BEN HARVEY: Relationship between Australia and US has always been strained — even 150 years ago

Relations between Australia and the United States are more fractious than at any moment in living memory.

Donald Trump’s attitude to Australia is at best dismissive and at worst outright hostile.

His wild accusations that Canberra has been taking the piss in terms of trade and military co-operation surely have the secretive mandarins at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade wringing their hands.

To any member of the diplomatic corps who thinks they are living through unprecedented events, here’s a dose of perspective.

If you flick through the pages of history, you will find there was a moment, 150 years ago to the day, when the US and Australia came within a whisker of being at war.

The reason wasn’t trade or military friction. It was because of a half a dozen Irish convicts who were languishing in Fremantle Prison.

The six men were Fenians — Irish nationalist revolutionaries determined to end British rule in their country.

Thomas Darragh, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, Thomas Hassett, Robert Cranston and James Wilson had been convicted of treason. They, along with 56 other Fenians, had been sent to the colony on the banks of the Swan River.

They arrived aboard the Hougoumont — the last convict ship to reach Australian shores — in January 1868.

The Fenian Brotherhood, which had chapters in Canada and the US, considered any conviction to be illegal and believed those found guilty of subversion were political prisoners.

There was a fair bit of sympathy for the Fenian cause Down Under, which may have explained how Wilson managed to smuggle a letter out of Fremantle Prison a few years into his sentence.

The note was addressed to Irish republican agitator John Devoy, who lived in New York. Miraculously, the letter got to its intended destination and in 1873 Devoy read it.

Wilson must have been a persuasive writer because Devoy set about arranging one of the world’s most extraordinary prison breaks from a different hemisphere.

He began by purchasing a whaling ship called the Catalpa, which he put under the command of Captain George Anthony. Anthony’s mission was to sail to the west coast of Australia under the guise of a whaling expedition.

The American crew had no idea they were hunting prisoners, not whales.

The Catalpa arrived in international waters off what is now known as Rockingham in April 1876.

By this stage, Wilson and his five mates were occasionally working outside the walls of Fremantle Prison.

They had received word that the Catalpa had dropped anchor and were biding their time.

At 8.30am on April 17, 1876, the men quietly slipped away from their work detail and raced south.

Prison bosses soon realised the men had escaped and it wasn’t long before colonial authorities put two and two together.

The Catalpa was identified as an escape vessel and the steamer Georgette — armed hastily with a 12-pound cannon — was dispatched to intercept the ship.

The maritime standoff that followed was one wrong move away from re-writing the rule book on international relations between the US and the tiny British colony.

The Georgette pulled alongside the Catalpa and demanded Captain Anthony surrender the fugitives.

It was tense, to say the least, because the Brits meant business and the Catalpa was unarmed.

In what was one of the 19th century’s great bluffs, Captain Anthony pointed to the Stars and Stripes flying above his vessel and yelled “If you fire on this ship, you fire on the American flag”.

The crew of the Georgette were just smart enough to know that picking a fight with the United States was a decision above their pay grades, so deferred to Governor William Robinson.

Robinson was in no mood to trigger an international incident, let alone be responsible for what might be considered an act of war, so he ordered Georgette not to fire on the Catalpa.

To make sure his command was not betrayed by jittery hands, he turned the Georgette back to Fremantle.

Two days after the Fenians ran from prison, the Catalpa set sail for America, arriving in New York in August.

The aftermath was what British aristocracy may well have deemed a frightful hoo-ha but it was short lived.

Pro-Britian colonial newspapers raged at the treasonous audacity of it all for a while, but the colonial administrators were quietly happy that the Fenians had “become the problem of some other nation”, as one senior figure was quoted as saying.

Representations were made to Washington but there was no major diplomatic protest.

Calm heads prevailed in 1876; it’s hard to believe the same would be the case 150 years later.