Daniel Deniehy

Daniel Henry Deniehy (18 August 1828[1] – 22 October 1865) was an Australian journalist, orator and politician; and early advocate of democracy in colonial New South Wales.

Meanwhile, Deniehy became a leading figure in Sydney's small but lively literary world and in radical politics; artist Adelaide Ironside was an associate.

Deniehy argued that the real issue was control of the vast grazing lands of inland New South Wales, which the squatter class of early settlers had seized for themselves.

He accused the conservatives, led by the veteran Sydney politician William Wentworth and what Deniehy called "some dozen of his friends," of wanting to "confiscate for their own uses the finest portions of the public lands, to stereotype themselves into a standing government, so that they may retain, watch over, and protect the booty they wrest."

When Wentworth proposed creating a hereditary peerage in New South Wales, Deniehy savagely satirised it: "Here," he said, "we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a "bunyip aristocracy."

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)[1] which was published in the Southern Cross.

Only 150 cm (five feet) tall and in poor health throughout his life, Deniehy possessed enormous energy and was a gifted orator.