Thomas Mooney, Part Two

Mr. Thomas Mooney had commisioned to be built, the National Hotel, just around the corner from Astley’s Amphitheatre, and also had a tunnel built to direct thirsty theatre patrons migrating from performance's end straight to his hotel rather than have them leave by the front and naturally gravitate toward the White Hart. It all seemed rather dramatic, but it was effective.

One has to wonder, whence came the money for such a venture? The usual explanation is that a person had made their fortune on the goldfields, but such was not Mooney’s case, for he had quite the adventure—both physical and literary—before his arrival here in Melbourne.

Mooney was Dublin born between 1809-1815 (dates vary) and went to America in 1841 on a speaking tour, taking in all the towns that he could, and Canada, to boot; and all of it for the purpose of addressing Irishmen about independence. Just how effective he was at lecturing it is not reported, but he had made a good deal of gingerbread (the door takings) and wrote a popular book, ‘Nine Years in America’ being a compendium of letters sent to his brother Patrick back in Ireland, published in newspaper columns and then set to press as a volume in 1850.

He also wrote a significant two-volume work entitled the ‘History of Ireland from its First Settlement to the Present Time’ even before he came to Australia. I found a version printed in Boston of 1853 though it was likely first printed long before that (and took great liberties with the truth, and made a few wild conjectures). It sold very well and it is upon its renumeration that I think he emigrated to Australia and built the National Hotel.

The ‘Ovens and Murray Advertiser’ the paper of record for Beechworth and surrounds, made much sport of keeping up with Thomas Mooney’s shennanigans; his ever increasingly calls for Fenian belligerency; his self-serving and Yankee style oratory; odd financial schemes; and the general escalation of silly anecdotes—and some of those gems I will post next. For now though, let us hear from the Age, of 10 Oct 1859:—

“Mr Thomas Mooney, better known as ‘Mooney,’ the whilom agitator of Melbourne
and the Ovens [Beechworth area] has started a paper in America under the title of ‘Mooney's Falsern and Placerville Express.’ The Golden Era noticed the event in a paragraph which was republished in the Express as follows: — ‘Mr Thomas Mooney, who possesses the varied talents peculiar to the cultivated Irishman, with all his dashing and go-a-head ways, announces that he has shut down the curtain for ever on the story of his matrimonial troubles, (as befits a genuine disciple of Caudle), and in the same breath offers himself as a candidate for the office of General Controller. Mooney compels our admiration and disarms our wit.

In the brief space of three or four months he has established a newspaper, published a volume of history, enacted a romance by carrying off from the custody of her watchful relatives a blooming bride, and entered the field of politics as an applicant for one of the first offices in the gift of the people. What brilliant coup will this young reprobate of fifty (born therefore, 1809) next be up to? (Forty only, 'pon honor. — En. Express.) By the way, anent the history of Ireland, now republishing in the columns of the Express, we perceive that Mr Mooney has gone backward to the days of the Egyptians, and is new floundering among the gods and goddesses of the heathen mythology. Does he intend eventually to prove that Venus was an Irishman?’”