Just after 7pm on the evening of Saturday 28 May, 1898, a retiree named Daniel Maloney sat in his house in Nicholson Street, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. He was “placidly reading The Argus,” as one journalist later wrote, “by the light of a kerosene lamp on the kitchen table.”

His wife had left the building from the rear to go shopping in Brunswick Street. As she walked out the gate, a bomb exploded at the front of the house, smashing down the door, wrecking the verandah and sending a plume of smoke soaring into the air.



Understandably, the Fitzroy bomb blast caused a sensation across Australia, so much so that the next day “visitors came from all suburbs and loitered about Mr Maloney’s house watching it as intently as if they expected the whole crime to be re-enacted for their especial benefit.”

Eventually, some 200 rubberneckers gathered on the grass plot where Bell and Nicholson streets intersect, just to stare at the damaged building.

From our perspective, the aftermath to that now-forgotten incident seems both immediately familiar and yet weirdly off kilter, a useful prism through which to re-examine responses to political violence today.

For instance, the contemporary reader can’t help but be struck by how, though the editorialists of 1898 unhesitatingly ascribe a political motive to the Fitzroy bombing, not one of them mentioned terrorism. Back then, of course, the word’s connotations were different.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The fellow wore “the soft black hat which is generally supposed to be the outward and visible sign of anarchy”.’ French anarchist Georges Cochon (1879-1959). Photograph: flickr

For the political writer of the late 19th century, “terror” and “terrorism” retained their association with the policies of Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin party during the French Revolution. In everyday use, the term “terrorism” had evolved to include violence or threats used to sway opinion but it tended to refer to the actions of a state (or at least a collective) rather than the deeds of an individual: hence, in 1898, Sydney’s Sunday Times was bemoaning the “extent to which the larrikin pushes of the city still exercise a terrorism.”

Nevertheless, even if the label was different, the response was the same: the Nicholson Street bombing was generally understood as a local manifestation of an international campaign of political violence.



After all, just three weeks earlier, a similar blast had detonated in a lane off Napier Street at the residence of a Mr Underwood (whom The Age described as “an Israelite, engaged as a carrier for John Terry and co., the well known timber merchant”).

Many feared Melbourne faced a bombing campaign. The immediate suspects were not, however, Muslims, but anarchists.

What we would now call the anarchist terrorism of the 1890s has been largely forgotten. Yet in no other period have as many heads of state been murdered as during that brief spate of time, with Sadi Carnot, president of France, killed in 1894; Antonio Cánovas, prime minister of Spain killed in 1897; the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898; King Humbert of Italy in 1900; and US President William McKinley in 1901.



The assassinations of political leaders were accompanied by other, less discriminate attacks, such as the bombing of Paris’ Chamber of Deputies in 1893 and the Café Terminus in 1894, and then, most bloodily, the explosion at the Barcelona religious procession in 1906 that killed 23 people.

Politically, the ideas of the anarchist bombers could not have been more different from those of today’s jihadis. For one thing, most of them were avowed atheists.

The Frenchman Ravachol, perhaps the most famous of the dynamitards, inspired a popular song (with the chorus: “Long live the sound of the explosion!”) after he threw an “infernal machine” at a judge notorious for his treatment of political prisoners. On the way to the guillotine, Ravachol chanted: “To be happy, God damn it, you have to kill those who own property! To be happy, God damn it, you must cut the priests in two!”

Later, when Emile Henry, an admirer of Ravachol, tossed dynamite into a fashionable restaurant, a prosecutor wondered how he justified killing random patrons.

“We will not spare the women and children of the bourgeois,” Henry snapped, “for the women and children of those we love have not been spared.”

The resemblance between that sentiment and the justification given by the Pakistani Taliban for school massacres (“If our women and children die as martyrs, your children will not escape,” explained Taliban leader Umar Mansoor) should give pause to those who understand contemporary terrorism as specifically Islamic or solely religious.

The scholar Richard Jensen reminds us that the “age of of anarchist terrorism coincided with the beginning of the age of mass journalism”. He notes how Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal employed the still-developing conventions of tabloid publishing to cover the killing of Empress Elizabeth on 10 September 1898:

A giant headline stretched across the entire top of the front page, ‘AUSTRIA’S EMPRESS FOULLY ASSASSINATED BY AN ITALIAN ANARCHIST’, accompanied by a large sketch of a youthful and attractive crowned head in a low-cut evening gown.

The arrest of Ravachol: “Long live the sound of the explosion!” Photograph: James Vaughan/flickr

Australia might have been thousands of miles from the most prominent anarchist attacks but the local papers followed the bombings assiduously: in a survey of one Australian newspaper from October 1893 to 1 May 1894, the historian Bob James found no less than 67 leading items or editorials on “anarchist outrages”.



Thus, when news broke of dynamite in Nicholson street attack, the reporters were already primed to uncover a plot, even before police found the word “Anachy” (sic) scratched into the bomb casing.

The Age recalled how, during the previous year, posters had appeared (“the work of some irresponsible fanatic,” they explained) on local telegraph posts and lamp poles, “set[ting] forth in wild and unreasoning phrases the advantages of Anarchy.”

But why would an anarchist target a retiree and his family?

In response to that baffling question, speculation mounted that the real target might have been a certain Cornelius Crowe, an ex-policeman living nearby who operated a private security or “night patrol” firm. The theory was buttressed by the curious testimony of two eyewitnesses.



According to the Argus, a cigar manufacturer called Mrs Spry told the police how, on the night of the bomb, she had noticed snooping around her house a tall man, “of gentlemanly – even refined – appearance”, with fair hair and a drooping moustache. Worse still, the fellow wore “the soft black hat which is generally supposed to be the outward and visible sign of anarchy”.

The following day, this mysterious “refined gentleman” paid another visit.

Mrs Parker, another neighbour, had been discussing the bombing at the gate of her house when a stranger asked her, “Do you know where ex-constable Crowe lives?”

When she told him, he exclaimed “What a pity!” before walking on. Parker described her man as:

[G]ood looking, extremely gentlemanly in his manner and demeanour. His speech was refined and grammatical, though tainted with a strong foreign accent … On the little finger of his left hand shone a gold ring the whole of the time his hand was raised caressing his moustache.

No further trace could be found of the gentlemanly stranger nor his anarchistic trilby, and we might be legitimately suspicious of a description that so closely replicates a by-then well-established trope of the anarchist mastermind: the too-clever intellectual, whose long hair hints at his disordered morals.

You can see already see antecedents of the stereotype in Emile Zola’s great 1885 novel Germinal, which features the nihilist Souvarine: a gentle and sensitive man who plays chess, loves to stroke a pet rabbit … and then dispassionately kills his own friends by dynamiting a coal mine. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad’s novel of terrorism, presents a similar figure in the form of “the Professor”, a talented chemist devoid of all human emotions and devoted only to perfecting ever more destructive explosives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “The too-clever intellectual, whose long hair hints at his disordered morals.” US anarchist and doctor Ben Reitman (1879–1943). Photograph: flickr

While Zola based Souvarine on the real anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, he clearly intended the character as a warning: a cautionary tale about the inhuman consequences of nihilistic violence.

“[Souvarine’s] anarchism is the expression of a profound and destructive despair,” notes the historian David Renton. “In Germinal, Souvarine’s existence is a futile, wasted life.”

Yet, fascinatingly, the Parisian bomber Emile Henry understood the novel quite differently.

“I am almost tempted,” he told the court, as it sentenced him to death, “to say, with Souvarine in Germinal: ‘All discussions about the future are criminal, since they hinder pure and simple destruction and slow down the march of the revolution...’”

In other words, Henry read what was intended as an expose of terrorism – and then embraced the doctrine it presented.

It’s a striking literary instance of a more general phenemon: the peculiar dialogue that played out between the advocates of political violence in the 1890s and the media that denounced them.

The anarchist bombers explained their attacks as the “propaganda of the deed” – shocking acts intended by their very audacity to wake the masses from their slumber. The concept implied a certain theory of the media, taking for granted the necessity for spectacular, violent actions to make political gestures newsworthy.

Not surprisingly, many of the bombers were obsessed with their press.

“Lucheni, who murdered the Empress Elizabeth, longed to get into the newspapers as a famous anarchist assassin,” says Jensen. “Czolgosz, who shot [president] McKinley, slept with a clipping describing the assassination of King Humbert tucked beneath his pillow.”

The bombers wanted the lurid newspaper coverage that followed dynamite outrages, on the basis that readers (or a percentage of them) would be attracted to the cause. It’s scarcely surprising, then, that some of their recruits were ignorant of (or indifferent to) the texts of anarchist theory but instead embraced the caricature of anarchist bomber presented to them by a hostile press.

As Jensen puts it:

[I]t can be argued that the wave of anarchist terror that swept through Europe during the eighties and nineties drew its growing strength from a curious combination of the acts of ideologically committed anarchists and of the violent deeds of a miscellany of perpetrators who shared dubious or no connections with anarchism.

The “propaganda of the deed” has, under different circumstances, been embraced by highly-disciplined, ideologically-driven individuals and organisations. The intellectuals who, under the crushing regime of Tsarist Russia, joined the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya were famous for their asceticism, and calmly accepted the death sentences handed to them.



Yet terrorism’s reliance on publicity means that it has also always fascinated attention-seekers.

In his interesting book The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan Koerner chronicles the epidemic of skyjackings in the US: 159 planes were taken between 1961 and 1972 – and the vast majority of them toward the end of that interval. This was, he notes, a time when the optimism of the 1960s was palpably being extinguished:



Large segments of the population were aggrieved that words and placards had failed to end the war in Vietnam, or cement the gains of a civil rights movement that was decimated by assassinations. That disappointment quickly mutated into a more pervasive sense of hopelessness, a feeling that no amount of civic engagement could ever salvage a system that had been rigged to serve a selfish elite.

Yet while the skyjackings were, in a sense, avowedly political – many of the planes ended up in Cuba – the skyjackers themselves were a weird bunch: “their ranks included frazzled veterans, chronic fabulists, compulsive gamblers, bankrupt businessmen, thwarted academics, career felons and even lovesick teens.”



Frank Arbano (L), a US dynamiter accused of plotting a “dynamite war against churches and men of wealth” in 1915. Photograph: flickr

The comparison with the Sydney siege of late 2014 should be obvious.

Throughout his erratic career, Man Haron Monis seems to have yearned to be noticed. He was preoccupied with Islam and politics in the Middle East but his religious and ideological views swung wildly from his initial claim to be a liberal Shiite persecuted by the Iranian regime, to his final presentation as an enthusiast for the Sunni Islamic State movement. Whatever the cause he promoted, he was drawn to flashy stunts, like chaining himself to parliament or writing bizarre and inflamatory letters.

Monis craved attention – and, in today’s climate, nothing gets attention like terrorism. Should we call him a terrorist?



In a sense, yes. He was a deeply unstable individual: a conman and a criminal, with a penchant for hurting women. But instability goes with the territory – Ravachol, whose chequered career apparently included a stint of grave robbery, also seems to have been quite peculiar.

When skyjacking dominated the papers, there was a certain inevitability about a percentage of lost or damaged individuals declaring themselves skyjackers. Now, with the media fixated on Islam, we’re seeing a comparable tendency for loners and misfits to embrace jihad, not because they’ve studied the theology of Sayyid Qutb or received training in Afghanistan, but because the rhetoric of holy war offers certainty – and waving a black flag gets them noticed.

France, for instance, has recently suffered a spate of what’s been called “lone wolf” attacks. In Dijon, a man screaming “God is great” in Arabic deliberately rammed his car into a crowd, injuring 11 people. Authorities said he had a history of mental illness and had repeatedly sought treatment. In Nantes, the driver of a white van did the same thing. In Jou-les-Tours, a man with a concealed knife walked into a police station and attacked three officers before being shot dead.

Now, it’s difficult to believe that the crimes would have taken the form that they did had the world not been reshaped by 9/11. Like Monis, the assailants used the lexicon of jihad. The rhetoric of Islamism clearly shaped the way they understood their actions.

Yet what’s at stake in calling them terrorists? What has that term come to mean in this particular context?

In the immediate wake of 9/11, the architects of the war on terror warned Western nations to brace for more attacks masterminded by bin Laden and his gang. If the operatives of al-Qaeda weren’t building a “dirty bomb” to take out a city, they were, we were told, plotting to release anthrax into our air supply.

Hence the necessity for attacking Iraq and Afghanistan: if we smashed the terrorist chiefs and destroyed their training camps, the leaderless foot soldiers would be unable to implement their schemes.

Today, the fear of bin Laden has been transferred holus bolus to the Islamic State (Isis), a group that didn’t even exist in 2001. Tony Abbott says Isis has “declared war on the world”. George Brandis, the attorney general, argues it represents an “existential threat”, more dangerous than that posed by the nuclear-armed Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Throughout his erratic career, Man Haron Monis seems to have yearned to be noticed.’ Photograph: AAP

That’s the problem with simply labelling Monis a “terrorist”: it can be a way of shoehorning the Martin Place events into the same tired narrative we’ve been hearing for 13 years, the one in which Australia must perpetually confront catastrophic danger directed by super villains from across the ocean.

In reality, this remains one of the safest countries in the world. Statistically, in the list of dangers that ordinary Australians face, terrorism doesn’t even rate – and anyone who suggests otherwise is a liar.

Furthermore, bin Laden’s dead and so’s Saddam Hussein. It seems most unlikely that Monis had any contact whatsoever with the Islamic State (would its cadre really recruit a self-confessed practitioner of magic?). Nor did he require training from al-Qaeda to conduct his siege – rather, he learned how to use a gun when working as a suburban security guard.

He was not an elite operative smuggled into the country on a secret mission but a damaged and perhaps delusional individual, demanding the government provide him with the Islamic State flag he’d forgotten to bring.

We can call that “terrorism” if you like but it’s a very different phenomenon from the one the politicians described back in 2001: an attack not directed from the hills of Afghanistan so much as one auto-generating from the War on Terror itself.

In the 1890s, when the newspapers invoked anarchism, the label came freighted with all kinds of baggage. Anarchism was, the editorialists said, a grand conspiracy that would annihilate all politicians and destroy civilisation, with the isolated attacks conducted with homemade bombs the forerunner of a looming globally-staged revolution.

“When compared with the suppression of anarchy,” explained US President Theodore Roosevelt as late as 1908, “every other question sinks into insignificance.”



In reality, the death toll from anarchist violence was far, far less than the press coverage suggested. Bob James argues that anarchists and anarchist sympathisers initiated perhaps 40 violent attacks between 1880 and 1902, and were to blame for 100 deaths throughout the entire world.

Furthermore, the notion of some powerful organisation co-ordinating the attacks (along the lines presented in Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday) was purest fantasy. Most of the bombers were impoverished workmen, acting alone, Jensens explains:

By connecting together a disparate series of events, many having nothing to do with anarchism, newspapers helped create the “myth” of anarchist terrorism as a fearsomely powerful phenomenon sweeping through the world. Many governments, frightened publics, and vengeful anarchists (as well as those who aspired to the name of anarchist) came to believe in this myth.

The hysteria that ensued sounds remarkably contemporary:

The public flooded the offices of the Paris police with reports of suspected bombs and bombings. The police found themselves carefully extracting suspicious objects from the garbage, taking them to the municipal laboratories and opening them with a thousand precautions, only to discover that the deadly device was no more than a sardine can. The slogan ‘Long Live Anarchy!’ appeared everywhere in the French capital, spoken in private discussions and shouted at public meetings, printed in the newspapers and scrawled on innumerable walls. The police imagined they heard it whenever encountering resistance, although the culprit might be a tipsy railway clerk rather than a dangerous anarchist. In one case police and prosecutor browbeat a seventeen-year-old youth, after he had stabbed a man, into a false confession that he was an anarchist. In other cases robbers willingly cloaked their deeds with the mantle of the anarchist cause, even though this meant a death sentence rather than imprisonment. Once again police and non-anarchists alike unwittingly collaborated in magnifying the anarchist menace out of all proportion to its true size.

The construction of that myth justified all manner of coercive measures, many of which, once again, seem terribly familiar.



An inspector holds bombs recovered from an attempted anarchist bombing of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, in 1915. Photograph: flickr

In September 1897, Spain circulated a proposal in which a special island (“either in the Philippines or the Carolines”) would become an international penal colony “where dangerous anarchists could be detained for life”. That Guantanamo Bay for anarchists never came to fruition but the next year Italy hosted, under conditions of extraordinary secrecy, the “International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists”, attended by 54 delegates from 21 European countries, including Britain, Germany and France.

That event, and a similar gathering in St Petersburg in 1904, insisted on treating anarchism as a purely criminal matter. The protocol from the Rome conference declared that anarchism had “nothing in common with politics” and was not “under any circumstance to be regarded as a political doctrine”, a statement as preposterous as the repeated denial by governments in the 21st century of any connection between terrorism and Western intervention in the middle east.

The understanding of anarchism as a conspiracy spurred a certain kind of response, focussed on unmasking and punishing the ringleaders so as to smash their networks and prevent new ones forming.

Yet, in retrospect, it’s clear that the punitive measures being advocated produced an effect entirely opposite to that authorities claimed they intended. Predictably, public executions of anarchists spurred revenge attacks (no less than nine bombs followed the guillotining of Ravachol), which led to renewed crackdowns, which led to more bombings, in the spiral of violence we’re accustomed to seeing today.

Historians disagree about the precise reasons for the eventual decline of dynamite violence in most countries during the early 20th century. The most plausible explanations pertain to politics rather than policing – in particular, the development of mass political parties and trade unions offered an alternative model of social change.

What of Mr Maloney and the explosive assault on his family home? Alas, that remains shrouded in mystery!

Though the police paraded a series of moustachioed men before Mrs Spry, she was unable to identify any of them, and no more was heard of the gentlemanly foreigner.

Meanwhile, confronted by the thorny conundrum of how an anarchist mastermind, particularly an educated and gentlemanly one, might misspell the name of his own creed, The Argus eventually conceded that the bomber might be merely a conventional criminal – but then added the scratchings on the explosive (“Anachy”) indicated “the pernicious rubbish upon which his imagination has been feeding”.

Which may well have been true, though it was rather an ironic claim from a newspaper that, like all the others, had immediately (and on the basis of very little) proclaimed the blast an anarchist attack.

Had the press investigated the real world of Australian anarchism instead of simply denouncing “the weak-witted unfortunates who are prone to talk of anarchy on the banks of the Yarra”, the reporters might have discovered that the dynamite faction never established a meaningful foothold in Australia. Rather, as William Lane explained in his novel Working Man’s Paradise, most of the local anarchists simply believed “that men should live in peace and concord, of their own better nature, without being forced, doing harm to none and being harmed by none”.

Indeed, the posters that The Age reported may well have been placed there by JA Andrews, one of the founders of the Melbourne Anarchist Club and someone who made a point of leaving flyers wherever he went. As Bob James documents, Andrews persistently denounced proposals to imitate Ravachol, believing (with good cause) that they were mostly raised by police provocateurs.

It’s possible that the bomb did indeed relate in some way to the ex-constable Cornelius Crowe, a man who subsequently enjoyed a rather chequered career, which included the production of the still-cited Australian Slang Dictionary. He later published a series of inflammatory accusations about police collusion with organised crime, for which he was found guilty of libel.

Could Crowe have been the target – or perhaps (given the repeated suggestions he was a fantasist) could he have planted the bomb himself? We simply don’t know.

Maloney repaired his house, which remains intact today: a distinguished looking building in a pleasant and increasingly prosperous suburb. There’s nothing to suggest that crowds once gathered at the site, terrified by a “threat” that most Australians don’t even remember.