WHILE William Smith O'Brien languished in the Antipodes, he was considered a traitor by his class at home. O'Brien, conscious of his descent from Brian Boru, regarded himself as a prisoner of war. He is remembered as a quixotic figure: the reluctant leader of an ill timed insurrection. In his Tasmanian journal, which has been published after 140 years, he emerges, furthermore, as a melancholy aristocrat transported to Van Diemen's Land by British authorities anxious to consign him to oblivion.
In Tasmania - where a new heritage trail recalls the Young Ireland felons - O'Brien was never deprived of books or writing materials and never forced to wear convict dress or do any labour. But the isolation proved excruciating. Initially, he was held in solitary confinement, refusing a ticket of leave until instructed by his formidable mother to "act like a man and make yourself and your family happy". On accepting parole - and giving an undertaking not to escape - he wrote to his wife, Lucy: "Until now I have never felt myself thoroughly beaten by English power."
Her lack of sympathy for his nationalist principles pained him. He compared Lucy unfavourably with Adelaide Dillon, who, "a six months bride, sent her husband to the scene of danger bidding him to die for his country rather than live for her".
The commutation of his death sentence to transportation for life was not an act of clemency to O'Brien, but a punishment worse than death. He was deeply unhappy in Tasmania, where the higher and nobler impulses of man's nature are crushed by an overruling spirit of selfishness. Intellectual gifts and accomplishments are despised."
He consoled himself with the reflection that "our sufferings will tend to strengthen the aspirations after nationality", and be "a forerunner of sanctification". Towards the end of his exile he" grew hopeful that "the principles for which we so earnestly contended appear to have at length implainted themselves in the national mind of Ireland". White admitting that the rising had been a "fatal miscalculation", he insisted that in 1848 revolution was more justified in Ireland than in, any other European country.
Britain's policy of silencing the literary rebels failed most dramatically in, the case of O'Brien's fellow convict, John Mitchel, who escaped to the US and published his Jail Journal. More humane than Mitchel but lacking his fire, O'Brien politicised the Famine too. Nevertheless, the reader has to plough through this 175,000 word scholarly discourse to find an arresting (pun intended) idea.
One of the best things in it is his brooding over the 1851 census. O Brien, who was a moderate for most of his 20 years as an MP, held the British government responsible for the premature extinction of one million Irish people: "Yet Englishmen and their rulers calmly contemplate without self reproach the havoc which they have permitted if they have not caused it nay some of their leading statesmen deem it a subject of congratulation that so large a proportion of its inhabitants has been removed from a country which they consider over peopled and hostile.
A wise and benevolent administration could have averted the tragedy. England spent more on a year's warfare than would have been, sufficient to make, ample provision for the Irish Famine victims. "When I ponder the statistical return of the Irish population, I feel that I did my duty when I endeavoured at the risk of my life to avert the evils which have been the most calamitous reign that Ireland has experienced since it became subject to the British crown - when I read the figures I am proud to be in exile."
Professor Richard Davis, who is writing a biography of O'Brien, and his editorial team have made a significant contribution to Irish Australian historiography. This book will become a collector's item. The general reader would have been better served, however, if the text had been abridged - as intended by Den is Gwynn, O'Brien's great grandson.
