
By Stephen Utick
The extreme saga of the colonial personality 'Captain' Charles Gordon O'Neill is advised for the 1st time. An engineer, inventor, parliamentarian and philanthropist, Charles was once a imperative co-founder of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia and New Zealand. Born of Irish mom and dad in Scotland in 1828, O'Neill travelled to the colonies in 1863 with using ambition, matched via entrepreneurial imaginative and prescient. an excellent engineer, he helped create city plans, railway routes and tramways throughout New Zealand. Elected to the recent Zealand parliament as a goldfields MP, he warned of the danger of weather swap from destroying forests. He moved to Sydney in 1881 to paintings for the negative of Australia. starting in Sydney's wild Rocks district, he pioneered many charitable tasks and verified the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales. His foresight was once vindicated because the colonial age of gold used to be by way of the commercial melancholy of the Eighteen Nineties. In a sour accident, regardless of all his technical ability, entry to capital and political connections, O'Neill died a pauper amid the slums of The Rocks in 1900.