to persuade his Church members to leave, while John O’Shanassy, who the anti-Catholic press described as a ‘notorious ring-leader of the Irish rabble in civic matters’,29 tried to move the priest away from danger.
Several men were shot before the police eventually managed to disperse everyone, but tensions simmered. Superintendent Charles La Trobe and Town Magistrate William Mair ordered all pubs to be closed for the day, and went to the rival gatherings with mounted police. They found the Orangemen at a pub in Flinders Lane ‘armed to the teeth’ with 200 pistols and 70 muskets, and the Irishmen on the green facing Lonsdale Street prepared for ‘war to the knife’ with their own arsenal of guns, pistols and blunderbusses. The Mayor ‘read the Riot Act’ to each party and ‘in the Queen’s name’ commanded them to disperse.30
The Argus gave full vent to anti-Irish Catholic sentiment, publishing a special report on the ‘Popish riot’ to be sent to the mother country on the next mail ship. It denounced the ‘Popish rabble’ and ‘Popish murderers’ for reducing Melbourne to the most unsettled districts of Ireland, ‘the nest from which these birds of ill-omen were set loose on the province’.
An accompanying verse by ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’ said those Melbourne Orangemen who dreamed the law in Australia would be ‘strong enough at least to clip the Papist rabble’s claws’ had to realise they must emulate what their fathers had done in the 1798 Rebellion lest ‘A Romish mob, uncheck’d, work out their Church’s vile decrees’.31
While Orangemen and Protestants evoked Cromwell’s maxim of ‘put your faith in God, my boys, but mind to keep your powder dry’, an undaunted Fr. Geoghegan convened a public meeting in the St Francis school-room to ‘raise a fund for the relief of the poor Irish now suffering under the visitation of an almost unparalleled famine’. The ever critical Argus said it could not provide details because it ‘could not reasonably be expected to adventure our own life, or ask a reporter to peril his, by attending such a meeting’.32 Its editor claimed some society members had intimated their intention ‘to assassinate him whenever opportunity offers.’33
Following the ‘Popish riots’, NSW Governor Charles FitzRoy prohibited party processions in Port Phillip, still run as an extension of New South Wales, with an exemption for English fraternities, the Freemasons and Odd Fellows. The St Patrick’s Society suspended its annual march for several years, although 500 gathered on St Patricks Day in 1847 to lay a foundation stone for one of Melbourne’s first halls, St Patrick’s Hall, ‘dedicated to the memory of Ireland’, and attend a banquet at Queen’s Theatre, where William O’Farrell was one of many speakers.
It was an auspicious day for the O’Farrells the following year when they welcomed the first Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, James Alipius Goold. The son of a prosperous family in Cork and Augustinian missionary, Goold was consecrated in 1848 in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, at the age of 35, before leaving immediately on a ground-breaking 600 mile coach journey to Port Phillip, arriving in 19 days despite heavy rain.
Escorted into Melbourne by more than 100 horsemen and 50 carriages, Goold enthused Irish Catholics as he quickly set out to make the church a more recognised influence. He fought with the Anglican Bishop about the use of the title ‘Bishop of Melbourne’, opposed Anglican claims of precedence at government functions, and defended Irish immigrant orphans being attacked by administrators because of their difficulties assimilating into a township environment.
The ambitious Bishop Goold, who inherited just two buildings and four priests, saw the need for an enhanced physical and fiscal Catholic presence. He created a new seminary attached to St Francis, which became the de facto cathedral church before determinedly beginning what became an 80-year project, the grand and gothic St Patrick’s Cathedral on Eastern Hill in East Melbourne.
In addition to the cathedral project and securing 64 church buildings in his first 13 years, Goold also sought more clergy to meet the rapidly growing population. He particularly wanted some home-grown priests, especially as he found some of the colony’s imported priests were ‘bad and faithless’, their example and scandal nearly destroying the ‘faith of the people, as they had ruined their morals.’34
For
