Gold graves and glory

by Jackie French

  The result: bushrangers.

  The colonies had had bushrangers before, especially in Van Diemen’s Land. They were escaped convicts who preyed on settlers and the Aboriginal people. But the gold rushes meant there was real wealth around for the bushrangers to steal.

  The gold was guarded, of course. Diggers in Victoria were charged a shilling an ounce to have their gold taken safely to Melbourne or Geelong. In September 1851, the first official gold escort left Ballarat. The Victorian Native Police helped guard the gold coaches, as did the British 40th Regiment and a privately-owned escort service owned by a group of Melbourne businessmen set up in 1852 and run by C.R. Dight, which was known as Dight’s Light Cavalry.

  But too often the bushrangers outwitted, outfought or outrode the gold escorts. The carriages transporting the gold and their escorts were very slow, averaging under 4 miles an hour along the rough roads—and it was easy for a bushranger on a good horse to catch up with them.

  These new bushrangers were ‘wild colonial boys’, expert horsemen and bushmen. And if their horses weren’t as fast as those of the troopers, they simply stole faster ones!

  Some bushrangers seem to have been cruel and vicious, like Dan Morgan, who killed sleeping and unarmed men. Thomas Jefferies bashed a baby to death, raped its mother and shot its father.

  But other bushrangers prided themselves on never hurting anyone, except the troopers or bounty hunters who tried to capture them. Many also had a real sense of injustice.

  And as the first gold rushes of the 1850s gave way to the 1860s there were other types of bushrangers too: poor Australian settlers, often with Irish parents, who felt excluded from the privileged position of people like the squatters and magistrates.

  SQUATTERS AND SELECTORS

  By 1850 most people with big land grants, or who’d had the money to buy big runs, were doing pretty well. Squatters leased enormous blocks from the government, and had become New South Wales and now Victorian and Queensland aristocrats—wealthy and with a lot of political power. Many squatters were also magistrates, and that made them the main legal authority in an area.

  The gold rushes had been both a curse and a blessing for big landowners. Their meat, wheat and wool were needed by the thousands flocking into the country. The gold rushes also meant there was an enormous market for horses. Men didn’t only needed horses to get to the goldfields; many of the gold mining engines were horse-powered, and the mines needed lots of timber—which was carried by horses as well as bullocks.

  On the other hand, farm workers raced off to the diggings too. In 1851 a shepherd was paid about £20 a year. In 1853 it was £35 a year—if the farmer could find anyone to do the work!

  A LAND WITHOUT FENCES

  Most bullocks and horses had bells around their necks—bells that had a distinctive sound, so farmers could tell where their own animals were.

  During the 1850s squatters often switched from sheep to cattle, because cattle didn’t need as many men to look after them.

  Then in the early 1860s kerosene started to be used for lighting lamps, instead of tallow (beef fat) or whale oil. The price of cattle dropped. And now wool was fetching incredible prices, as so much of it was needed for uniforms in the American civil war. Suddenly sheep could make you very, very rich again!

  Was Australia to be a land of big, wealthy farmers?

  But all the new people in Australia hadn’t just created a market for produce. Once the diggers gave up on the gold, many of them wanted land to farm.

  Several land acts through the 1860s in New South Wales and Victoria were intended to get as many people as possible onto the land, letting small farmers choose any part of the country that hadn’t been surveyed yet to ‘select’. These ‘selectors’ could buy their land on easy terms.

  Many successful gold miners bought land near the goldfields. So did bullockies and pub owners—who usually made a lot more money than the miners!

  This did not please the squatters. Their land was only leased, not owned—and sometimes selectors could take land the squatters had been using. Many selectors picked the eyes out of a run—or selected the land around the waterholes, so the rest of the run was useless. Sometimes stockmen and farm workers selected the best land just to get even with the boss.

  But the squatters played dirty tricks, too. They selected land in the names of all the members of their family, or even their servants. Many servants couldn’t read or write, so it was easy to cheat them and make them sell the selections back to the squatters for a few pence.

  LIFE FOR SELECTORS AND SMALL FARMERS

  Many small farmers had good lives—far better than they could have had in the countries where they were born. Living with dirt floors, no proper windows, no bathrooms or electric light and the wind blowing through cracks in the slab walls of the hut seems hard to us now, as does getting up at dawn to milk cows, or sitting up all night to keep the roos away from the crops.

  But most of Australia’s small farmers had been born in even more primitive huts or the cramped, stinking city slums of Ireland, Wales, England or Scotland. They wrote home about the glory of having all the butter they could eat, meat three times a day, sackfuls of potatoes. Their kids might die of the many diseases rife in the 19th century, like influenza, typhoid, scarlet fever or polio, but they didn’t die of starvation as so many did ‘back home’.

  Other selectors had it pretty hard, though. Land sales had to be registered with a magistrate—and when the magistrate was a squatter, he got in first and took the best land. Often the selectors were forced to take land that the squatters didn’t want, or they could only afford poor land—and not enough of it to support their family. On top of that, buying stock to breed or even seed to plant often cost more money than many small farmers had.

  Kangaroos ate the corn or wheat crops. Dams or creeks dried up and precious cows and horses died. Often men had to go shearing or droving to pay the bills, and that meant leaving the women alone with their kids to try to keep the farm going.

  There was little or no education for poor kids out in the bush. Many were the sons or daughters of ex-convicts, who couldn’t read or write much either. Often they deeply resented the rich landowners who had so much, when they had so little.

  Sometimes, too, ex-convicts taught their kids the rule they themselves had grown up with—steal what you can. Many small farmers relied as much on cattle rustling and horse stealing as they did on what they could grow.

  BOLD BAD BUSHRANGERS

  The early bushrangers were escaped convicts.

  Now in the 1860s bushrangers of a different kind were taking to the hills. They felt a real sense of injustice, because they couldn’t make a living on poor, small blocks of land, or because they had been persecuted by corrupt police and magistrates.

  BEN HALL

  Ben Hall was born on 9 May 1837, at Wallis Plains, near Maitland in New South Wales. His parents had both been convicts, but now his father was a farm overseer.

  Ben was known as a hard-working, generous and honest man, who didn’t approve of bushrangers.

  He married Biddy Walsh when he was 19 and they had a child. He worked as a stockman, then with John Maguire leased 10 000 acres, and worked hard to clear and fence the land and make his farm prosperous.

  But in 1862 Ben was wrongly arrested for being involved in a robbery at a race meeting. He went to jail for a month till the trial, then was let off because there wasn’t any evidence that he was guilty and because one of his accusers changed his story during the trial. But when Ben got back home he discovered that Biddy had taken the baby and run off with an ex-policeman.

  Ben blamed his wife’s lover and that man’s corrupt police friends for his arrest, especially when he was soon arrested again for stealing gold. Again he was let off—even before the trial, as there was no evidence at all that he had done it. But by the time he got home, all his stock had died of thirst and his house had been burnt to the ground.

  Ben was angry and bitter—and
it seemed as though the New South Wales police force were out to ruin him, one way or another.

  In 1863, a gang robbed the Pinnacle Police Station. No-one knows if Ben was part of the gang. But he was seen with some of the suspects—so he was to be hunted down.

  He escaped and went bush with Johnny Gilbert and John O’Meally, two of the men from the bushranger Frank Gardiner’s gang.

  Ben became the leader of the gang. They would charge onto the road in front of a gold coach, yelling, ‘Bail up!’ while firing a gun into the air. From 1863 to 1865 they robbed 10 mail coaches, held up 21 towns and stations and stole 23 racehorses. But like Ned Kelly, Ben and his gang only robbed from the rich … and sometimes they did give to the poor.

  Ben became a hero to many of the small settlers who had also suffered at the hands of the police and magistrates—and even sometimes from the people he had robbed. When his gang took over the Robinson Hotel in Canowindra, they kept all the town’s 40 or so people at the hotel for three days. Everyone was given any food and drink they wanted, with music to sing and dance to. Only the town’s policeman was treated badly. He had to march up and down the verandah, while everyone else sang and danced. At the end of three days all the ‘guests’ were given ‘expenses money’ to take home—except for the policeman.

  So far, the outlaws had only robbed ordinary citizens. But when Johnny Gilbert shot a policeman during a holdup, the gang members were declared outlaws. Now they could be shot on sight.

  But Ben Hall was tired of being a bushranger. He was saving his money to leave New South Wales and sail to the United States.

  He never did get there.

  In May 1865, his friend Mick Connolly was forced to tell two policemen where Ben would be that night—camping on Connolly’s property.

  The police didn’t dare face Ben while he was awake, but waited till he was asleep and, accompanied by Ben’s former friend, the black tracker Billy Dargin, they crept up and shot him. Ben woke up, badly wounded and bleeding. He saw Billy and cried out, ‘Shoot me dead, Billy! Don’t let the traps take me alive.’

  And then he died. He was 27.

  The police strapped Ben’s body on his horse (or maybe it was a donkey) and led it through the streets of Forbes, to show the body off. But many of the townsfolk pulled their curtains, shut their doors and refused to look.

  SEND THEM TO SCHOOL!

  Why did so many people think that the bushrangers were heroes?

  A Commission of Enquiry was set up by the New South Wales government to look at why so many people were helping the bushrangers, and whether corrupt police and magistrates might be helping them, too.

  The Commission found that many of the police were drunkards or criminals themselves, and that people didn’t respect them. The Commission said that most people thought the ‘honorary’ magistrates—the untrained and unpaid wealthy farmers, who judged trials—were biased and that ordinary people had no hope of receiving justice in the courts.

  The Commission also said that the small selections weren’t big enough to keep a family on, so small farmers turned to crime, cattle stealing and bushranging.

  But most importantly the Commission said that kids living on small selections, in poor conditions and with unfavourable influences, really needed to go to school.

  The Anglican Church in Australia was against free schools that weren’t run by the church. Catholic priests did their best to bring education to Catholic kids, often holding a few days school in the local pubs, as there was no other community hall where kids could gather. But isolated kids couldn’t even write their names. All they knew were their bush skills, and often the criminal skills of their convict parents.

  Kids needed to learn that there was a wider world beyond their farms and that, with education, they could have a choice of ways to earn a living.

  NED KELLY

  But before any of these recommendations could take effect, Australia’s most famous bushranger took to the hills.

  When Ned was at school he saved a 7-year-old boy from drowning and got a green silk sash as an award for his courage.

  Ned Kelly was born at Beveridge, Victoria in 1854. He was brave and a skilled bushman. But he could also be an unpleasant thug, sexist and cruel.

  He was from an Irish family that deeply resented the way the local squatters were able to force small farmers like the Kellys off their land—just as the English landlords back in Ireland could evict their tenants from farms they’d lived on for generations. Here in Victoria, just as in New South Wales, the big farmers had the political power as well as the land and because they were magistrates, too, even the law wasn’t much protection for the poor.

  Ned had to leave school to support his family after his father died when Ned was 12. When he was only 14, he was arrested for assaulting a fowl and pig dealer named Ah Fook and helping the bushranger Harry Power.

  Ned was found not guilty. But a few months later he was sentenced to six months with hard labour for assault and indecent behaviour for what he claimed had been just a prank—someone else had given him a package of calves’ testicles to give to his accuser, who’d then tried to bash Ned up.

  Three weeks after he got out of prison, he was arrested for using someone else’s horse. Ned claimed he hadn’t—he’d been in prison when the horse was stolen. But he was given three years with hard labour.

  Kelly was 19 by the time he got out of prison and discovered that all but one of his 32 horses had been stolen by the local police.

  For a while Ned stayed out of trouble. But he was angry and wanted revenge on the class of people he blamed for persecuting him. Ned joined his stepfather and other friends and relatives rustling cattle from the big landowners.

  But the police knew who they were. In April 1878, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick came to the Kelly home to arrest Ned’s brother, Dan, for cattle rustling.

  It’s hard to know what happened then. Fitzpatrick claimed that the Kellys—including Ned—had tried to kill him, so he had Ned’s mother arrested. Ned claimed that he hadn’t been there and that Fitzpatrick had run away freely when he was overpowered. It’s also been claimed that Fitzpatrick assaulted Ned’s sister, Kate.

  Ned’s mother and her baby spent six months in prison before she was even tried, then got three years in jail with hard labour. Ned was convicted at her trial, too, even though he wasn’t there to be tried, and hadn’t been at the hut when Fitzpatrick claimed to have been hurt.

  The police kept harassing the Kelly girls at home, breaking their furniture and emptying out all their flour and meat onto the floor.

  Dan Kelly and friends Steve Hart and Joe Byrne went bush, and Ned joined them. By now Ned was convinced that it was impossible for poor people to get any justice from either the police or the courts. The police tried to hunt them down—and three police were killed in a shootout at Stringybark Creek.

  Ned, Dan, Joe and Steve were now outlaws. They had become the Kelly Gang.

  Robbing the banks at Euroa helped make the gang famous. A £2000 reward was offered for their capture.

  Ned Kelly and his gang wore armour to try to protect themselves from police rifle bullets. The armour was made over open fires from metal plates fastened together with iron bolts and held on with leather straps. It weighed about 97 pounds and was almost unbearably hot to wear, as well as heavy.

  It was at Jerilderie that Ned wrote a letter—a 56-page manifesto—to put his side of the story. It would make him famous.

  The Jerilderie letter claimed that the Kellys and other small farmers were persecuted unjustly by corrupt police. It’s likely that most of what Ned said in the letter was true (though not the bit about Constable Fitzpatrick selling his sister to a Chinaman.) But it’s also likely that the police had good reason to think Ned and his friends sometimes stole horses and cattle.

  The letter called on the Irish in both the United States and Australia to rebel against the unjust and cruel rule of the English and their police.

  Unlike other bushr
angers, the Kelly gang robbed banks, hotels and rich property owners instead of travellers who might be carrying gold or money. And they would kill rather than be captured.

  An informer joined the gang. The Kellys shot him—but they now knew that the police were closing in, and that a trainload of police were coming after them. They decided to make the battle a good one, and to try to trap the police who were pursuing them.

  On 27 June 1880, the Kelly gang rode into Glenrowan. They took over the hotel, cut the telegraph wires so no-one could call for help and made the railway workers rip up the line. During the day they took 62 hostages as they waited for the trainload of police to arrive.

  But a local schoolteacher escaped and tipped off the police about what was happening. The gun battle lasted nine hours, during which Joe Byrne and two of the hostages were killed. Steve Hart and Dan Kelly were believed to have been burned alive when the police set the hotel on fire.

  In his scrap metal armour, Ned was safe from bullets—almost. He stayed fighting until his ankles were shot and he was captured.

  He was taken to Melbourne, tried and sentenced to death.

  At 10 a.m. on 11 November 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged in the Old Melbourne Gaol. His last words are said to have been ‘Such is life’.

  Ned Kelly had two final requests—that he be given a Christian burial and that his mother not be in the prison when he was hanged. Neither wish was granted.