Club Hotel. Around this time Henry ‘left the impression of being a very excitable man, very argumentative, rapid in utterance and cantankerous’.
The brothers, formerly shining lights in the Catholic Church, were now in a very different place, Peter in self-exile in the United States, Henry personally isolated and ‘excitable’ and dealing with another setback when his Ballarat business partner Kennedy, died, ‘so confirmed a drunkard he…fell a victim to delirium tremens’.
Some saw O’Farrell as merely intense and erratic, others spoke presciently of him as ‘one who having attached himself to an idea would pursue it at any cost to himself or to others’. He frequently alluded to his experiences on the Continent, saying he preferred its manners and customs to those of England, and fulsomely supported Chartism, an English working class campaign for increased democratic rights. And he ‘exceeded the wildest radical in his hatred of aristocracy.’20 One who met him at the Melbourne Cricket Ground went further, describing him as ‘a very dangerous man’.
Without the financial and personal support of his father, brother and business partner, Henry began to spend more time among hundreds of gold speculators, dealers and agents who clustered in Ballarat at what was known simply as The Corner, where the vigorous trading in mining stocks and ventures ranked it as one of the world’s busiest financial hubs. Henry lost heavily on failed mining companies, which led to the loss of some property assets. As he tried to speculate his way out of trouble he sank further and ‘drank more heavily than he had done previously’. He avoided many former acquaintances, made frequent threats and expressed ‘a determination to take the life of persons offending him’. The Ballarat Star said he was ‘greatly embarrassed’ by his plight, and while affable and gentlemanly when sober, drinking to excess was ‘completely upsetting his mental equilibrium’.
He now lived by himself in his hay and corn store, often went for days without a meal, and walked alone far into the countryside for, he said, his health. A neighbour witnessing a bout of delirium tremens thought he was evidencing ‘the worst species of insanity’21 and another found him crawling on the floor. Local doctors, often called in, found him ‘occasionally, extremely violent’.
Henry had also ‘secreted’ two pistols from a pawnbroker. At the same time, more reports of Irish patriotic uprisings and rebellious acts were appearing in the newspapers. The Freeman’s Journal reported crowds of 30,000 Fenians in New York endorsing militant cries, such as Colonel William Roberts’ declaration that ‘Ireland must be free and we shall free her (long and enthusiastic cheers again and again)…the sword shall now be the arbiter of her destinies…blood must wash out what blood and crime have stained (loud cheers)’.22
Irish American arms and funds supported the Fenians and a secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, later the Irish Republican Brotherhood, formed local cells swearing an oath to do whatever it took to make Ireland an independent republic, and Fenian-minded Irishmen, including some senior organisers, emigrated to colonies including Australia.
Irishmen around the world sensed an uprising in Ireland was imminent, but British authorities raided the IRB offices and arrested its leaders, including some Irish Americans, and seized revolutionary documents.
When news of Fenianism breaking out in America reached Ballarat, Henry ‘pronounced himself a decided partisan of (Fenian) Head Centre (James) Stephens’, one of the founders of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood.23
He would have been disappointed the uprising had failed, but also outraged by reading reprinted extracts from The Times:
Nationalities fill the world with their complaints, but are never able to right themselves, and cannot even stand alone without aid…they are too distinct to assimilate or get on well with their neighbours…they can neither comprehend nor be comprehended and are eventually crushed and ground to powder rather than affiliated. Ireland has hitherto been too Irish to make her way with the rest of us. A time may come when the proportion of Irish to English there, or rather of all foreigners to the natives, will put the country into a better condition for the great race of nations. Ireland may then be no more distinct from us than Lancashire or the valley of the Clyde.24
Authorities in Australia did not need talk of uprisings to be nervous about Irish rebellion. This fear arrived with convicts exiled for riot and sedition. Governor John Hunter, who succeeded Arthur Phillip, frequently warned London that Irishmen, especially Catholics who outnumbered Protestants twenty-fold, were ‘deluded’ and ‘turbulent’ and put the colony’s security at risk. Successive regimes brutally dealt with Irish plotting, proven or otherwise: suspects received up to 1000 lashes, priests were imprisoned, and at one major uprising at Castle Hill (later Vinegar Hill) about 15 shot dead and nine hanged.25
There were calls for a ‘man of war’ to be stationed in Sydney Harbour and two civilian para-military groups were organised and armed. The more recent presence of freedom fighters, such as the Young Ireland leaders exiled in 1849 and 1850, added to the nervousness of authorities.
While some said Irish and Fenian ambitions could never be ‘more than a madman’s dream’, others, like David Buchanan, who narrowly escaped imprisonment for Chartist activity and fled to Australia to become a lawyer and politician, accepted that Irish advocates of physical force were driven by a sincere love of their country, and their spirit ought not die ‘til it has consumed every vestige of wrong which has so ruinously fed upon their very vitals’.26
The fear of those determined to quash any such anti-Empire ambitions was illustrated when Buchanan gave a spirited address on ‘The Wrongs of Ireland’ to a packed audience in Sydney and was duly charged by the Empire with disloyalty, sedition and violation of his oath of allegiance to the Queen. In the subsequent libel case, Empire loyalists won a moral victory when the Chief Justice ruled in Buchanan’s favour but awarded him no costs and damages of one farthing.
As argument raged over injustices, and whether fighting for Irish freedom was a madman’s delusion or patriotic duty, Henry O’Farrell’s mind regressed, forming a darker view of both his personal plight and Irish homeland, and a ‘vindictive animosity’ toward aristocracy and Catholic clergy, ‘vilifying them in a most outrageous manner whenever they formed the topic of conversation’.
His sister Caroline Allan could see he was more restless, uneasy and excitable, deeply affected by financial losses flowing from his brother’s troubles and his own speculative losses and rising debt. She could see he was drinking more and becoming more erratic. O’Farrell lived alone but also now sought female companionship ‘he would otherwise have shunned’.
O’Farrell…rigidly adhered through life to the vows of celibacy he had taken when admitted to deacon’s orders. As illustrating his peculiar turn of mind and habit of living…he frequently made an arrangement with two neighbours…to spend an evening in his house, taking a sort of martyr pride in conquering whatever failings he might possess, though his visitors were allowed perhaps greater liberties than were either compatible with strict propriety…or with being mentioned in the columns of a newspaper.27
Perhaps he was testing his ‘strength through resistance’, the Catholic challenge of celibacy which his brother had warned would lead to a ‘blackness’.
The blackness deepened. In September 1866 he suffered another attack of delirium tremens and threatened to kill a banking friend he had invited to his rooms to plead for a loan to overcome his ruined state. When told that a loan would have to be on the usual terms, ‘he suddenly leapt from his bed, seized a sword cane, and would have killed or wounded the gentleman’ if others had not intervened. The shaken bank official declared ‘Oh, he’s mad! he’s mad!’28 Police alerted O’Farrell’s two sisters Caroline and Catherine, who travelled from Melbourne to attend to him and take him back to Melbourne. But they could not hold him or change his course.
Henry
