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    A Barrister's Brief
    A Barrister's Brief
    A Barrister's Brief
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    A Barrister's Brief

    By Michael Taylor

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    About this ebook

    Bernie Ryan has spent fifty years in the legal profession, primarily as a Prosecutor. He has worked in Australia, New Guinea and Hong Kong and his story is an amazing account of real life cases in all those countries.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Taylor
    Release dateOct 18, 2018
    ISBN9780463408056
    A Barrister's Brief
    Author

    Michael Taylor

    Michael Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Transport Planning at the University of South Australia. Author or editor of eight transportation books, Dr. Taylor is a leading pioneer in transportation network vulnerability analysis.

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      Book preview

      A Barrister's Brief - Michael Taylor

      The Barrister’s Brief

      by Michael Taylor

      Copyright 2018 Michael Taylor

      All Rights Reserved

      Smashwords Edition

      Formatting by Caligraphics

      THE BEGINNING

      In the year 1855, an eighteen year old Irishman, James Ryan, was rolling his way slowly across the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean on board an immigrant vessel bound for Victoria, Australia. He had left the landlocked County of Tipperary behind him along with the suffering and deprivations caused by The Great Hunger, for a new life in a new country.

      The Irish Potato Famine had been a time of mass starvation, disease and, ultimately, mass emigration from a country that was falling apart. A number of government enquiries in the years prior to 1845 had all come to the same conclusion – Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population was rapidly increasing, three quarters of her labourers were unemployed, housing conditions were appalling and the standard of living was unbelievably low.

      When the country’s potatoes were decimated by potato blight, more than one third of the population was solely reliant on that one crop. That reliance led to one million people dying and, between 1845 and 1855, nearly one quarter of the inhabitants of an entire nation, amounting to two million people, were permanently displaced from their homeland.

      It was a direct result of that famine that led young James to the vessel and then one hundred days at sea with three hundred other hopeful and mostly seasick passengers. It was not a trip for the faint hearted. Due to the condition of the people who embarked, and the filthy conditions aboard, the vessels became known as ‘coffin ships’. On arrival at Melbourne, he immediately made his way seventy miles west, to the goldfields of Ballarat. Gold had been discovered there only four years previously and there were still fortunes to be made, and lost. The town had been transformed in that time from a transitory tented community to a permanent settlement of 25,000 people, but the landscape was still largely a cluster of canvas dwellings on ground honeycombed with muddy holes and mounds of dirt. Accents from all over the world could be heard on the goldfields, and the lilting tones of the Irish were one of the most common.

      When James arrived in Ballarat, it had been less than a year since the Eureka Stockade incident. Thousands of miners on the diggings had protested about the cost of mining licences, and the behaviour and corruption of police. Led by Irish born, Peter Lalor, a stockade was built and then attacked by armed British soldiers supported by mounted and foot police. The ensuing battle resulted in thirty deaths and the arrest of over one hundred diggers. Peter Lalor survived, but lost an arm, and the incident would be forever etched into Australia’s anti-authoritarian history.

      Treason trials were held in Melbourne in early 1855, but all thirteen accused were acquitted. Seven of them were Irish. The Victorian Government clearly needed the services of a more effective Prosecutor, and that man would be James Ryan’s great grandson. Unfortunately, Bernard Michael Ryan would not be available to serve for another one hundred and thirteen years.

      Meanwhile, Irish settlers were filling up Victoria, working as whalers, fishermen, farm hands and in the gold fields. By 1871, one in four Victorians had been born in Ireland, including Ned Kelly’s parents, and the judge who hanged twenty six year old Ned, in 1880.

      James was a peace loving man, though, and his future would be a lot brighter. He met eighteen year old house maid, Mary Donnellan, when he was a twenty year old and they were married in the St. Alipius Church, East Ballarat in 1857.

      The couple settled in Buninyong, just out of Ballarat, which would soon have twenty hotels to serve a population of 2000 thirsty people. They then set about the mostly pleasant, occasionally arduous and very Catholic task, of having ten children.

      Another Irish immigrant to Australia was thirty four year old John Coffey, from County Cork, who had also arrived in 1855. He settled in Clunes, twenty miles north of Ballarat, also fossicked for gold and also married a Mary. John and Mary settled for a smaller family of eight children and, in years to come, luckily for Bernie Ryan, the Coffey family would cross paths with the Ryan family.

      The Victorian Government passed Land Acts in the 1860’s, which offered settlers land within defined agricultural areas. The Mallee district in central Victoria was one of those areas, and the Coffey family settled there in the 1870’s at a place called Whirily. A few years later, the Ryans arrived in the district and their large families became acquainted.

      In southern districts of Victoria and particularly in the Western District, pastoral tenants acquired extensive freehold estates through competitive auctions during the 1850s and 1860s. When Land Acts were introduced in the early 1860s they ruthlessly exploited loopholes in the legislation and employed agents or ‘dummies’ to select on their behalf. The 1869 Land Act attempted to avoid this by imposing heavy improvement and residency conditions on settlers, but permitted them to purchase properties on time payment. For the first three years of settlement selectors held the land as licensees and paid an annual rent of two shillings per acre. After three years they could pay the balance of fourteen shillings per acre or continue to pay off the land for seven years at the rate of two shillings per acre.

      During the licence period settlers were legally obliged to enclose their property with a boundary fence, cultivate ten percent of the holding, build a permanent house and generally make improvements to the extent of £1 per acre. They were also expected to live on site. Although the logic of these regulations committed squatters to enormous costs if they planned to acquire thousands of acres, it also placed substantial burdens on men and women with fewer resources who had selected up to the maximum limit of 320 acres. The system was carefully monitored by bureaucrats located in Melbourne and regional offices and by the regular inspection of mounted Crown Land bailiffs.

      Due to the cost of fencing, clearing, ploughing and building, as well as feeding a large family, early days for the Ryans and Coffeys were hard. The simple fact that no farmer could become prosperous on a 320 acre allotment would see other family members taking up their own allotments and joining forces to make their farming viable on a larger scale. Wheat, oats and barley were the primary crops – with not a potato in sight.

      It was inevitable with eighteen children of Irish descent, the Coffeys and the Ryans, running around the same patch of bushland that a couple of them would get together. Twenty five year old Michael Ryan and twenty year old Mary Ann Coffey did just that when they married each other at Karyrie, 175 miles from Melbourne and just outside the town of Birchip, in 1904. They would become Bernie Ryan’s paternal grandparents.

      Michael Ryan and his bride, Mary Ann, Bernie’s paternal grandparents

      The town of Birchip, only six miles from Whirily, had been established in 1887 and by the time Michael and Mary Ann were married, it had become a thriving centre serving a population of 600 people and 3000 in the district.

      The ‘Australian Handbook’ of the time described it as having, ‘ ....... a telegraph and telephone offices, a savings bank, Commercial and National banks, Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Presbyterian and Anglican churches, a mechanics institute and a free library.’ It also boasted a rifle club and two coffee palaces. The town was lighted with kerosene and was famous for its wheat and raising of stock.

      By 1911, following a period of agricultural prosperity, the town’s population had doubled to 1200 – a number that would never be exceeded.

      Michael and Mary Ann Ryan continued the Irish Catholic family tradition of raising as many children as time, circumstances and desire would permit and, over the next nineteen years, another eleven Ryan children were running barefoot around the Whirily and Birchip district. The most important of these, for the sake of Bernie Ryan, was James Joseph Ryan, middle child of the family, who was born in 1914, three months after the start of World War One. He was the eldest of the three boys and reluctantly attended Whirily State School until he left at the legal age of fourteen to work on his Dad’s farm. Six years later his Dad, Michael Ryan, died from tetanus at the age of fifty-four.

      With the help of his two younger brothers, Frank and Jack, Jim took over the running of the family farm, and became head of the household. Luckily, he had been used to hard work from a young age. Jim could work a team of horses, shear 130 sheep in a day and fix any mechanical problems that needed fixing. He was a self taught handyman, and then every Saturday he would lace on his footy boots and kick a few

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