The bitter controversy over education in the 1860s coincided with increasing concerns throughout the British empire at the course of Irish affairs. In 1866 militant Irish nationalists in the United States launched two abortive invasions of Canada. The following year Fenians launched an unsuccessful rising on Irish soil. The nationalist organisation’s plans in Britain, including an attempt to seize arms from Chester Castle, were foiled. However, though Fenianism’s failures in 1866–7 far outweighed its successes, the movement made its mark and attracted international attention in a series of dramatic events. The rescue of the movement’s leader, Colonel Thomas Kelly, from a prison van in Manchester, the trial and execution of the men who staged the rescue, and the bombing of Clerkenwell prison in London instilled across the British empire an unprecedented fear of Irish insurgency.

Fenianism’s impact was felt even in distant Australia. Through the latter half of 1867 the Australasian colonies watched with apprehension the rising tide of violence in the British Isles. It was hardly surprising, then, that the British government’s decision to dispatch a contingent of Fenian prisoners to Western Australia aroused considerable alarm. Colonial complaints against the perpetuation of convict transportation in general, and of the threat posed by the Fenians in particular, proved ineffectual. In January 1868 sixty-two Fenian prisoners and 217 other convicts arrived in Western Australia aboard the Hougoumont. The rebels’ presence incited considerable concern, especially among the population of the western colony. But isolation was not the only factor that aroused disquiet. The arrival of the Fenian prisoners was given particular poignancy by the coterminous visit to Australia of Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, first member of the British Royal family to tour the Australian colonies. ^[11]

The prince arrived in South Australia on 31 October 1867 where he received an effusive welcome from the local population. His party subsequently moved on to Melbourne, in tone the most Irish of Australian cities in the nineteenth century. Melbourne’s Irish Catholic population showed a measure of defiance to the royal visit, rallying outside the city’s Protestant Hall where a provocative illumination recalling the Battle of the Boyne had been erected. Shots were fired from the hall towards the protestors, and a Catholic youth was killed. A brawl ensued, and an Orangeman was arrested. Though this incident possessed no definite Fenian overtones, it provided a stark indication of sectarian tensions then on the increase throughout the Australian colonies and a chilling foretaste of the violence that would soon engulf the tour. ^[12]

From Victoria the prince travelled north to New South Wales where, as elsewhere in Australia, he was greeted with effusive displays of affection. The Sydney Morning Herald attempted to explain the colonial rapture when it wrote on 21 January 1868, ‘there is in the colonies a large reservoir of loyalty long pent up. [The] colonies have had few opportunities to exhibit their love [and these] demonstrations in honour of Prince Alfred are its overflow’. ^[13] Sydney’s Roman Catholic newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, likewise wholeheartedly endorsed the royal visit, and made no attempt to disguise its relief that the prince’s arrival in the city had proved incident-free. Its editorial comment, though, revealed a scarcely concealed nervousness about the days ahead, an air of fearful anticipation engendered at least in part by the shadow of Fenianism:

So far, at all events, we may congratulate ourselves that the royal visit has been marked by no incident distressing to anybody. All things being taken into consideration our freedom from accident has been most remarkable. No offensive display was made by any body of men. The utmost good humour prevailed. Indeed, the police report shows that the city was more peaceable than ordinary … of one thing we are quite sure, that there is not a man of any creed or nationality on earth who does not wish the Duke of Edinburgh a pleasant stay here and  a safe  voyage  home. ^[14]

But the tour did not remain accident free for long. The prince agreed to attend a picnic to raise funds for a new sailors’ home. On 11 March, while attending the event in the harbour-side suburb of Clontarf, an Irishman named Henry James O’Farrell shot Alfred in the back. The assassin was wrestled to the ground, arrested,  and  saved  from  the  vengeful crowd. ^[15] But even before the culprit had been publicly identified, all attention focussed on the assassin’s nationality and his political motives.

As news of the assassination attempt spread, the Freeman’s Journal feared the worst. Its weekly edition, forced to press before the gunman’s identity could be confirmed, admitted ‘the prayer which was fervently uttered by thousands of our countrymen on their learning of the sad affair was “Pray, God, that he is not an Irishman”’. Should the culprit indeed prove to be Irish, the newspaper avowed, ‘then Irishmen must bow their heads in sorrow, and confess that the greatest reproach which has ever been cast on them, the deepest shame that has ever been coupled with the name of our people, has been attached to us here in the country where we have been so free and prosperous’. ^[16] Too late for the newspaper’s editor, but soon enough for the colony’s Irish Catholic population, the awful truth was known: the culprit was indeed an Irish Catholic and a Fenian connection was strongly suspected.

Despite O’Farrell’s cry at the time of the shooting—‘I’m a Fenian—God Save Ireland’—historians discount the possibility that the assassin was truly a Fenian. He was, in fact, an unbalanced young man, recently cast out from a seminary. ^[17] But the prospect that he had Fenian connections, coupled with the recent arrival of the prisoners on Australian soil, incited a wave of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic hysteria the like of which had not been seen in the Australian colonies before. Local politicians, most notably Henry Parkes, inflamed passions with allegations of conspiracy with the result that the cloak of suspicion fell heavily upon the Irish Catholic population. Sleuths scoured the countryside, bounty hunters seeking payment in  return  for  uncovering  evidence  of the diabolical  Australian   Fenian  connection. ^[18] The colonial parliament, mortified at the attempt on the life of the monarch’s son, enacted a treason felony bill. The New South Wales premier, Cork-born Sir James Martin, declared in parliament that should Fenianism be found in the colony, ‘it would be met with a vigour and determination which it had not encountered in the mother country’. Membership of the Loyal Orange Order in the colony doubled by the end of 1868 as outraged and fearful Protestants enlisted their support in defence of queen and country. Across the land, sectarian feelings escalated to levels scarcely imaginable a decade before. ^[19]

Roman Catholics responded to this sectarian upsurge in two ways. Most heeded the advice of the Freeman’s Journal, to ‘obey the law of the land and patiently wait till the good sense of the people returns’. ^[20] Underpinning this counsel was a confident belief in the generally benign circumstances of colonial life and recognition of the presence of freedoms and liberties far exceeding those experienced in Ireland. Firm in those convictions, Irish Catholics cast their opponents as bigots, men and women out of touch with the true tenor of Australian life. As Melbourne’s Advocate remarked welcoming the New Year in 1869, those who perpetuated sectarian division in the Australian colonies were ‘out of date and out of place’. ‘The wretched days [of] idiotic nervous no-popery are now passed for ever’, it asserted all too prematurely, before prophesying better times ahead for Ireland. ‘For the first time in history’, wrote the Advocate, ‘those who have an influence on English opinion seem to think that the wishes of Irishmen should count for something in the government of their native land’. ^[21] In line with that optimism, most Irish Catholics initially eschewed open conflict with the Protestant majority.

However, a minority of Irish Catholics reacted to the sectarian taunts with a greater measure of defiance—or, at least, a show of fight. Most famously, drunken gold diggers in country New South Wales, worse for wear after the excitement of the St Patrick’s Day races, yelled at local townspeople ‘We’re bloody Fenians! Come On! We’d soon kill a man as look at him!’ Others joined in too, if less dramatically, more ambiguously, to assert and defend their own stake in Australian society. A Goulburn resident, Bartholomew Toomey, was brought before the magistrate’s court after declaring that the shooting served the prince right for ‘he had no business in the country’. Influenced by such incidents, the New South Wales governor, Lord Belmore, reported to the parliamentary under-secretary for the colonies, ‘rumours of a spirit of Fenianism [are] abroad, particularly in the country districts’. ^[22] But concerns also existed about the likelihood of a radical nationalist presence in the towns and cities. W. A. Duncan, a prominent Scots-born member of Sydney’s Catholic community, spoke publicly to deny the presence of organised Fenian groups, but admitted that ‘there were a few hot-headed young men who could not keep quiet … hot-headed youths who talked very foolishly’. Where once such expressions of bravado would have attracted little note, now they were sufficient to sound the alarm that violent Irish nationalist activity would surface in Australia, and served to intensify the fires of sectarian tension throughout the colonies. ^[23]

Events across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand added further to the commotion. In 1867 a new arrival on the South Island’s West Coast, John Manning, founded a newspaper, the New Zealand Celt. Manning’s journal was provocative and uncompromising, and soon found a strong following among the large number of Irish immigrants on the region’s goldfields. The population of single Irish men present on the West Coast proved especially receptive to the Celt’s enthusiastic promotion of Irish national consciousness. In line with the affirmation of that new and assertive Irish identity, on 8 March 1868 the Irish in Hokitika staged a mock funeral for the Manchester martyrs. Led by a Roman Catholic priest, Father William Larkin, a funeral procession wound its way to the local cemetery where a Celtic cross was erected. This overt display by Irish gold miners caused consternation among local loyalists, and when news of the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred reached New Zealand soon after, hostility was further aroused. Soon after, when Father Larkin made a provocative speech in which he expressed sympathy with Fenianism, local authorities reacted. Manning and five others were arrested. Rumours of Fenian activism in the West Coast mining community abounded, and the colony’s Anglo-Irish governor, Sir George Bowen, dispatched troops to reinforce local volunteers. All Australasia then seemed vulnerable to the tentacles of radical Irish nationalism. ^[24]

In both New Zealand and Australia, the Fenian threat was grossly inflated—in fact, as best one can tell, invented. But isolation, remoteness, and colonial fragility bred fear and paroxysm. By the late 1860s, Irish Catholics in Australia confronted more strident opposition and there existed for all groups a more hostile sectarian environment than had been present for several decades. In 1869, with the assassination attempt of the previous year still fresh in the colonial mind, renewed attacks were made on the level of Irish immigration to Australia. In a debate in the New South Wales parliament on administrative changes to the assisted immigration program, opponents of the Irish decried the threat posed to the colony by the twin evils of Romanism and Irish pauperism. Henry Parkes, who had exploited the O’Farrell affair to inflame sectarian passions, now advocated greater restriction on Irish entry to Australia, and quoted Charles Wentworth Dilke’s observations on the allegedly deleterious effect the Catholic Irish were having upon American life to support the case for immigration restriction.

through drink, through gambling, and other vices of homeless, thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary; and moral as they are by nature, the Irish are nevertheless supplying America with that which she had never possessed before—a criminal and pauper class. ^[25]

Though conditions in Australia and the United States were different in numerous ways, by 1870 the image of Australia’s Irish was increasingly influenced by local (Australian) interpretations of the Irish experience in North America, not just by negative stereotypes of the Irish at home. And though the reaction of Australian Irish Catholics was in degree nothing so defiant or abrasive as that evinced by their American counterparts, they would exhibit a decidedly sharper, brusquer exterior to their opponents through the 1870s.