The La Trobe Journal: Redmond Barry Number.(Book review)

The La Trobe Journal: Redmond Barry Number, no. 73. Edited by John Barnes and Shane Carmody. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: State Library of Victoria Foundation, 2004. 124 pp. Aus$65.00 per year. ISSN 1441-3760.

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,…