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BOOK REVIEW
| Margaret Glover and Alf Maclochlainn (eds), Letters of an Irish Patriot: William Paul Dowling in Tasmania, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 2005. pp. 142. $27.50 paper.
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| The story of the transportation of seven Young Irelander exiles to Van Diemen's Land (VDL), including Thomas Meagher, John Mitchel and William Smith O'Brien, is well known. Letters of an Irish Patriot concerns the experience of one of the Young Irelander's lesser lights, William Paul Dowling. Born in Dublin in 1824, Dowling was arrested in London in August 1848 in possession of Young Irelander documents, was convicted of sedition felony, the first case under a new sedition law that did not include the death penalty, and was transported to Van Diemen's Land for life. |
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On arrival in VDL he was granted a ticket-of-leave. Initially assigned to a 'gentlemanly little man' called Robin Hood, Dowling quickly established himself as a self-employed portrait painter. He married his Irish fiancé in Hobart in 1850, received a full pardon in 1857, then was joined by his brother Matthew in Launceston, Tasmania, where the two set up a reasonably successful photography and lithography business. Dowling and his family returned to Ireland in late 1866 and set up shop in Dublin, but the business failed and he returned to Tasmania in early 1869. He died in Launceston in 1877. |
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The book's introduction includes a potted biography of Dowling's family history, his political involvements in Irish nationalism and English Chartism in London, and a brief discussion of his trial, at which he told the presiding judge that what the law called sedition, he saw as patriotism. The bulk of this short book consists of 20 letters, 18 of them written by Dowling, most of them to his brother Bernard in Dublin. Four letters were written in Newgate awaiting trial, one on the journey to Van Diemen's Land, and most of the rest from Hobart and Launceston. The letters are supplemented by the editors with further detail about Dowling's life in Tasmania, so that a reasonably full although somewhat disjointed picture of his life journey emerges. |
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Dowling wrote mostly a self-effacing pedestrian prose; he was not a stylist with the pen. He wrote mainly about day-to-day matters, maintained a passing interest in political issues in Tasmania and Europe, commented on the fortunes of the other Irish exiles to VDL, and although he saw himself as politically 'dead', his Irish patriotism and contempt for British authority never waned. |
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The chief value of the letters is the reflective insight they offer into Dowling's changing disposition and the experience of forced exile. He moves from youthful defiance and optimism in the London letters, to a hardened cynicism in the early Tasmanian letters, to a 'more caustic', 'less generous' disposition in the letters written between 1854–58. He missed his Dublin family deeply. He saw himself as 'a solitary exiled artist' and wrote that he and his wife Julia felt themselves living in 'in a land of strangers'. For all that, this is an engaging book that makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Irish experience in Tasmania. |
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| University of Tasmania |
SHAYNE BREEN | |
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