Mr Cunningham was one of the finest men I have known, after Papa, but nonetheless I would be wary now of any leader who shines too brightly. We must have the strength to do what is right ourselves, or hand in hand with others. We must be able to see the path in front of us, not just the light within the one who leads us.
I talk about this often with Maman and Papa. There is so much that needs to be changed in the world, so the things we do must count for something, not be lost in a day of fruitless fighting, like the rebellion that never truly was.
I am a farmer’s daughter now. One day I’ll most likely be a farmer’s wife. The child who fled into the darkness for a cause she hardly understood has gone. But where there’s wrong that needs righting, I’m still a rebel too.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Words in the Text
‘Frog’ in this book would have used far more of the slang spoken by most of the underclass in England at the time (the poor and thieves). Back then much of what one class used might not be understood by the other, sometimes deliberately so thieves’ words could not be understood by outsiders, or to make the gentry feel superior.
I’ve only used a few of these words, to give the flavour of that speech, as modern readers would also find it difficult to understand. Once Frog started living with Barney and Elsie, who had been educated by the well-spoken Johnsons, she’d have learned to speak the way a young lady was expected to.
Been skinned: cheated.
Boyo: boy.
Cabbage tree: tall tree that tempted the early colonists to use them for building, but the inside is soft and soon rots.
Captain Tom: fine strong man, a leader.
Cove: man.
Croppy: this word was used by all classes. It referred to anyone who had ‘cropped’ their hair short as a symbol of rebellion against the established classes, who at that time wore long curled or powdered hair, or powdered wigs. Anyone with short hair was suspected of rebellion and it was also a way rebels could recognise each other.
Cross crib: place where young thieves were trained and sent out to steal.
Dimber-dabbler, dibbler, dimble-damble, dabble, damble and other variations: pickpocket.
Gammon: try to trick (it’s also a kind of bacon). Gentry: wealthy but also of a high social class.
Gentry cove: gentleman.
Glass lay: theft after breaking in through a window, or smashing the glass in a window to grab what was inside.
Gut-foundered: extremely hungry.
Ha’pennies: halfpennies, worth maybe a dollar or even two in today’s currency.
Head cully: head of the gang.
Jackanapes: someone making a fool of themselves.
Leery: wary.
Loll-a-bed: someone who lazes too long in bed.
Murphy: potato or potato eater, referring to anyone from Ireland.
Paddle-pated: stupid. A ‘pate’ is a head.
Parks me shambles: staying here. ‘Shambles’ are legs.
Ragamuffin: ragged or unkempt child.
Redcoat: English soldier. The red coat was part of their uniform till the authorities finally accepted that the bright colour made them easy targets to shoot at.
Shanks’s pony: on foot.
Shufflers: thieves who shuffle around a shop or stall waiting for a chance to steal.
Snaffle: steal.
Stubble it: be quiet, stop talking rubbish.
Ticket-of-leave men: convicts who had been given their freedom, but were still serving their sentence. They couldn’t go back to England, but could farm or take whatever jobs they wanted.
Wattle and mud: ‘wattles’ are small branches. They were stacked between poles to make walls, then mud was plastered over them. If the branches were a hard wood like red gum, and the ‘mud’ clay mixed with ants’ nest or tussock and covered by a good roof, the walls could last more than a century or two. More often the wood rotted and the mud washed away in heavy rain.
Whippersnapper: small young insignificant person.
The Castle Hill Rebellion
When I was at school, we were taught that the Battle of Castle Hill was fought by a small rabble of Irish Catholic convicts, ignorant and badly armed, and that the decisive courage of Major Johnston soon defeated them and the convicts ran away in terror, but were quickly recaptured.
End of story.
There is some truth in that version. But history is rarely simple.
The Irish rebels sent to Australia for trying to free Ireland from English Rule — a rule which meant great repression and injustice for Catholics and kept Irish land in the hands of absentee English landlords — were a very mixed group. Some were poor and uneducated; some wealthy and highly educated. Many were sent to Australia with no trial and so had no fixed sentences — they were not necessarily imprisoned, but were never to be allowed to leave New South Wales.
But the rebellion was not just of convicts, political or otherwise, nor Irish nor Catholic. While some of the conspirators, like Cunningham, had been rebel leaders back in Ireland, the colony of New South Wales had also suffered a decade of deep injustice and corruption under the New South Wales Corps, who had ignored English law to make their own fortunes, taking land, creating monopolies to trade goods and convict labour, and even buying and selling convict women as personal slaves.
Free settlers and ticket-of-leave farmers, merchants and tradespeople were angry — they had long been exploited, cheated, even attacked by members of the Corps, or thugs the Corps members employed to bully anyone who tried to stand up to them. When the Reverend Johnson taught convicts how to read, the Corps hired men to disrupt his church services, and eventually burned down the church Mr Johnson and his supporters had built with their own hands.
Governors Phillip, Hunter and King had tried to curb the Corps, but were unsuccessful, with vicious campaigns against them mounted by the members. Soon after the events in this book a new governor, Governor Bligh, would also attempt to bring justice to the colony, and faced mutiny and then imprisonment by the Corps.
The rebels had good reason to hope that not just the Irish or the convicts would rise in rebellion, but that free settlers and small farmers would support them too. That fear was echoed by Major Johnston himself — he felt that if the rebellion had been allowed to continue, the colony might well have broken away from England.
The account of what happened during the rebellion is as accurate as I can make it, but there are, naturally, several differing accounts of what happened, where and when. (Be suspicious when all the sources written in the past say exactly the same thing — chances are the authors have got together to agree on what story they are going to tell.) Until relatively recently, even the site of the battle was disputed.
The only sources for what happened at Vinegar Hill (now known as the second Battle of Vinegar Hill, after the first Battle of Vinegar Hill in Ireland) are testimonies from those who were captured and gave information to save their lives, and who obviously gave the story they thought would get them the best treatment from Major Johnston, wanting to make his possibly illegal actions look heroic, and from the dying confession of a convict to the Reverend Marsden, who both hated and feared the rebels, and whose testimony might be biased. Governor King too had good reason to downplay what happened in those two nights and a day. An ‘almost successful rebellion’ meant others would try again. It was in his interests to have it described as a brief scuffle by a few renegades who had forced others to join them.
Nor are any two accounts the same. Only one — that of Marsden — talks of adding ‘a ship to take us home’ to the demands Cunningham made to Major Johnston, though passage home was certainly what many of the rebels and other convicts wanted. If all had decided to sail home, there’d have been no need to proclaim the Republic of New Ireland.
But the sheer numbers tell their own story: the large band who rebelled at Castle Hill had every reason to expect they would have been matched by those at Parramatta, Green Hills (Windsor) and the Hawkesbury,
as well as those in Sydney Town, as the traitor Mr Holt told the authorities. Thousands of rebels — many of whom had fighting experience — would easily have defeated soft-living soldiers who had little or none.
It is easy to assume when we read a report written in the past that the writer is telling the truth. Major Johnston had good reason to exaggerate the heroism of his role — he had done something that was almost unthinkable for an English officer of the time: captured and attacked two men under the flag of truce, as well as (illegally) using soldiers in a civil matter, something that had recently been declared illegal under English law. He might have faced criminal charges and imprisonment back in England.
For Governor King, the rebellion was an excuse to put down Catholicism in New South Wales. It became illegal to say or attend Mass, and once again the only legal religion in the colony was Anglicanism. That is, the stern Anglicanism as propounded by the Reverend Marsden, not the far more compassionate practice of the Reverend Johnson (as portrayed in the earlier Secret Histories books), who spent his time — and strength and love — educating convicts and working with Indigenous people.
It is difficult these days to realise the degree of prejudice against and repression of Catholics in England and New South Wales in those years. At various times and in various ways, too complex to detail here, Catholics in Ireland, England and the Empire were denied the right to vote, own land, inherit land, gain an education, marry or be baptised or buried within their faith, or hold important positions. But Catholicism remained strong, with ‘hedge schools’ educating children and Mass said in private homes.
This was not just religious prejudice. England had suffered through a civil war with opposing sides supporting either the Catholic Stuarts or the Anglican House of Hanover. (The House of Hanover was German, not English, but that is another complicated story, just as the Stuarts were Scots and French as well as English. If you look at the recent ancestry of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, you may find it unexpectedly less English than you thought.)
So to put it (too) simply: the New South Wales authorities welcomed the chance to blame the rebellion solely on Catholic rebels, especially the well-educated ones. Later rebels would be carefully sent well away from Sydney, either as prisoners or to distant land grants in the hope ownership would make them conservative law-abiders, which, by and large, it did.
Lies, Myths and Promises
Australia has had two armed rebellions: Castle Hill and Eureka. Both have been dismissed as ‘ten-minute scuffles’. Both were far more than that, even if the initial battles were soon over. If swift action had not been taken both times, they may well have been the initial fight in a successful war of independence, similar to that of the American colonies. Read The Night They Stormed Eureka if you would like to know how that battle too almost succeeded.
It is interesting that in both cases a battle which should easily have been won was lost because there were spies among the rebels. At Castle Hill those spies stopped the message being passed to other rebel groups — a general uprising would have been impossible to control so far away from England. At Eureka spies called out that troopers were attacking distant parts of the camp, drawing out those at the Stockade so when the attack came, just before dawn, only a couple of hundred people were left inside to fight, out of the ten thousand or so who had sworn to fight for independence.
It is also interesting that in both cases the authorities sought out a trusted priest to assure the rebels of a truce. Undoubtedly both men believed what they were saying and hoped only to avoid bloodshed. Father Dixon was forced to press his hands into the bloody flesh of the rebel men who had been flogged as punishment for his part in the rebellion.
Repression in Ireland
In simple terms — and again this is too simple to be entirely accurate — England gradually conquered Ireland, beginning from the time an Irish king called on Norman/English support in 1169, and progressively seized much of the land.
This increased after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1536 so he could divorce his wife and marry his mistress. He proclaimed himself King of Ireland in 1541 and declared that Ireland too must accept him as the head of his new church. Ireland resisted.
Under his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, much of northern Irish land was confiscated and given to ten thousand Scottish Protestants. When the Catholic King James II of England (who was also King James VII of Scotland and King of Ireland — see, I told you it was complicated!) was ousted from England, he fled to Ireland, where supporters fought and lost the Battle of the Boyne.
As with later colonial restrictions, the penal laws of 1691 to 1793 forbade Catholics from acquiring land, teaching in schools, building churches of stone near roads, producing books or newspapers, and passing on land without dividing it. If one son became a Protestant, most property had to go to him, and there were many other similarly unjust restrictions, causing poverty and inequality.
Simple is not accurate, but that is the best I can do simply.
So why then did so much Irish rebellion break out in the late 1790s, when so many of those unjust legal conditions were improving?
Rebellions happen not when things are at their worst, but when people begin to have hope that their lot might change. The French Revolution of 1789 showed that a popular uprising could succeed against a monarch and his or her aristocrats. The American War of Independence showed that English troops could be defeated.
Despite Ireland’s slowly more liberal laws, Catholics were still oppressed, socially and economically, and much of the land was owned by absentee English landlords who took their rents and left tenants to starve in years of bad harvests. (In the 1840s, long after the events in this book, about a third of Irish people would starve through successive famines because of this, and about a quarter would emigrate to escape starvation.)
If Ireland could be free, not just of English law but of absentee landlords, Ireland might prosper.
By now anyone who knows this subject will be saying, ‘But . . . but . . . but . . .’ As I said, simple cannot be accurate with something as broad and complex as history. But this is perhaps a beginning for anyone who wants to read further.
The struggles, battles and martyrdoms as the Irish tried to gain self-rule continued into the twentieth century. After the brutal War of Independence from 1921 to 1922, Ireland was divided into the Irish Free State, which became the Republic of Eire in 1949. Conflict in Northern Ireland — seen from various perspectives as either a chapter of a centuries-long war for independence or as acts of terrorism or as both — at last led in 1998 to the Belfast Agreement with a re-established Northern Irish Parliament, reform of the police, disarmament of civilian militias and a great reduction in the British military presence in Northern Ireland.
As I write this, Britain is planning to leave the Common Market Alliance with Europe, and once again there are negotiations about uniting the two Irelands and allowing them to remain in the European Union.
Roman Catholicism in Australia
While Roman Catholics arrived on the First Fleet and about ten per cent of convicts were Catholic, most were criminals and often only nominally Catholic, just as their fellow convicts were only nominally Anglican or Presbyterian or Methodist, depending on whether they originated in Ireland, England, Scotland or Wales. There were also Jewish convicts. However, more than ten years later, between 1800 and 1803, between five hundred and six hundred Irish rebels or political prisoners were sent to Australia.
The official religion in the colony was Anglicanism. It was technically illegal to be an adherent of any other religion and, according to the law, every convict had to attend Sunday service — but this was rarely enforced. There were no Roman Catholic priests until rebel priests were sent to the colony from Ireland in 1800.
In 1803 one of these priests, the Father Dixon in this book, was granted permission to say Mass, but this was revoked after the Castle Hill rebellion. In 1820 Fathers John Joseph Therry and Philip
Connolly were appointed as official chaplains to the colony by the government in London, and allowed to say Mass.
In Australia, as in Ireland, Anglicans held economic and political power well into the twentieth century. Even in the 1970s it was commonly held that a Catholic could not have a senior public-service position except in the Department of Taxation or the Treasury. Catholics were referred to as micks and often assumed (incorrectly) to be uneducated. The social divisions were so major that country towns and suburbs were sometimes physically divided into Catholic and Protestant areas. When my Catholic grandfather married my Presbyterian grandmother, both families disowned them, and their children and grandchildren.
By the 1980s religion no longer played such a major part in most Australians’ lives. With many of their children becoming agnostic or atheist or turning to Eastern faiths, those who would never have eaten with someone of the ‘wrong’ religious background soon became more tolerant. The passions that had fuelled centuries of religious wars and hatred dissolved relatively quickly, with a growing commitment to not just tolerance of differences but the celebration of beliefs and goodwill in common.
Philip Cunningham
Philip Cunningham was born at Glenn Liath in County Kerry. I haven’t been able to find out when he was born, but he seems to have been possibly in his twenties or early thirties when sent to New South Wales. He moved to Tipperary in the 1790s, and was a stonemason and a publican in Clonmel, where he became a rebel leader. There are many accounts, including references at his trial, to his being tall, handsome and an impressive speaker with enormous personal magnetism. Though he wasn’t gentry, he dined with aristocrats, and the Mayor of Clonmel gave a character reference at his trial.
There doesn’t seem to be any record of Cunningham in the Battle of Vinegar Hill in 1798, though he was almost certainly there (as was an ancestor of mine), but in 1799 the police believed he was leading rebel groups to rescue prisoners and gather firearms while the rebels waited for the promised French assistance (France never did send help). He was dobbed in by an informer, and captured and charged with sedition at Clonmel in October 1799. He was sentenced to death, but that was changed to transportation to Botany Bay for life.
The Secret of the Youngest Rebel Page 6
