🎙️ From Vernon Mount to Vaucluse: Exile, Empire & What Remains
Undercover Irish – Episode 2
Henry Browne Hayes was sentenced to transportation for life.
But exile did not humble him.
In this second part of the series, we follow Hayes from Ireland to Australia — from convict ship to colonial estate — and examine how power adapts even when it is supposedly punished.
Along the way, we encounter Irish political prisoners, Freemasonry in the early colony, the Rum Rebellion, a dramatic shipwreck, and the unfinished legacy of both empire and rebellion.
And at the centre of it all remains Mary Pike.
🔎 In This Episode
- The convict ship Atlas and Hayes's bribed passage
- Irish political prisoners transported after 1798
- Tristram Moore and other United Irishmen in New South Wales
- Early Freemasonry in Australia
- The attempted lodge of 1803
- Vaucluse House and its convict origins
- The Rum Rebellion (1808)
- Governor William Bligh and the New South Wales Corps
- Hayes's exile to Newcastle (Coal River)
- The role of Governor Lachlan Macquarie
- The controversial pardon
- The wreck of the Isabella in 1813
- Joseph Holt's account of the disaster
- Hayes's return to Cork
- The long shadow over Mary Pike's life
- Modern-day legacies in Ireland and Australia
