Wednesday, July 23, 2008

First Australian Terrorist Act

When I was writing The Great Shame, I became aware that the first act of terrorism on Australian soil was an attack on the duke of Clarence, youngest son of Queen Victoria, at a picnic held in his honour at the Sydney suburb of Clontarf on March 12, 1868. As the prince passed the enthusiastic crowd, Henry O'Farrell, a self-proclaimed Fenian, drew two pistols and shot him in the back. "I'm a Fenian, God save Ireland!" yelled O'Farrell, who had earlier been treated for mental instability and was not a member of the Fenian movement, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The prince survived; O'Farrell was hanged at Darlinghurst jail.

The governor of NSW, Lord Belmore, an Ulster landowner, was near the prince and saw the shooting. The state government, which included Parkes, yielded to the temptations of demagoguery and stirred up in the community the belief that all Irish were involved in a plot of deepest Papist dye, to shed the blood of the royal family.

A Tampa-level hysteria was let loose. A ridiculous Treason-Felony Act was passed, which made the public utterance of republican sentiment punishable by up to 20 years in jail. The Irish, and even some evangelicals who thought the prince had been punished by God for his hedonism, were tailed, questioned, detained, sacked from their jobs. In a riot in Melbourne, an Irishman was killed.

Flattened by a Falafel,
Tom Keneally

The Australian Literary Review
February 2007

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