The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger (18 page)

In the 1880s Richard Marks spent two or possibly three years in gaol for stealing cattle. He died of pernicious anaemia when he was forty-three, leaving behind the wife he described in his will as his ‘dearly beloved’ and his five sons, as well as a daughter born to another woman before he married.

In this book I have said that Annie’s hair had no grey, despite being in her fifties. My mother and her mother were in their early seventies before their hair started to go grey (or suddenly became briefly red, in my mother’s case), and I don’t have any grey hair yet either. (My dark hair is bleached to make it blonder.) My mother, grandmother and great grandmother all looked (or look, in my mother’s case) much younger than their age, and I suspect Annie did as well. Annie also had children well into her fifties.

These days people can buy apples year-round, cold-stored and sold in supermarkets. There are only a few varieties of apples for sale too. But back in the 1850s there were hundreds of varieties of apples for sale, and farms like Markdale would have late-ripening apples like Sturmer Pippins, that ripen as late as August in a cold climate like Markdale’s, stored well in a cool storeroom for months, as well as early
ripening apples like the Irish peach, which ripens at the end of November.

We grow 132 varieties of apple at our place. It means that—like Conservative and Rebel Yell—we can have home-grown apples every day of the year.

Brumbies are wild horses. Horses aren’t native to Australia, but even after only a few years of white settlement enough of them (and cattle too) had got free to form feral herds. There are now mobs of wild horses in most states, often causing enormous damage to the fragile land where they roam. I’ve based the descriptions of their behaviour on studies of brumbies in the ‘high country’ of New South Wales and Victoria.

All through the 1800s and even up till World War Two brumbies were a valuable resource. Almost all transport was based on horses—milk carts, bread carts, personal carriages, even early buses were pulled by horses, and of course people rode them as well. Men would round up large herds of wild horses to sell.

Nowadays horses are rarely used for work, except on a few farms and, even there, motorbikes, four-wheel drives and helicopters are being used more and more.

When I was very young there were still a few retired carthorses in most suburbs. Up till twenty years ago farmers around here rounded up their sheep and cattle on horseback. Now I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone ride a horse for anything but pleasure.

Humans have had a long partnership with horses. Sometimes it’s been a hard partnership for the horse, but I am still sad to see that world vanish.

As far as I can discover, there is no physical record that Ben Hall held up the house at Markdale—at that stage known as the Horse and Jockey Inn, as Ann and William Junior tried to make enough money to set the whole family up comfortably. But the story Grandma and Great Grandma told does fit in with other facts known about Ben Hall—that he had a limp, and that he had also held up a hotel nearby only a few months before. They also used the words ‘pistols’—not one pistol, but two. Neither woman knew anything about firearms, but they used the correct word to describe Ben Hall’s weapons and knew he carried more than the single weapon thieves would carry today.

Bushrangers have a romance about them these days. In reality, most of them were simply criminals, ruthless and greedy, who found it easier to prey on gold coaches and hold up farms than to work themselves.

Others—like Ben Hall—were different.

Ben Hall was born on 9 May 1837, at Wallis Plains, near Maitland in New South Wales. His parents had both been convicts—his father had ‘chosen’ his mother from the female workhouse for convicts at Parramatta—but now his father was a farm overseer.

Ben married Biddy Walsh when he was nineteen, and they had a child. Ben worked as a stockman then took up a lease of 7,000 hectares. He was
known as a hardworking, generous and honest man. He even let the police use his house as a base while they were hunting for bushrangers.

But in 1862 Ben was wrongly arrested for helping a robbery at a race-meeting. He went to gaol for a month till the trial, then was let off as there wasn’t any evidence that he was guilty, and one of his accusers changed his story during the trial. But when he 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 his corrupt police friends for his arrest, especially when he was soon arrested again for stealing gold. Again he was let off—even before a trial, as there was no evidence at all that he was guilty. But by the time he got home, all his stock had died of thirst, trapped in a holding yard, and his house had been burnt to the ground—both deeds the work of a policeman.

Ben was angry and bitter. It seemed as though the New South Wales police force were out to ruin him. In those days there was no media to take up the battle, and no court he could appeal to. If the police and local magistrates (often ex-convicts and sometimes corrupt themselves) were out to get you, there was little you could do—legally.

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

If Ben Hall was innocent, then the police and corrupt judicial system had made an honest man an outlaw. If he was guilty, there was now no turning back.

Ben went bush with Johnny Gilbert and John O’Meally, two of the men from 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 guns into the air. From 1863 to 1865 they robbed ten mail coaches, held up twenty-one towns and stations and stole twenty-three racehorses. But like Ned Kelly, Ben and his gang only robbed from the rich…and sometimes they did give to the poor too. Many of their exploits were designed simply to embarrass the police. One time they ambushed three policemen, made them undress, tied them to trees, then gave them a long lecture on police dishonesty and their duty to protect, not exploit people.

Ben became a hero to many of the small settlers who had also suffered at the hands of the police and magistrates—even stories from people he had robbed contributed to his popularity. When Ben’s gang took over the Robinson hotel in Canowindra, they kept all the town’s forty or so people at the hotel for three days. Everyone was given all the free 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. None of the gang took any money for themselves.

By now Ben Hall had a reputation as a ‘ladies’ man’—despite his limp, caused by an accident when he was younger. He was handsome; more than that,
he seems to have charmed women, treating them kindly and politely. These days we
expect
men to be respectful, as well as kind and polite. In those days, women had minimal protection under the law; and so many men were ex-convicts with little experience of a good family life, they were more likely to be drunk and violent.

The gang—by now Ben Hall, Johnny Gilbert and John Dunn—came to the small town of Binda, near Goulburn, on Boxing Day, 1864, the closest town to Markdale in those days. They robbed a store, then broke into the Flag Hotel, and joined in the Boxing Day ball being held there, dancing with three local girls they either met there, or had brought with them. (None of them could have been Sarah Quince, my ancestor, or Mattie Jane; they were too young to have even gone to the ball, much less ridden up to it with a gang of bushrangers.)

Ben Hall had never shot or killed anyone—had even prohibited others of his gang from doing so. But by 1865 both Gilbert and Dunn had shot policemen while part of Hall’s gang. Now the reward for them was £1,000 for each man. A new Act of Parliament was about to be made law too. Under the
Felons Apprehension Act
any bushranger named in the legislation could be shot and killed by anyone, without warning. It was time to get away, and Hall, Gilbert and Dunn made plans to quit the colony while they could.

There are many conflicting stories about what happened next. The gang split up in early 1865, possibly to make it harder to identify them—in those days before TV and lots of photos it was hard to
recognise a man you’d only seen in a newspaper sketch, especially if he grew a beard or shaved his whiskers.

One version says they all planned to leave the colony—certainly by then they had made a lot of money, though there are no records that prove this, nor any bank accounts in their names or their close friends’ names. On the other hand, they would have been crazy not to use a false name for a bank account and, in the early 1860s, this was easy to do. Like other bushrangers, they might also have left money or valuables in a safe-house or a cave, or even buried it in the ground.

The police believed that the three bushrangers planned to meet again on the Billabong Creek near Forbes. The usual story is that the owner of the property, an old friend of Ben’s called Mick Connolly, was forced to tell the policemen that Ben and the gang would be camping on his property. But I haven’t found any proof of that—the police records simply say there was ‘an informer’.

The police hoped to get the whole gang. They waited nearby for days. Ben Hall arrived with his horses on 4 May, six days before his twenty-eighth birthday, and seven policemen, a police tracker and perhaps the landowner made camp nearby. They tried to get closer to his camp, but his horse kept snorting each time they approached, so they waited until dawn, when possibly the horses were further away, eating or drinking.

At dawn, as he was going to collect his horses, which had probably been hobbled so they couldn’t go far, Ben Hall was shot in the back. The first shots
may have killed him, but there is also a legend that he lived long enough to turn over and see the police tracker, Billy Dargin, who had once been his friend, and to whisper to him, ‘Shoot me dead, Billy. Don’t let them take me alive.’ Whether this is true or not, his body was shot more than thirty times.

The police waited to see if the rest of the gang arrived. They didn’t.

Ben Hall was a bushranger, but his death may also have been murder. The Act hadn’t yet been made law; he had never had a trial, and if he had, it’s possible he wouldn’t have been condemned to death, as he had never killed anyone, but instead had prevented others from killing. He was given no chance to surrender—though on the other hand, he had stated publicly that he would never surrender, and that no man would ever hang Ben Hall.

At the inquest held in Forbes the next day, the verdict of the Police Magistrate was that his death was ‘justifiable homicide’.

His grave is still in the Forbes cemetery, with a white headstone, and a rail around it. Hundreds of people attended his funeral—some of them, possibly, like my family, were people who condemned bushranging and all criminal activity, but who believed Ben Hall was both a victim and a good man.

He was a man who simply didn’t get a second chance.

For many years I assumed that the story of the dance had been changed over the years, and that my great
great grandmother Sarah Quince had danced with Ben Hall at Binda, not at Markdale.

Why should there be a ball at Markdale? It was a prosperous but not extremely wealthy house. The descriptions of the ball—the many candles flickering, the floor polished with beeswax, the food, the hired musicians—didn’t fit with what I knew of Markdale back then.

And then, while researching something else, I came upon an ad: a public ball to be held at the Horse and Jockey Inn, proprietors Ann Marks and William Marks—her son William, at that stage, not her late husband.

And so the pieces came together. There was at least one ball, probably several, at the right time for a bushranger to have attended.

An attack by Ben Hall made sense in other ways as well. Markdale was well known for its horses—and fast, sturdy horses were essential for a bushranger. The police report states that Ben Hall had two horses when they shot him that last day of his life.

A ‘subscription ball’—one where the guests paid—would have had wealthy guests, with money, pocket-watches and jewels. A double prize then: riches to be stolen as well as horses.

But this only means the story I was told is possible, not that it really happened. There is no proof—so far, at any rate—that Ben Hall danced that night at Markdale.

But somehow, after years of doubting the story told to me by three generations of my family’s women, I now think that he did.

The earliest bushrangers were escaped convicts, like massive Black Caesar, who terrorised settlers at Parramatta, and the famed ‘wild colonial boy’, Jack or John Doolan. These bushrangers preyed on farmers, stealing food and weapons, and holding up coaches for valuables like watches or money.

By the 1840s many of the bushrangers were ‘colonial born’, often the sons of small farmers who were unable or unwilling to make a living honestly. Much of the good land, with water for stock to drink, had been occupied by squatters, those who took up large tracts of good land without leasing or paying for it, and held it till it was theirs. Small ‘selectors’ often ended up with poor, steep land without water—and too often the magistrates who oversaw the distribution of land were ‘squatters’ themselves: corruptly claiming land in the names of their servants, who were forced to sell it for a small sum to their masters.

The spread of the gold diggings in the 1850s led to a new type of bushranger—often convicts who had served their time in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) where the worst of the convicts were sent. These ‘demons’ preyed on coaches taking gold to the banks in towns and cities; they held up travellers too.