In Canada, Thomas D'Arcy Magee won fame as a journalist on the _New
Era_ before he became even more distinguished as a parliamentarian.
When the history of Australian journalism is written it will contain
two outstanding Irish names: Daniel Henry Deniehy, who died in 1865,
was called by Bulwer Lytton "the Australian Macaulay" on account of
his brilliant writings as critic and reviewer in the press of
Victoria. Gerald Henry Supple, another Dublin man, is also remembered
for his contributions to the _Age_ and the _Argus_ of Melbourne. In
India one of the first--if not the first--English newspapers was
founded by a Limerick man, named Charles Johnstone, who had
previously attained fame as the author of _Chrysal, or the Adventures
of a Guinea_, and who died at Calcutta about 1800.
Stirring memories of battle and adventure leap to the mind at the
names of those renowned war correspondents, William Howard Russell,
Edmond O'Donovan, and James J. O'Kelly. Russell, a Dublin man, was
the first newspaper representative to accompany an army into the
field. He saw all the mighty engagements of the Crimea--Alma,
Balaclava, Inkerman, Sebastopol--not from a distance of 60 or 80
miles, which is the nearest that correspondents are now allowed to
approach the front, but at the closest quarters, riding through the
lines on his mule, and seeing the engagements vividly, so that he was
able to describe them in moving detail for readers of the _Times_.
O'Donovan--son of Dr. John O'Donovan, the distinguished Irish scholar
and archaeologist--was in the service of the London _Daily News_.
That dashing campaigner--as his famous book, _The Merv Oasis_, shows
him to have been--perished with Hicks Pasha's Army in the Sudan in
November, 1883. At the same time James O'Kelly, also of the _Daily
News_, was lost in the desert, trying to join the forces of the
victorious Sudanese under the Madhi. Ten years before that he had
accomplished, for the New York _Herald_, the equally daring and
hazardous feat of joining the Cuban rebels in revolt against Spain.
He escaped the perils of the Mambi Land and the Sudan, and survived
to serve Ireland for many years as a Nationalist member in the
British parliament. John Augustus O'Shea, better known, perhaps, as
"The Irish Bohemian", also deserves remembrance for his quarter of a
century's work as special correspondent in Europe--including Paris
during the siege--for the London _Standard_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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