Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, PC (12 April 1816 – 9 February 1903), was an Irish poet and journalist (editor of The Nation), Young Irelander and tenant-rights activist. After emigrating to Australia in 1856 he entered the politics of Victoria on a platform of land reform, and in 1871–1872 served as the colony's 8th Premier. Ireland Early life and career Duffy was born at No. 10 Dublin Street in Monaghan Town, County Monaghan, Ireland, the son of a Catholic shopkeeper. He was educated in Belfast at St Malachy's College and in the collegiate department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution where he studied logic, rhetoric and belles-lettres. One day, when Duffy was aged 18, Charles Hamilton Teeling, a United Irish veteran of the 1798 rising, walked into his mother's house (his father had died when he was 10). Teeling was establishing a journal in Belfast and asked Duffy to accompany him on a round of calls to promote it in Monaghan. Inspired by Teeling's recollections of '98, Duffy began contributing to the journal, The Northern Herald. In Belfast, Duffy went on to edit The Vindicator, an O'Connellite journal launched by Thomas O'Hagan (later the first Catholic to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland since 1687). At the same time, he began studying law at the King's Inns in Dublin. Duffy was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1845. But before then he established himself in literary circles as the editor of Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1843), and in political circles as editor of a new Dublin weekly, The Nation. The Nation In 1842, Duffy co-founded The Nation with Thomas Osborne Davis, and John Blake Dillon. Contributors were notable for including nationally minded Protestants: in addition to Davis, Jane Wilde, Margaret Callan, John Mitchel, John Edward Pigot and William Smith O'Brien. All were members or supporters of Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, dedicated to a restoration of an Irish parliament through a reversal of the 1800 Acts of Union. When he had first followed O'Connell, Duffy concedes that he had "burned with the desire to set up again the Celtic race and the catholic church". But in The Nation (which repeatedly invoked memory of the United Irishmen) Duffy committed himself to a "nationality" that would embrace as easily "the stranger who is within our gates" as "the Irishman of a hundred generations." This expansive, ecumenical, view of the opinion-forming tasks of the paper