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Sir Redmond Barry

Sir Redmond Barry KCMG (June 7, 1813 – November 23, 1880) was a British colonial judge in Victoria, Australia.

Barry was the son of Major-General Henry Green Barry, of Ballyclough, County Cork and his wife Phoebe. Barry was educated at a military school in Kent, and at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the Irish bar in 1838.

Barry emigrated to Australia, and after a short stay at Sydney went to Melbourne in 1839, a city with which he was ever afterwards closely identified. After practicing his profession for some years, he became commissioner of the Court of Requests, and after the creation in 1851 of the colony of Victoria, out of the Port Phillip district of New South Wales, was the first Solicitor-General, with a seat in the Legislative Council and a member of the Executive Council. In 1852 he was appointed judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria. He also served as acting Chief Justice and Administrator of the government.

Barry was noted for his service to the community, and convinced the state government to spend money on public works, particularly education. He was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1848), the University of Melbourne (1853), and the State Library of Victoria (1854). He served as the first chancellor of the university until his death, and was president of the trustees of the State Library.

Barry was the judge for the Eureka Stockade treason trials in the Supreme Court in 1855. The thirteen miners were all acquitted.

He represented Victoria at the London International Exhibition of 1862 and at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876. He was made a knight bachelor in 1860, and was created a Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1877.

In October 1878, at Beechworth court, Barry presided in a case against a Mrs Ellen Kelly (King) and two others men in aiding and abetting the shooting of a police officer called Fitzpatrick. In sentencing Mrs Kelly to three years with hard labour, Barry said, 'if your son Ned were here I would make an example of him for the whole of Australia - I would give him fifteen years'. That Ned Kelly was not charged before that court, yet deemed guilty without a trial, that his mother was sentenced to hard labour on the false and unsubstantiated evidence of the drunkard Fitzpatrick, was beginning of the Kelly Outbreak (1878-1880). By the time it was over, wrote Kenneally, Barry's 'unlawful, unjust and maliciously threatened sentence of fifteen years on Ned Kelly...was responsible for the deaths of ten persons.(p.188) In 1880 he presided at the final trial of Ned Kelly. Here was a confrontation between Barry of the Irish Protestant ascendancy and Kelly, the Irish Catholic bush larrikin. The trial and the exchanges between Kelly and Barry were the subject of many articles and books by lawyers and historians. When he sentenced Kelly to death by hanging, Barry uttered the customary words "May God have mercy on your soul". Kelly is reported to have replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go". On 23 November 1880, twelve days after Kelly's execution, Sir Redmond Barry died from what J.J. Kenneally termed 'congestion of the lungs and a carbuncle in the neck'.

The State Library of Victoria has named a reading room after Sir Redmond Barry, who was the first Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library.[1]

• Serle, Percival (1949). "Barry, Sir Redmond". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Kenneally, J. J. The Inner History of the Kelly Gang and their pursuers, (first printed 1929); (quote above from 1969 (8th) edition p. 188)

• Bright Sparcs
• Trial of Ned Kelly
• Ned Kelly: An Overview

• Judiciary of Australia
• List of Judges of the Supreme Court of Victoria

• Supreme Court of Victoria Website
• Redmond Barry's Gravesite
• Peter Ryan, 'Barry, Sir Redmond (1813 - 1880)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, MUP, 1969, pp 108-111.