Gangland Robbers (3 page)

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 promptly 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 frock 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'.

Bradshaw then became involved in horse stealing, working with John Mulholland, known as Flash (or Lovely, because of his extreme ugliness) Riley. (Lovely Riley should not be confused with John Finnerty, or John Burns, known as ‘Riley the Bushranger', who, in 1874, robbed the Warialda mail coach and was finally released from prison in 1900. His career lasted from the month following Ned Kelly's execution until the day the Indigenous Governor brothers began their murderous spree near Gilgandra in 1901.)

In May 1880 Bradshaw and Riley held up the Commercial Bank in Quirindi, an event described as ‘unsurpassed by any of the exploits of the notorious and bloodthirsty Kelly gang'. Richard Allen, the manager, had gone to the stables behind the bank to rug up his horse when he was bailed up by two men who took him to the bank, where his wife was being held, and demanded the keys to the safe. Allen told them the local chemist had them, but when the robbers threatened to blow the safe, he handed over what he said was a duplicate. Even though he managed to hide some of the money and securities in what was called the treasury drawer, they took £600 in notes and gold, and demanded the record of the numbers of the notes—in fact there was a duplicate. They also demanded food and whisky, and when they had finished, told Allen that the premises would be watched during the night and he would be shot if he put his head outside.

Allen had asked if he could keep his watch and the men had said their target was not him but the bank. It was more likely that they thought they might be identified if they were found with it.
The robbers were masked but Allen claimed
he could tell that one of them had a scar on his nose and cheek, and an unusual accent.

After the robbery, Bradshaw had initially left the area, and returned after getting married, only to be arrested on 4 October at the Namoi River. On 15 November Bradshaw and Riley were found guilty of the robbery. Their arrests had come in a roundabout way, down to a dobber de luxe in the form of the cockney Joseph Goodson, described as a man with protruding grey eyes that looked like marbles and almost flashed when he became excited. He had been involved in a robbery at Cobar in central New South Wales, during its race meeting, when £375 was taken in gold, silver and cheques from a local store. The manager put up a £50 reward and 20 per cent of the value of the cheques. Goodson dobbed in his mates and, while he was in protective custody at the police station, took the opportunity to dob in Bradshaw and Riley as well.