Imagine this: you are happy with your life. You have followed a career that has fulfilled you for decades. You have never researched or written anything. Then, a story from the past comes along that demands to be told. The story? Australia’s first attempted political assassination, in 1868, in Sydney. The target? Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s favourite son. The would-be assassin was Irish Republican Henry James O’Farrell, my ancestor. This is how it all happened.
It was 1968. I was not quite 12 years old – one of the significant ages of life. I was a child who delighted in the stories of my family, told to me by my mother and great aunts. I listened and remembered. My mother opened a large, Bible-sized book, bound in deeply hand-tooled green leather. Inside were faces from another time. All of them, she told me, were family. I was transfixed. I felt
