THE LIFE OF R.D. MEAGHER – PATRICK MULLINS

In Patrick Mullins’ The Stained Man he captures and retells an extraordinary tale – “A two-volume mystery!” Mark Twain called it – of the solicitor who incited a campaign to free a man he knew was guilty of attempted murder, who lost his reputation and ability to practise, and who embarked on a decades-long political career to regain it all. It is Sydney, 1895 and Richard Meagher is a brilliant criminal defence solicitor with ambitions in politics. What happens next is as intriguing as it is a testament to the politics of colonial New South Wales. On Wednesday 24 June 2026, author Patrick Mullins addressed The Sydney Institute to give some insight to this story of crime and redemption, not of the criminal but the barrister who fought the case.

THE LIFE OF R.D. MEAGHER

PATRICK MULLINS

A few years ago, I was reading a book by the late legal historian, John Bennett, entitled A History of Solicitors in NSW. It is a worthy, well-researched, and substantial volume, but one that I advise against reading while in bed. For it is so substantial and so thorough that any accidental drift toward sleep will see the book fall on your face — with catastrophic results.

But, to this day, I have a vivid memory of encountering, amid its many pages, two or three pungent paragraphs about a solicitor-turned-politician named R.D. Meagher.

I appreciate that he is a figure largely forgotten by history. There are no statues of him about. No streets are named after him. No suburb in Canberra bears his name. Unless you know where to look, evidence of the heights to which he reached is reasonably scarce. There are a few plaques about Sydney that bear his name. And there is an oil portrait in a rarely-used staircase at Sydney Town Hall looks sternly upon the rare passer-by.

Indeed, if anyone knows about him today, it is almost undoubtedly thanks to Cyril Pearl’s classic 1958 study of thuggery and braggadocio, Wild Men of Sydney, in which Meagher features as one of the titular “wild men”.

But there is much more to Meagher than this.

And, among the reasons that I was moved to sit, bolt upright, rub my eyes, and re-read those paragraphs about Meagher was because of what seemed to me both the singularity of his story and its resonances in contemporary Australia.

For his life fell into two parts: the first concerned a sensational criminal and political scandal, one that transfixed the then-colonies, that lifted his fortunes with meteor-like speed into stratospheric heights, that twisted and turned with such great spectacle and drama, with such frothy waves of intrigue and fresh revelation, that Mark Twain was moved to call it a “two volume novel” and Meagher himself liken it to a work by Balzac.

As the Bulletin magazine would say — this case was “the talk of the continent; the keenest minds of New South Wales have grappled vainly with its mysteries; Parliament has debated it, a special omission has sat upon it, a Supreme Court judge has wept over it; and even now, in the hour of its almost complete elucidation, its ramifications remain no less profoundly astonishing than they were at any time in its history…”

It was a scandal that left Meagher disgraced — a pariah throughout the continent, discredited, cast out of parliament, exiled from the legal profession, and stranded (as he was to say) in the abyss of wrecked hopes and shattered ambitions.

And yet, in the second half of his life, over twenty-five years, he climbed out of that abyss, recovered his reputation and name, and clawed his way beyond his earlier positions, to offices of high status and considerable influence, that plunged him into the big issues and debates of the day: from Federation to the rise of Labor to the First World War. It saw him win allies across the political and cultural divides: from George Reid and Billy Hughes, Edmund Barton and Jack Lang and the Archbishop of Sydney. It saw him assail the courts and, notably, make legal and political history.

The story of his rise and fall, and his rise again, is unique in its particulars, in its details. And yet also representative: of how we deal with disgrace in this country, how the public looks at noble men and surveys with a jaundiced eye fallen women. How the public sympathises with victims and is fond of fighters of respectable opinion. How the press may incite, how politicians may succumb to cravenness and exigency, how opprobrium can be re-cast as martyrdom, how marks of censure can be transformed into badges of honour.

Most of all, perhaps, in a country with a long history of ignoring, forgetting, and denying disgraceful acts, Meagher’s story suggests how even the most indelible stains can be expunged.

That is the story I set out to tell in The Stained Man.

*

To understand this story, of course, we need to cast back around 130 years — to a world rather different to ours now: more brutal, more squalid, but also smaller and more vivid in the “charge” of public emotion and involvement, grander in the nearness of its aspirations and protean in its culture and outlook.

But, simultaneously, a world that is still familiar. Being here on Philip Street, of course, makes this a little easier. For, just down the road, in 1895, cheek by jowl with the leading barristers and silks of the day, just as Phillip Street still is now, was a building called Chancery Chambers — and, in those chambers, was the office of the law firm Crick & Meagher.

Paddy Crick — or Billy, as Meagher called him — was the senior partner. He was an experienced criminal defence solicitor and a notorious member of the NSW parliament: once expelled from it by a vote of members for drunkenness and rowdiness in the chamber, and immediately sent back by a vote of his electorate.

Meagher was the junior partner, twenty-nine years old, brilliant at his job and ambitious for the future. As one of his peers wrote, his eloquence and fire and aspiration was of a kind that electrified audiences and a harbinger of a “brilliant and distinguished career”.

Together, the two dominated Sydney’s police courts, running a gamut of appearances for minor and at times major criminal matters. From murderers to frauds, thugs to thieves, hapless innocents to ne’er do wells. They were involved in high-profile cases of the day — Crick sensationally saved from the hangman a man convicted of rape; Meagher led a string of cases and campaigns seeking unsuccessfully to overturn capital sentences that aroused the public and won him acclaim and praise.

That March, Meagher was brought a case of attempted murder — a client accused of poisoning his own wife with strychnine and arsenic. A client charged with attempting to kill his wife of only one year, the mother to his own baby child, barely three months old.

George Dean was a good-looking man in his late-twenties, the captain of the ferry that took passengers between Circular Quay and Milson’s Point through the night. He was well-known for this work, and well-regarded for it. He was also a known hero — having jumped into the water on several occasions to save people from drowning in Sydney Harbour.

News of the charges against him, then, aroused immediate confusion and disbelief. To so many people, it seemed improbable, if not impossible, that such a man would try to poison his own wife. Not for the first time, a man on a pedestal was given the benefit of the doubt.

When the case came before the courts for trial, Meagher decided to use Dean’s reputation to his advantage. He claimed that, far from being guilty, his client was in fact a hapless innocent being stitched up by his own wife, Mary, and her mother, Caroline Seymour. To give this argument a semblance of credibility, Meagher drew on the work of one of his investigators, a man named Daniel Green, and pointed out that Caroline Seymour had a criminal past. She had been transported to Australia from England for pickpocketing, and done at least two stints in gaol in Melbourne. In Sydney, moreover, Caroline had set up her home and shop directly opposite an assignation house in Surry Hills, where she had also played host to criminals visiting from Melbourne.

In Meagher’s telling, the marriage between Dean and Mary had been failing and Mary and her mother had contrived to frame Dean for attempted murder. The argument flew in the face of the considerable proof of Mary’s poisoning — which the courts could see, visibly, when Mary appeared to testify — but its appeal to deep-seated prejudices gave it a veneer of credibility to those outside the courts.

The jury’s vote to convict Dean, made after the intervention of the trial judge, William Windeyer, agitated the existing confusion and disbelief into concern and disquiet. Reportage of the trial quickly gave way to critical commentary that was given added urgency by the capital sentence hanging over Dean.

In this context, three days after the trial — with newspapers increasingly critical, and associates of Dean’s coming to Crick & Meagher’s office with claims of new evidence — Crick spoke with Meagher about using parliament and extra-judicial methods to re-open the case. He asked Meagher to visit Dean and raise with him the prospect of such a campaign. But they should be clear that, if Dean was guilty, it would be better to do nothing.

Meagher set out to Darlinghurst Gaol and, sitting alone with Dean in the corridor of E Wing, with a warden just out of earshot, discovered that Dean was in fact guilty: he had attempted to murder Mary, on multiple occasions, using arsenic and strychnine.

Meagher left the gaol to return to Phillip Street. As he was to say, he spent the whole tram ride ‘torn asunder’ as to whether he should upset the verdict against Dean, or stay silent about what he knew. Compelling him to go along with a campaign was a range of factors. There was Meagher’s opposition to the death penalty and the capital sentence then hanging over Dean. There was his belief that Dean had not had a fair trial: Windeyer’s interventions with jury, to bring about a guilty verdict, had been most improper. There was Meagher’s belief that, as Dean’s solicitor, he was under a strict obligation of confidentiality to not disclose Dean’s guilt. There was his and Crick’s earlier efforts to use extra-judicial methods to re-open cases. There was a commercial imperative that, as Dean’s solicitor, he be seen to be doing all he could for his client — just as he would for future clients. There was also, in my view, a determination to match Crick and set free a man convicted and sentence to hang.

I give little credit, at this point, to Meagher’s subsequent claims that he had no agency in the matter — that the public was already “aflame”, that the matter had spread across the colonial boundaries, and so on — for the simple reason that these were the product of Meagher’s decision, in the tram, to keep silent about Dean’s guilt.

For, that afternoon, in the Legislative Assembly, Crick opened the campaign to overturn Dean’s guilt by asking premier George Reid to delay a decision on Dean’s sentence and to allow him to inspect the police files about the matter. He and his firm were now investigating it, fully, Crick said.

It was that question, and Crick and Meagher’s efforts to amplify their campaign, that set the fire to the fuse, and were responsible for the enormous outpouring of criticism and support that followed over the next month. Public meetings in support of Dean, with hundreds of attendees, followed almost immediately across Sydney and across New South Wales. George Reid’s efforts to douse the matter, by commuting Dean’s sentence to life imprisonment, were ineffectual. The newspapers covered the case and campaign in detail, airing rumours and scuttlebutt with seemingly little thought to the veracity or credibility of it all. The matter became the subject of an extended debate in the parliament, and then the subject of a “monster” meeting at Sydney Town Hall, attended by a crowd in excess of 12,000 people. The number of people and the calls to force the government to re-open the matter appear to have spooked George Reid and attorney-general Jack Want. The next day, Reid announced in the parliament that a royal commission would investigate.

Meagher, as Dean’s solicitor, doubled-down on the strategy he had employed at Dean’s trial: claim that there was a conspiracy at work, smear Mary and her mother, and bestow a halo on his client. Thus, over the next month and a half, he called a long line of cranks, frauds, pimps, and perjurers to blacken the reputations of Mary Dean and Caroline Seymour. Men came claiming to have seen Mary in brothels; her teenage love letters were read aloud at the royal commission; Caroline Seymour’s first husband turned up with a foggy claim that she had poisoned him once, too. Dean’s barrister, Charles Pilcher, called Mary a disgrace to her sex for accusing her husband and scoffed that if she were as honest as she claimed, given her upbringing, she would be ‘the biggest living marvel the world has ever seen since Adam’.

Double standards were everywhere. When the Crown barrister pointed out that a witness had been convicted of perjury, Pilcher shrugged that the defence was hardly about to locate witnesses at Government House. When the Crown’s barrister pointed out that Dean had been convicted of “horse sweating” — stealing a horse — and been imprisoned for three months in Wagga Wagga Gaol, aged twelve, the president of the royal commission dismissed it, saying that no one should be judged on what they had done when they were twelve years old.

It all had the desired effect. Two of the three royal commissioners were so persuaded by the smears that they opted to set aside all of Mary Dean’s testimony and all her mother’s testimony; they so equivocated over the rest of the evidence that they averred that Dean could just as easily be innocent. Thus, to general jubilation, Dean was given a pardon and set free; Mary and her mother were dismissed as degraded contemptibles; and Meagher was acclaimed a hero — to the point that, when the government called an election, Meagher was carried on a wave of goodwill to victory in the Legislative Assembly seat of Philip, in Sydney.

But along the way Meagher made a mistake. Criticised during the election campaign by the Daily Telegraph for putting the colony to the expense of the royal commission, he decided to sue the newspaper for libel. For advice, he went to see Sir Julian Salomons — who had not only been the Crown barrister at the royal commission but was also a former Chief Justice of NSW.

A brilliant barrister with a strong moral core, Salomons was, on his appointment in 1886, the first Jewish Chief Justice in any of the Dominions — but he had resigned after realising that his appointment as Chief Justice was opposed by colleagues on the Bench. He had rebuilt himself afterward, and by the time of the Dean case was the undoubted leader of the Sydney Bar, with a range of retainers — including for the government.

He was, therefore, astonished at Meagher’s approach to him. And he pointed out to Meagher that the Telegraph’s criticism had some merit. If Dean was truly innocent, Meagher should have got him off at trial. To this, Meagher smiled and told Salomons that Dean was guilty — and that he had known this since within days of Dean’s conviction.

Far from marvelling at this, Salomons was horrified — especially because he knew of the ongoing vilification and denigration that Mary Dean and her mother continued to experience. Salomons swiftly realised, moreover, that Meagher had ostensibly locked him into silence, via a client-solicitor confidentiality. And, when his efforts to persuade Meagher to come clean failed, he determined to make the matter public. In a sensational series of speeches, all made in parliament, Salomons disclosed Meagher’s confession and efforts to hide Dean’s guilt. Crick denied it and drunkenly assailed Salomons with antisemitic slurs; Meagher followed by claiming that Salomons had fallen prey to “the demon of mental affliction which periodically, it is known to the [legal] profession, sits astride of his brilliant intellect”. But Salomons dispelled that accusation, as well as Crick and Meagher’s denials, in a lengthy, powerful, and forceful speech. Perhaps most powerful was Salomons’ denunciations of Crick’s slurs about his Judaism:

I am a Jew; I was born a Jew; and I hope I shall die a Jew. […] I should be a poltroon and a coward, as well as a fool, if I were not proud of belonging to a race which has given an Isaiah to the world, the Psalms of David, and all the mighty mysteries of the Bible, upon which the civilisation, the consolation, and the happiness of the world depend.

From there, the conspiracy to conceal Dean’s guilt unravelled fast. The chemist who had supplied Dean with the poisons came forward and confessed. Police tested the ashes in the chimney in which Dean had burned the poisons, right before his arrest. Dean, having petitioned parliament and signed a statutory declaration attesting to his innocence, confessed. And Meagher, pressured by Crick, resigned his seat, confessed his guilt, and — under threat of blackmail from Crick — exculpated his partner from any knowledge of the matter.

A criminal trial against Meagher, Dean (already tried and sentence to a lengthy gaol term for perjury), Crick, Green, and a witness from the royal commission, on charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, followed swiftly. Meagher and Dean were convicted but, in the following year, with the help of Edmund Barton, the conviction was overturned on appeal on a technicality. Meagher’s only lasting punishment, beyond his disgrace, was to be removed from the roll of solicitors.

It was a slap on the wrist, in so many ways, but to Meagher it was an intolerable affront, a psychic injury to who he was, and a stain on his reputation that he would spend the next twenty-five years seeking to expunge.

In service to that gaol, he returned to parliament in 1898 as a Protectionist-aligned independent MLA. He helped bring NSW into Federation, took a horsewhip to a journalist and editor much despised among the political elite, and passed his own private member’s bill, reforming courtroom procedure. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Senate in the 1901 federal election, and refused an offer to become a senator after Richard O’Connor was appointed to the High Court, in 1903. Involuntarily out of politics from 1904–07, Meagher was ensnared in the lands scandal that brought Crick down as postmaster-general and almost ruined Liberal Reform premier Joseph Carruthers. By 1909, however, he was a member of the Labor Party and, with Billy Hughes his patron, rising fast through its ranks. He helped the party gain power in NSW and federally the following year, and was only prevented from gaining a ministry in the McGowen government by the intervention of NSW governor Baron Chelmsford, in 1912: “This gentleman’s past,” Chelmsford explained to his superiors in London, “is of the worst reputation.”

By 1913, however, Meagher’s power and influence was sufficient to overcome such vetoes. He prevailed over McGowen that December in a vote for the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, and held the office for the next three years. He endeared himself to the party membership, which made him party president in 1915, and gave him the backing to vie with premier William Holman over Labor policy and the continued existence of the Legislative Council. Holder of a Sydney City Council seat since 1901, Meagher became Labor’s candidate for the Lord Mayoralty in the 1915 elections — and, when the ballot was deadlocked, was appointed to the position after state government intervention.

A fierce advocate for the allied cause during the First World War, Meagher echoed to Billy Hughes’ calls for conscription and was transformed from a “demi-god” to a “demon”. Expelled from Labor late in 1916, he managed to secure another term as Lord Mayor on the strength of his efforts for the conscription cause, but in the state elections that followed the next year he lost his seat amid what he termed a “saturnalia of sectarianism and a hurricane of hate”. He was soon put back to work as a member of the Legislative Council, but in 1919 he resigned to seek a return to the popular chamber at the elections in 1920.

Loss at those polls did not seem to faze Meagher. By 1920 he had made so many unsuccessful applications for restoration to the roll of solicitors — in 1900, 1902, 1904, 1907, 1909 (which succeeded, only to be reversed by the High Court), 1917, 1919, and 1920 — and had so thoroughly retailed a different account of the Dean case that popular opinion was on his side.

As was political influence and power. And, in December 1920, the NSW parliament passed a bill overriding the courts and restoring Meagher to the ranks of solicitors, ending his quest for rehabilitation. The legislation was unprecedented at the time, and to my knowledge has not been repeated anywhere since.

*

In my view, the story of Meagher’s rise and fall, and his rise again, is representative of so much of this country. It is illuminating of how we deal with disgrace, how the public looks at noble men and surveys with a jaundiced eye fallen women. How sympathy may be extended to victims and to fighters of respectable opinion alike. How the press may incite, how politicians may succumb to cravenness and exigency, how opprobrium can be re-cast as martyrdom, how marks of censure can be transformed into badges of honour.

Most of all, perhaps, in a country with a long history of ignoring, forgetting, and denying disgraceful acts, Meagher’s story suggests how even the most indelible stains can be expunged.

The ambivalence that this creates, and the contradictions it embodies, may be gleaned in one of the few other places where Meagher has a statue: at his grave, at Waverley Cemetery. There, engraved on a red granite obelisk that sticks out like a bloody knife amid the white angels and Celtic Crosses, is a verse that takes it all in:

His was the troubled life,
The conflict and the pain,
The grief, the bitterness of strife,
The honour without stain.
—