Thomas Mooney (1809— ca.1887) Part One

Thomas Mooney ("bird of passage") is one of those footnote creatures, and in his case, he built the "National Hotel" and later had a brief fling with the Royal Hotel connected to the Theatre Royal. He was a man who made a decent bag of money on American speaking tours as a "Fenian" platform speaker, and I suspect, ran off with money that he should not have.

His story is long and interesting, so here is part one:—

Entry, Truth, 24 feb, 1912, EARLY MELBOURNE No. 126 by “Old Chum” (J. William Forde”)

“The Mr. Thomas Mooney who built the Amphitheatre for Mr. G.B.W.Lewis in the latter part of 1854 was merely a bird of passage, and disappeared whence he came when the roaring fifties begand to get quiet, about the year 1857. He was typical of many other agitators who have ventured on Australian soil in the last 60 years: an immense amount of ‘blow’ with little or no lasting merit. A successor to Mooney in the ‘gas line’ was one Osborne, but of him more anon. Mr. Mooney’s stock phrase was that every Australian should ‘have a rifle, a farm and a vote.’ There was no land open to the public at that time, so that Mooney had a ‘peg’ on which he could hang his hat. When he opened the National Hotel—or rather, when he became its tennant—Mr F. A. Harris having had the liscence before him, did a good business, as the gold fields attracted men from California where Mooney had graduated in stump oratory. When he built—largely, if not entirely, on credit— the Amphitheatre, he had wisdom enough to make an underground passage from the circus to his hotel, and thereby scooped in much of the coin that might have gone elsewhere. It will be seen that, if Mr. Mooney had not secured the underground passage to his drinkery, the circus patrons, on coming into Spring Street would have simply walked accross to the ‘Old White Hart’ and there, slaked their thirst. The ‘National’ and the ‘Old White Hart’ were the only public houses in the locality in 1854. When the circus, or Astley’s Amphitheatre was done away with, the underground passage was closed up, and all public entrances to the building being from Spring Street. Mr. Mooney returned to California early in 1857, I think, and I have heard rumours against his commercial credit, which went down after he gained the Pacific Slope."

And until next time, let us leave him. There is much more to come, and the Australian Press continued to have fun with him long after he left Australia.