The La Trobe Journal: Redmond Barry Number, no. 73 (review)

Redmond Barry is hardly a household name in Australia today, but a century and a half ago most people in the colony of Victoria would have heard of him, and many would have admired him. Admitted to the bar in his native Ireland in 1838 but with dim prospects at home, Barry set sail for New South Wales. A scandalous shipboard and later land-based romance with a married woman saw him shunned by polite society in Sydney, so he soon made his way to Melbourne. There in a series of legal appointments he put his formidable energy to work, becoming in due course solicitor-general and at the age of thirty-eight a justice of the newly created Supreme Court of Victoria. Among the thousands of cases over which he subsequently presided—often at breakneck speed—were trials of some of the conspirators in Australia's iconic rebellion of 1854 at Eureka Stockade. A quarter of a century later Barry sat in judgment over another Australian icon: the bushranger Ned Kelly. Barry pronounced the death penalty with the customary "may the Lord have mercy on your soul," to which Kelly responded that he would see Barry "where I go." Kelly was hanged on November 11, 1880, and twelve days later Barry died in his chambers, leaving in his wake the legend of the Kelly curse but also a reputation for service to the community.

Libraries were prominent among the public causes that Barry espoused, and 2004 marked the sesquicentenary not only of the Eureka Stockade but also of the laying of the foundation stone of the Melbourne Public Library (now known as the State Library of Victoria). To commemorate the latter event the State Library of Victoria Foundation has dedicated a special issue of the La Trobe Journal to Redmond Barry, with a dozen essays dealing with aspects of the life of this complex and contradictory character.

It has been said that Redmond Barry opened everything in Melbourne that was worth opening. He helped found the University of Melbourne (where he was chancellor from 1853 until his death), the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, the Melbourne Hospital, the Supreme Court Library, as well as the Melbourne Public Library, which in due course sprouted a museum and an art gallery. His interests were wide and his dedication to worthy causes tireless, characteristics that readily emerge from his biographies. First came Peter Ryan's slender Redmond Barry: A Colonial Life 1813–1880 (2nd ed., Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1980). More recently, there is Ann Galbally's lengthier Redmond Barry: An Anglo-Irish Australian (Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1995). Have they left much for the twelve essayists (including Galbally) in the commemorative journal? Well, yes. The essays explore his patronage of the arts, his significance as a jurist, his role as a university administrator, his attitude toward Aboriginal culture, and his championing of a library intended to rival that of the British Museum.

There is a speedy verdict on Barry the jurist from John H. Phillips, a former chief justice of Victoria. In its lawless infancy the colony of Victoria "did not need a Sir Owen Dixon or a Lord Dennin"—or indeed an Oliver Wendell Holmes—but hard-working, efficient, and energetic judges able to tolerate the arduous travel involved in circuits. Barry was "an ideal judge for his times" (24).

Chancellor Barry is tackled by R. J. W. Selleck, who shows that Barry was not seduced by the gold discoveries that were sending Victoria into a frenzy in the 1850s but was "determined that the colony to which he had come would pay adequate homage to things of the mind," including a University of Melbourne (53).

Barry the Irishman is the subject of Shane Carmody's contribution, which depicts some vivid examples of the Irish diaspora—including Ned Kelly and former Prime Minister Paul Keating—who...