by James Morton
Manns’ execution, on 26 March 1863, was not a humanitarian success. Apart from trying to steal his new boots, the hangman failed to secure the rope properly and Manns’ face was half torn off. Eventually, four convicts held his body while the executioner readjusted the rope. That night, an Archibald Hamilton, clearly a follower of Cesare Lombroso, the criminologist who believed criminals had different skulls from those of the general population, gave a lecture, ‘Crime, Its Causes, Punishment and Crime’, illustrated with replicas of criminals’ skulls. Instead of punishment for them, he advocated a course of treatment ‘in strict accordance with their phrenological developments’. Admission was one shilling and reserved seats two shillings.
One outcome of the robbery was the decision that no longer should all members of a gold escort ride in the coach in which the precious metal was being carried. In future, there would be an outrider and officers behind it. Over the years, Cobb & Co coaches were held up a relatively modest thirty-six times, with nine of those occurring between the middle of September 1862 and the end of February the next year. On 10 February the special commissioner sentenced three men to be hanged; five to fifteen years on the roads, the first year in irons (the man’s legs would be chained together, although this did not prevent escapes); one man to twelve years; and another to ten. This may have decreased the number of robberies but it certainly did not put an end to them. Several more coaches were attacked before the end of the year.
The first attempted armed bank robbery in Australia is credited to the remnants of Frank Gardiner’s gang. On 13 July 1863 Ben Hall, along with Johnny Gilbert and John O’Meally, held up the Commercial Bank at Carcoar, an area popular with ex-convicts. A teller fired a shot into the ceiling, thwarting the robbery. The manager was shot as he was returning to the bank, and the gang fled without seizing anything. However, as some compensation, on their way out of town they robbed a man of £2 and his watch.
But now, with the cities growing, bank branches were springing up in the suburbs, very often as rooms in shops. And these were not the targets of bushrangers but of metropolitan criminals. On 14 June 1864 a team led by Samuel Woods, whose real name was Young and who had served fifteen years on Norfolk Island, raided the George Street, Collingwood, branch of the ES&A Bank. However, the raiders had bitten off more than they could chew.
Around 10.45 a.m. Woods, who appeared to be drunk, entered the bank, and John Dowling, the manager, took him into a side room, at which point Woods produced a gun and ‘threatened to blow his brains out’. Undeterred, Dowling called for the assistance of young ledger clerk Percy de Jersey Grut, but before Grut could assist, he had problems of his own. Two men came into the bank and threatened him; one produced a pistol and a bullet scorched Grut’s neck. They ran out of the bank, and Grut went to help the manager, picking up a candlestick as he went.
The manager’s nephew, Thomas, arrived to help and was shot in the hand. Woods, who had a dagger, stabbed the unfortunate Grut, who now hit him three times with the candlestick, breaking it. There was a knocking on the door, and the manager thought the police had arrived but it was a man from the shop opposite, who had brought a cheese cutter with him. Woods gave up, saying, ‘You can’t prove I fired the pistol—it was an accident’.
The gang members, who were thought to have robbed Bergers in Flinders Street a few days previously, were quickly rounded up. As for Dowling, his nephew and Grut, there were testimonials, collections and justifiable praise; in particular, for Grut. The collections realised £120, divided equally between them. On 23 June Melbourne Punch published a congratulatory little poem, beginning:
When you cracked that
cracksman’s nut,
Bravely daring,
On the scroll of fame
You traced your worthy
Name.
At the trial, Woods and William Carver, one of the gang members, tried to argue that the bank’s money had never been in Dowling’s possession, so avoiding the scenario that would convert the robbery into a capital offence. They were unsuccessful, and were executed on 3 August 1864, along with Christopher Hamilton, hanged for a murder. Two other members of Woods’ gang, Jeremiah Phillips and James Anderson, each received fifteen years on the roads, the first three to be served in irons. Woods, who was not pleased by what he saw as their cowardice and betrayal in not coming to his rescue, remarked that very soon they would wish they had been hanged.
With the passing of the New South Wales Felons Apprehension Act 1865, it became lawful to shoot an outlaw bushranger on sight. That year Ben Hall, who had come to be seen as a ‘social bandit’, was shot and killed by police, along with his offsider, John Gilbert. Captain Thunderbolt lasted only another five years before, on 25 May, he was killed by Constable Walker, near Uralla.
Probably Queensland’s first major crime for profit, as opposed to survival, occurred on 6 November 1867. Gold commissioner, magistrate and thorough rogue Thomas Griffin, born in Sligo, Ireland, had been a store clerk in Dublin before serving in the Crimean War. On his way to Melbourne in 1857, he had met and charmed the widow Crosby, who had children of his age. He squandered her money, and upon their separation, took half of what was left. He went to Sydney, and became a clerk and then acting sergeant in the constabulary office. He undoubtedly had charm, because he endeared himself to Governor Brown and so was eventually appointed gold commissioner.
Unfortunately, he gambled away £252 worth of gold that Chinese miners had given him, and to retrieve his losses, joined a gold escort party that included several police officers. During the journey, at the Mackenzie River, Griffin attempted to poison four officers, and when that failed to kill constables John Power and Patrick Cahill, he shot them dead and escaped with £4000 of gold.
Caught and convicted, and after an unsuccessful appeal, Griffin continued to deny his guilt to the bitter end, even on the scaffold when, after a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, he was hanged at Rockhampton on 1 June 1868. No one doubted his guilt, though, and the Queenslander thought he had died as he had lived: ‘hard, callous and impenitent’.
The day after his death, a warder, Alfred Grant, wrote to the Queenslander that Griffin had tried to bribe him so he could escape. In return, Griffin would tell him where he had buried the stolen money. If escape was impossible, Grant was to bring him either strychnine or a knife, and if he did so, Griffin would make sure his sister in Ireland received £500. Grant had reported this to the principal turnkey, John Lee, and it was agreed he should play along with Griffin. Eventually, Griffin told Grant the whole story of the killings, and after a search, Grant and Lee found the missing money, which was returned to the Australian Joint Stock Bank. For their efforts, the pair were given £200 each and dismissed from their positions.
Eight days after Griffin’s death, his grave was broken into and his head severed from his body. At the time there was considerable interest in criminals’ phrenology and it has been suggested that the theft was for scientific purposes. His skull is believed to have ended up in the home of a Rockhampton doctor but, despite a £20 reward, it was never retrieved. Cahill and Power are believed to have been the first Queensland officers to be killed on duty, and Griffin was the first man to be legally executed in Rockhampton.
A number of others followed him to the scaffold in relatively quick succession. These included dubious jockey Alexander Archibald, bludger George Palmer and New Zealander John Williams, hanged for the murder, on 24 April 1869, of Patrick Halligan, one-time landlord of the Lion Creek Hotel at Rockhampton, which he had just sold to Archibald.
Halligan, who regularly brought gold in from the Morinish field, had set out with more than £300 in coins and notes. When he did not return, a search party was sent out, and trackers found traces of blood, a bullet mark on a tree and two silver coins, as well as his hat and whip. On 7 May his badly decomposed body was found in the Fitzroy River.
Three days after the body was found, a miner provided enough information for the arrest of Archibald, who promp
tly dobbed in Palmer, Williams and a Charles Taylor. If Archibald thought that by turning Crown witness he would not be prosecuted, he was wrong. It was Taylor who was allowed to turn Queen’s evidence and so escape the gallows. George Palmer had long been suspected of bailing up the coach running between Gympie and Brisbane. He hid out for some time before arranging with a local solicitor, JW Stable, to turn him in and so pick up the £700 reward on offer.
On 16 January 1880 an attempted robbery of the Queensland National Bank took place. The robber, later identified as Joseph Wells, entered it at 10 a.m. and, armed with a six-chamber revolver, demanded money from the bank’s employees. Following a scuffle and the wounding of a Mr Murphy, who was helping to thwart the robbery, Wells ran off into the bush. He scampered up the so-called ‘robbers tree’, where he stayed until he was found and eventually lured to the ground. He was charged with robbery under arms and at his trial, held in Toowoomba, his counsel attempted the same type of ingenious defence that Woods and Carver had attempted in Melbourne seventeen years earlier—that to be convicted of robbery under arms, Wells had to have injured the man, or men, from whom he actually stole the money. It did him no more good than it had Woods and Carver. Wells was the last person to be hanged for robbery under arms in Queensland, when he was executed on 22 March 1880 at Brisbane Gaol.
The transport of gold in the early days could be described as cavalier. In Western Australia, which did not have its gold rush until the 1890s, the ingenious, if flawed, theory behind what would now be seen as recklessness was that even if a robbery occurred, the villains could not get away. A police escort was expensive, and the National Bank was the first to organise gold deliveries with its own security escort, in the form of a couple of youths. Even then, the bullion boxes were simply placed on the floor of the carriage, with the escorts on each side.
The journey by horse from Malcolm to Menzies, a distance of 70 miles, took fourteen to eighteen hours on a good day, and forty-eight hours if the roads were in worse condition than usual. Horses were changed every 8 to 12 miles. By coach, the journey could take up to four days. On occasion, the so-called gold escort was one man driving a sulky, with weapons unhelpfully secured at the bottom of the trap, along with the gold. Some of these guards were members of the English upper classes out for adventure who were very disappointed not to encounter the Western Australian equivalent of Ned Kelly at Southern Cross.
One early Western Australian robbery took place on a wages, rather than bullion, run, when in January 1897 John Mitchell and John Paull set out by horse and buggy with £723 to pay the men working at the Burbanks mines. En route, they were held up and tied to trees. A man, Houlihan, hearing the scuffle, came to investigate and he was tied up as well. The three men managed to release themselves soon afterwards and drove into town, but by then, both the robbers and cash were long gone. Troopers and a tracker found discarded clothing and two rifles, which had been set on fire, but the robbers were never caught. It was thought that miners, rather than genuine bushrangers, were responsible.
In New South Wales, John Vane was said—incorrectly—to have been the only bushranger to die in his bed. He had met and ridden with Ben Hall in the early 1860s. After the death of his friend Mickey Burke, in a raid at Dunn’s Plains 25 miles from Bathurst, Vane surrendered and was sentenced to fifteen years.
In Dunn’s Plains, the local gold commissioner, Henry Keightley, had effectively thrown down a challenge to Ben Hall and his gang to attack his property and, on 24 October 1863, they took him up on it. The five-strong gang rode to his station and, in a brief shoot-out, Burke was killed. Keightley was kidnapped and held hostage while his wife, Caroline, rode the 25 miles to Bathurst with a friend, Dr Pechey, following in a buggy, to raise the £500 ransom Hall demanded. There had been a bounty of £500 on each of the gang and Keightley would have been paid that for killing Burke. This was the ‘Neapolitan system of ransom’ to which the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal referred. Caroline Keightley borrowed the money from the Commercial Bank, and Pechey rode to the Hall camp and threw the £500 to gang member John Gilbert to count. Keightley was released and the gang rode away, leaving Burke’s body to be buried by the gold commissioner. The reward money was raised two days later to £1000 each. It was then Vane surrendered.
With the arrival of the telegraph and the railways, the era of the bushranger was both changing and coming to a close. The Irish-born Andrew Scott, known as Captain Moonlite, was a one-time lay preacher at Bacchus Marsh on the road to the Ballarat goldfields. Some have claimed his father was a Church of England minister and that Scott seduced a young girl, Eveline, who died in childbirth.
Scott went to New Zealand, where he served in the police force before returning to Bacchus Marsh. Transferred to Mount Egerton, he befriended 18-year-old Ludwig Julius Bruun, the manager of the London Chartered Bank, which Scott robbed on 8 May 1869, leaving a note saying that Bruun had done everything he could to stop the robbery. Bruun was acquitted at a subsequent trial but lost his job, while Scott went to Sydney, where for a time he cut a swathe through society, entertaining actresses and buying himself a yacht. He was jailed over passing a dud cheque, and on his release in March 1872, was rearrested for the Mount Egerton robbery. He appeared before Mr Justice Barry, who sentenced him to eleven years. Released after seven, he first toured as a lecturer on penal reform but was met by a hostile press.
Now, together with his close friend James Nesbitt, with whom he was possibly in a sexual relationship, he began his career as a bushranger, leading the so-called ‘Moonlite Gang’ of young admirers. One story is that when Scott offered his services to Ned Kelly he was rebuffed, with Kelly replying that he would shoot the increasingly mentally unstable Scott on sight.
Others suggested that Scott’s first bushranging exploit was also his last, and that he and his group of young friends had merely set out to walk to Sydney to find work. Whether they were true bushrangers is another question. Some say they were genuinely looking for work. They did, however, take weapons with them, purchased with Moonlite’s lecturing earnings.
The life of a bushranger was not always whisky and women. On 15 November 1879 his gang bailed up the Wantabadgery station, near Wagga Wagga, after being refused work, shelter and food. Starving, and having sold their clothes for bread, and with the cold and rainy nights in the bush, Moonlite, in his words, succumbed to ‘desperation,’ terrorising the staff and family of Claude McDonald, the unsympathetic station owner. He also robbed the Australian Arms Hotel of a large quantity of alcohol, and took Edmund McGlede prisoner at his farmhouse, where he and the gang holed up. The number of hostages now totalled twenty-five.
During the subsequent police raid, Nesbitt was shot and killed while attempting to lead them away from the house so that Scott could escape. While Scott was distracted by seeing Nesbitt shot down, McGlede took the opportunity to disarm the gang leader. According to newspaper reports at the time, as Nesbitt lay dying, ‘his leader wept over him like a child, laid his head upon his breast, and kissed him passionately’. Scott was hanged at Darlinghurst, along with another member of the gang, Thomas Rogan, on 20 January the following year. His last wish was:
to be buried beside my beloved James Nesbitt, the man with whom I was united by every tie which could bind human friendship, we were one in hopes, in heart and soul and this unity lasted until he died in my arms.
He had planned their joint headstone:
This headstone covers the remains of two friends … Separated 17/11/1879 and United 20/1/1880.
At the time, his final wish was not granted, but in January 1995 Scott’s remains were exhumed from Rookwood Cemetery and reburied at Gundagai, next to Nesbitt’s grave. In recent years, Scott has become something of a championed figure in the gay community.
It would not be surprising if many of the bushrangers were gay. Certainly, there have been suggestions that members of the Kelly Gang were. Sidney Nolan’s 1946 paintings of them depict Steve Hart wearing an attractive floral fr
ock and riding sidesaddle. Frederick Standish, the police commissioner who supervised the hunt for the Kelly Gang, may also have been gay. He was said to have been attached to two of his men, Frank Hare and Stanhope O’Connor, whose relationship with him was described as being like that of David and Jonathan, a clear reference to the biblical homosexual pair.
Just as, later, robbers and standover men would claim the soubriquet of ‘Captain of the Underworld’ or ‘King of the Underworld’, or the ‘Grey Shadow’, so there were a number of claimants for the title of ‘The Last of the Bushrangers’. These included John Vane who was the only member of the Ben Hall Gang not to be killed or hanged, dying of Crohn’s disease in January 1906.
An early candidate for the title was Michael Howe. A pamphlet published immediately after his death named him ‘The Last and Worst of the Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land’ but this was wishful thinking. He was probably not the worst and, since he was killed—beaten to death and decapitated—as early as October 1818, he was certainly not the last.
Howe had been a merchant sailor, then a military man, before turning to highway robbery, for which he was transported to Australia in 1812. He almost immediately rebelled against his merchant boss and bolted for the bush, where he had heard that John (or James) Whitehead led a large gang—some say as many as eighty-strong. Like the Romans with the Sabines, they raided an Aboriginal camp and abducted women for themselves. Howe’s woman, ‘Black’ Mary Cockerill, provided him with useful bush knowledge and helped him avoid capture, until he turned on her.
One of the more likely contenders for the title was Jack Bradshaw, also known as George Davis. Born in Dublin in 1845, he came to Australia at the age of fifteen and worked as a shearer. He seems also to have been a small-time confidence trickster, working with ‘Professor Bruce’, who claimed to be able to read people’s skulls. Bradshaw would already have cased the particular small town they were operating in and reported back to Bruce for his ‘readings’.