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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2020
One of the most famous public figures in later nineteenth-century Australia was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The man known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ – Europe and South America – was in fact also the hero of a third. The nature of Garibaldi's iconic status in the Australian colonies was complex, multi-faceted, and fractured and it occurred at a moment when the notion of celebrity was being transformed amid what was effectively a fundamental democratization of the public sphere in the Anglophone world. As such, it provides an important opportunity to ponder the implications of what has been called ‘intimacy at a distance’.
An embryonic version of this article was presented under the title ‘Garibaldi's shirt: the influence of Garibaldi and Mazzini on popular politics after 1850’, World Italian Language Week, Sydney University, Aug. 2011.
1 South Australian Register (Adelaide), 9 Oct. 1860; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Dec. 1863.
2 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Feb. 1879. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Tommy Gatti, and I have work in progress on a study of fancy-dress balls in nineteenth-century Sydney.
3 Riall, Lucy, Garibaldi: invention of a hero (New Haven, CT, 2007)Google Scholar; Scirocco, Alfonso, Garibaldi: citizen of the world (Princeton, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar; Grévy, Jérôme, Garibaldi (Paris, 2001)Google Scholar.
4 Cooper, Roslyn Pesman, ‘Garibaldi and Australia’, History Teachers of New South Wales: Teaching History, 16 (1982), pp. 9–25Google Scholar; Pesman, Ros, ‘Garibaldi: a hero and his making’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 13 (2008), pp. 536–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, ‘In search of professional identity: Adelaide Ironside and history’, Women's Writing, 10 (2003), pp. 307–27. See also Cresciani, Gianfranco, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi between myth and reality’, Italian Historical Society Journal, 16 (2008), pp. 15–24Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Italians in Sydney’, Sydney Journal, 1 (2008), pp. 73–9, at pp. 74–5.
5 See Pickering, Paul A. and Tyrrell, Alex, eds., Contested sites: commemoration, memorial and popular politics in nineteenth-century Britain (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar.
6 Morgan, Simon, ‘Celebrity: academic “pseudo-event” or a useful concept for historians’, Cultural and Social History, 8 (2011), pp. 95–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See McCartney, Donal, ‘The changing image of Daniel O'Connell’, in Nowlan, Kevin and O'Connell, Maurice, eds., Daniel O'Connell: portrait of a radical (Belfast, 1984), pp. 19–31Google Scholar.
8 See Jones, Benjamin and Pickering, Paul A., ‘A new terror to death: public memory and the disappearance of John Dunmore Lang’, History Australia, 11 (2014), pp. 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Ben and, over many years, Alex Tyrrell for many discussions of these issues.
9 Lucy Riall, ‘Garibaldi: the first celebrity’, History Today (Aug. 2007), pp. 41–7. See also Inglis, Fred, A short history of celebrity (Princeton, NJ, 2010), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 14. This point was also made by Louis Snyder in his seminal book, The new nationalism (Ithaca, NY, 1968). In a review of Riall's book, Roland Sarti noted that she is ‘not the first historian to “deconstruct” or “demythologize” Garibaldi’. Sarti draws attention to Giuseppe Garibaldi e il suo mito, a volume of papers presented at the fifty-first congress of the Istituto per la storia del risorgimento italiano, in Nov. 1982, and Maurice Agulhon, ‘Le mythe de Garibaldi en France de 1882 à nos jours’, Histoire vagabonde, vol. ii. Idéologie et politique dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1988), pp. 85–131. See Sarti's review on H-Net, Oct. 2007, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13748.
11 Weber, Max, On charisma and institution building: selected papers, ed. Eisenstadt, S. N. (Chicago, IL, 1968), p. 46Google Scholar.
12 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 64.
13 Ibid., p. 13; Braudy, Leo, The frenzy of renown: fame and its history (Oxford 1986), p. 5Google Scholar. See also Jason Goldsmith, ‘Celebrity and the spectacle of nation’, in Tom Mole, ed., Romanticism and celebrity culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 21–40.
14 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 13.
15 See ibid., p. 3.
16 Weber, On charisma, p. 61. Riall recognizes that, for Weber, charismatic authority was ‘inherently unstable, prone to both “routinisation” and to challenge and failure’ (Riall, Garibaldi, p. 16). This is not the point I am making here.
17 Cited in Graham Darby, ‘Garibaldi: luck or judgement’, History Review, 70 (2011), https://www.historytoday.com/archive/garibaldi-luck-or-judgement.
18 Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, ‘Mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance’, Psychiatry, 19 (1956), pp. 215–29.
19 As Bent put it, ‘Few men have been judged more differently by different minds than General Garibaldi.’ Bent, J. Theodore, The life of Giuseppe Garibaldi (London, 1881), p. 1Google Scholar. See also Riall, Garibaldi, p. 337.
20 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1882.
21 Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘Italians’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/italians.
22 Buchanan, David, An Australian orator, ed. Thatcher, Richard (London, 1886), p. 250Google Scholar.
23 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1882.
24 Ibid.
25 See Sydney Morning Herald, 30 June 1882. Fariola did not outline his military service at the meeting. It is unclear whether he was born in Belgium or in Italy. For more details, see Boney, F. N., ed., A Union soldier in the land of the vanquished: the diary of Sergeant Matthew Woodruff, June–December 1865 ([Tuscaloosa], AL, 1969), p. 18nGoogle Scholar.
26 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1882.
27 Ibid.
28 Queenslander, 10 June 1882.
29 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1882.
30 Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 1845. Although the Herald did not give its source, the same phrase appeared in the Times (London). Riall, Garibaldi, p. 47, argues that it and others like it added to Garibaldi's reputation for rebelliousness. The Carbonari organization was reported in Australia as early as 1821 but infrequently thereafter. See Sydney Gazette, 21 Apr. 1821; Australian (Sydney), 1 Nov. 1826. Garibaldi was not mentioned by name, and none of his exploits of the 1830s were noted in later reports.
31 South Australian (Adelaide), 20 Oct. 1846. The news was ten months old.
32 See Empire (Sydney), 31 July 1860.
33 Argus (Melbourne), 14 Aug. 1860.
34 Bathurst Free Press, 5 Sept. 1860.
35 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Dec. 1861.
36 Moreton Bay Courier, 16 May 1861.
37 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Dec. 1861.
38 Hibbert, Christopher, ‘Garibaldi in England, 1864’, History Today, 15 (1965), pp. 595–604, at pp. 600, 604Google Scholar.
39 Bent, Life of Garibaldi, p. 14. There was also enough effusive adoration from men (often aristocrats) to suggest a degree of homoeroticism.
40 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1882.
41 Ibid.
42 Blackett, Howard, The life of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian hero and patriot (London, 1882), p. 1Google Scholar.
43 See Trevelyan, G. M., Garibaldi and the Thousand (London, 1909), p. 7Google Scholar. This ‘liberal’ incarnation was best known to readers in the Anglophone world thanks to a succession of biographies, which reached a highpoint in Trevelyan's magnificent trilogy.
44 Garibaldi to the executive of the Reform League, May 1867, London, Bishopsgate Institute (BI), Howell collection, 11/2D (9, 99); draft reply, c. 1867, 11/2D (104).
45 BI, Holyoake collection, 11/3 (1, 2, 3), 11/7, 11/1.
46 Bent, Life of Garibaldi, p. 10.
47 Napoli, Mario Di, ‘Garibaldi and parliamentary democracy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 13 (2008), pp. 503–11, at p. 510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Gippsland Times, 11 May 1875. Some of Garibaldi's officers visited Victoria in 1873: see Bendigo Advertiser, 2 May 1873.
49 ‘Italy and the war: interview with General [Ricciotti] Garibaldi’, British Australasian (London), 18 Feb. 1915; biographical cuttings on Ricciotti Garibaldi, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 1897961. Ricciotti's Recollections of the Franco-Prussian War was sold in translation in Melbourne in 1876: see Argus, 29 June 1876.
50 See Geoffrey Bartlett, ‘McCulloch, Sir James (1819–1893), Australian dictionary of biography, 1974, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcculloch-sir-james-4075. See also Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 8 Mar. 1879; Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald paradox: a strange case of authorship (Melbourne, 2003), p. 20.
51 Janet Fyfe, ed., Autobiography of John McAdam (1806–1883) with selected letters (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 139, 178; Daily Telegraph, 12 Apr. 1864; Standard, 2 Oct. 1867.
52 British Australasian, 18 Feb. 1915.
53 Ibid.
54 See Partington, Geoffrey, The Australian nation: its British and Irish roots (Melbourne, 1994), p. 208Google Scholar; Lawson, Archibald paradox, pp. 20–1; Sylvia Lawson, ‘Archibald, Jules François (1856–1919)’, Australian dictionary of biography, 1969, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archibald-jules-francois-2896/text4155. See also Pesman Cooper, ‘Garibaldi and Australia’, p. 64.
55 See cutting from Reynolds News, c. 1861, BI, Holyoake collection, 11/4 (31); Herbert Mitgang, ‘Garibaldi and Lincoln’, American Heritage, 29 (1975), pp. 34–9, 98–101; Leeds Mercury, 17 Aug. 1863.
56 See, for example, Massey, Gerald, Garibaldi: a group of reprinted poems (London, 1882)Google Scholar; Socialist (Melbourne), 4 June 1908; Red Republican, 6 July 1850; G. J. Holyoake, Bygones worth remembering (2 vols., London, 1905), ii, pp. 231–58; idem, Sixty years of an agitator's life (2 vols., London, 1906), ii, pp. 119, 390–1; BI, Holyoake collection, passim. See also Sutcliffe, Marcella P., Victorian radicals and Italian democrats (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 4–6Google Scholar.
57 See Fyfe, Autobiography of John McAdam, esp. p. xx.
58 See P. A. Pickering, ‘A wider field in a new country: Chartism in colonial Australia’, in M. Sawer, ed., Elections: full, free and fair ( Sydney, 2011), pp. 28–44, at p. 43; Walker, R. B., ‘David Buchanan: Chartist, radical, republican’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Association, 53 (1967), pp. 122–38, at p. 123Google Scholar.
59 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Jan. 1878; Buchanan, Australian orator, pp. 248–55. See also Hirst, John, The sentimental nation: the making of the Australian commonwealth (Oxford, 2000), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.
60 See Ballarat Star, 29 Aug. 1866; Argus, 20 Nov. 1889, 26 Jan. 1891, 17 Aug. 1893, 25 May 1912; Socialist, 13 July 1907. For Thomas, see Richard Kennedy, ‘Embling, Thomas (1814–1893)’, Australian dictionary of biography, 1972, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/embling-thomas-3483/text5335.
61 See Australian Town and Country Journal, 29 Nov. 1879. Scott also claimed to have fought in the Union army and in the militia during the Maori wars in New Zealand. Only the latter is true: see ‘Scott, Andrew George (1842–1880)’, Australian dictionary of biography, 1976, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/scott-andrew-george-4546/text7451; Terry, Paul, In search of Captain Moonlite: the strange life and death of the notorious bushranger (Sydney, 2013), pp. 133, 143Google Scholar.
62 Pesman, ‘Adelaide Ironside’; Baker, Don, Days of wrath: a life of John Dunmore Lang (Melbourne, 1985), pp. 472–3Google Scholar; Ruth Teale, ‘Ironside, Adelaide Eliza (1831–1867)’, Australian dictionary of biography, 1972, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ironside-adelaide-eliza-3838/text6095.
63 See Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘Sceusa, Francesco (1851–1919)’, Australian dictionary of biography, 1988, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sceusa-francesco-8351/text14655.
64 F. Sceusa, Hail Australia: morituri te salutant! (Sydney, 1888). Sceusa was also capable of virulent racism. See, for example, his rant against the ‘Chinese-isation’ of the cane industry, Socialist, 23 Mar. 1907.
65 He represented numerous organizations: the Socialist League of New South Wales, the Social Democratic Federation of Queensland, the Social Democratic League of Victoria, the South Australian Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein, and the Verein Vorwärts of Melbourne. See South Australian Chronicle, 4 Nov. 1893.
66 Birmingham Daily Post, 9, 10, 11, and 12 Aug. 1893; Argus, 14 Aug. 1893.
67 Worker, May 1890.
68 Hirst, Sentimental nation, p. 7.
69 Age, 16 Apr. 1855.
70 See Greene, Jack P., ed., Exclusionary empire: English liberty overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.
71 See Pickering, ‘Wider field’, pp. 28–44.
72 See Pickering, Paul A., ‘“Ripe for a republic”: British radical responses to the Eureka stockade’, Australian Historical Studies, 34 (2003), pp. 69–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Democracy and race: an infamous Chartist legacy’, unpublished paper given at Prifysgol De Cymru (University of South Wales), Newport, 4 Nov. 2016.
73 See Sceusa, F., The ‘glorious house of Savoy’: the socialists’ tribute to the memory of Hubert I (Sydney, 1900), p. 5Google Scholar.
74 For Cincinnatus, see Livy, 3.16.1–8, 3.29.2–7, in B. O. Foster, ed. and trans., Livy: books iii and iv (London, 1967), pp. 89–99.
75 Bathurst Free Press, 21 Dec. 1861.
76 Garibaldi to executive of the Reform League, BI, Howell collection, 11/2D/44.
77 Garibaldi to Robert Hartnell, secretary of the Trades’ Demonstration Committee (translation), 1 Nov. 1863, in BI, Holyoake collection, 11/3 (18). See also Robert Applegarth, ‘People I have known’, paper read at the Hotspur Club, 12 Mar. 1898, BI, Howell collection, 23/9, annotated typescript, p. 31.
78 Socialist, 13 July 1907, 20 July 1907, 28 Sept. 1907. See also Socialist, 29 May 1908, 6 June 1908, 4 June 1909.
79 Bent, Life of Garibaldi, pp. 2–3, 10; Trevelyan, George Macaulay, Garibaldi's defence of the Roman republic (London, 1907), p. 25Google Scholar.
80 Socialist, 13 July 1907.
81 See Hirst, Sentimental nation, p. 9.
82 Argus, 6 Feb. 1862.
83 South Bourke and Mornington Journal, 14 Mar. 1888.
84 See Empire, 5 Apr. 1862; Queenslander, 30 June 1888; Australian Town and Country Journal, 27 Oct. 1888; Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton), 30 May 1898; Maitland Mercury, 8 Oct. 1892; Hobart Mercury, 6 Feb. 1888; Perth Gazette, 8 June 1866; Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 1 Dec. 1890; Camperdown Chronicle, 23 Nov. 1889.
85 Hobart Mercury, 2 Oct. 1886; Queenslander, 12 Aug. 1893; Socialist, 11 May 1907; Adelaide, State Library of South Australia (SLSA), album collection B7722/42; SLSA, Mortlock pictorial collection B7723/341.
86 Empire, 29 Aug. 1862.
87 Empire, 19 Mar. 1862; Moreton Bay Courier, 24 Nov. 1860; Brisbane Courier, 22 July 1861; Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1862; Maitland Mercury, 6 Mar. 1886, 20 Nov. 1886, 19 Mar. 1887, 10 May 1888.
88 See South Australian Advertiser, 8 Nov. 1860, 22 Nov. 1882, 14 Oct. 1890; Argus, 22 Feb. 1862, 23 Aug. 1873; Empire, 12 Mar. 1870; Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Feb. 1861, 29 Mar. 1862, 15 Mar. 1884, 17 Mar. 1885; Ballarat, Gold Museum, Staffordshire-style porcelain ornament: ‘Garibaldi’ – a man standing with his arm on a horse, n.d., 9.2.0282; Melbourne, Museums Victoria, historical archaeology collection, clay pipe (part), inscribed ‘Garibaldi’, c. 1880, LL60713.
89 Australian Town and Country Journal, 6 May 1903.
90 See Argus, 14 Mar. 1877.
91 Ballarat Star, 9 Dec. 1861; Maitland Mercury, 27 Mar. 1850.
92 See Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Dec. 1861, 28 Jan. 1862, 17 June 1862, 21 Feb. 1873, 16 Sept. 1873; Empire, 15 Apr. 1864; Hobart Mercury, 20 May 1873, 20 Dec. 1881; Australasian, 18 June 1898; South Australian Register, 4 Apr. 1865; Argus, 14 Feb. 1870; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, La Trobe picture collection, Brodie collection, H99.220/1388.
93 See Ballarat Star, 19 June 1863; Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston, Tasmania), 16 Dec. 1854.
94 See Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Aug. 1860, 11 Apr. 1874; Northern Star (Lismore), 29 Sept. 1897.
95 See Campbell, ACT, Australian War Memorial, Garibaldi jacket, REL/18398.001 and REL/06493; Anita Selzer, Governors’ wives in colonial Australia (Canberra, 2002), p. 154. For Nottingham Forest's adoption of shirts of ‘Garibaldi red’, see ‘History of Nottingham Forest’, http://www.nottinghamforest.co.uk/club/history/history.aspx; they were known as the Garibaldis.
97 Boorstin, Daniel, The image: a guide to pseudo-events in America (New York, 1961), p. 57Google Scholar. Boorstin distinguishes between a celebrity – defined by an image – and a hero – distinguished by achievement. See pp. 61ff.
98 For example, the most popular of the Chartists in the 1840s, Feargus O'Connor, was described by one shrewd commentator as a ‘constantly travelling’ dominant leader. See Pickering, Paul A., Feargus O'Connor: a political life (Exeter, 2006), pp. 69–70Google Scholar.
99 Gippsland Times, 20 July 1872. See also Argus, 16 Nov. 1860.
100 In 1852, Garibaldi landed on a small uninhabited island within Australia's territorial waters. See Autobiography of Giuseppe Garibaldi, trans. A. Werner (3 vols., London, 1889), ii, pp. 65–6.
101 Inglis, History of celebrity, p. 5; Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and hero worship (Philadelphia, n.d. [1900?]; orig. edn 1840), p. 207.