Global Lives: Hugh Mahon
Prof. Jeff Kildea
On 25 October 1920 Terence MacSwiney, the Sinn Féin mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison after 74 days on hunger strike. A fortnight later 12,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, Irish-born Hugh Mahon, a member of the Australian parliament, addressed a public meeting called to protest MacSwiney’s death.
In front of the 3,000 people who had crowded into the Richmond Reserve, Mahon declared:
Never in Russia under the worst rule of the Czars had there been such an infamous murder as that of the late Alderman MacSwiney. They were told in the papers that Alderman MacSwiney’s poor widow sobbed over his coffin. If there was a just God in heaven that sob would reach round the world, and one day would shake the foundations of this bloody and accursed Empire.
Four days later the Australian prime minister Billy Hughes rose in his place in the House of Representatives and moved the following motion:
That, in the opinion of this House, the honorable member for Kalgoorlie, the Hon. Hugh Mahon, having, by seditious and disloyal utterances at a public meeting on Sunday last, been guilty of conduct unfitting him to remain a member of this House, and inconsistent with the oath of allegiance which he has taken as a member of this House, be expelled this House.
For the next 14 hours, interrupted only by breaks for dinner and a midnight snack, the House debated Hughes’s motion and a Labor amendment that disavowed the parliament’s right to try Hugh Mahon. In the early hours of the next morning the House divided and, voting along party lines, 34 to 17, Labor’s amendment was defeated, and Hughes’s motion passed. For the first and only time a member of the House of Representatives had been expelled from the Australian parliament.
Today the expulsion of Hugh Mahon is rightly regarded as an injustice. Yet, in the charged political and sectarian atmosphere of 1920 Australia, many Australians saw it otherwise, believing that the parliament did the right thing by ridding itself of a seditious and disloyal member. Such was the strength of feeling in Australia with regard to the revolution then taking place in Ireland.
So, who was Hugh Mahon, the man in the centre of this political storm, and why did events half a world away provoke such a strong reaction in Australia?
Born at Killurin, County Offaly, in 1857, Hugh Mahon was the 13th of 14 children of James and Anna Mahon. In 1869 James, Anna and eight of their children, including young Hugh, gave up their farm and emigrated to America, first to Ontario, Canada and then to Albany, New York, where Hugh trained as a printer and newspaperman. Unfortunately their American dream failed and in 1880 the family returned to Ireland, where Hugh’s brother Patrick had retained a small remnant of the family farm.
On his return to Ireland, Mahon soon found employment as editor of the New Ross Standard and as a reporter for the Wexford People. Both newspapers were owned by Edward Walsh, a leading nationalist and supporter of tenants’ rights. Like his employer, Mahon was an activist as well as a journalist. He was instrumental in the establishment of the New Ross branch of the Land League in 1880, serving initially as assistant secretary and then as secretary. He also engaged in activities, such as printing leaflets calling for boycotts of landlords and publicising evictions in order to attract a crowd that would intimidate the bailiffs.
These activities brought him under notice of the police. Sub-Inspector Wilson reported to the government, ‘Mahon is by occupation a reporter and by inclination a rebel’. As a result of his Land League activities Mahon was arrested in October 1881 and interned without trial. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol with Parnell. After two months he was released on health grounds following a diagnosis of tuberculosis. Mahon immediately returned to his Land League activities in and around New Ross. Threatened with re-arrest he sought the assistance of John Redmond, MP for New Ross, who questioned the government in the House of Commons over Mahon's predicament. With the government intent on returning him to Kilmainham, Mahon took his doctor’s advice to move to a warmer climate and emigrated to Australia.
The previous year, Parnell had sent John W. Walshe to Victoria as a representative of the Land League. Walshe, a cousin of Michael Davitt and a co-founder of the league, was in poor health, made worse by extensive travel through outback Australia promoting the cause. He had requested an assistant, only to be told no one was available. Mahon’s decision to emigrate therefore came as a godsend. As an enthusiastic young man with recent knowledge and experience of the land agitation in Ireland, he was the ideal person to assist Walshe with his heavy workload.
Arriving in Melbourne in May 1882, Mahon soon found himself in an atmosphere of intense anti-Irish rancour. News had just reached the colony of the assassination in Dublin’s Phoenix Park of the Chief Secretary of Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish and his Under-Secretary Thomas Henry Burke. The colonial press, already hostile to the Land League’s campaign of boycotting landlords, was quick to link the murders with the league’s activities. Also at this time there was a local scandal involving five Irish members of the Victorian Legislative Assembly who had signed an address commemorating the centenary of Henry Grattan's declaration of Irish legislative independence. Critics described it as 'treasonable and seditious' because it referred to the imperial government as 'a foreign despotism'. In a letter to Sydney’s Freeman’s Journal, Mahon expressed his astonishment ‘that men of Irish birth or blood who have honourably acquired honour and position in the colony should be hounded down with vindictive malevolence for offering sympathy and encouragement to their kith and kin at home’.
Together with Walshe, Mahon travelled extensively, defending and promoting the activities of the league and collecting money to send back to Ireland. When John and William Redmond visited Australia in 1883 to promote and raise funds for the new Irish National League, Mahon helped organise their tour. In the introduction to The Land League: A Narrative of Four Years of Irish Agitation, a pamphlet written by Mahon, Redmond commended its author as ‘one who has worked and suffered for Ireland, and is qualified, from intimate knowledge to speak with authority upon this matter’.
When the Redmonds departed Australia after their gruelling 10-month tour, Mahon resumed his calling in journalism as a reporter, editor and newspaper owner in New South Wales and Victoria. When gold was discovered in Western Australia in the 1890s Mahon travelled there and set up a newspaper at Menzies in a remote corner of the goldfields. In 1898, he was appointed editor of the Kalgoorlie Sun, gaining a reputation as a pugnacious and racy editor, exposing corruption in government and business. A contemporary later wrote, ‘Mahon could put more venom into a stick of type than any man I ever knew. Mahon’s headlines were masterpieces of alliteration and venom’. He successfully defended five libel actions, four of them prosecutions for criminal libel.
Hugh Mahon (back row, right of picture) Postmaster-General in the world’s first national Labor government, 1904' (Image: National Library of Australia).
Mahon’s career as a journalist effectively ended in 1901 when he was elected as a Labor member to the first parliament of the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia. Initially representing the seat of Coolgardie, he became the member for Kalgoorlie in 1913 following a redistribution of electoral boundaries. He served as a minister in four administrations, including Postmaster-General in the world’s first national Labor government in 1904 and as Minister for External Affairs during World War I.
During his time in parliament Mahon was an early advocate of Aboriginal rights. He also became associated with the cause of Irish home rule. When the Redmond brothers left Australia in 1883, Mahon dropped out of Irish nationalist politics. But two decades later, when William Redmond returned to raise funds for the Irish Parliamentary Party, he persuaded Mahon to shepherd through the Australian parliament a resolution in support of Irish home rule. Chastened by the bitter experience of the Grattan address that saw many Irish members lose their seats at the next election, supporters of home rule were reluctant to raise the matter in parliament, fearing it would harm them electorally while having little effect on British policy. Mahon later wrote that Redmond’s decisive attitude as to the efficacy of such a resolution was persuasive: ‘It was felt that we had no excuse for refusing to do our part, whatever consequence might ensue’. In the end Mahon’s skilful use of parliamentary procedure proved successful – in October 1905 both houses of parliament passed the resolution.
Mahon soon gained a reputation as the ‘go-to man’ for Irish and Catholic causes. In 1907 Cardinal Patrick Moran invited him to deliver the St Patrick’s Day address in Sydney. In 1909 he was a key player in the St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Melbourne, addressed by the Governor General. In July 1910 he moved a resolution in the House of Representatives beseeching the new king George V to omit from the coronation oath references offensive to Catholics.
Mahon’s business interests included insurance and in 1911 the Catholic bishops approached him to establish an insurance company to provide fire and accident cover for the church’s buildings throughout Australia. In setting up the company he adopted a scheme that had operated in Ireland. The Catholic Church Property Insurance Co. opened for business on 1 January 1912 with Mahon as managing director. The company still exists today as Catholic Church Insurances.
In the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, religious sectarianism between Catholics, mostly of Irish descent, and Protestants, mostly of British descent, became acute. It had been endemic in Australia ever since the founding of the colony in 1788. But it intensified in the early twentieth century when Catholics, who were about 23 per cent of the population, launched a political campaign for state aid for their schools. This local conflict soon became entangled with the politics of the old world following the introduction of the third home rule bill into the Westminster parliament, with attitudes to the measure dividing generally along ethno-religious lines. The declaration of war in August 1914, put an end to these debates as Australians united in support of the war effort.
However, sectarian conflict re-emerged in 1916 following the Easter Rising and increased a few months later when the federal government called a referendum for October 1916 to determine whether Australia should introduce conscription for overseas service. The Australian Irish for the most part opposed conscription and when the referendum was defeated Prime Minister Hughes and his supporters singled them out for blame. Soon they were being labelled ‘Sinn Féiners, shirkers and pro-German’. The governing Labor Party split over the issue and Hughes, and his supporters left the party, joining with the Liberal Party to form a new Nationalist Party government. Hugh Mahon sided with the anti-conscription side and remained with the Labor Party, which now found itself in opposition.
In the ‘khaki election’ of 1917 Mahon lost his seat. Out of office, he devoted more time to his business interests and to advancing the cause of Irish self-government. Like most Australian Catholics of Irish descent, Mahon had been a home ruler, but in the years following the Easter rising he gradually moved towards a position of supporting Irish independence. In 1919 he was elected president of the Irish-Ireland League of Victoria, a peak body that represented the growing number of organisations in that state that supported Sinn Féin. At the end of the year he won back his seat in parliament at the general election.
The advent of the Irish War of Independence widened Australia’s sectarian divide and as it intensified in 1920, so too did the vicarious conflict in Australia. In that year a number of local events added to the growing rift: in May the federal government ignited strong protests from Catholics when they deported a German-born priest; in July an Irish-born nun fled from her convent and placed herself under the protection of the Orange lodge igniting a bitter controversy that was played out in the courts, in parliament and in newspapers across the country; in August the Royal Navy hijacked Daniel Mannix, the Irish-born Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, from the ocean liner taking him to Ireland and off-loaded him in England, provoking angry protests by Irish Catholics around the world and especially in Australia.
It was in this context, described by New South Wales Attorney General Edward McTiernan as ‘a veritable hurricane of sectarian strife’, that Hugh Mahon addressed the public meeting in Melbourne at which he castigated the British government and profaned the British Empire. This was just four days before the second anniversary of the armistice that brought an end to the war in which 60,000 Australians had died fighting for ‘this bloody and accursed empire’. Public reaction was swift and brutal.
Protestant, loyalist and ex-service organisations inundated the government with telegrams, letters, and personal representations demanding Mahon’s removal from parliament. Newspaper editorials followed suit. The Argus declared, ‘By his statements Mr. Mahon had done treason to Australia, and had insulted and humiliated the overwhelming bulk of his fellow citizens.’ The Sydney Morning Herald complained that Mahon had ‘uttered the most vulgar diatribes on the Empire of which this country is a part. … [H]e is an experienced ex-Minister of the Crown … and no Australian Government could do anything but arraign before the House an ex-Minister guilty of such behaviour.’ The Age agreed, arguing that ‘the government will be compelled to take further action, and in doing so it will merit approval.’
Keen to pick up an extra seat to secure his parliamentary majority, Prime Minister Hughes readily obliged, moving Mahon’s expulsion. To this day, Mahon remains the only person to have been expelled from the Australian parliament, and he is likely to remain so. In 1984 a joint select committee described his expulsion as an ‘abuse of power by a partisan vote’ and in 1987 legislation was passed removing the federal parliament’s power to expel its members.
At the by-election for his seat, Mahon sought vindication from his constituents. But in a campaign fought mainly on empire-loyalty grounds he was narrowly defeated. Out of parliament, Mahon continued his successful business career. In 1922 he embarked on a trip to Paris to take part in the Irish Race Convention. However, a recurrence of the respiratory ailment that plagued him all his life led to his being hospitalised near Marseilles for three months. Upon recovering he travelled to Rome where he had an audience with the new pope, Pius XI, before making a brief visit to Ireland for the first and last time since his exile 40 years before. While there he gave an interview to the press in support of the pro-treaty side, earning a rebuke from an Irish Labour newspaper for his criticism of the party’s stance over the issue.
Mahon died at his home in Melbourne in 1931. Debate in parliament on the usual condolence motion was interrupted when a Country Party member, Roland Green, a veteran of the war who had lost a leg in the conflict, stormed out of the chamber after declaring he could not support the motion because of Mahon’s attack on the Empire. To Green and others like him, Mahon’s words still rankled – a decade or more after the event they were still obscene and unforgiveable.
Hugh Mahon was one of the many talented people that were lost to Ireland in the 19th century due to the oppressive political and economic conditions in their native land. As with so many such cases, Ireland’s loss was Australia’s gain. As a newspaperman, Mahon was acknowledged by friend and foe alike as one of the best in his day. As a politician, he was regarded by contemporaries as one of the ‘brainiest’ men in the parliament. He also excelled in the business world. Yet, in many ways he was an enigma who evoked high praise from some while at the same time attracting damning criticism from others; he was a man described by some contemporaries as warm and generous but by others as cold and mean. Driven by a strong sense of justice and of right, he could become frustrated when events did not turn out the way he thought they should. In response, he often resorted to invective, a propensity that tended to alienate rather than to persuade, to make enemies rather than allies when it was the latter he needed most.
Perhaps the final word on Hugh Mahon goes to another enigmatic Irishman, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who said of him: ‘The late Mr Hugh Mahon was [my] personal and honoured friend. ... The late Mr Mahon had been a good Irishman, a good Australian and an exemplary Catholic’.
Jeff Kildea is an Adjunct Professor of Irish Studies at the University of New South Wales. He held the Keith Cameron Chair of Australian History at University College Dublin in 2014. He is the author of a two volume biography of Hugh Mahon entitled Hugh Mahon: Patriot, Pressman, Politician, published by Anchor Books Australia. Volume 1, published in 2017, covers the period 1857 to 1901 and volume 2, published in 2020, covers the period 1901 to 1931.
