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Exerts
taken from
“Our First Republicans”
Lang, Harpur, Deniehy
Editors: Dr. David Headon and Dr. Elizabeth Perkins
Available at The Federation Press, Sydney
William Bede Dallye referred
to his fellow currency lad as ‘the most brilliant of the
native born inhabitants of this country. By all accounts, it
was an accurate description.
In his tragically brief public career, Deniehy distinguished
himself first as a promising poet and short-storey writer, and
later as a literary critic, social and cultural commentator,
orator, essayist, satirist, politician and republican publicist
of prodigious ability.
Deniehy was in the public eye for a bare seven years: from August
1853 when he delivered his ‘Bunyip Aristocracy’
address, one of Australia’s most memorable political speeches,
until the final edition of his Southern Cross newspaper, in
August 1860. He did edit the Catholic newspaper, the Victorian,
on and off in 1862 - 1864, but his activist and influential
days had finished. Alcohol, ‘Our Lady of Darkness’,
had taken over, and he soon after died a squalid death in a
Bathurst street in October 1865.
Residing at Mandelson’s Hotel in Goulburn from 1854 -
1855 and thereafter at a private residence in Goulburn until
1858, he gradually articulated (in the pages of the provincial
Goulburn Herald) a vision of a society of Whitmanic democrats,
a ‘community of families’, prospering in the Australian
bush.
Deniehy dreamed, in other words, the first Australian utopian
dream.
Deniehy left Sydney to take up
residence in the southern New South Wales town of Goulburn,
probably travelling on 24 May 1854. As he indicates in a letter
to Lang-one of the most important in Australian republican history-he
had two aims. To improve his fragile health and to make sufficient
money to support his family adequately. That he failed to realise
both aims, however, is not a fair measure of the significance
of his years in the bush. From May 1854 until his election to
the New South Wales Legislative Assembly as the Member for Argyle
in February 1857, Deniehy had, as he put it in a letter written
in early 1856, ‘the leading column of the Goulburn Herald
at my command...’. One of his friends, a solicitor in
Yass, called it ‘a regular Reign of Terror’. Though
Deniehy arrived in Goulburn determined to avoid public life
while he furthered his broad cultural and moral education, the
bewildering frequency of important political events forced his
hand. Australia’s squattocracy threatened domination.
Thus Deniehy embarked on a long series of Goulburn Herald editorials,
some brief but most meticulously detailed and consciously iconoclastic.
Collectively, they represent Australia’s most challenging
republican output by a single author.
After arriving in Goulburn, Deniehy
eschewed direct confrontation with William Charles Wentworth
and his squattocratic ‘sham legislators’. and opted
instead for more wide-ranging social, cultural and political
considerations in his Goulburn Herald editorials. The moral
foundations for all his later activity were established in this
pivotal article. ‘Our Country’s Opportunity’
is Deniehy's social blueprint to ‘Advance Australia’,
his scheme for the future. American visionary, Transcendentalist
thinkers - in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery
Channing, Orestes Brownson and Theodore Parker - appealed because
of their republican ‘New-World’ assumptions. If
John Dunmore Lang concerned himself in the 1850’s with
the practical steps needed for Australia to become a republic,
Deniehy preferred to address spiritual issues. He contemplated
an ideal republic in the Southern Hemisphere.
In early July 1854 Deniehy delivered
a lecture at the Goulburn Court House on the ‘Poetry of
Ireland’ to the members of the Mechanics’ Institute
and, as the Goulburn Herald reported, to ‘a numerous assemblage
of visitors, amongst whom were many ladies. The audience was
evidently electrified by the exquisite language, deep pathos,
and racy humour of the lecturer, and by repeated applause testified
to their delight. ‘The lecture was a most delicious treat...’.
Describing himself in his talk as a ‘Botany-Bay literateur’,
Deniehy demonstrated to Goulburn’s citizens that he wanted
to raise the standard of cultural and literary debate; he was
equally determined, as this editorial indicates, to analyse
the weaknesses of the colonial power structure. Just as the
best Irish poetry had ‘local colouring, the hue of essentially
national feeling, the tints borrowed from a differential and
heartily local treatment of local customs, feelings, scenes,
aspirations, objects....’, so colonial government needed
its local colouring, its ‘men of Australia’.
In recognising the desperate need
for universal education in Australia, Deniehy gravitated to
a fundamental notion held by American writers from Thomas Jefferson
the New England Transcendentalists and Walt Whitman. Democracy,
susceptible to mob rule, necessitated and intelligent and informed
populace. In the United States, the lyceum had and important
role in population education; Australia had its mechanics’
institutes. Deniehy liked to call the institute ’the People’s
University of the age’ and felt it to be a meaningful
case of the people taking ’their culture into their own
hands’.
The proposal by the Solicitor-General of New South Wales to
tax colonists in order to defray Britain’s Crimean War
expenses provided Deniehy with a perfect opportunity both to
revisit the issue he had discussed in the People’s Advocate
three months earlier, and to rekindle the republican debate.
Deniehy finds irresistible the historical parallels between
the Australian colonies and pre-revolutionary America, thus
confirming his name on the growing list of Australian commentators
who, since William Charles Wentworth in 1819, had threatened
Great Britain with the prospect of colonial revolt. In an editorial
entitled ‘Our Representatives’, written three weeks
after this one, Deniehy was even more specific in his praise
of American precedent:
‘The names of those men who took a prominent part in the
great movement which led to American independence now occupy
a conspicuous place in history, and though most of them were
men of humble origin, yet they will descend to posterity revered
and cherished by all the wise and good in every nation of the
earth’.
In his Goulburn Herald editorials
of late 1854 and early 1855 Deniehy maintained a furious attack
on what he called ‘the infamous Wentworth Constitution
Bill’. The aim of Wentworth and ‘some dozen of his
friends’ was to confiscate for their own uses ‘the
finest portions of the public lands, to stereotype themselves
into a standing government, so that they may retain, watch over,
and protect the booty they wrest. It is a battle in which the
people must gain the victory...’. This victory would,
for Deniehy, only come if every person assumed the responsibility
of acting as a ’trustee for posterity’. Within this
context, each citizen, each ’guardian’ of the country,
had to recognise the necessity of obtaining as much public education
as possible-as the American Unitarian clergyman William Ellery
Channing (1780-1842) advocated in his influential Self-Culture
(1838). Channing defined ’self culture’ as ‘the
care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting
of his nature’.
Keenly anticipating ‘the
greatness of the Australian republic amongst the mighty nations
of the earth’ (from late 1854 onwards), Deniehy steadily
expanded his conception of a utopian Australia comprised of
a society of small farmers - as John Dunmore Lang and John West
had before him. Though naive, it was a grand dream and the first
substantial attempt by a native-born Australian to explore an
alternative vision to a squatter monopoly.
In a letter to his close friend
John Armstrong, written on 6 January 1856, Deniehy discussed
some of the domestic details of his life in Goulburn. He was
far from contented because, as he put it, ’while occupied
up to the neck in the muddy waters and monotonous turbulence
of sylvan law, struggling for existence, the golden hours for
the mental and spiritual study and experiences which are to
fit a man for doing something of the great and the good in his
generation are melting sadly and rapidly away’.
Deniehy strongly endorsed the
need for a ’complete’ education for all aspiring
parliamentarians; he was also highly conscious of ’the
broader proportion of wisdom and learning’ that he himself
still required. Nevertheless, his dissatisfaction with the composition
of the Legislative Assembly (since the inception of self-government
for New South Wales in May 1856) was such that when a vacancy
in the Goulburn seat of Argyle was created, in January 1857,
Deniehy was prevailed upon to stand. Not surprisingly, the Goulburn
Herald editorial writer, committed to liberal politics, supported
the liberal candidate - himself.
In a letter to the Goulburn Herald,
written on Christmas Eve 1857, Deniehy referred to the ’utter
confusion’ in parliament. ’The popular party is
falling to pieces’, he said, and ’meanwhile the
squatting capitalists are waiting with a grim chuckle, secure
of coming back to that power which will enable them still longer
to keep to their private uses the national estate to the injury
of the people at large...’. Yet if the ’Land Question’
dominated his thinking, it must have been with immense satisfaction
that Deniehy, as the sitting member, laid the foundation stone
for the new Mechanics’ Institute in early January 1858.
For well over three years he had lobbied for its establishment
in suitable premises. Finally, Goulburn had its ’People’s
University of the age’.
Daniel Henry Deniehy died and was buried in Bathurst. About
30 years later his remains were exhumed and reburied in Sydney’s
Waverley Cemetery. Approximately 500 people were present at
the ceremony. Later, a monument was erected over the grave.
An inscription on it reads:
The vehement voice
of the South
Is loud where the journalist lies
But calm hath encompassed his mouth,
And sweet is the peace in his eyes.
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