SIR MAURICE O’CONNELL.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1608, 16 April 1879, Page 4

SIR MAURICE O’CONNELL.

The Australian colonies have (says the “Australasian”) lost a man of mark and eminence in Sir Maurice Charles O’Connell, who has been for many years President of the Legislative Council of Queensland. The history of the deceased gentleman is emphatically Australian, rather than belonging to any particular colony, and is so in a degree beyond that in which the same observation could be made of any other colonial statesman. By birth Sir Maurice was a native of Sydney. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Admiral Bligh, well-known in connexion with "the mutiny of the Bounty, was one of the early Governors of New South Wales, and his father, General Sir Maurice O’Connell, was Acting Governor of New South Wales, and the lately deceased Sir Maurice has acted in the same capacity in Queensland several times. In his youth Sir Maurice O’Connell entered the army as ensign at the age of sixteen, and seven years later threw himself in the very spirit of chivalry into the Carlist war, then raging in Spain, He raised in Ireland a regimen of the British Legion, and embarked for Spain to fight for “the Queen and the constitution.” He attained the rank of general of brigade in command of the British Auxiliary Legion, and he was created a knight commander of Isabella the Catholic, besides gaining other high distinctions by his personal gallantry. He returned to Sydney in 1835 as military secretary on the staff of his father, and his active and energetic disposition soon asserted itself as conspicuously in social and political life as it had on the field of warfare. Ho was one of the members for Port Philip in the Legislative Council of New South Wales. Throughout his life Sir Maurice O’Connell has brought to his public duties something of the high chivalric feeling which led to his early plunge into tho Spanish war, and he has been enabled to hold with dignity an eminens place above the level of faction or party strife. A colony is fortunate which poasesset among its public men some of the stamp of Sir Maurice O’Connell, and it is matter for regret that we see so few of this order arising to take the place of the old ones as they pass away.