by Graham Seal
My name is Frederick Ward, I am a native of this isle;
I rob the rich to feed the poor and make the children smile.
There was a large price on Ward’s head, but his bush skills and strong local sympathy kept him at large for nearly seven years, until he was killed by a policeman in May 1870. In an echo of many other outlaw stories, it was long claimed that it was another man—Frederick Britten or a Fred Blake—who had been killed, and that the real Thunderbolt was living safely elsewhere in Australia, or in New Zealand, Canada or even the United States.
Contemporary accounts of Thunderbolt’s robberies tend to support his Robin Hood image, as in this letter by one of his victims, hotel manager James Neariah Roper, in May 1867:
On the 3rd May I sent the Hosteler to Tenterfield on business, but he could not find the horse he intended to ride, which at once excited my suspicion that he was stolen, in consequence of a boy the previous evening, purchasing 20 lb of flour with other goods, to go on a journey to Grafton. I wrote a note to Constable Langworthy. He arrived the same evening and has been in and about the neighbourhood till now.
On the 8th (this morning) I sent the mail off to Tenterfield and Constable Langworthy kept it in sight as far as Maidenhead, they had been gone about half an hour (half past 10 o’clock a.m.) when Thunderbolt and boy rode up, both well mounted. I was making up my accounts. Old Dick and Archie Livingstone in my company, immediately recognized the boy that I suspected of stealing my horse. We at once said, that is Thunderbolt. Archie slipped out of the back door and hid his watch under the kitchen bed. I walked into the bar, threw open all the doors and prepared to serve him if he called for grog. When he came in he presented a horse pistol at me and stated his business. I told him I could not resist, being at the moment unarmed, and he then mustered the lot of us, asked for the key of the store and marched us all into it, locked us up and the boy kept guard over us with a small pistol. He then went over the premises and finding a drawer locked, he sent the boy to fetch the key. I went back with the boy and unlocked the drawer, his pistol disagreeably close to my head. I told him he need not be frightened (he appeared to be very nervous) as I did not intend to show fight, the balance of power being against me. He took several cheques and small orders and about £2 worth of silver. I asked him to leave the silver as I could not carry on the business without it, then he gave me back about a dozen shillings, I told him 23 [shillings] belonged to the Hosteler, the price of an accordion I sold for him, he said he would not take the Hosteler’s money and left it.
I told him my mates were getting tired of their confinement, he ordered the boy to let them out, and then keeping us in conversation on the verandah whilst the boy selected what ever they fancied in the store. After getting all they wanted, he called for glasses all round and paid me for them. I told him my stock was very low so he only took a couple of bottles of brandy away with him. We had a long conversation after it was over. I tried to persuade him to give over his present calling and take a stockman situation, where he was not known. He thanked me for my advice but said he tried that before but it was no answer.
They left here 10 minutes to 12 a.m. and rode by a few minutes afterwards leading two horses, all in fine condition. Three hours after they left, Constable Langworthy came back from Maidenhead, his horse considerably faded and extremely vexed. He wanted to follow, I told him ’twas no use with the horse he had by him, he went to the station for another, but I don’t think he succeeded. I must say Mister Langworthy had exerted himself to the utmost, but will never succeed until he is furnished with better horses. When he borrowed a horse ’tis a 2nd or 3rd rate animal, whereas Thunderbolt is riding the finest horse I have seen in the district. John Macdonald, Esquire is an exception to the rule and furnishes a good horse if one is to be convenient to the place.
May 9th. Thunderbolt and boy went through Ashford today with five horses.
Thunderbolt’s gentleman-thief image lived on long after his death. It was recalled in 1939 by James Roper’s son, then around 90 years old:
Of course we often heard of Thunderbolt’s doings. It was often rumored that he would stick up Tenterfield, but he never did. Once he was supposed to have paid the town a visit and to have mixed with the people and to have at length been recognized by somebody, but as he was far from being unpopular, he got away from the town without trouble.
My father was stuck up by him when managing a store at Bonshaw for C A Lee. The bushranger took all the cash from the till and made my father have dinner with him. They sat at opposite ends of the table and Thunderbolt had two revolvers and placed one at each side of his plate and watched my father like a cat all the time. My father said to him, ‘You need not be afraid of me. I have no gun at all, and you have two. I’m not such a fool as to try anything with you.’ The dinner passed off pleasantly enough. Apart from his mission at [that] moment, my father said Thunderbolt was a very nice chap and took a liking to him. Of course, Thunderbolt never took life.
When he was leaving my father said to him. ‘Look, you are putting me in a fix, taking all the change. When people come along with only notes or cheques, I won’t be able to do business with them.’ Thunderbolt agreed it was not quite playing the game and handed him back a good handful of silver, although when he had first taken the money he had said, ‘It’s not enough.’ But my father had been warned that Thunderbolt was about and had previously hidden the bulk of the money in an old boot hidden above the door.
Today, Thunderbolt the gentleman bushranger is like many other bushrangers, proudly advertised by tourism bodies in New England.
Grace Bussell
In September 1838, the steamship Forfarshire was wrecked on the Farne Islands, off Britain’s northeast coast. The lighthouse keeper William Darling and his daughter, Grace, mounted a heroic rescue effort, rowing a small boat through mountainous seas to save the lives of five passengers. The country was agog with admiration and gratitude. Grace and her father were both awarded gold medals by the Royal Humane Society and an admiring public subscribed 1700 pounds for them. Twenty-three year-old Grace became a national sensation, but she shunned all attempts to turn her into a heroine. She died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven but her story would have a lasting echo in Australia.
Thirty-eight years after the Forfarshire was lost, Grace Bussell, a sixteen-year-old living in the Margaret River region of Western Australia, had a strange dream. She saw a smoking sailing ship shattered on jagged rocks, with screaming passengers hanging desperately to the rigging. The following night, the ship Georgette, bound for Adelaide with a cargo of jarrah wood, ran aground twenty kilometres from the Bussells’ home. With the boiler room flooded, the captain had deliberately wrecked his sinking ship to give its passengers and crew, some sixty people in all, a chance to survive. A lifeboat was launched, but the stormy seas capsized it, drowning five children and two women. The others in the lifeboat were then rescued by four crewmen, eventually reaching shore after a twelve-hour battle against the wind and waves. The rest of the Georgette’s crew and passengers were unable to escape. Any lifeboats they launched capsized in the crashing seas, drowning their occupants.
On shore, an Aboriginal employee of the Bussells’ named Sam Isaacs saw the ship and galloped to the homestead with the news. Grace Bussell took a spyglass, ran to the top of a nearby hill and spotted the wreck. She and Sam found some ropes, mounted their horses and rode to the sea.
At a rocky place called Calgardup, they were able to get down a cliff and into the swirling water. They swam the horses out to the ship, and carried or towed the survivors to shore. After four hours, they had saved most of the Georgette’s remaining passengers and crew. Grace then rode back to the homestead and alerted her father. He and a rescue party arrived at the scene the following morning. The passengers and sailors were all taken to the family home, where they were cared for by Grace’s mother, Ellen.
When news of the rescue
reached Perth, and then the world, Grace Bussell was pronounced ‘the Grace Darling of the West’. In 1878, she was awarded the silver medal of the Royal Humane Society. Sam received the Society’s bronze medal and a grant of 100 acres. Ellen Bussell, already in poor health, died just a few weeks after the disaster. Her last words were supposedly, ‘Fetch them all. I can take them in.’
Grace Bussell’s legend lives on, though mostly in Western Australia. At Redgate Beach, where the Georgette foundered, the rock that brought the ship to disaster is known as Isaacs Rock after Sam Isaacs. Grace is commemorated in the town names Lake Grace and Gracetown, and the city of Busselton is named after the Bussell family. No one seems to have recognised the bravery of the horses.
Diggers
From Gallipoli on, the Australian experience of war has produced a rich trove of anecdotes, legends and yarns, which commonly stress the diggers’ wit, lack of pretension, and refusal to kowtow to their presumed betters.
One particularly popular group of stories dealt with Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, the commanding officer at Gallipoli, whom the Anzacs affectionately nicknamed Birdie. One day Birdwood was nearing a dangerous gap in a trench when the sentry called out, ‘Duck, Birdie; you’d better —— well duck.’ ‘What did you do?’ asked the outraged generals to whom Birdwood told the story. ‘Do? Why, I —— well ducked!’
Most Birdie yarns present the general as a ‘digger with stripes’, a leader who has—and appreciates—the qualities his men themselves esteem. Set in central London, this story neatly combines Australian anti-authoritarianism with a wariness of the English class system. In it, Birdwood explains to the class-bound English generals that he would be abused by the low-ranking Australian soldiers if he had the temerity to discipline him for failing to observe the military etiquette of saluting officers, thus affirming the egalitarian character of the AIF, as opposed to that of the British army.
Whilst General Birdwood was chatting in the Strand with two or three Tommy officers, an Aussie strolled by, characteristically omitting the salute.
‘Notice that Digger go by, Birdwood?’ asked a Tommy officer.
‘Yes, why?’
‘Well, he didn’t salute. Why didn’t you pull him up for it?’
‘Look here,’ said Birdie, ‘if you want to be told off in the Strand, I don’t.’
A number of the Birdwood yarns play on the general’s ‘common touch’. When a naive sentry fails to recognise him, for example, Birdwood jovially shakes his hand. At Gallipoli, Birdwood seldom wore his insignia of rank. In one story, a digger addresses him a little too casually. ‘Do you know who I am?’ asks Birdwood. ‘No,’ says the digger. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m General Birdwood.’ ‘Struth,’ says the digger, springing to attention. ‘Why don’t you wear your feathers the same as any other bird would?’
There is also the Gallipoli reinforcement who mistakes the general for a cook, and the digger who, when told Birdwood’s name, asks him to ‘’ave a cup o’ tea, Mister Birdwood.’
Birdwood sees an Anzac pushing a wheelbarrow, an unusual sight at Gallipoli. ‘Did you make it yourself?’ he asks. ‘No, Mister Birdwood, I bloody-well didn’t,’ pants the digger, ‘but I’d like to find the bastard who did!’
Later, on the Western Front, Birdwood says to a digger, ‘Come on, let’s go for a run.’ ‘Too right,’ replies the digger, and off they go. After a while, the panting digger draws level with Birdwood. ‘Hey, where’s that bloody rum you promised me?’
In another tale, Birdwood sees a digger trying to wash from a tin half-full of water. ‘Having a good bath?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ says the digger, ‘but I could do much better if I was a blinking canary.’
One digger, flat broke, decides to write to God and ask for a ten-pound note. He addresses the letter ‘per General Birdwood, Headquarters’. The general, much amused, takes the letter into the officers’ mess. ‘We will collect amongst us and raise the tenner for this fellow,’ he says. The laughing officers put together seven pounds, and Birdwood sends it to the digger. Next day there arrives a receipt as follows: ‘Dear God, Thanks for sending me the tenner; but the next lot you send, don’t send it through Headquarters, as Birdie and his mob pinched three quid of it.’
In another anti-authoritarian Aussie tale, Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener, the British War Minister, visits the Anzacs at Gallipoli and tells them they can be proud of what they’ve achieved. To which one digger replies: ‘My oath we are, Steve.’
Another tale that understood Australians’ irreverence towards rank appeared in the British Australasian in 1920 under the title ‘The Digger and the Colonel’:
An ‘Aussie’ story has to do with a sentry who stopped an English colonel, who was trying to get to his own lines. The officer was without a passport so the sentry would not let him pass.
‘But I am an English colonel, and I must get to my lines,’ the officer said.
‘I don’t care a damn,’ said the Aussie, as he shouldered his rifle.
The colonel continued his expostulations until he heard a drowsy voice from the trench say: ‘Don’t argue, Bill; shoot the tinted cow, and let’s get to sleep.’
In a variant on this story, a captain draws the fed-up cry from a nearby tent: ‘Don’t stand there argufying all night, Dig, shoot the blighter.’ Variations of this one were still being told by Australian troops in the Western Desert during World War II.
The toughness and nonchalance of the digger under fire was another common theme. In a typical story, four Aussies have settled down to a game of cards in a quiet corner of the Western Front trenches when a great commotion is heard. One of the players jumps up to the look-out step. ‘Hi, you fellows!’ he calls to his mates. ‘A whole enemy division is coming over!’ Another digger gets up, looking bored. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘You get on with the game. I’m dummy this hand; I’ll go.’
Similar stories are told of diggers who are so little bothered by enemy fire that they play two-up by the light of the barrage flares, or who are so intent on their game that others think they are praying. Then there are the diggers who blast an enemy position, then, meeting no resistance, run up to it—and find a fellow digger inside, nonchalantly cooking a meal and wondering what all the noise is about.
Other tales underscore the diggers’ bravery by gently mocking awards like the Victoria Cross. In one, a soldier is carrying a mate across No Man’s Land under heavy fire.
‘’Ere,’ the wounded soldier suddenly exclaims, ‘what about turnin’ round and walkin’ backwards for a spell? You’re gettin’ the V.C., but I’m gettin’ all the blinkin’ bullets.’
The same kind of casual iconoclasm features in the yarn in which a digger is taken to see a sacred flame (usually in Bethlehem) that has burned for two thousand years. The puzzled Australian looks at it for a moment, fills his lungs and blows. ‘It’s about time someone put it out,’ he says.
The alleged vulgarity of ordinary Australians—alleged by British visitors, at least—became a popular theme of digger yarns, which often combined a proud use of Aussie vernacular with a tilt at perceived British pretensions.
An officer, inspecting the front lines, calls down, ‘What soldiers are in this trench, my man?’ ‘First Sussex Regiment, Sir.’ A few yards on, he repeats, ‘What soldiers are in this trench, my man?’ ‘What the ——— has it got to do with you?’ comes the reply. ‘Oh, this is the Australian trench,’ the officer says.
Or, in another version: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ asks a sentry. ‘Auckland Mounted Rifles,’ or some such. ‘Pass, friend.’ Next, ‘Halt, Who goes there?’ ‘What the ——— has that got to do with you?’ ‘Pass, Australian.’
The diggers’ egalitarianism and sense of humour went home with them after the war. This tale dates from World War II:
A traveller stopped to chat to a farmer who had a large number of men at work in the fields.
‘Are those men ex-soldiers?’ he asked.
‘Most of them,’ the farmer said. ‘One was a private; he’s a first-class worker. The chap over near the fence was a corporal; he’s pretty good. The chap driving the harrow was a major; he’s only so-so; and the man over there stacking the weeds used to be a colonel.’
‘And how do you find him?’
‘Well, I’m not going to say anything against no man who used to be a colonel,’ the farmer said; ‘but I’ve made up my mind about one thing—I’m not going to hire no generals.’
Sportsmen
Australia is widely recognised as a sports-loving nation, and one of the largest troves of heroic tales centres on hall-of-famers like Don Bradman, Roy Cazaly, Cathy Freeman, Evonne Goolagong and Dawn Fraser.
In many cases, sporting heroes’ life stories are impressive enough to serve as quasi-legends. Les Darcy is just one example.
Born near Maitland, New South Wales, in 1895, Darcy was apprenticed to a blacksmith. As a teenager, he started making money by entering boxing matches, and eventually caught the attention of managers in Sydney. He lost his first three bouts there, but from early 1915 he won twenty-two fights in a row, including thirteen successive Australian middle-weight titles, and seemed well on the way to fame and fortune.
In October 1915, Darcy stowed away on a ship headed for the US. This not only breached the War Precautions Act but brought accusations that he was a shirker who was afraid to enlist. When promised American matches did not eventuate, he was reduced to performing in vaudeville. He became a US citizen and joined the army, but his call-up was deferred so he could train for a bout in Memphis, Tennessee. On the eve of the fight, he collapsed from septicaemia, which was later blamed on poor dental work he’d received in Australia. His fiancée flew to his side, but he died at the age of twenty-one.