While Dublin Castle anticipated a revival of United Irish activity in Leinster 200 years ago, it was in New South Wales, Australia, that the republican organisation made its last show of force. The scale and potential of the Castle Hill revolt of March 1804 shocked a colonial regime that had weathered several ‘Irish plots’ between 1800 and 1802. Governor Philip Gidley King was obliged to declare martial law for the first time in Australian history and believed that Irish rebels had come close to seizing control of the British Empire’s penal colonies.
The rising of 1804 had a long and complex gestation. From 1788, thousands of predominantly English and Irish convicts had been transported to New South Wales to alleviate pressure on a justice system deprived of its traditional dumping grounds by the American Revolution. Counter-insurgency measures in Ireland ensured that considerable numbers of Defenders and United Irishmen were transported to Australia in the 1790s. By 1800 New South Wales was at least one-third Irish and home to at least 600 republican prisoners. The Minerva and Friendship transports, which arrived from Cobh in January/February 1800, carried such notorious figures as Wicklow ‘General’ Joseph Holt, Dublin radical Richard Dry and Offaly rebel captain James Meehan. Within months of their arrival, a series of interlinked conspiracies were uncovered in Sydney, Toongabbie, Parramatta and Norfolk Island. Severe flogging, re-transportation and a hunger strike by Holt did nothing to reconcile the imported Irishmen to their new environment.
