in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a "bunyip aristocracy." (The bunyip is a mythical beast of Aboriginal legend.) His ridicule caused the idea to be dropped. Deniehy was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1857, representing Argyle (the Goulburn region). In 1859 he stood for West Sydney, but was defeated. However he was successful in 1860 representing East Macquarie (the Bathurst region). As a radical democrat, he should have been an effective supporter of the liberal parliamentary leaders Charles Cowper and John Robertson. But he disliked both these leaders, and was temperamentally unable to work in a parliamentary team. He soon became an isolated loner, and began to drink heavily. With the introduction of manhood suffrage in New South Wales in 1858 his campaign for democracy was fulfilled, and he was out of sympathy with the more advanced radicals. Members of Parliament were not paid at this time, and Deniehy always earned his living as a barrister and as a journalist. He founded and edited Southern Cross, a radical newspaper, in 1859. Deniehy had opposed the appointment of Lyttleton Bayley as Attorney General and produced a satire How I Became Attorney-General of New Barataria (Sydney, 1860) which was published in the Southern Cross. In Melbourne in 1862 he edited The Victorian for its owner, the Irish-Australian politician Charles Gavan Duffy. In Sydney he became a notable literary critic, and lectured on modern literature at the newly founded Sydney University. He was a regular contributor to the Irish-Australian newspaper The Freeman's Journal and other papers. Late life Only 150 cm (five feet) tall and in poor health throughout his life, Deniehy possessed enormous energy and was a gifted orator. The Australian historian Manning Clark writes of him: "His heart was a battlefield between the cherub and the insect of sensual lust." (He married Adelaide Hoals in 1852 and had seven children in nine years). "At times his face caught a fire and beauty that looked like phases of actual transfiguration. At other times his face was coarsened by days of drunken debauchery." He died of alcoholism in Bathurst, aged only 37. In 1895 his remains were exhumed and reburied in Sydney's Waverley Cemetery, where a monument was erected over the grave. An inscription on it reads: The vehement voice of the South Is loud where the journalist lies But