Sydney – 1848 – Joseph Fowles

Joseph Fowles (1810–1878) did not write an almanac of the colony. He drew Sydney street elevations and public buildings in copper plate and published them in twenty fortnightly parts from 1848 into 1850, printed by D. Wall at 76 York Street and sold from Fowles’s own address at 5 Harrington Street. The line that calls Sydney in 1848 a complete almanac of every street in the colony is a stretch. What you have here is the city centre: George, Pitt, King, York, Elizabeth, Macquarie, the Domain edge, the churches and banks he thought would shut English mouths.

His July 1848 purpose note is the key. He wanted to “remove the erroneous and discreditable notions current in England” and show gas-lit streets, sumptuous shops, and buildings raised for religion in sixty years. Dedication to Governor FitzRoy. Facsimiles and the Gutenberg text are how most of us meet the plates now; this post is the hub — forty-odd scans from those elevations — not a substitute for walking each street page.

Use it as an index. Lower George is the maritime strip; Charlotte Place is later Grosvenor; Bridge Street is the Tank Stream crossing; Hunter has the closed Bank of Australia; the Barrack-wall George Street plate is the retail boast; King Street looks east to St James’. Don’t collapse the three banks, don’t date the Lands Office into 1848, and don’t treat every plate as the same month of issue — the title year is the project, the parts ran on. These are copper-plate engravings, not Austin’s separate lithographic series.

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Sydney - 1848

The First Real Attempt At A Complete Almanac Of All The Streets Of The Colony, Which Had Sprouted Into A City was Completed by Jospeh Fowles in 1848. 

John Plunkett - An Australian Hero

 John Plunkett 

John Hubert Plunkett was a prominent figure in the early colonial history of Sydney, New South Wales. Here's some information about John Plunkett:

1. Early Life and Education: John Plunkett was born on May 1, 1802, in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland. He studied law at Trinity College, Dublin, and was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1823.

2. Arrival in Australia: In 1832, Plunkett arrived in Sydney, New South Wales, to take up the position of Solicitor General. He was appointed by the British government to assist in legal matters and became a prominent legal figure in the colony.

3. Legal Career and Reforms: Plunkett's tenure as Solicitor General and later as Attorney General (1836-1847) was marked by significant legal reforms. He aimed to improve the criminal justice system and address issues such as corruption and inefficiency. Plunkett was known for his progressive approach and was dedicated to ensuring fair trials and just outcomes.

4. Landmark Trials: Plunkett was involved in several notable trials during his career. One of the most significant was the Myall Creek Massacre trial in 1838, where he successfully prosecuted a group of white settlers for the murder of Indigenous Australians. This was a groundbreaking case that highlighted Plunkett's commitment to justice and equality.

5. Contribution to Legal System: Plunkett played a key role in the development of the legal system in New South Wales. He introduced reforms that included the establishment of circuit courts, improved legal aid, and the appointment of professional magistrates.

6. Later Career and Legacy: Plunkett returned to Ireland in 1847 but continued his involvement in legal affairs. He served as a member of the British Parliament and later became a judge in Ireland. His reforms and contributions to the legal system in New South Wales were significant and had a lasting impact on the colony.

7. Personal Life: Plunkett married Maria Lumsdaine in 1834, and they had several children together. Plunkett was known for his intellectual pursuits and his commitment to justice and equality.

John Plunkett's contributions to the legal system in New South Wales during the early colonial period were highly influential. His progressive reforms and commitment to fairness and justice left a lasting legacy, and he is remembered as an important figure in the history of Sydney and the development of the Australian legal system.

John Hubert Plunkett (1802-1869), lawyer and politician, was born the younger of twins in June 1802 at Mount Plunkett, County Roscommon, Ireland, son of George Plunkett and his wife Eileen, née O'Kelly. His family, which had aristocratic connexions, had kept some of its estates intact in 1703-78 and was thus well placed to take advantage of the relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics. John entered Trinity College, Dublin, in November 1819 (B.A., 1823), was called to the Irish Bar in 1826 and later to the English Bar. He won distinction and popularity on the Connaught circuit in 1826-32. Daniel O'Connell gave Plunkett the credit for the success of his candidates in Connaught at the 1830 general election which put the Whigs in power. Plunkett's reward was the solicitor-generalship of New South Wales at a salary of £800. He was the first Catholic appointed to high civil office in the colony, though Roger Therry's appointment to a magistracy antedated his by three years. Plunkett arrived in Sydney with his wife and sister and four female servants in the Southworth in June 1832. Also in the ship was Rev. John McEncroe.
John Kinchela, the attorney-general, was deaf and Plunkett had to perform many of his duties. Thus from 1 August to 5 November 1833 he appeared for the attorney-general during the criminal session, conducting ninety-one cases and obtaining sixty-four convictions. In 1835 he published The Australian Magistrate, the first Australian practice book of its kind. It had great importance in effecting uniformity in the procedure of the inferior courts. In 1840 a second and revised edition was published by James Tegg. When Kinchela retired in February 1836 Plunkett was appointed attorney-general. He was given a doubled load, some said in hope that he would resign. As a Crown law officer he was largely responsible for the technical legal form and any technical legal defects of the legislation, which in these crucial years in New South Wales established the equality of all men before the law. Profound personal conviction went into his draftsmanship. Jury rights were first experimentally extended to emancipists at his instance. Ostentatiously he extended the protection of the law to convicts and assigned servants, and successfully used the James Mudie case to argue the abolition of convict assignment. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, 'He exercised important influence on general legislation, and we believe that every measure tending to equalise the social conditions and promote civil and religious liberty amidst the various, and often hostile, elements of this Colony has either been framed or supported by him'. After the Myall Creek massacre in June 1838 he extended the same protection, with the same ostentation, to the Aboriginals, when he secured the condemnation to death of six white men and one black man of Afro-Caribbean origin for the murder of a native. At the first trial Plunkett was defeated on a technical point: because a whole tribe had been massacred the remains of the Aboriginal in question could not be identified with sufficient certainty. Undeterred Plunkett brought forward a fresh charge and won his case. The action ensured his reputation for austere impartiality. Hence he was able to combine the offices of solicitor-general and attorney-general, engrossing those of grand jury and public prosecutor.
To judge from his later public utterances Plunkett considered the Church Act of 1836 the most important single achievement of his public career. It definitely disestablished the Church of England and established legal equality between Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians; its provisions were later extended to Methodists, and Plunkett himself would gladly have included Jews and Independents. Plunkett was the first president of the board set up to administer this Act in 1839. Like Governor Sir Richard Bourke he had wished to supplement the ecclesiastical provisions of the Act by the introduction of the Irish National system in schools, under which children of all religious bodies combined for secular education but separated for religious instruction. In Plunkett's mind, however, 'combined secular education' included the truths of natural religion, God, the after-life, and the Ten Commandments. The opposition of Catholic, Anglican and Nonconformist authorities, including McEncroe, though far from unanimous, sufficed to defeat this measure at the time. But in 1844 Plunkett supported the Lowe committee, of which he was a member, in advocating the National system, and when it came into force in 1848 Plunkett became the first chairman of the board.
From late 1841 to August 1843 Plunkett had been granted leave to attend to family affairs in Ireland. It is not possible to say exactly what contribution Plunkett made in England during the drafting, largely supervised by Stanley, of the 1842 Act for adding elected representatives to the Legislative Council of New South Wales. In 1837 he had, however, piloted the Market Commissioners' Act through the old council, establishing the first representative body in New South Wales, and within the limits of his office had been prominent in advocating extension of the franchise to include emancipists when the municipal council was incorporated in Sydney. His claim to have argued strongly with Stanley in favour of a wide franchise in 1842 is therefore credible. On his return he resumed duty as attorney-general, but not as solicitor-general, and in 1843-51 was one of the twelve official nominees in the newly constituted council. But Plunkett was always a lawyer first. Although he preferred not to be elevated to the Supreme Court bench on uncertain terms when Judge (Sir) William Burton went on leave in 1837 he was an applicant for appointment as chief justice in October 1844. The post went temporarily to (Sir) Alfred Stephen who wrote to Governor Sir George Gipps expressing high regard for Plunkett and trusting that their rivalry would not 'disturb the friendly feelings between us … [as Plunkett] has many claims on … Government and country for … long, arduous and most faithful discharge of duty'.
Plunkett carried on as attorney-general in a political hurly-burly to which he was temperamentally unsuited, for he lacked eloquence, flexibility, and capacity for rapid decision. The reputation for genial sociability which he had brought from Ireland did not sit easily on him in the colonies, except with a few intimate friends, and he found himself increasingly isolated. He was at odds with many fellow-Catholics, including McEncroe and Archbishop John Bede Polding, because of his views on education. The old O'Connellite could give only half-hearted support to the Catholic Association formed to promote church schools in 1851, and in 1853 he engaged in acrimonious public controversy with McEncroe on the education issue. He alienated extreme Protestant opinion, as represented or manipulated by John Dunmore Lang, by the firm backing he gave to Caroline Chisholm. In the disputes on land tenure and squatting he fell foul of the anti-squatter party because he advised the governor that the crown had no power to break in upon licences already in operation and that the law did not permit the sale of licensable land once a licence had been applied for. Both Victorian and English legal opinion later backed him on these questions, and it was he who found a loophole for the executive in the provisions for reserving from lease, or resuming from lease, lands required for public use. But he also antagonized many of the squatter party by his opposition to any resumption of transportation. From 1843 to 1856 he was a member of the Executive Council, a key figure from the dawn of representative government until the granting of responsible government because of his unique experience of the law of the colony. His personal touch was most apparent in his stringent liquor legislation of 1856 and in the marriage bill of 1855 giving church weddings civil status. In 1849 he sat on the William Charles Wentworth committee to establish a university, and became a member of its first Senate. He made one crucial political mistake. Elected in 1852 to the drafting committee for the colony's new Constitution, he supported Wentworth's proposal for a hereditary upper house, and treated his critics with stubborn hauteur. The credit he earned by his other work on the Constitution was denied him because of this eccentricity.
In 1856 Plunkett retired from office on a pension of £1200. His impartial administration over a quarter of a century had won him widespread appreciation, and he decided to seek election to the first Legislative Assembly under responsible government. His political campaign leaned heavily on Irish national sentiment. Here he felt on strong ground, for each year when chairing the St Patrick's Day dinner, he always managed to break through his normal reserve. But against the background of the Crimean War Irish nationalism was an uncertain recommendation, and he was defeated for Sydney by a team led by Henry Parkes and Charles Cowper, who used Plunkett's Catholicism against him without scruple. He eventually won the country seat of Argyle, but felt unable to act as attorney-general under Cowper, since only the shortage of lawyers had prompted the invitation. In 1857-58 he was president of the Legislative Council.
In February 1858 Cowper, as premier, dismissed Plunkett from the presidency of the National Schools Board. It was a complex dispute, with personal and political overtones as well as important constitutional aspects on the relative powers of the Executive Council and of the board as a body corporate established by an Act of the superseded Legislative Council. Cowper correctly asserted the powers of the government generally, but acted vindictively in using the board's decision to publish its correspondence in the press as his reason for dismissing Plunkett. Public opinion strongly backed Plunkett, and the Legislative Assembly voted for him, but to no avail. As a result Plunkett resigned the presidency of the Legislative Council and all his many public offices. He now espoused the popular side in politics and used its methods. Defeated by the Parkes 'bunch' in 1856, in 1858 he 'bunched' himself with Daniel Deniehy for the electorate of Sydney. Only Plunkett won election. He sat in the Legislative Assembly from September 1858 into 1860, taking a democratic position on the land question, adult male suffrage, and the secret ballot, but did not resume his post on the National Schools Board or become attorney-general when invited in December 1859. Governor Sir John Young later appointed him to the Legislative Council and he held office in the ministry of James Martin in 1863-65. In 1865 at Young's instance he accepted the attorney-generalship in Cowper's cabinet and precipitated the fall of the ministry when he resigned from it. His health now required frequent absence from the council and he eventually settled in Melbourne, coming to Sydney only for the parliamentary sessions.
Plunkett was an important leader of Catholic opinion in the colony. He publicly defended Polding when the archbishop left Sydney in 1854 and chaired the welcome gathering when he returned in 1856. He took the leading role in establishing St Vincent's Hospital, Potts Point, under the management of the Irish Sisters of Charity. He had been a generous benefactor to the sisters since they arrived in 1839. As treasurer of St Vincent's he consistently used his position to insist on the non-denominational character of the hospital. In 1858 he criticized the archbishop's control of the hospital's affairs which had contributed to the resignation of the head nun, Sister de Lacy, and thus joined the majority of prominent laymen who had been objecting for some time to the administration of the archdiocese. These protests resulted in Rome's recall of the vicar-general, Henry Gregory, in 1861. Plunkett became reconciled to Polding before 1869 when he acted as lay secretary to the second Provincial Synod in Melbourne. Meanwhile his attitude towards denominational schools had changed and prevented him from accepting William Forster's invitation to resume his seat on the National Schools Board. The stand of the Irish bishops against the National system was confirmed by the Australian bishops late in 1862, and in the Legislative Council Plunkett endorsed their action.
In his last years Plunkett devoted more time to his lifelong recreation, the violin and Irish folk music; on this subject he gave many public addresses, which he illustrated himself. He had become a Q.C. and in 1863 published On the Evidence of Accomplices. He was elected a founding fellow of St John's College in June 1858, and was vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney in 1865-67. He died on 9 May 1869 in East Melbourne. His remains were taken to Sydney and buried in the old Devonshire Street cemetery, beside those of Archpriest John Joseph Therry and Archdeacon McEncroe. His widow survived him by many years. They had no children, but various kinsmen settled in Australia, including his twin brother.

St Oliver Plunnkett (1625-1681)

Oliver Plunkett was born in 1625. At that time, Cathoklics were persecuted  for their faith and many were evicted  from their homes and forbidden from attending mass. Priests, themselvges were hunted down and particularly punished if they were caught. Many pPriests  fled to rOME TO STUDY FOR THE pRIESTHOOD. 

    Oliver went to Rome a& was ordained in 1654 as a Priest & then later, in 1669, as the Archbishop Of Armagh and Primate of Ireland. On his return to ireland, Archbishop Plunkett established himself as a man of peace & sert about visiting his people, establishing schools, ordaining priests 7 confirming thousands of lay people. Durin g this time, he made many enemoies, one of whom later gave evidence at his trial. 

In 1673, with a renewal of religous persecution, Bishops were banned once again and Archbishop[ Plunkett went into hiding, and suffered a great deal.  His letters revealed a determination not to abandpon his peobut to remain a faithful shepherd. The oppression eventauslly eased 7 for a short time, he wass able to move amongst his people more freely, once again 
in 1679, Archbishop Plunkett was arrested 7 falsely charged  with treason. this man of pece was accused of plpotting tp bring 20,000 French soldiers to Ireland. He was taken to stand trial & because he was not given a time to arrange his defence, Archbishop Plunkett was found guilty asnd sentanced to death. The presiding jusdge said that at the baiss of his treason charge was setting up od a false religion, which was a crime against God. 
Archbishop plunkett, accepted his fate, refusing to give flase evidence against his brother Irish Bishops and publicly forgave all those responsible for his impending death. With a deep serenity of soul, he was executed in London on July 1st, 1681. in 1920 Oliver P)lunkett was declared a Matyr for the faith and was canonised on 12th October 1975. his feast day is on July 11th. 

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Sydney's First Free Subscription Library - Bent Street - Sydney - New South Wales 

Sydney's first major public library. The organisation formed in 1826 and the Library opened in rented rooms in Pitt Street, 1 December 1827, with 1,000 volumes. In 1845 the Library moved into a purpose built building on the corner of Bent and Macquarie Streets. The organisation was renamed the Australian Library and Literary Institution in 1853. After financial difficulties, in 1869 the collection and building was bought by the colonial government and became the first Free Public Library of Sydney and has since evolved into the State Library of New South Wales.

The Australian Subscription Library, located at the corner of Macquarie and Bent Streets in Sydney, played a significant role in the city's intellectual and cultural life during the 19th century. It was one of the earliest libraries established in Sydney and was a vital institution for fostering education and literary pursuits. Here's an overview of its history:

Founding and Early Years:

• The Australian Subscription Library was founded in 1826 by a group of prominent individuals, including barristers, merchants, and professionals.
• It was established as a private subscription library, where members paid a fee to access the library's collection.

Purpose and Collection:

• The library's primary purpose was to provide a range of books, periodicals, and other reading materials to its members.
• It aimed to cater to the intellectual interests of Sydney's educated elite and provide access to knowledge and culture.

Location:

• The library was initially located on Macquarie Street, near the corner of Bent Street.
• The central location made it accessible to the city's residents and professionals.

Cultural Significance:

• The Australian Subscription Library played a crucial role in promoting learning, literature, and cultural pursuits among the city's residents.
• It provided a space for members to engage in intellectual discussions and access a variety of written works.

Expansions and Changes:

• Over the years, the library underwent expansions and changes in its operations to adapt to the evolving needs of its members and the community.
• Its collection grew, reflecting the changing interests and literary trends of the time.

Closure and Legacy:

• The Australian Subscription Library faced challenges in the latter half of the 19th century, including competition from other libraries and cultural shifts.
• The library eventually closed its doors, and its collection was transferred to other institutions.

Impact and Heritage:

• The Australian Subscription Library's legacy lies in its contribution to Sydney's cultural and intellectual development during the early colonial period.
• While the library itself no longer exists, its historical significance as a hub of learning and literature is remembered.

The Australian Subscription Library at the corner of Macquarie and Bent Streets represented a place of intellectual enrichment, community engagement, and cultural exchange during Sydney's early years. Its establishment and operation reflect the city's commitment to education and the advancement of knowledge in the 19th century.