How Irish Resistance Shaped Australian History

In the beachside Sydney suburb of Bronte, perched high on a sandstone cliff overlooking the sea, there’s a nine-meter tall white-marble Celtic cross. If you ignore the nice weather and palm trees, you might convince yourself that the monument — the largest of its kind in the world — stands on the Cliffs of Moher, along Ireland’s rugged west coast. But instead, it gazes out over the Pacific Ocean from Waverley Cemetery.

Erected in 1900, the monument tells two stories at once. On the base of the cross, an inscription points to the first. It reads: “In loving memory of all who dared and suffered in Ireland in 1798,” marking the year in which the Society of United Irishmen led a failed uprising against British colonization.

Poorly organized and outgunned, the Irish rebels suffered defeat at the hands of the British at the Battle of Vinegar Hill in June 1798. In the aftermath, the rebels retreated to Wexford, before dividing into two groups and taking to the hills. Michael Dwyer, an Irish captain who survived Vinegar Hill, led one of the groups to the Wicklow Mountains, where he waged a guerrilla campaign. In 1803, the failure of a planned rising in Dublin forced Dwyer to surrender, and in 1805, the British banished him to their Australian penal colony in a fate shared by an estimated 325 to 600 other United Irishmen.

This points toward the other, less well-known story told by Waverley Cemetery’s Celtic memorial cross. In 1800, while Dwyer was still dodging the British in the Wicklow Mountains, the first United Irishmen arrived as political prisoners in Britain’s newly established Colony of New South Wales. They immediately began conspiring against the Crown, with authorities breaking up seditious plots each year after.

In 1804, news of another rebellion in Ireland hit Australian shores, spurring Irish convicts to organize an uprising in solidarity. Six weeks later, on March 4, the Castle Hill Rebellion broke out, led by Philip Cunningham, a Vinegar Hill veteran, who rallied some 250 to 400 Irish rebels (as well as a few other convicts who saw an opportunity to win freedom). Conspirators gave the signal to take up arms by setting a hut ablaze on Castle Hill before the insurrectionists seized the settlement of Parramatta, capturing around a third of the colony’s stockpile of arms.

The Irish convict rebels fought under the slogan “Death or liberty, and a ship to take us home,” and for a short while, their insurrection threatened to end British rule in the sixteen-year-old Colony of New South Wales.

Unfortunately for the rebels, however, defectors alerted colonial authorities in Sydney who hastily declared martial law and prepared a force of soldiers and free-settler militiamen. Led by Major George Johnson — himself a veteran of the American War of Independence — the loyalists set out to confront the rebellion the following day. After the two groups squared up near the Hawkesbury Creek, the scene was set for what became known as the “second Battle of Vinegar Hill.”

Unfortunately for the rebels, the outcome was a decisive British victory — not won through strategy or superior force, but by deceit. Under a false flag of truce, the British asked Cunningham to negotiate unarmed. During these talks, Major Johnson produced hidden pistols, bashed Cunningham over the head, and pulled him limp into the British lines. Without their experienced leader, the insurrection fell to pieces, with fifteen rebels dying in skirmishes and over three hundred surrendering.

The Castle Hill Rebellion remains the largest convict uprising in Australia’s history, and is matched only by the 1854 Eureka Stockade, an event that looms much larger in Australia’s historical memory. Although the Eureka Stockade was in protest against hyperexploitation and for democratic rights, the memory of Castle Hill was not far from the minds of many of the miners who took up arms.

One of the Stockade’s leaders, Peter Lalor, was an Irishman, and he chose the phrase “Vinegar Hill” as the uprising’s night password. The decision, however, turned out to be as ill-fated as its inspiration — the evening before battle, his force of rebellious miners split, as some wished to distance themselves from Irish nationalism, seeing it as a bad omen. Despite this, the Eureka Stockade was a turning point in the struggle for democracy in Australia, and remains a foundational event for the trade union movement.

The failure of the Castle Hill Rebellion dimmed the prospects for Irish or convict uprisings in Australia’s British colonies. So, life for convicts remained brutal — and this was especially so for Irish convicts and their descendants, who were subjected to profound racism and abuse by British Protestant authorities. Absent any alternative form of resistance or redress, many became bushrangers.

One such was the legendary Ned Kelly, the son of two Irish convicts whose gang struck terror into the hearts of rich colonists and their police protectors. From “Such is Life” bumper stickers to Sidney Nolan’s famous series of paintings, Kelly is, by far, the most famous bushranger. But despite their centrality to Australia’s popular imagination, today it’s often forgotten that many bushrangers were Irish, and that they saw themselves not as bandits but as freedom fighters.

It’s also forgotten that the tradition of bushranging — historical and literary — depends at least as much on Kelly as it does on his far less well-known predecessor, Francis “Frank the Poet” MacNamara.

In 1832, at the age of twenty-one, MacNamara was found guilty of having stolen cloth and sentenced to transportation from Ireland to Australia. According to the account of an officer on the ship that transported him, during his trial, MacNamara “recited a mock heroic poem of his own composing in which he ridiculed judge jury and other officers of the Court that had tried him.” As the officer notes, “This of course enhanced his offence and added to his punishment.”

Undeterred, after arriving in the Colonies, MacNamara continued using his gift of the gab to mock his oppressors, often at the cost of additional punishment. In eight years, MacNamara’s good humor earned him fourteen separate floggings, totaling over 650 lashes. Finally, a stint of bushranging led MacNamara to a sentence of twelve years in Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then known.

Only one of MacNamara’s poems was published in his lifetime. The rest were kept alive orally, passed from convict to convict, itself an act of rebellion, as colonial authorities censored subversive songs and poems. Irishness was at the center of MacNamara’s poetry; as much in his characters as in the audience he addressed and the self-image he presented to them. In “Labouring With The Hoe,” a poem of protest against the slave-like conditions endured by convicts in Australia, MacNamara addresses the final stanza to, “You generous sons of Erin’s isle / Whose heart for glory burns,” before imploring listeners to “Pity a wretched exile who / His long-lost country mourns.”

Frank the Poet’s best-known work is “Convict’s Tour of Hell,” a subversive, Irish-Australian spin on Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the devil guides Frank on a journey through hell. He watches his British jailers burn in brimstone before leaving for heaven, where the poor and oppressed live. At the pearly gates, Saint Peter lets Frank enter because he is a friend of bushranger Jack Donahue, who was killed by the colonial authorities in 1830.

Echoes of MacNamara’s poetry can also be heard in Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, a fifty-six-page manifesto named after Jerilderie, New South Wales, a town the Kelly gang captured before Kelly dictated the letter to his comrade Joe Byrne. Kelly’s father, “Red” Kelly, served his sentence in Van Diemen’s Land at the same time as MacNamara, and although Kelly is still an icon to many, his Irish nationalism is less well-remembered than his armor or famous last stand. This is an oversight — indeed, Kelly saw his own struggle with the law as a front in the Irish war of resistance against British colonialism. He hoped that the Jerilderie Letter would spark a broader uprising against the authorities and the wealthy British landowners they protected.

As Germaine Greer has pointed out, the Jerilderie Letter’s “cadences are southern Irish . . . rather than present-day Australian. The letter is, as the Irish say, blarney.” Reminiscent of MacNamara’s poem “Moreton Bay,” the Jerilderie Letter name-checks the same notorious places for Irish convicts to find themselves in British bondage. As Kelly chronicles, the Irish were

doomed to Port Mcquarie, Toweringabbie, and Norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyranny and condemnation many a blooming Irish-man rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke, were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains but true to the shamrock and a credit to Paddys land.

Later, in the letter, with verses that give Kneecap a run for their money, Kelly calls out the British and their collaborators. He describes Irish policemen as “a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords,” before concluding the letter by ordering them to leave the Colony of Victoria on pain of death.

Like the convict uprisings that preceded it, the Kelly gang’s guerrilla war against British authorities was as heroic as it was doomed. But in 1916 — some thirty-six years after Kelly was executed — Australian Irish resistance won a major victory against British colonialism and imperialism, this time as part of a mass movement against World War I.

The Great War exacted a huge cost on Australia — from a 1914 population of nearly five million, about 416,000 men served, of whom over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, amounting to about 21 percent of the male military-age population. Economically, war spending totaled  about £377 million, roughly eighteen times the 1914 federal government budget, a cost which raised Australia’s public debt by 1,000 percent.

The costs — human and economic — would have been far worse, however, had it not been for the antiwar and anti-conscription movement. Led disproportionately by the Irish diaspora, this movement helped to defeat two referenda on conscription, a victory that changed the Australian political landscape in the process.

At its outbreak, enthusiasm for the war was high, and consequently so were enlistments, with 50,000 joining voluntarily by the end of 1914. But by 1916, huge losses and the grim reality of the front were being reported at home. Public opinion had begun to shift, triggering massive antiwar demonstrations.

In a 1914 speech, Andrew Fisher, Labor PM in 1914 and 1915, had promised to fight the war “to our last man and our last shilling.” By 1916, however, it had become clear that a referendum to enforce conscription would be the only way for his successor as Labor PM, Billy Hughes, to deliver on the promise.

Around 20 percent of the Australian population were Irish, and without their votes, the referendum on a constitutional amendment enabling conscription was bound to fail. Winning Irish Australian support for the war was always going to be a hard ask, given they were disproportionately working class and shouldered a disproportionate share of frontline fighting.

Then, the 1916 Easter Uprising — a week-long republican insurrection in Dublin against British colonial rule — galvanized Irish nationalist sentiment, both in Ireland and among the worldwide Irish diaspora. In particular, Britain’s violent and ruthless suppression of the rising echoed in Australia, acting as a catalyst for antiwar sentiment.

The first referendum on conscription was held in October 1916. The “yes” campaign enjoyed support from the government, the conservative opposition, and the majority of the media. The “no” campaign, by contrast, had to contend with wartime censorship and  drew support from a grassroots coalition of civil libertarians, unions, and Irish community groups. Nevertheless, women-led anti-conscription marches spearheaded by suffragettes Vida Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst brought huge numbers of people onto the streets to debate and oppose the referendum.

In the first referendum, the “no” vote won by a narrow margin of 3.2 percent — and the fallout was monumental. Although a Labor government had initiated the referendum, the majority of the party came down against conscription, resulting in a split that saw Hughes expelled and his government toppled. Undeterred, Hughes regrouped and formed a new government with support from right-wing nationalists.

Amid skyrocketing food prices and escalating tensions between predominantly Catholic Irish Australians and the pro-British Protestant establishment, Hughes pressed for a second conscription referendum in 1917. Although he attempted to scapegoat the Irish for the first defeat, the “no” campaign won the second vote in December 1917 by an even greater margin.

Although few realize today, the Irish contribution to Australian working-class history stretches far beyond World War I into the twentieth century, shaping the union movement and Australian Labor Party profoundly.

But it’s not just a forgotten history — it’s a history that was deliberately buried, beginning after the war, when a new national mythology focused on the figure of the ANZAC soldier was constructed. This mythology was intended to articulate a new Australian nationalism, partly in order to supplant both class consciousness and Irish republicanism. And it attempted to do so by concealing the injustices of European settler colonialism, including the systematic oppression — political and economic — of Irish Australians.

The history of Irish resistance in Australia challenges this selective remembering, both by shining a spotlight on the atrocities committed by British colonialism and by foregrounding a tradition of solidarity.