X.
AN INSTITUTION OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
InNew South Wales a considerable proportion of the population is of convict descent. It is impossible to saywhatproportion, for the line of separation is no longer strictly preserved, as it once was, between free settlers and emancipists; and questions are not often asked nowadays about origin and parentage. The tendency of the convicts when they got their liberty was to go to the country districts, rather than to the towns. Many became shepherds or hutkeepers on remote stations. Their children born in the bush have grown up with less instruction, religious or secular, often in even worse companionship, and with a still worse political education, than their fathers. For who was to look after them? Squatters, even if they had the will to do so, were few and far between, and Squatters’ wives fewer still. The Voluntary System does not supply clergymen where there is no demand, although common sense and common experience show that where there is the least demand there is the sorest need. Those who remain of the convicts sent from England are old men now, except a few who have come across from Tasmania, for it is more than aquarter of a century since the last shipload of them entered Port Jackson. But they have left a legacy behind them which is emphatically the ‘peculiar institution’ of New South Wales, as distinguished from the other Australian colonies—Bushranging.
In the old times bushrangers were simply escaped prisoners, often desperate ruffians, who took life, when it suited them, without scruple. Even then they were not regarded as we regard thieves and murderers in England. Familiarity with criminals had taught the more humane among the settlers to consider them as men of like passions with themselves, and not as only pariahs and enemies of the human race. I have heard an eye-witness describe the ‘sticking-up’ of a house in the country many years ago. One of the bushrangers, without any warning, deliberately shot a manservant in the kitchen through the window. The lady of the house, hearing the report, ran into the kitchen and found the man badly shot in the arm. The bushranger who had shot him, instead of setting to work to plunder with his companions, at once came to her assistance, obeyed her directions, fetched water, and the two were amicably engaged for a long time binding up the wounded limb and assisting the sufferer. The gang were nearly all taken and hanged afterwards, but I think the people of this house felt more pity than satisfaction at their fate.
Many of the lower class have hardly disguised their sympathy with these successful outlaws. There is a tinge of romance about their lives. A bushranger isa greater and a freer man than a Hounslow highwayman of a century ago. He rides an excellent horse, and leads another by his side. He is armed with a ‘six-shooter,’ and perhaps with a rifle as well. He has miles and miles of country to roam over, and many a hut where fear or sympathy will at any time provide him with food or a night’s lodging. Boys at school play at bushrangers, and no boy, if he can help it, will act the inglorious part of policeman. Even the name of the profession has been dignified by being turned into Latin. There is an inscription in the principal church of Sydney to some onea latrone vagante occiso.
And so it has come to pass that bushranging, which languished, or was kept under by the help of an efficient police, for many years, has broken out again with as great vigour as ever. The country is distributed between different gangs. I asked the driver of the Wollongong Mail if he had ever been ‘stuck up.’ His reply was, ‘Not for nearly a year,’ or something to that effect. On the main north road, along which you seldom travel a mile without meeting somebody, the mail coach was stopped at one o’clock in the day by a single armed man, who calls himself Thunderbolt, and carries on his depredations in this district. He compelled the driver to drive off the road into the bush, and there deliberately took down the mail bags and carried them off on a led horse. A few days later he unexpectedly came upon a policeman, who at once fired at him. He had just time to cover himself behind a horse he was leading; the bullet struck the led horse,and he escaped on the one he was riding. Less than three weeks after the first robbery he again stopped the same mail coach and the same driver, almost at the same place; this time at night. The account in the Sydney paper was as follows:—
The down mail from Muswellbrook to Singleton, with two days’ mails, was stuck up by Thunderbolt this morning at 3 o’clock, between Grasstree Hill and the Chain of Ponds. With the exception of one bag, all the letters were taken by him. The police are in pursuit.
The weather is very warm.[10]
There is an unconscious irony in the way the hot weather and the robbery of Her Majesty’s mail stand side by side, as if they were equally every-day matters. Generally a bushranging story only gets into small type in a corner of the paper, and very seldom indeed inspires a leading article. You may sometimes see two or three such accounts in a single daily paper. The most formidable gang is in the Lower Murrumbidgee, and is known as ‘Blue Cap’s’ gang. I should like to quote unabridged a column of the newspaper in which some of their doings are described, but it is too long. It describes[11]how in the course of about a fortnight they ‘stuck up’ two mails, two public-houses (shooting at the owner of one, but fortunately not hitting him), a steamer on the river, and four stations, taking allmoney, arms, horses, and valuables they found. Only one man, a mail-man, made serious resistance. He was mounted, and carried a large duelling pistol in each sleeve, and a revolver in his belt. Finding he was outnumbered, he fled, closely pursued by two of the gang, who soon overhauled him. Pistol shots were exchanged in quick succession, the horses going all the time at full speed. In the end, the mail-man, after wounding ‘Blue Cap’ in the hand, had come to his last barrel, when his horse fell with him, and he was at the mercy of his assailants. ‘Blue Cap’ was for giving him ten minutes to prepare for death and then shooting him; but his life was spared at the entreaty of a woman and of one of the gang who was friendly to him. A very pretty ‘sensation’ story this, one would have thought, and rather a catch for an editor. But no; it is a stale subject. And so the newspaper, for want of something better, had a leader on the expenses of Greenwich Hospital.
This wholesale plundering of houses and stations does not often happen. Operations are nowadays generally confined to the road. And usually no violence is offered except in resisting capture. For unless a bushranger has already forfeited his life by committing murder he will abstain from taking life if he can, being pretty sure that for any number of highway robberies unaccompanied with violence he will only be punished, at the worst, with penal servitude for life, and that if he behaves well in prison he may very likely be at large again in ten years. The owner of ahouse which is attacked must resist if he has much to lose which he cannot spare. But in travelling, people generally prefer to take little that is valuable with them, and to leave their pistols at home. For the bush which borders all the roads, more or less, gives the bushranger an almost irresistible advantage. He can choose his own position, and without being seen cover a driver or a passenger with his rifle or his revolver, and bid him throw up his arms or be shot, before the latter has time to get at his pistol. The traveller cannot be prepared on the instant. To undergo the jolts and plunges of an Australian coach on Australian roads with a cocked pistol in one’s hand would be to run a greater risk than any to be apprehended from bushrangers. They practise, too, a certain contemptuous Turpin-like courtesy towards passengers, especially poor ones and women; and often take nothing but the mails. And so the actual loss and danger from this state of things is not so great as might be supposed. But the insubordinate and lawless spirit of the population, of which it is the evidence, is a more serious matter. And it must prevail very widely. A bushranger’s person and features are generally perfectly well known in the district where he carries on his depredations. A large reward is offered for his capture. He could not get food to support him or clothes to wear without the connivance of a great number of persons.Withtheir connivance he often pursues a successful career for years; and it is often only by a lucky accident if the police succeed in making a capture.