A vintage 19th century coloured lantern slide of former NSW Premier Sir Henry Parkes. Photo: Supplied.
The NSW Supreme Court’s striking down of the controversial anti-protest laws was a momentary legal victory for protest organisations in their fight against the NSW government to silence dissent.
In a single 2025 Christmas Eve sitting of the NSW Parliament, legislation was passed placing restrictions on protests in NSW in the wake of the 14 December events at Bondi.
These restrictions have now been found to impinge upon Australia’s implied constitutional freedoms. Thus the protestors won their case on Thursday 16 April after a ruling by Chief Justice Andrew Bell.
Perhaps the Government’s recent legislation was just a panicked aberration and would never be repeated in NSW, but the Premier has expressed disappointment with the judgement and does not seem to have definitely ruled-out introducing amended legislation.
Famously, another sort of legislative panic happened way back in 1868 because of a speech made in the Illawarra when NSW politician Henry Parkes delivered his “Kiama Ghost” story.
It was in the wake of Henry James O’Farrell’s attempted assassination in March 1868 of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Albert, who was then visiting Sydney.
The would-be assassin O’Farrell was an Irishman who when seized by the police in attendance declared: “I am a Fenian. God save Ireland!”
As a supporter of the Fenian Brotherhood, founded in America in 1858, O’Farrell presumably wished to help crush the long-term British domination of Ireland and, if necessary, to take up arms against the English oppressors.
But the British Government had very effectively riddled the Fenian Movement with informers and, in the year prior to O’Farrell’s attempted assassination of the Duke in Sydney, three Fenians had been hanged for attempting to violently rescue other Fenians who had been arrested in Manchester.
These events were widely reported in Australia and it is thus little surprise that after O’Farrell’s declaration that he was a Fenian, all sorts of rumours and propaganda hit the press.
And one of the great Australian NSW political opportunists, Henry Parkes, jumped enthusiastically on the press bandwagon.
Above: Henry Parkes was ridiculed in the Sydney Punch in December 1868 in both poem (above) and cartoon. Images: Supplied.
After O’Farrell was hanged for his assassination attempt, Henry Parkes visited his Kiama electorate in August 1868. He delivered the following news to his shocked constituents, declaring that he had “in his possession, and could produce at any moment evidence, attested by affidavit, that not only was the assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh planned, but that someone who had a guilty knowledge of the secret, and whose fidelity was suspected, had been foully murdered.”
Parkes already had lots of political enemies and they made sure his claims were treated with both derision and humour.
One witty journalist declared that Parkes had personally raised “a Kiama Ghost” – and the phrase caught on big time.
Nonetheless, the NSW Parliament in just one day passed legislation through both upper and lower houses titled the Treason Felony Act.
The Act made it a felony to “compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend” to deprive the Sovereign of their crown, move foreigners to invade the realm, or levy war against the Sovereign.
Offenders could be sentenced to hard labour on the roads or public works for life or any term of years and conviction for speaking or writing treasonable thoughts that only required “proof by two witnesses or a confession in open court”.
But a NSW Select Committee was subsequently appointed (with a rival of Parkes as Chairman) to inquire into the existence of Parkes’ supposed NSW conspiracy for the purposes of treason and assassination.
Unsurprisingly, the committee found there was zero evidence of Parkes’ claim that O’Farrell had acted on Fenian orders and that one conspirator had been murdered when suspected of revealing O’Farrell’s assassination plot.
By December 1868, Sir Henry Parkes and his imaginary ghost were a laughing stock as the above poem published in the Sydney Punch newspaper reveals.
But some politicians are remarkable survivors. Henry Parkes, this time as the Member for Mudgee, became Premier of NSW for the first time in 1872. He also managed to again briefly become Premier from March to August 1877, yet again from 1878 to 1883, from 1887 to early 1889 and then from August 1889 until October 1891.
And so a big difference between 1868 and 2026 is that, even though “The Kiama Ghost” nickname embarrassed Parkes for the rest of his life, his Treason Felony Act was never declared unconstitutional, whereas in 2026 the NSW Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2025 has been.
