Richard Meagher (c.1905) Background: Federation parade, Sydney (January 1, 1901). City of Sydney Archives/Public domainIn Sydney, in the decades around Federation, Richard Meagher (1866–1931) was a prominent criminal defence solicitor, parliamentarian, city council alderman and player in the emerging Labor Party. For many, his name was also a byword for unethical and unscrupulous practice in public life. Patrick Mullins’ The Stained Man tells the story of Meagher’s rise, fall, and rise again.Review: The Stained Man: A Crime, a Scandal, and the Making of a Nation – Patrick Mullins (Scribe)The book begins with the high-profile “Dean case”, as it came to be known. George Dean was a handsome and well-liked young ferry captain. In March 1895, he was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of his wife Mary. Dean stood accused of poisoning Mary with arsenic and strychnine while she was recovering from the birth of the couple’s first child. The defence fell to Meagher, who saw the case through a committal hearing and then to a trial before Justice William Windeyer. Despite Meagher’s best efforts, Dean was convicted. Justice William Windeyer (1834-1897). National Library of Australia/Trove Before Dean could be sentenced, questions were being asked about Windeyer’s handling of the trial and the accuracy of the jury’s finding. Public meetings and an organised defence committee pressed for review. There was a large element of sexism in this. The popular desire was to believe in a man’s innocence over a woman’s accusations. This was especially the case after Meagher had thoroughly besmirched the reputations of both Mary Dean and her mother, Caroline Seymour, accusing them of associations with prostitution and criminality. Dean’s motive also remained obscure. Meagher seems to have genuinely believed in Dean’s innocence throughout the trial. But in the hubbub that followed, he extracted an unexpected confession from Dean. He kept this to himself. He allowed his senior partner, parliamentarian William Crick, to call for a royal commission into the case in ignorance of Dean’s guilt. The government obliged, at considerable public expense. The ensuing royal commission heard evidence from more than a hundred witnesses. Dean’s conviction was overturned and he returned to his job on the harbour ferry. Meagher rode the wave of publicity generated by the Dean case to become one of Sydney’s best-known citizens. Capitalising on his new-found fame, he stood as a protectionist for an inner-city seat at the 1895 parliamentary elections. Then, in an extraordinary act of misjudgement that remains difficult to explain, Meagher casually told the government representative on the royal commission, Sir Julian Salomons QC, of Dean’s guilt. Salomons, possessed of a keener sense of justice than Meagher, was exercised by the news. Though he felt unable to speak publicly, he consulted with legal colleagues. Rumours spread. By the time the truth of the matter came to light, Meagher sat in parliament. The revelations were made on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. Meagher, Crick, Dean and several others were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Meagher and Dean were found guilty, but had their convictions overturned on appeal. Dean served nine years of a 14-year sentence on a separate charge of perjury for having signed a statutory declaration protesting his innocence. Meagher avoided jail, but was forced to resign from parliament in disgrace and was struck off the roll of solicitors.The press had a field day. American novelist Mark Twain, then in Australia on a lecture tour, called the case a “two-volume novel in itself”. A novelistic approachThe story of the Dean case has been told a number of times before, perhaps most memorably as an episode in journalist Cyril Pearl’s Wild Men of Sydney (1958), an exposé of the misdeeds of the querulous, hard-drinking, hard-living men who built up Australia’s muckraking tabloid press in the decades around Federation. While the case is by no means unexplored historical territory, its byzantine intricacies have rarely been narrated with such patience as they are in The Stained Man. Mullins treats the saga as a legal thriller, vividly animating its numerous twists and turns. It is an indication of the sheer volume of legal, parliamentary and press documentation the case generated that the book can sustain such a novelistic approach. This extends to the use of directly quoted dialogue, not only from public speeches, but also from many private conversations later recounted by their participants. A stickler for historical empiricism may question whether the sources fully support some of Mullins’s more granular details – a character takes a breath here, another frowns or raises an eyebrow there – but it is usually clear enough where such minor dramatic embellishments start and end.The second half of The Stained Man is more leisurely in its pacing. Mullins charts the slow rehabilitation of Meagher’s reputation and status over his remaining working life. Meagher regained a place in parliament, lost it again, then won it back. As an MP, he worked towards Federation. In 1905, he became embroiled in another scandal over the administration of the state Department of Lands, also the subject of a royal commission. As the modern party system solidified, Meagher joined the New South Wales Labor Party and, in 1914, became its president. He was a long-serving alderman of the Sydney City Council. In 1916, he became the first Labor-aligned lord mayor of Sydney. At the height of his political career, he served as both lord mayor and speaker of the Legislative Assembly. But he soon lost his seat, and then the mayoralty, for supporting prime minister Billy Hughes’s divisive campaign for wartime conscription, which split the nascent Labor Party. An appointment to the Legislative Council, the then unelected state upper house, was a limited consolation. Richard Meagher (centre), as speaker of the Legistaltive Assembly, with officers (1916). State Library of New South Wales Through all this, Meagher sought repeatedly to be readmitted to the roll of solicitors. Mullins methodically details Meagher’s eight applications, over nearly two decades, to the state Supreme Court. These were opposed on every occasion by the Law Institute of New South Wales. Meagher was successful on his fifth application in 1909, only to be struck off again following an appeal by the Law Institute to the new federal High Court. After three more failed attempts, Meagher was finally readmitted in 1920 by a dedicated act of parliament that overrode the Supreme Court’s veto, an extraordinary exercise of legislative special treatment. Meagher was then in his mid-fifties and, except for three months’ reprieve following his 1909 readmission, had been barred from practising for a quarter of a century. He lived for another 11 years, dying in September 1931.Memory and forgettingMeagher was a talented orator and a savvy political operator. He was tenacious when it came to his own interests. Yet at practically every turn he was dogged by suspicions about his moral character, and his fitness for high office and as an officer of the law. The legacy of the Dean case was ever-present. Throughout his subsequent rehabilitation, there were constant questions about whether he had adequately repented, whether he had suffered the exclusions of the law and public opinion long enough, and whether his subsequent good works in public life were sufficient to expunge past transgressions. These were ethical and practical questions; they were also questions of memory and forgetting. Mullins begins with a reflection on settler Australia’s “long history of ignoring, forgetting, and denying disgraceful acts”. At the turn of the century, an Australia in which the memory of convict origins still lingered set great stock in second chances and new beginnings. As one of Meagher’s references for his first Supreme Court application put it, “I do not believe punishment should be eternal”. This was also the period, as the frontier closed, in which colonial violence against Indigenous people ceased to be openly acknowledged and myths of largely peaceful settlement took hold. Patrick Mullins. Philip Le Masurier/Scribe The book’s other motif, which also connects to wider questions of nationhood, is the Australian love of would-be martyrs, victims and underdogs. Built on the patient nursing of past grievances, this trait may seem to contradict the tendency to forget. But in the vagaries of a national psyche the two may be opposite sides of the same coin. Like the great national mythologies that bookend this period of Australian history – Ned Kelly and the Anzacs – Meagher saw himself, and publicly presented himself, as cut from the cloth of victimhood.Mullins’s title adapts part of the inscription on Meagher’s gravestone in Waverley Cemetery, which declares him to have lived a life of “honour without stain”. “Stain” recalls the language once used for the sense of shame associated with settler Australia’s convict origins. In memorialising Meagher as a “stained” man, in defiance of the defiant gravestone inscription, Mullins resurrects and historicises the stain on Meagher’s honour. It is an unflattering if studiously fair portrait. As a representative figure, Meagher evokes, in Mullins’ words, some “unattractive but enduring truths about Australia and its people”. In this sense, The Stained Man is of a piece with contemporary scholarly and public imperatives to remember and confront Australia’s challenging past. Yet as the defeat of the 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum and the recent derailing of the Queensland Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry show, there remain large popular constituencies for forgetting and denial. If remembering and forgetting shaped Australian nationhood at the turn of the last century, Mullins’s vivid account of Meagher’s story speaks evocatively to their differing configurations in our own time.Joel Barnes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.