What begins as a search for cigarettes and a three-dollar coffee becomes an unexpected journey into Brisbane's hidden history, Irish Queensland and the inheritance of old wars that never entirely ended.

By Tim Flynn

I woke early on a Sunday morning in Petrie Terrace needing cigarettes.

It was one of those minor inconveniences that becomes a small expedition. Coles at the Barracks doesn't open until 9 a.m. on Sundays, so my destination was the 7-Eleven opposite the Supreme Court.

The walk took me down Roma Street through one of Brisbane's most interesting civic landscapes. On my right stood the Magistrates Court, the Watch House and Police Headquarters. On my left was Roma Street Station. At that hour there were only a handful of people about. The office workers, lawyers and public servants were still at home. The city belonged instead to shift workers finishing for the day, travellers waiting for trains, police coming off duty and the occasional soul who had clearly been awake all night. There is something different about this part of Brisbane on an early Sunday morning. During the working week it is a place of constant movement, crowded footpaths and the relentless business of law, government and transport. Before breakfast on a Sunday it feels almost contemplative. The buildings are the same, but with fewer people around you notice them more.

The man ahead of me in the queue at 7-Eleven was far more interesting than the coffee.

Whether he had just emerged from the Watch House across the road I couldn't say, but it was hard not to wonder. He wore no shirt. His face was heavily tattooed. He spoke rapidly and continuously, sharing an uninterrupted stream of grievances, explanations and tales of misfortune. The stories poured out with a frantic energy, as though he had been carrying them around for days and had finally found an audience, however reluctant.

What fascinated me most was not what he was saying but what he was doing. Rather than using the coffee machine, he took an empty cup and began tearing open sachets of sugar. One after another disappeared into the cup. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Perhaps twenty. It seemed an oddly determined exercise, as though he were attempting to manufacture sweetness in its purest form. I offered the occasional sympathetic noise while he recounted yet another setback. There seemed little point in discouraging him. Eventually I seized a gap in proceedings, gently slid my coffee ahead of his remarkable sugar project, paid and made my escape.

The coffee cost three dollars, which may be one of the last genuine bargains left in Brisbane. Cigarettes acquired as well, I crossed the road and sat on one of the benches outside the Supreme Court.

Looking down at the large coffee in my hand, it struck me that even the store I had just visited was a small piece of living history. The name "7-Eleven" dates from an era when opening from seven in the morning until eleven at night was considered remarkably progressive. Today the store never closes. By rights it should probably be called 24/7. Yet the old name survives, just as old institutions survive around it. Sitting opposite the Supreme Court, surrounded by buildings laden with history, it seemed a fitting reminder that traces of the past often persist long after the original circumstances have disappeared.

Looking around, I was reminded of an article I had recently written about the Barracks Shopping Centre. There, amid supermarkets, cafés and cinema-goers, I had found traces of Brisbane's military and colonial past. It struck me that the area around the Supreme Court offered a similar lesson. Most people passing through this corner of the city were focused on immediate concerns: catching a train, reporting for work, appearing in court or simply buying a coffee. Few were thinking about history.

Sitting there with my three-dollar coffee from a store that should probably be called 24/7 rather than 7-Eleven, I did what any modern flâneur does. I pulled out my phone and opened Google. One search led to another and before long I had disappeared down one of those historical rabbit holes that the internet makes possible.

What began as idle curiosity about the Supreme Court led me to Sir Patrick Real. Born in Ireland, Real lost his father while still a child and was forced into working life at an early age. He began as an apprentice carpenter before teaching himself law and eventually rising to become one of Queensland's most respected and fiercely independent judges. It was a remarkable journey from the workshop to the Supreme Court bench. There was another reason Real fascinated me. He was not merely an Irish immigrant who rose through talent and determination. He was also one of the few prominent Irish Catholics to penetrate the upper reaches of Queensland's legal establishment. In a colony where power remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant, his ascent was itself a challenge to the social assumptions of the day.

From Real I found myself reading about Patrick Kenniff and James Kenniff, the men often described as Australia's last bushrangers. Their prosecution for the murders of Constable George Doyle and station manager Albert Dahlke became one of the most sensational criminal cases in Queensland history.

What particularly caught my attention was the use of a special jury.

The Crown insisted that the Kenniffs be tried before a jury drawn not from ordinary working people but from a carefully selected pool of merchants, professionals and substantial property owners. Critics argued that the purpose was obvious. The Kenniffs enjoyed considerable sympathy among selectors, labourers and bush workers. A conventional jury might have been unpredictable. A special jury was considered a safer option. After hearing the evidence, the jury retired and returned guilty verdicts in about an hour.

During the Irish Land War, British authorities repeatedly relied on special juries, venue transfers and jury-selection procedures in politically sensitive cases. The rationale was always dressed in the language of impartial justice. Yet the practical effect was often to remove defendants from sympathetic juries and place them before panels drawn from the propertied classes. It was impossible for me not to think of Michael Flynn, the Galway Land League leader whose story I had researched in depth. Flynn himself was tried before a special jury in Dublin, before jurors drawn from the very classes whose interests the Land League challenged. My novel, Part an Irishman, is dedicated to Flynn's memory. Sitting outside the Supreme Court on a quiet Sunday morning, with a three-dollar coffee in my hand and Queensland's legal history unfolding on my phone, I found myself thinking once again about the enduring relationship between power and procedure. The argument for special juries was always that they produced better justice. The argument against them was that they produced the desired verdict.

It was a modus operandi that appeared across the nineteenth-century British Empire. Not brute force but procedure. Not repression openly declared but rules carefully designed to produce the desired outcome while preserving the appearance of fairness. The Kenniff case fitted the pattern uncomfortably well. To supporters of the prosecution, the convictions demonstrated the strength of the evidence. To critics, they demonstrated the effectiveness of the system.

What made the story even more intriguing was that Real emerged as the dissenting judge in the subsequent appeal. While the majority upheld the convictions, Real questioned the sufficiency of the evidence against James Kenniff. More than a century later, historians still debate the fairness of the trial and the significance of Real's dissent. Public sympathy for the Kenniffs remained strong in many parts of Queensland. The trial, the special jury and the speed with which the convictions were returned fuelled ongoing debate about whether justice had truly been done. The authorities found themselves confronting a problem familiar throughout the British Empire: securing a conviction was one thing, securing public acceptance of it was another. Patrick Kenniff paid with his life. Yet even in death there were signs that the authorities understood the depth of public feeling surrounding the case. Rather than disappearing anonymously into the sort of forgotten felon's grave that was the fate of many executed prisoners, Kenniff received a substantial public funeral. His brother James Kenniff escaped the gallows. His death sentence was commuted and he would eventually regain his freedom. Officially, the reprieve arose from legal and executive processes. Yet it is difficult to ignore the combination of public agitation, widespread sympathy and Real's dissent. In the end, Queensland hanged one brother and spared the other.

Having followed the trail from Patrick Real to the Kenniffs and from Queensland to Galway, I found myself reflecting on how often the machinery of justice and the machinery of power overlap. The details varied, but the pattern looked familiar.

Looking across at the Supreme Court buildings, it struck me how much had changed and yet how much remained familiar. The Watch House still stands nearby. Defendants are still brought before magistrates and judges. Lawyers still argue over evidence, credibility and procedure. Police, courts, prisons and governments continue to perform the same essential functions they performed when Patrick Real sat on the bench. The technology has changed, the laws have evolved and the sectarian divisions of colonial Queensland have largely faded, but the fundamental questions remain remarkably familiar.

The shirtless man in the 7-Eleven suddenly seemed less out of place in this landscape. Courts, police stations and watch houses have always attracted the same cast of characters: the unlucky, the troubled, the hopeful, the innocent and the guilty. The faces change. The stories rarely do.

As I finished my coffee, the Sunday morning quiet remained. A few more people had appeared since I had started out, but Roma Street was still largely subdued.

What had started as a hunt for cigarettes had become another encounter with Brisbane's hidden past. Thousands of people pass through this part of Brisbane each week without a second thought. Yet within a few hundred metres stand institutions that have witnessed some of Queensland's most dramatic stories: bushranger trials, sectarian disputes, political controversies and the endless procession of human dramas that pass through every court and police station.

Eventually I stood and began the walk back towards Petrie Terrace.

As I walked, Marianne Faithfull's Broken English began playing in my head.

"It's just an old war, not even a cold war. Don't say it in Russian, say it in Broken English."

There is a fury running through that song, a refusal to accept the polite language by which power so often disguises itself. Walking back up Roma Street with the Kenniffs, Patrick Real, Michael Flynn, the Galway Land League and the machinery of Empire still circling in my thoughts, it felt like the only appropriate soundtrack.

The Kenniffs, the Irish Land Leaguers, the tenant farmers of Galway, the miners of Queensland, the shearers, railway workers and the founders of Australia's trade union movement all inhabited different worlds. Yet their stories revolved around the same question:

Who held power, and how was it exercised?

The ghosts were still there, as they always are. You simply have to sit still long enough to notice them.

As I turned back into Petrie Terrace, I found myself reflecting that this was not merely history. It was an inheritance.

The old arguments about land, power, class, justice and Empire had not entirely disappeared. They had simply taken new forms.

I realised that this is a war I have inherited.

And I know which side I'm on.

About the Author

Tim Flynn is a novelist, flâneur and cultural historian of Irish and Australian life. Descended from people who left Tuam in County Galway and Lancashire in industrial England, his essays explore the intersections of Irish history, Queensland history, labour, politics, literature, music and place. Writing from Brisbane's inner west, he is the author of Part an Irishman and the creator of #flynntheflaneur.

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