The storekeeper at Momba Station was W.H. Suttor, who would later be a member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. He himself had had hard times in 1868–70 on a station of his own in this country of saltbush and cottonbush, and he was in heavy overdraft when he took the job of storekeeper at remote Momba. Suttor told young Plorn that he was enjoying John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, a work which was based on the great writer’s conversation and anecdotes. He thought Charles Dickens one of ‘the Great Magicians’ able to distract from the harshness of station life. ‘A man must read out there—or drink’, a man of the west told the journalist C.E.W. Bean a quarter of a century later.
To the family back in England, looking at a map of New South Wales, Corona, Alfred’s station, and Momba looked close, and they surmised that Alfred would be able to give emotional support to Plorn. In fact, over 200 kilometres of rough terrain separated the brothers. On the day before his death in 1870, Dickens addressed a letter to Alfred at Corona and the subject was in large part Plorn. ‘I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind?’ But Plorn endured life there, amongst the stockmen of Momba, in country an Englishman who had never seen it could barely imagine. It provided for young Plorn an experience which was sometimes exciting and sometimes the Australian equivalent of his father’s blacking factory days.
C.E.W. Bean described the country of western New South Wales as ‘beautiful, endless, pitiless’. Sheep could live there, he said; men couldn’t. It was a landscape of stunted trees, blue clumps of applewood, needlewood, belar, grey-blue mulga, leopard tree, saltbush and spear grass. When water filled the lagoons near Momba, Plorn would have found duck, teal, swans, brolgas, pelicans, ibis, kangaroos and emus coming in to drink. But rain also isolated him and his fellows, making the track to Wilcannia a soup of red mud into which horses sank to the fetlocks and beyond. Ration carts came round about every six weeks to two months, selling supplies the manager or owner might need. The table Plorn sat at in Momba offered a raw cuisine—limitless mutton, damper and golden syrup in 2-pound tins. Since Plorn had gone to Momba as an apprentice, he received no wage, or only a very small one, for all his work.
The store Suttor ran was like those on all the big stations, where drovers bought their tobacco and other needs. Distance made the prices high. But Suttor the storekeeper remained a bush patron to the younger Dickens and helped him with advice about horses he wished to buy with the money he had brought from England. Before he died Dickens was pleased to hear about Plorn’s ventures into Australian horseflesh. Plorn, he wrote—approvingly now—was taking ‘better to the bush than to books’. Horse racing was often the only communal sport for these widely spread people and Edward would enjoy it all his life. Throughout the nineteenth century, gentlemen often raced their own horses in bush and city race meetings, as would the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson.
Dickens suffered a severe stroke, and died on 9 June 1870. It was August before the news reached the boys on their remote stations. Edward’s resolve to stick to the business of being a bushman was nevertheless reinforced. After his father’s death, Aunt Georgie, Dickens’ executor, sent him a yearly allowance of £100, enough to buy horses with. But he was not yet twenty-one and able to inherit. He wrote asking for a larger part—for, despite what Suttor, other drovers and the country itself could tell him of the hardships, he wanted to become an Australian pastoralist. As it would for many others, the land would grind him on the anvil of its drought years.
In December 1872, however, four months before his inheritance would be released to him, Plorn and two partners bought a small part of and took a lease on the rest of Yanda, a station of 300 000 acres along the banks of the Darling on the road from Bourke to Wilcannia. From its homestead a particularly beautiful bend in the deep-banked river was visible, and standing by the shearing shed above the water, Plorn must have felt that he had joined the world of men and validated his father’s memory.
One of the partners, William Hatton, undertook to live on the property, an arrangement the Land Act required of partners in pastoral leases. But the fare by riverboat from Wilcannia to Bourke, the nearest town to Yanda, was over £12, which was 12 per cent of Plorn’s annual endowment. Plorn was fortunately promoted by the pastoral company, E.S. Bonney and Company, to manage the neighbouring station, Mount Murchison, which was about half a million acres with a 25-mile frontage on the Darling.
He was closer to Wilcannia at Mount Murchison, and became a young Justice of the Peace in the area and sat as a magistrate. He was a member of the committees of both the Church of England and the Wilcannia Jockey Club. His horse, Greytail, was second in the Wilcannia steeplechase. Later in his career, his horse Tam O’Shanter won by a length, while his Murky Morn won the squatter’s purse of £15 at the Mena Murtee Station races. He scoured local stations to create a cricket team to play the township, and he was captain of it.
Plorn met a girl named Constance Desailly, whose father ran a station named Netallie west of Wilcannia. The marriage was to take place in July 1880. Though there was a week of feasting, dancing and celebrations at Netallie Station, he and Constance did not go on a honeymoon but instead headed straight back to Mount Murchison, to the demands of running a station in hard country. Plorn told Rusden in a letter that he was in receipt of £300 a year for running Mount Murchison and thus he would have no difficulty in supporting a wife. He had moved to a new house, the old homestead, spacious enough for a woman to put her mark on it.
Now Momba and Mount Murchison were bought by the South Australian firm Elder, Smith & Company, and Mount Murchison was absorbed into Momba. It became a property bigger than Ireland, 2 million acres carrying 190 000 sheep. But Yanda, Plorn’s leasehold, was not flourishing. His partner, Hatton, who managed Yanda and to whom Plorn and his wife were now heading, complained of the drought and wished them a happy trip on their way to him ‘and a wet one’. Pastoralists in that area did what they could to retain the yearly rain, building dams and high mounds to stave off the wind, planting trees and covering the tanks with water weeds to protect them from the sun. But the evaporation was furious, and only 9 to 12 inches fell on the plain around. There would be three straight years in which only 7 inches of rain fell. Magwitch had not made his fortune in country like this—he had been transported early enough to find the pasture lands further in. But the Dickens boys were struggling to survive on the edges of desert.
SOCIAL BANDITS
At the other end of the pole of social aspirations and pastoral dreams lay the bushranger, generally a selector of land, or a selector’s son. Bushranging had begun with absconding convicts such as Martin Cash in Tasmania and bold Jack Donohue in New South Wales. But in the second half of the nineteenth century it was influenced by the movement of gold around the countryside from regions not yet serviced by railways and, above all, despite the land laws—by land discontent and a dark sense of rancour towards the law and the squatter. Children of small settlers who grew up before land acts in communities where former convicts were plentiful and where the attitudes of dispossession associated with both convicts and the Irish seemed to form an amalgam of resentment, often took to bushranging or supported the concept.
The high standing of the bushranger in popular imagination has been, despite the disapproval of authorities, enduring. Ned Kelly remains fabled, where the man who condemned him to death, Redmond Barry, despite being a great Victorian in both senses of the word, despite his statue outside the State Library of Victoria, despite being one of the creators and Chancellor of Melbourne University, despite his brilliance as judge and classicist, despite his being bravely loyal to a long-term partner named Mrs Barrow, despite his being a defender of Aborigines, is unknown in popular legend. Even the students who pass Redmond Barry Hall at Melbourne University are probably ignorant of his record. Search the streets of the cities and one finds statues of forgotten monarchs and unspecified colo
nial politicians, and scarcely a marker to bushrangers. Glenrowan, scene of the last stand of the Kelly Gang, goes unmarked and unexplained by anyone other than local entrepreneurs. Yet the bushrangers’ monuments have existed since their day and until now in the Australian imagination. When the bullet-ridden corpse of Ben Hall was buried in Forbes in 1865, respectable girls and women attended the gravesite, on the grounds of his gallantry to those he held up or detained as temporary prisoners, though they were secretly attracted by his glamour and daring. They were not alone in that.
The bushrangers got all the popular ballads too.
Oh come all you Lachlan men, and a sorrowful tale I’ll tell
Concerned of a hero bold who through misfortune fell.
His name it was Ben Hall, a man of good renown
Who was hunted from his station and like a dog shot down.
In the 1860s remoter rural areas such as the Fish River district between Goulburn and Bathurst had a high number of ex-convicts, predominantly Irish Catholics, illegally occupying small holdings and having little contact with people beyond their district. Here an Irish farmer named Coffee was arrested in 1864 for receiving part of the ransom paid to the Gilbert–Hall gang for the life of the captured gold commissioner, Henry Keightley. A dispirited policeman named H. Master reported that it was impossible to get information on bushranger movements out of people like Coffee in the bush, not because of fear of the miscreants but because ‘the population in this District would sooner screen the Bushrangers than put the police on their tracks, and I have no hesitation in saying that one half of the inhabitants of the Burromee and Fish Rivers does harbour and assist them at times’. A local magistrate in the wild Wollombi district, hunting William White, alias Yellow Billy, the part-Aboriginal bushranger who flourished between 1863–66, declared, ‘Nearly every settler . . . is a sympathiser with this vagabond.’ As well as that, these were men who, as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, ‘Rode like centaurs and ran like kangaroos’. The police had to use black trackers to get anywhere in a landscape that was familiar to the bushranger.
Ben Hall, most renowned of all 1860s bushrangers, was born at Breeza Station, west of Tamworth in New South Wales, on 8 March 1838, his father a convict from Bristol, his mother one from Dublin. The family settled on the Hunter. According to the morality of many hand-to-mouth smallholder former convicts and immigrants, cattle, sheep and horse theft was no sin. Cattle duffing and gully-raking for wandered livestock were in some cases a prelude to bushranging. There were many small landholders who boasted that they never ate their own meat, and indeed butchering a neighbour’s cow was tolerated by the owner as long as large numbers of livestock were not slaughtered. Horse stealing was a very important activity to the flash sons of small farmers. Young bushrangers knew every horse in their district, and who owned them. The native-born bushranger Frederick Ward, also known as Captain Moonlight, was shot dead while trying out a horse at Kentucky Creek near Uralla in the New England area of New South Wales. Sometimes bushrangers borrowed horses and tack from their supporters in the bush population. Ben Hall walked with a limp as a result of a friend trying to set a broken leg for him, but on a good horse he was lightning.
When New South Wales established a new centralised police force in 1862 it was modelled along the lines of the British and Irish constabularies, and staffed by men from both these forces. Fear of corruption meant that those who had served in the old New South Wales police forces were given no encouragement to join the new one. Though corruption was avoided, valuable knowledge of rural areas was squandered. Telegraph stations were too far apart, police weaponry was inferior and the centralised nature of the force required any officer pursuing bushrangers to report first to Sydney. To deal with the outlaws, if they were brave enough, the bush policemen rode the cheapest horses the government could acquire, on which they had no chance of capturing the bush-crafty renegade on his stolen thoroughbred. The law’s reach was so poor that in December 1864 Ben Hall threatened that he and his accomplice, Johnny Gilbert, could capture the attorney-general, James Martin, and an Anglican archbishop, both of whom were travelling in the vicinity at the time. Hall said he was ‘quite amused at the thought of making the Attorney-General his humble and obedient servant’. Nothing came of the plan, and indeed Hall and Gilbert were soon to be dead, but the bush, which the bushrangers knew and the attorney-general did not, made such threats plausible.
Under the reign of bushrangers, there were periods of lawlessness when central government seemed at peril. The mails on the southern roads beyond Goulburn were stopped and plundered day after day, locals complained. The roads around Mudgee and Bathurst were almost as dangerous, and the police seemed helpless to prevent crime or to detect offenders.
The Empire newspaper wrote in 1864 that it was no exaggeration to say ‘that a large portion of the South-Western and Western Districts of the interior of this colony has been under the control of robbers rather than the Government’. In October 1863 Ben Hall’s gang went into Bathurst one Saturday night, bought oranges, visited a gun shop and took over the public house. There was no intervention by the police. With John Gilbert, Hall held up the town of Canowindra, some 50 miles (85 kilometres) west of Bathurst, for three days. They offered hospitality in a pub, in what does appear to be a benign sort of hostage taking, at Robertson’s Hotel; stopping each dray and team that passed through town, they lodged and fed the passengers and supplied them with drink free of charge. Townspeople who wanted to move about the town were given signed passes by Ben Hall. It was this power and stylishness that resonated with the sons of small selectors. The Herald even suggested that the solution would need to be a treaty between the government and the bushranger, as disgraceful a thing as that would be for a British territory; under an arrangement, travellers in the bush could pay a sort of toll to the bush bandits. The fight was unequal both in material and mythic terms.
It was on the road from Binalong to Goulburn, where the Halls were taking horses of sundry origins for sale, that Ben first met the bushranger Frank Gardiner, alias Christie, a charismatic scoundrel of Scots descent. It is harder to attach the social bandit label to Gardiner. One could make a stronger case for his being, even in his own mind, a criminal and nothing more, but he had a certain way about him. He had already served a sentence at Cockatoo Island for horse theft before getting a ticket of leave. Later, in the early 1860s, the young Ben would link up with Gardiner in one of the famous Royal Mail gold escort raids.
Ben had never intended to become a bushranger. He settled on his own small station outside Forbes while managing a larger one which belonged to a squatter, Hamilton. He had met a young woman, Bridget Walsh, who, according to fellow bushranger John Bradshaw, was a disgrace to her sex, a curse to her husband, a woman more vicious than the Empress Messalina. While Ben was away mustering, she left him, taking their infant son with her, to run away with a man named Taylor. Her departure, together with the financial stress of keeping a small farm going in the Weddin Mountains, and then the burning of his homestead by the police, are said to have turned the genial Hall into a professional bushranger in a colony where great unpoliceable stretches of track existed.
Hall’s native hills were placed in the midst of a series of gold-mining and pastoral towns—30 miles (50 kilometres) from Forbes, 40 miles (60 kilometres) from Lambing Flat, and only 15 miles (25 kilometres) from Grenfell. All portable wealth which travelled these roads was, by the authority of his whimsy and sense of grievance, potentially forfeit to him. So he began to fulfil the bushranger destiny whose phases were, in the imaginations of people in the bush, as definite as the phases of the Stations of the Cross, and which all ended at Golgotha.
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The hold-up of the Eugowra gold escort in April 1862 was an extraordinary feat of bushranging, the hold-up par excellence. The location was a steep gully where the coach had to both slow and pass a rock outcrop. The bushrangers—including Ben Hal
l, Frank Gardiner and John Gilbert, a Canadian-born expert horseman and model of boldness—persuaded some bullockies to block the road with their wagons and to pretend to be drunk or sleeping. At the appearance of the bandits, the horses bolted and the coach turned on its side, the driver and four police fled for the bush, one of the police being shot in the testicles. A fabulous £14 000 in gold and bank notes were taken.
The association between Ben Hall and Gilbert was informal—any attempt to see bushranger gangs as a fixed set is not viable even in the case of Ned Kelly. But Gilbert was with Hall in the hold-up of the entire town of Bathurst, in the raid on Canowindra, and the kidnapping of Gold Commissioner Henry Keightley, who had shot the young bushranger Mickey Burke at his property, Dunn’s Plains. An undaunted Mrs Keightley rode alone through perilous territory to her father’s property to get the £500 ransom.
In November 1864, while holding up the Gundagai–Yass mail with Hall, Gilbert killed Sergeant Parry, and then burned down a store in revenge for an attempt by one Morris, the proprietor, to hunt them down. Social banditry was starting to get bloody. In all, between 2 February 1862 and 10 April 1865, Gilbert had a part in at least forty-four armed hold-ups in New South Wales, including the theft of five racehorses. Outlawed under the Felons Apprehension Act, Gilbert was shot by Constable John Bright on 13 May, and buried in the police paddock in Binalong. Hall had earlier been shot dead in a police ambush near Forbes.
Yet, once again, the bushranger triumphed at the level of legend. The respectable Sydney solicitor and journalist Banjo Paterson, who first heard of Gilbert’s death as a child in the bush school at Illalong near Yass, would write: