Who fears to speak of '98?
When cowards mock the patriot's fate.
Who blushes at the name?
Who hangs his head in shame? |
Erected in 1898, this monument contains the bodies of Michael Dwyer, the "Wicklow Chief", a survivor of the Fenian Uprising, and his wife Mary. Also inscribed upon the walls are the names of patriots murdered during the Easter 1916 Uprising, and those who died on hunger strikes against the British Government in the early 1980s.
Born in 1772, Michael Dwyer was a
Society of the United Irishmen leader in the 1798 rebellion. He later fought a guerilla campaign against the British Army in the Wicklow Mountains. In August 1805, Dwyer was transported to New South Wales as an unsentenced exile.
However, when he arrived in February 1806 in the
Tellicherry, Dwyer was given free settler status. He was given a grant of 100 acres of land on Cabramatta Creek in Sydney. He was later to become Chief of Police (1813–1820) at Liverpool but was dismissed for drunken conduct and mislaying important documents. In December 1822 he was sued for aggrandizing his farm. Bankrupted, he was forced to sell off most of his assets, although this did not save him from several weeks incarceration in the Sydney debtors' prison in May 1825. Here he contracted dysentery, to which he succumbed in August 1825, aged 53.
Originally interred at Liverpool, his remains were reburied in the Devonshire Street cemetery, Sydney, in 1878 by his grandson John Dwyer, dean of St Mary's Cathedral. In May 1898 the coincidence of the planned closure of the Devonshire Street cemetery due to the creation of Central Railway Station, and the centenary celebrations for the 1798 rebellion, suggested s second re-interment of Dwyer and his wife, this time in Waverley Cemetery, where this massive memorial was erected. The crowds attending Dwyer's re-burial and the unveiling of the monument, testified to the esteem in which Irish-Australians held the former Wicklow hero.
