The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Knowing that his protection was other convicts, Brady took care not to harm assigned servants in the homesteads he robbed; but in case they “gave music” to the police later, he forced them to drink their masters’ whiskey until they were too fuddled to remember what his men had said, or which way they had gone. At least one luckless teetotaller died from this; and others, due to the vile quality of colonial spirits, became very sick.

  The Brady gang fought like Tasmanian devils when cornered, with skill and coolness, shooting their way past many police ambushes. They had no compunction about revenging themselves on people who they believed were their oppressors—especially “flogging magistrates”—but they would also treat their captives fairly if such people had once been fair to them. Thus they made a prisoner of John Barnes, a colonial surgeon, while ransacking a magistrate’s house at Coal River:

  One of them men who stopped me … had been punished a few days before by order of the magistrate, upon some trifling complaint of his master; the man was not in very good health … and I took him down before the whole of the flagellation had been inflicted, and requested that the magistrate would pardon him the rest; he recollected the circumstance with a little gratitude, or probably I might have been more severely handled.44

  They took his watch but gave him back his lancet-case, “telling me that that might be of service to them by and by.”

  But Lieutenant-Governor Arthur was a tirelessly methodical man, and he wore Brady down. With a reorganized police force and more soldiers from the 40th Regiment under his command, he picked off the gang members in running skirmishes, one by one. He offered irresistible rewards—300 guineas or 300 acres of land free of quit-rent to the man who brought Brady in; or, for convicts, a full unconditional pardon and free passage to England. He sent rank-and-file field police convicts out wearing fetters, to infiltrate the remnants of Brady’s gang with a story of having escaped from the chain gang. Betrayed and outflanked, Brady was shot in the leg in a skirmish near Paterson’s Plains outside Launceston. He got away but was captured a few days later, limping and exhausted, by a settler named John Batman (the future founder of Melbourne).

  They put Matthew Brady in Launceston Jail and a few days later loaded him with chains and brought him down to Hobart—accompanied, to his disgust, by the man he most despised in the world, the infant-killer Mark Jeffries. Before his trial and hanging, Brady was feted as a popular hero. Dozens of petitions for clemency arrived at Government House. Women shed tears for the “likely lad,” the “poor colonial boy,” who had shown such consideration to their sex. His cell was filled every day with visitors bringing baskets of flowers, fan letters, fruit and fresh-baked cakes. If his fate had been decided by vote, he would have gone free. But the judge was determined to make a solemn and awful example of him. On May 4, 1826, Brady received his last Communion and mounted the scaffold above a sea of colonial faces, contorted in grief or cheering him over the drop; only his enemies were silent. The government could not expunge his name from popular memory: A 4,000-foot peak in the Western Tiers, which frowns directly down on Arthur’s Lake below, is still known as Brady’s Lookout, and there is a Brady’s Lake out past Tungatinah power station on the Lyell Highway—whereas Mike Howe is remembered in less noble geographical detail, a gully near Lawrenny and a marsh east of Table Mountain.

  Matthew Brady was by no means the last Tasmanian bushranger, or even the last to acquire a popular aura (that man was Martin Cash, an Irish picaro who absconded no less than four times from Port Arthur in the early 1840s and lived to a ripe age as a farmer near Glenorchy). But he was the last politically significant bandit, the last menacing avatar of a convict counterculture in Van Diemen’s Land that soon withered under the patient, systematic totalitarianism of Sir George Arthur. After Brady’s death, no roaming bushranger would be able to impede, or even threaten, the progress of Tasmanian settlement. Nor would any of them threaten a jacquerie, the convicts’ revolt that had figured in the nightmares of Australian settlers and governors since the Irish rose at Toongabbie in 1804. Van Diemen’s Land was a small island, soon filled up, and the pattern of ownership and intensive grazing that dominated it by the mid-1830s disposed of the bushrangers’ environment. They could no longer strike from virgin wilderness to prosperous farm or town in a day’s walk, or even a day’s ride. They were left without cover, like foxes in a bare field; whereas 700 miles north on the mainland, in the wide expanses of New South Wales that lay back from the coast, the bandits continued to pillage and present their threats to the law, reminding convicts and awakening the fears of their masters that chains were made to be broken.

  iv

  IT WAS ON the mainland, after 1825, that the popular myth of the Australian bushranger took its final form in story and folksong. Repressed in Van Diemen’s Land by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur—significantly, there seem to be no bushranger ballads of Tasmanian origin—it sprang up like an irritant weed in New South Wales. Bushranging became a social problem there later than in Van Diemen’s Land, because Sydney and Parramatta had never had to rely on convict kangaroo-hunters for their early survival. Not until the colony broke out of the narrow coastal plains and expanded over the mountains to Bathurst (giving plenty of scope for outlaws to hide in the gorges and caves of the Blue Mountains, now within striking distance of new trunk roads and farms) did bush-ranging start to flourish. And the supply of new bushrangers was guaranteed by Governor Ralph Darling’s crackdown in convict discipline. Most of them came from the dreaded iron gangs working on the “Great West Road” across the Blue Mountains and on the “Great North Road,” surveyed in 1825 and completed in 1831, which ran through 170 miles of rough sterile gorges and linked Sydney to the burgeoning farm districts of Maitland and the Hunter River Valley. The local names for spots along this road were eloquent: “Hungry Flat,” “Dennis’s Dog-Kennel,” “No-Grass Valley,” “Devil’s Backbone.” As the iron gangs of Darling’s administration wore their way through the mountain sandstone, cutting the roads foot by anguished foot, there was no shortage of men who would rather take to the bush at any risk than spend another day “condemned to live in slavery, and wear the convict chain.”

  For ten years the roads and semi-settled districts of New South Wales, west to Parramatta and Bathurst, north to the Hunter River, were pestered by bushranging convicts who struck singly or in small gangs. There was nothing romantic about them. A few were pathetic harmless men who ran away from chain gang or master because, like a Bathurst absconder named Charles Jubey, they were “so harassed and torn about” by cruel discipline that they became “weary of life.” Many were mere thugs: muggers, chicken-stealers and occasional rapists. Small farmers were their victims, not the “rich,” and their crimes were brutal when not petty. Some tended, not without reason, to be paranoically suspicious: Daniel “Mad Dog” Morgan (ca. 1830–1865), one of the second wave of bushrangers who terrorized Victoria and New South Wales after the convict period, was so afraid of poison that he would accept no food from the settlers he robbed except hard-boiled eggs.

  When caught, the mainland bushrangers did not comport themselves like Robin Hood either. Their speeches from the dock or at the gallows’ foot were apt to be primitive. In 1834, Dr. Robert Wardell, barrister and former editor of the colony’s chief newspaper, The Australian, was riding the river boundary of his 2,500-acre estate at Petersham, near Sydney. Outside a humpy, he surprised three escaped convicts, whose leader, an iron gang absconder named John Jenkins, took aim with a stolen rifle and shot him dead. Jenkins and his adult accomplice, a runaway assigned servant named Thomas Tattersdale, were tried on the evidence of the third prisoner, a terrified boy called Emanuel Brace. At the verdict of guilty, the judge uttered his ritual question: Did either have anything to say before sentence of death was passed? Jenkins did:

  Throwing himself into a threatening and unbecoming attitude, [he] remarked, that he had not had a fair trial, a bloody old woman had been palmed upon him for Counsel; he did not care a bugg
er for dying, or a damn for anyone in court; and that he would as soon shoot every bloody bugger in court … [He made] a violent attack on Tattersdale, and struck him two tremendous blows in the face, which knocked him down in the dock … The Judge sat in mute astonishment.… [I]t took a dozen constables to secure and handcuff him.45

  Not until 1839 would the traveller be able to speak with confidence of “bushrangers, a sub-genus in the order banditti, which, happily, can no longer exist, except in places inaccessible to the mounted police.”46 These mounted police, whose sole task was tracking and capturing bushrangers, began in 1825 as a small force of dragoons (whence, “goons”] under Governor Brisbane, drawn from infantry regiments in Sydney—2 officers and 13 troopers, operating mainly around Parramatta. Darling increased it until by 1839 it had swollen to 9 officers, a sergeant-major, 156 non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, with 136 horses—not a large net to throw over so large a territory, but often an effective one. The “horse-police” or “traps” (mounted police) like Sir George Arthur’s constabulary in Van Diemen’s Land, were disliked only a little less than the bushrangers themselves. They were apt to use violence when dealing with small Emancipist settlers whom they routinely suspected of harboring bushrangers out of criminal sympathy. Free workers hated them, because of the “pass system” enforced under Darling’s emergency Bush-ranging Act of 1830 (11 Geo. IV, c. 10), whereby any man in the colony who could not produce his ticket-of-leave and travel pass on demand could be clapped in jail until he could prove he was not an escaped convict. Despite its unpopularity, the Bushranging Act was renewed under Governor Bourke in 1832, and again in 1834. Although Bourke’s gubernatorial instincts were more liberal than Darling’s, he persuaded himself that it was worth offending the spirit of British law with such an act: “I believe … it would occasion very great dissatisfaction among the free People of the Colony to deprive them of the protection which this law affords,” he told London in 1832.47

  Furthermore, because Governor Darling had followed Sir George Arthur’s lead in setting up government rewards for information against bushrangers, the colony was a morass of denunciation and spying. In this way the lower classes came to feel victimized by the bushranger laws, and this created a wave of sympathy toward the bushrangers themselves.

  Much as the “free objects” (as convicts and ex-convicts sardonically called emigrant settlers in Australia) might detest the bushrangers, it was not easy to stamp out every vestige of fellow-feeling between men who had undergone the government lash. Alexander Harris, while working in the 1820s as a cedar-cutter on the coastal slopes of the Illawarra, noted that bushrangers would freely join the loggers’ jamborees around the rum keg on deserted beaches and he compared the sight of their boisterous revelry to “a pirate’s isle.” No one would denounce them to Darling’s dragoons (who seldom dared to penetrate those deep coastal forests), partly from fear of reprisals but mainly “because, having mostly been prisoners themselves, it was a point of honour among the sawyers to help them as much as they could.”48

  By the late 1820s, such sympathies had already crystallized into folk ballads—none of whose texts, unfortunately, survive. To be the hero of a song offered a snatch of immortality to the convict, as the surgeon Peter Cunningham speculated in Two Years in New South Wales (1827):

  The vanity of being talked of, I verily believe, leads many foolish fellows to join in this kind of life—songs being made about their exploits by their sympathising brethren.… It is the boast of many of them, that their names will live in the remembrance of the colony long after their exit from among us to some penal settlement, either in this world or the next; Riley, the captain of the Hunter’s River banditti, vaunting that he should be long spoken of (whatever his fate may be) in fear by his enemies, and in admiration by his friends!

  The year Cunningham published this, the prototype of Australian convict-ballad heroes began his desperate colonial career. His ballad, the first surviving one about a bushranger, opens in fine style:

  Come all you gallant bushrangers who gallop on the plain,

  Who scorn to live in slavery and wear the convict chain,

  Attention pay to what I say, and value it if you do—

  I shall relate the matchless fate of bold Jack Donohoe!

  “Bold Jack” was a short, freckled, blond-haired, blue-eyed Irishman named John Donohoe (1806–1830), sentenced to life transportation in Dublin in 1823. On arrival in 1825, Donohoe had been assigned in the usual way (to John Pagan, a settler of Parramatta). He had misbehaved and spent time in a road gang; then he returned to assigned service under a Parramatta surgeon, Major West. The ballad, with a reasonable minimum of exaggeration, takes up the story:

  He’d scarcely served twelve months in chains upon the Australian shore,

  When he took to the highway as he had done before:

  He went with Jacky Underwood, and Webber and Walmsley too,

  These were the true companions of bold Jack Donohoe.

  Bold Donohoe was taken for a notorious crime,

  And sentenced to be hanged upon the gallows-tree so high—

  But when they brought him to Sydney Gaol he left them in the stew,

  For when they came to call the roll, they missed Jack Donohoe.

  The “notorious crime” was committed in December 1827: Donohoe “went out” with two Irish confederates named Kilroy and Smith, holding up the bullock-drays that plied between farm and market on the Windsor Road—a kind of highway robbery which, because of the lumbering slowness of its target, did not demand a horse. The three men were soon caught, and in March 1828 they were sentenced to hang. Kilroy and Smith duly swung, but Donohoe made a break for freedom between the court and the condemned cell and fled. Before long he had assembled a small gang of other Irish and English absconders. They stole horses from settlers and, for the next eighteen months, to the discomfiture and occasional terror of the law-abiding, ranged across a wide swath of territory beyond the Blue Mountains, from Bathurst south to Yass and the Illawarra, close to Sydney and Parramatta, and north almost to the Hunter River. Hardly a week passed without a stickup, and in the bush where goods of any kind were hard to come by, Donohoe easily got rid of the swag. After his death, police searches (directed by a gang member named Walmsley, who turned informer to save his neck) showed that no less than thirty small settlers had received stolen goods from him.

  As Donohoe made his escape, to the bush he went straightway,

  The people they were all afraid to travel by night or day—

  For every day in the newspapers they brought out something new,

  Concerning that bold bushranger they called Jack Donohoe!

  This verse commemorates what would become a frequent gripe of Australian authorities—that the press, in its lurid pennycatching, works against the government by making heroes out of criminals. With Ralph Darling as governor there was more point to this, for the Sydney papers took any chance they could get to make him look like a fool. In Van Diemen’s Land, the colonial press pointedly observed, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur took the field himself in pursuit of bushrangers and stamped them out; but in New South Wales, Governor Darling sat in Government House, while “with a mounted police and a police establishment, which if not effective is not for want of expense, and a strong garrison of armed soldiery, the bushranging gentry seem to carry on their pranks almost without molestation.” Donohoe and his mates even displayed a raffish elegance of dress and “a remarkably clean appearance,” their leader sporting “black hat, superfine blue cloth coat lined with silk surtout fashion, plaited shirt (good quality), laced boots.” Not only were they Pimpernels, the Australian sardonically implied, but they were not as bad as they were painted:

  Donohoe, the notorious bushranger, whose name is a terror in some parts of the country, though we fancy he has more credit given to him for outrages than he is deserving of, is said to have been seen by a party well acquainted with his person, in Sydney, enjoying, not more than a couple of da
ys ago … a ginger-beer bottle.49

  The price on Donohoe’s head rose from £20 to £100, and Darling sent more police and volunteers into the field to refute the myth—which had spread beyond “the ignorant and tainted portion of the population”—that the fierce little Dubliner had a charmed life. They caught up with him at Bringelly, near Campbelltown outside Sydney.

  As he and his companions rode out one afternoon,

  Not thinking that the pangs of death would overtake them soon,

  To their surprise the Horse-Police rode smartly into view,

  And in double-quick time they did advance to take Jack Donohoe.

  “Oh Donohoe, oh Donohoe, throw down your carabine,

  Or do you intend to fight us all? And will you not resign?”

  “To surrender to such cowardly dogs is a thing I never would do—

  Today I’ll fight with all my might!” cried bold Jack Donohoe.

  “It never shall be said of me that Donohoe the brave

  Could surrender to a policeman or become an Englishman’s slave—

  I’d rather roam these hills so wild like a dingo or kangaroo

  Than work one hour for Government,” cried bold Jack Donohoe.

  The Sergeant and the Corporal they did their men divide,

  Some fired at him from behind, and some from every side,

  The Sergeant and the Corporal they both fired at him too,

  And a rifle-bullet pierced the heart of bold Jack Donohoe.

  Nine rounds he fired and nine men shot before the fatal ball

  That pierced his heart and made him smart and caused him for to fall—

  And as he closed his mournful eyes, he bade the world adieu,

  Crying “Convicts all, pray for the soul of bold Jack Donohoe!”

  The song embellishes, as ballads do. Donohoe did not kill nine “traps” with nine shots (or even six with six, as variants of the ballad have it) and his only recorded utterance at the moment of battle was a stream of oaths, inviting the effing buggers to come and get their bloody guts blown out, or something to that effect; he was not shot in the heart, but in the head, by a trooper named Muggleston—and so forth. Ballads are not history. Nevertheless, they do give us some sense of the penumbra of received opinion that surrounds historical events, even small ones like the killing of a flash, cursing little Mick by a squad of mounted police among the gum trees on one hot September afternoon in 1830. In death, Donohoe became more than the meager sum of his parts in life. At one end of the social scale, one finds Darling’s surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell (later Sir Thomas, distinguished Australian explorer and translator of Luis de Camoëns’s epic Os Lusiades from the Portuguese) visiting the Sydney morgue to view Donohoe’s corpse and drawing his portrait, beneath which he quoted a couplet from Byron: