Chapter 9
Explorers, Selectors, Bushrangers . . . and Trains
In This Chapter
Exploring what the big fuss was about when it came to explorers
Dispelling — and creating — exploration myths with Sturt and Leichhardt
Entering the great intercontinental race with Stuart versus Burke and Wills
Getting established on the land with selectors and bushrangers
Bushranging with Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang
Heading towards nationhood with telegraph and trains
Explorers and bushrangers both have the biggest claims to being the first ‘heroes’ of colonial Australia. Even though explorers were celebrated by their contemporaries as being the outriders of civilisation while bushrangers were decried by many for being at war with society, both groups had something in common. They were both active in the remote or rural hinterland of the Australian continent, which most colonial arrivals had remarkably little contact with.
Even though the emerging mythology of the Australian colonies featured explorers traversing wilderness, and bushrangers performing bold highwayman-like deeds in remote rural areas, the majority of colonial Australians were urban, living in the towns and cities that clung to the coast. It took the arrival and expansion of the train networks for the rural areas of the colonies to be brought more closely into the familiar experience of most colonials.
In this chapter, I cover the major players in the exploration and bushranging businesses, the myths that built up around them, and the impact these activities had on colonial life. I also cover the expansion of the telegraph and train network in Australia, which allowed an exploration of a different kind.
Explorer Superstars
In the 19th century, explorers in Australia were treated in a similar way to our modern-day sports stars. They pitted themselves against the elements and other explorers as they competed for the great prestige that came with achieving certain feats (such as first to cross the continent, first to cross the continent and not die while doing so, first to find a non-existent inland sea). Public subscriptions subsidised the various expeditions, and explorers’ exploits were recounted in intricate detail in the newspapers (all with the excited tone of ‘This just to hand . . . ’). They received rapturous welcomes if they returned alive, and solemnly impressive martyr-like funerals if they died in the attempt.
Colonial Australians were predominantly urban. In the second half of the 19th century, more people in Australia lived in towns and cities, proportionately, than anywhere else in the world: More than the United States, more than Canada, more than Britain, more than anywhere in Europe. With the exception of a small cluster of gold towns in Victoria — such as Castlemaine, Bendigo, Beechworth and Ballarat — practically all the significant towns and cities were clinging to the coast, sending staple exports and receiving imports and immigrants. The farms and the bush weren’t where most people lived. Most long-term colonial residents wouldn’t have seen a bushfire, an Aborigine or a kangaroo.
Seeking thrills in the great unknown . . .
Colonial urbanisation helps explain why explorers in this period became the big heroes of Australian life — it was through following the exploits and stories of the explorers that colonial Australians got some sense of contact with the Australian interior. Plus, compared to most humdrum lives, the world of the explorer was undeniably exciting — head off into the interior and there was a good chance you might die. Starvation, scurvy, spearing, drowning or just plain disappearing: Plenty of opportunity for adventure arose.
. . . Then making the unknown known
As well as being admired as adventurers, the explorers were also lauded as ‘men of science’. Many had scientific training and backgrounds, had worked as surveyors, and did the work of civilisation — encountering the unknown, topographically surveying it, reducing great mysteries to the realm of the known, and putting it all on maps. These explorers found new land — some of it immediately useful for graziers, agriculturalists and settlers, much of it not, but it all became known. The explorers were taming the wilderness and creating new knowledge, as 19th-century scientists prided themselves on doing.
The Victorian Era was big on progress. People had all these new inventions — such as steam, telegraph, electricity, telephone and trains — which transformed what was possible in the world, improved standards of living and completely changed the way people lived. The acts of the explorers seemed to be a very dramatic and bold example of the more general mood of British progress and ‘civilisation’: The explorers were the ‘advance guard’ of progress and civilisation. Within this mood of general advancement, the whole continent was going to be drawn into the dominion of colonial Australians, and this was an unalloyed good thing. Very few people at the time questioned its impact on Indigenous Australians, and even fewer noticed how assistance from Aborigines was often vital to the explorer’s survival in difficult environments.
Sometimes the wilderness beat civilisation, as when Burke and Wills died, Leichhardt disappeared, or Sturt’s long-cherished dream of a vast inland sea surrounded by fertile land was found to be dry and stony desert (see the sections later in this chapter for more on all of these explorers). Other times, progress was the winner over wilderness, as when Sturt found land that would become South Australia or when Stuart completed the herculean labour of finding a viable way through the centre of the continent (which the Overland Telegraph would later follow). But always the story was a good one. Explorers, successful or otherwise, were seen and spoken of as the outriders and the trailblazers of settler society’s inevitable advance. And some of them looked rather spiffy on camels. (See Figure 9-1 for the routes travelled by Sturt, Leichhardt, Burke and Wills, and Stuart.)
Figure 9-1: The routes travelled by Sturt, Leichhardt, Burke and Wills and Stuart in the 19th century.
Sturt and Leichhardt Go Looking
Charles Sturt and Ludwig Leichhardt were two explorers whose most prominent exploits took place in the 1840s. Sturt, courteous, good-hearted and decent, dispelled a long-standing myth that had grown up in previous decades — the existence of an inland sea. Leichhardt, brooding, enigmatic, German, didn’t dispel a myth — he became one. He pulled off the greatest exploratory feat to date when he led a party from Moreton Bay (in modern-day Brisbane) to Port Essington (north-east of modern-day Darwin). A couple of years later he set off to cross the continent . . . and disappeared completely.
Sturt — have boat, will walk
Charles Sturt was born in India, the son of an East India Company judge based in Bengal. At the age of five he was sent to England to live with relatives, be educated and to follow generally the established pattern for the sons of the British in the Indian colonies: Harrow at fifteen, then Cambridge, then the military.
Arriving in Sydney with his regiment in 1827 and placed in charge of convicts, Sturt became interested in the work done by John Oxley and Alan Cunningham in charting rivers that seemingly all headed inland. In 1828 he was given the job of tracing the course of the Macquarie River, which led him to the Murrumbidgee River. In 1829 he followed this river into the Murray River, which took him to the Southern Ocean. His published accounts of the land he found around the mouth of the Murray River led to the establishment of a new colony: South Australia. In 1838 Sturt himself overlanded cattle to the new colony, and found himself pleasantly surprised at the admiring reception he received on his arrival in Adelaide. Once settled in Adelaide, he joined the public service.
Even after Sturt’s tracking of various rivers, the great mystery of what exactly lay in the middle of the continent was still unsolved. Sturt liked the idea of an inland sea and was so confident in it becoming a reality that in August 1844 he led an expedition off into the interior — carrying a boat.
Initially, Sturt and his party followed where the rivers were going. But this turned out to be fruitless — they kept petering out into marshes or small lakes. Further on and further into the interior, the party found themselves stuck in dry, hot, stony country in the middle of summer, and had to bunker down until fortuitous and heavy rains arrived in July 1845.
They kept going, still hopeful of finding an inner sea (at least Sturt was — some of his fellow travellers were having serious doubts), only to run into the Simpson Desert. With the second–in-command dead from scurvy, the party had to retreat to find water. Sturt then had the bright idea of heading off on what would have been a 724-km journey to the still-unseen centre of the continent. His party managed to talk him out of this final act of death-and-glory-style heroic, and they began to retrace their steps to Adelaide.
The whole endeavour was, Sturt said, ‘a fearful but a splendid enterprise . . . if I fell my name would stand in a list I have always envied.’
The whole thing took 16 months. Instead of a vast inland sea, Sturt had found barren, stony desert. On the plus side, he’d lived to tell the tale.
Leichhardt also walks . . . right off the map
If no Germans had come to the Australian colonies in the 19th century, not only would Australia have lacked for the beginnings of a serious wine industry (courtesy of Germans who settled in the Barossa Valley), but a significant number of all colonial scientific endeavours mightn’t have been attempted so early.
German education and science throughout the 19th century was at the forefront of progress, while British science education lagged behind. Prussian schools and universities pumped out botanists, naturalists, astronomers, physicists, artists and explorers while British institutions tended to produce fluent speakers of Latin and ancient Greek. Australia, and the Australian frontier, as a ‘new’ country for the western world, required scientists, naturalists and artists to help people gain an intellectual grasp of this largely alien continent they lived in. A vital proportion of this scientific and artistic reconnaissance was carried out by arrivals from Germany. The most famous example of this was Leichhardt, soon to be renowned as the lost explorer.
Having studied at Berlin University in philosophy, classics, biological sciences, mathematics and anatomy, Ludwig Leichhardt travelled throughout Europe, meeting and becoming close friends with Englishman William Nicholson. Under Nicholson’s influence, Leichhardt came out to Australia.
In August 1844 (the same month as Sturt was leaving Adelaide to search for the inland sea), Leichhardt left Sydney and travelled north to Brisbane. In October 1844, he then set off on an expedition to the far north of modern-day Queensland. A year and two months later, and some eight months late, he and his party reached Port Essington (north-east of modern-day Darwin), with everyone having already given him up as lost. Although late, Leichhardt had managed the opposite of Sturt’s venture: As he travelled through the interior but parallel to the coast, he had found fertile, well-watered country. Leichhardt thought it ‘magnificent country’, and everyone thought he was wonderful. He received a tumultuous reception on his return to Sydney, and the explorer cult went stratospheric.
For his next trick, Leichhardt attempted to cross the continent, from east to west — which had never before been achieved. Leichhardt tried once and failed. He tried a second time and disappeared, along with his party, without trace. His career, and dramatic end, has been inspiring poems, novels, paintings and plays ever since.
The Great Race — Stuart versus Burke and Wills
The late 1850s saw increasing colonial rivalry for the honour, prestige and publicity that would result from sponsoring great exploratory expeditions — not to mention for news of any great untapped resources in the interior of the continent that might be ready to plunder.
In 1860, both South Australia and Victoria got caught up in the race to cross the continent for the first time. The ostensible purpose of exploration (science, knowledge, blah, blah . . .) took a back seat as colonies sent men out with the express purpose of just getting to the other side — as quickly as darn possible, please. The results were sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical, and very occasionally useful.
While Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills of Victoria made it onto the big disaster list, feats of endurance and survival helped John McDouall Stuart’s endeavours as part of the South Australian contingent join the growing list of stirring explorer adventure tales.
Seeing the back of Burke, losing Wills
Robert O’Hara Burke was many things: An Irish ex-army officer with a thirst for glory; a Castlemaine police superintendent with a mad crush on a Melbourne bombshell actress. He was also a man of persuasive charm, as is evident from the fact that he managed to convince the Royal Society of Victoria to appoint him leader of the expedition to the north coast of Australia, despite not having any exploration experience.
The expedition’s chief purpose was not so much scientific or geographic — the cashed-up gold rush colony of Victoria just wanted the honour and glory of being the first colony to sponsor an expedition that crossed the continent. Time was an issue too, as South Australia had John McDouall Stuart, a veteran of Sturt’s earlier expedition, itching to do the same (see the following section for details of Stuart’s expeditions). It was going to be what Victorian Governor Barkly called a ‘glorious race across the continent’ between two great rivals: Victoria and South Australia.
Burke’s expedition left Melbourne in August 1860, and confidence was more than high, it was soaring: 15,000 enthused Melburnians turned out to see them off. ‘Where the camel pioneers the way, telegraph and railway will in due course inevitably follow’, said The Age. The exploration party was more like an advance force of Victorian conquest, the article continued, and great cities would surely rise up ‘beside the now lonely waters of Carpentaria’. Nowadays ‘there is nothing improbable, much less impossible . . .’ and Burke and his party are just the men to reveal new territory that will succumb to settlement, to commerce, to trade, to railways, telegraphs and all the rest.
Burke’s party was far from modest — it consisted of officers, a camel-master, several Afghan camel drivers, a surveyor-meteorologist (William Wills), two German scientists (never leave home without them), one foreman and nine assistants. The provisions packed bordered on the ridiculous (actually, I think they might have breezed past that border). All initially considered essential for the trip, supplies packed included oak tables and chairs, rockets and a Chinese gong.
Their original progress was more like a slow victory parade, but things began to speed up as Burke grew more impatient and began dumping supplies (some of which would turn out to be essential, such as sugar), splitting the party up, and arguing with various other party members. Wills was made second-in-command after Burke quarrelled with the first holder of this position. By the end of 1860, a base camp had been established at Cooper’s Creek (in South Australia) and Wills, Burke, Charles Gray (an ex-seaman) and John King (a young Irish ex-soldier) then made a dash for the Gulf of Carpentaria.
This smaller party was in luck with the weather — heavy rains that season temporarily converted the Stony Desert (which Sturt had discovered) into one big garden dotted with lily ponds, and finding water supplies, normally the biggest problem in the Australian interior, was no hindrance. But such was their haste that navigation readings were inaccurate, and they didn’t stop to hunt for much-needed fresh food — the overwhelming goal was beating Stuart to the north coast.
The goal was reached, just — the party turned back after sighting a sludgy tidal channel in mangrove swamp near the Gulf — but they were now very far from home.
Camels were dying and more equipment was abandoned. Gray died, and Burke, Wills and King spent a day scratching out a shallow grave to bury him. This proved fatal — they got back to Cooper’s Creek, more than a month overdue, to find the main party had left that morning. On arriving at the camp, they failed to see the tree marked ‘Dig’, directing them to precious supplies. Then, as they gradually starved to death, Burke fired on local Aborigines who had been providing food to the party. Four search parties were sent after them, and King was eventually found being sustained by the natives. Burke and Wills, however, were both dead.
In January 1863, the remains of Wills and Burke were given a state funeral in Melbourne. The city streets were packed with 40,000 people in a public farewell of what the local paper called ‘two gallant but unfortunate men’. The funeral procession took three hours to weave through the thick crowd. Overall, the project had cost an astronomical £60,000 (including the cost of monuments to commemorate those who had died), and seven lives.
Super Stuart — just a pity he’s drunk
John McDouall Stuart was an intense Scot given to drinking. He arrived in South Australia (SA) in his early 20s, at about the same time that Charles Sturt overlanded some cattle there from NSW (refer to the section ‘Sturt — have boat, will walk’ earlier in this chapter). Stuart accompanied Sturt on the 1844 expedition into the interior, and was the companion Sturt chose near the end of the trek to join him on an insane 724-km journey to the very centre of the Australian continent (fortunately both Sturt and Stuart were talked out of it).
Apart from nearly dying in a hare-brained scheme, Stuart benefitted mightily from the Sturt expedition. He’d watched a pro in action, and become accomplished at topographical mapping and survey work. Unlike the Burke and Wills expedition, the subsequent journeys he took were clearly navigated and mapped.
Stuart’s expedition to the centre
In the 1850s, Stuart worked as a surveyor, and led successful expeditions in SA in search of gold, grazing country and stock routes, and became the first to cross the salt lakes that had hemmed settlement in. He was therefore the prime candidate when in July 1859 the SA Parliament offered a £2,000 reward for the first expedition to successfully cross the Australian continent.
By April 1860, Stuart was camped at the centre of the continent, and next day planted the Union Jack flag at what he named Mt Sturt in honour of his mentor (but which was afterwards changed to Mt Stuart to honour the discoverer himself).
Stuart wrote in his journal that ‘we . . . gave three hearty cheers for the flag, the emblem of civil and religious liberty . . . may it be a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilization, and Christianity is about to break upon them’ (lucky fellows).
Stuart continued north, reaching Tennant’s Creek and beyond before being stopped by impenetrable scrub. He made it back to Adelaide, and was received with public banquets and Government House welcomes — some of which he was sober for.
Stuart’s expedition to the north
At the end of 1860, with Burke and Wills making indecent haste to cross the country and reach the Gulf of Carpentaria (refer to the section ‘Seeing the back of Burke, losing Wills’ earlier in this chapter), SA Parliament agreed £2,500 should be spent on funding another Stuart expedition to the north, and he left practically the next day — in January 1861. This time Stuart made it through the previously impassable scrub, but couldn’t get beyond the plains that lay on the other side. Provisions down to practically zero, clothes shredded, his party barely made it back to Adelaide.
Stuart was still game for more punishment, however, and left once more in October 1861, perhaps strangely emboldened by the news that Burke and Wills had died in their own attempt. This time he met with success. On 24 July 1862, Stuart and his companions stood on the sand on the north coast of Australia.
This time Stuart made it back in even worse shape. Scurvy riddled, nearly blind, carried in a stretcher, he made it back to Adelaide in December 1862, but such was his woeful state the city had to wait until the end of January before holding a public holiday to celebrate, with crowds, banners and streamers ornamenting the streets.
A grateful SA government awarded Stuart £2,000 for the achievement, but then, worried he’d drink it all, allowed him to access only the interest accrued from the sum rather than the capital. This improved Stuart’s mood not one bit, and in 1864 he left the continent he’d been first to cross, kept drinking, and died two years later.
SA gained a lot from this monumental achievement — the state secured the contract to build an overland telegraph line across the continent to connect to the rest of the world, and it largely followed Stuart’s tracks. Stuart became retrospectively lionised as one of those heroic martyrs who sacrifice their lives and die for the spread of civilisation.
Selectors and Bushrangers
In the rural areas of Australia, two main groups really established themselves in the public’s consciousness during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s: Selectors and bushrangers.
Selectors were small-scale farmers who had selected land for cultivation and, overall, they became more successful through the 1870s, thanks partly to their own improved efforts after the failures of the 1860s (refer to Chapter 8), partly to improved legislation, and partly to the arrival of rail. Bushrangers, on the other hand, became the definitive bad boys of colonial Australia, and were indulged, adored and reviled for that reason. Bushrangers went in for adventure, money, fast horses, gorgeous women, fancy clothes and, oftentimes, revenge against society (and especially police). Selectors went in more for next season’s harvest. Bushrangers were sometimes selectors — although they were happy to rob selectors.
Myths sprang up about each group. One myth said that bushrangers robbed from the rich and gave to the poor (untrue — they robbed from everybody, and mostly gave to their mates, who also tended to be their criminal associates, and to their immediate families, girlfriends and wives). Another myth said that selectors were forever doomed to be ground down and oppressed by bad legislation and predatory squatters (also untrue — by the end of the 1870s, selectors were beginning to establish farms with a rate of success and accumulation of profit that defied selection failures of the previous decade).
Moving on from the selectors’ dust heap
In the early 1860s, many gold-seekers had tried their hand at becoming small farmers as new Land Acts were passed by colonial parliaments. Many failed in their first land selections. Coming from modern Britain, they often had little or no experience of life on the land — being town or city dwellers to begin with. Frequently, they lacked the money to start up and successfully establish a farm, even if legislation allowed them to select land to live and work on. On top of that, most of the rural colonial hinterland could only be used for wool-growing until railways began to fan out from the main metropolitan centres, offering cheaper freight costs to markets in the city and overseas. (Chapter 8 describes these difficulties and failures more fully.)
By the 1870s, however, things were starting to improve significantly. While NSW pastoralists had been successful in restricting selection, in Victoria and SA better legislation aimed at getting rid of old loopholes proved successful. As well as this, the colonial parliaments, keen to do everything possible for their selector voters, created special boards to oversee the administration of these Acts. Land departments made sure legislation and its regulations weren’t abused. It had taken them a while, a good decade in fact, but they’d learnt.
Simultaneously, the selectors too had learnt. Those taking up land in the 1870s had often had previous experience farming on other selections and had begun to develop intelligent strategies for Australian conditions.
The railways were also now arriving with a vengeance. The squatters’ great declared enemies, the radical liberals, were in government (see Chapter 10 for more on Colonial Liberalism), and the Victorian Government, in particular, made a point of building railway lines out to all areas featuring dense selector settlement before building lines out to areas of traditional squatter strongholds, such as the western district of Victoria. The modern wheat belt, which developed in South Australia and northern Victoria during this time, was predominantly made up of smallholders who could make use of these new train lines. (See the section ‘It’s raining trains’ later in this chapter for more on the impact of the expanded rail network.)
While come election time the old terms of political abuse would still be wheeled out against the great class enemy the squatter, the reality closer to the ground was far less polarised. Both pastoralists (many of whom were squatters) and selectors were surprised at the extent to which their needs and interests could overlap, and the extent to which they could all integrate into a localised rural community. Getting a railway put through your region was in both pastoralist and selector interest. Ditto good roads and decent postal services. Droughts, floods and sudden climate shifts were common enemies and dangerous to both groups.
A shop owner, storekeeper or pub owner would generally try to keep friendly with both pastoralists and selectors. If a pastoralist wanted to get voted onto the local council or for mayor or into parliament, it was the majority of small-scale farmers he’d have to woo. Their children went to the same local schools, and intermarriage rates were high — the marriage choices of the daughters and sons of selectors and pastoralists had a pattern of confounding expectations. Selectors would often ask pastoralists to be godparents to their newborn, thinking of them more as the prominent local figure rather than the eternal class enemy.
Bushranging nation
Statistically, a higher degree of criminality occurred in the Australian colonies in the 1850s than during the same period in Britain — mostly because of that certain proportion of ex-convicts still in the colonial population with a propensity for crime.
But the gold rush world of 1850s Australia provided many more opportunities for crime. Society was now largely made up of new arrivals living in unfixed and free-floating circumstances, where staggering amounts of wealth could be seen — with diggers who had got lucky flaunting their wealth down the street, and gold escorts, who carried large fortunes between gold fields, towns and cities, becoming numerous. This situation made for many people taking matters into their own hands. Bushranging flourished during the 1850s and 1860s, and experienced a brief renaissance in the late 1870s when the most famous and notorious gang of all — the Kelly Gang — reigned.
When the Gardiner Gang comes together . . . look out!
The 1850s bushrangers and highwaymen were generally men who had arrived freely in the gold rush, while most of those operating in the 1860s were ‘native-born’. These native-born were like the city-based larrikins who were exciting notice and censure at the same time, in that they were a new generation quite different from their parents, who had mostly arrived as immigrants from Britain. The bushrangers of the 1860s had either been born in Australia or arrived very young, and had grown up in the bush and rural districts.
The Clarke brothers, Frank Gardiner, Ben Hall and John Gilbert formed the nucleus of a gang that operated in the southern tablelands region of NSW between Yass, Bathurst and Forbes, an area uniquely rich in both goldfields and rugged mountain country — offering a remote and inaccessible refuge. For a brief period in the 1860s, they led the police and authorities on a merry dance and pulled off enough bold robberies and violent deeds to inspire the next generation of native-born youths who would come along after them.
The biggest exploit was the Eugowra gold escort robbery at Coonbong Rock in 1862. Planned by Gardiner, featuring the involvement of Gilbert, Hall and others, it netted a massive sum — some £14,000. Soon after, Gardiner narrowly avoided capture, decided a quiet life was better than a short and glorious one, and headed up north with his girlfriend. They ran a grog shanty and store near Rockhampton till tracked down by police two years later, after which he was arrested, tried and sentenced to 32 years’ hard labour.
Gilbert, meanwhile, became Hall’s right-hand man as they embarked on a crime spree of truly impressive proportions. Robbing travellers on the Melbourne–Sydney road, they carried out over 600 robberies, with the record being 60 travellers in one day — impressive, no? Gilbert and Hall had stolen racehorses, rifles, double-barrel shotguns and revolvers in abundance, while the police, riding on old nags and stuck with single-shot muzzle-loading cavalry pistols, had a problem: They couldn’t ride them down, nor could they outshoot them. Plus the gang had an extensive support network consisting of everyone from small-time squatters to big property owners and even officials in the local region, all working as a ‘bush telegraph’ and keeping them abreast of police whereabouts.
Even though the Gardiner Gang robbed all and sundry without compunction — including children, selector farmers, recently lucky (now not so lucky) gold diggers, shearers, an old shepherd, a mail-coach driver and a toll-keeper — and were well known to cheerfully let their prize horses graze on small farmers’ crops, they pulled off enough grandiose exploits to win a lively public following. Often enough, they favoured daring hold-ups that would humiliate and taunt police over exploits that would simply score them big loot. The gang raided Bathurst in broad daylight, and took over the entire town of Canowindra for three whole days, but ended up taking no money or property.
Larrikins on the streets of Sydney let out big ‘hurrahs!’ when news arrived of policemen being shot by the gang, young stock riders thought it sounded fine, and shearers and station hands didn’t ever intervene if a pitched battle between bushrangers and police happened to be taking place nearby. Verses and songs started circulating, and the colonial pastime of laughing at police being fooled and humiliated (a tradition cherished since convict days) went from strength to strength in the 1850s and 1860s.
Meeting the members of the Gardiner Gang
The Gardiner Gang may have acted together to pull off some big robberies, but individually they had each already got up to some real mischief.
Frank Gardiner. Reportedly the son of a free settler father from NSW and an Aboriginal mother, when Gardiner began his highwayman career he acquired the nickname ‘Darkie’. Arriving in Victoria in 1850 aged 20, he was quickly convicted for horse stealing and sentenced to five years’ hard labour. The next year he escaped Pentridge prison and made off back to NSW. In 1854 he was convicted of two charges of horse stealing in Goulburn. Given a ticket of leave in 1859, he soon broke his parole and went to the Lambing Flat goldfield where he opened a butcher’s shop. Soon after he began carrying out robberies on the road, and formed a gang to carry out sundry ‘daring outrages’.
Ben Hall. Native-born, with parents who were ex-convicts but considered respectable, Hall grew up around Maitland and became a stockman, leasing a pastoral run and becoming a squatter. Dashing, funny and courteous to women, he had a propensity for crime, and was often found in the company of bushrangers and armed men up to no good. Hall was involved in armed robberies and was caught and charged. Although acquitted, he had to sell his squatter’s lease to pay his legal fees. He then experienced the police harassment coup de grace when the local police inspector burned his house down on very flimsy pretext. This made Hall angry enough to go full-time as bushranger — and he joined Frank Gardiner’s gang.
John Gilbert. Arriving in Melbourne from Canada in 1852 and aged 10, Gilbert soon after became a stableboy in Kilmore. From here it was a short trip to the Victorian goldfields, where he fell in with card sharps and crims. Wearing his hair long ‘in the native-born style’, he started dressing ‘flash’ — and the authorities started to have strong suspicions the source of the wealth for all the fine clothes wasn’t legitimate. By now 18, Gilbert took off to NSW where in 1860 he met Frank Gardiner on the Kiandra goldfields.
The Gardiner Gang meet their (mostly) grisly ends
The bulk of settlers in the regions where the Gardiner Gang was operating stayed quiet. Some were actively colluding with the gang, but most stayed passive and didn’t take sides. Partly this was fear — the bushrangers intimidated, assaulted and burnt down the property of those who acted as informants, witnesses or actively assisted the police. Partly it was just attitude. The ex-convicts didn’t have much respect for the law, and squatters who had expanded beyond the boundaries of settlement in the 1830s and 1840s (refer to Chapter 6) were used to a world where central authority was weak. You looked after your own property, kept your guns loaded, and minded your own business.
But gang members were starting to get shot — not so much by policemen but by homeowners when they began raiding homesteads and pastoral stations.
In November 1864, the Gardiner Gang robbed the Gundagai–Yass mail coach. A battle with police took place and Gilbert shot a sergeant. In April 1865, the Felons Apprehension Act was passed. All citizens could now shoot a bushranger down on sight.
In December 1864, Gilbert was shot by a constable and buried in a police paddock at Binalong. He was 25. Hall was betrayed by an informer, ambushed and shot by police on the Yass plains. His body was riddled with bullets, shot by police who could finally have their revenge after being made to look like fools for so much of the past few years, and paraded through the town of Forbes in grisly triumph.
Gardiner, meanwhile, was still doing his time (refer to the preceding section). Eight years into his sentence, in 1872, people started submitting petitions pleading for mercy, saying he was both chronically ill and a reformed character. These petitions began to have an effect on the NSW Governor, and in 1874 Gardiner was let out of jail (which led to a public outcry and the fall of the government of the future ‘father of Federation’ Henry Parkes, but no matter). Because one of the conditions of release was exile, Gardiner headed off to Hong Kong, and then to San Francisco. Once there he ran a saloon, and eventually died, aged 73, in Colorado in 1903.
Between 1863 and 1867, six bushrangers were killed, including the aptly named and psychopathic ‘Mad Dog’ Morgan, and the Clarke brothers. In the same period, seven policemen died. Looking only at these bald facts, the numbers don’t seem to add up to much. But enough robbery, adventure and ostentatious showmanship had taken place to reinvigorate an old folk myth. Colonial Australians now had their very own highwaymen, transplanted and flourishing as bushrangers. The next generation of native-born youth was inspired.
Getting in on the action with the Greta Mob
While the Gardiner Gang had been wiped out by 1867 (refer to the preceding section), a small criminal subculture was flourishing in the Greta area of Victoria in the 1860s and for much of the 1870s. In this group were professional stock thieves who preyed on selector and squatter alike; the core group was called the Greta Mob.
Most of those in the Greta Mob were part of the native-born generation who were born to migrant gold rush parents in the 1850s. In the Greta area of Victoria, stock theft was abnormally high — more horses were stolen there than in any other part of the district. The Mob numbered about 40 and its members had a conviction rate of 56 per cent, mostly related to horse-stealing charges. They were part of a generational phenomenon that was acquiring the new term ‘larrikin’ — flash thieves and petty crims who were confident, cocky, self-assertive and entirely at ease in this colonial world that they’d grown up in. They were prone to drinking, fighting, gambling, stealing and racing very fast horses.
From this group emerged the most well known bushranger of all: Ned Kelly.
Ned Kelly: Oppressed Selector’s Son or Larrikin Wild Child?
Few individuals in Australian history have polarised opinion as effectively as Ned Kelly — and this includes the opinions of historians as much as those of the wider public. Admire him or otherwise, the acts Kelly performed during his short life and two-year outlaw career compel attention.
Kelly was a horse thief, and when the police pursued him for this he ‘went bush’. Search parties went after him, police got shot, and Kelly and his mates — brother Dan, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart — were declared outlaws.
Kelly showed the usual, run-of-the-mill bushranger behaviour:
Shooting policemen
Robbing banks
Having a final shootout with police
But his more outlandish behaviour went beyond that of the ordinary bushranger type:
Authoring two massive public letters, each bloodcurdling and lyrical in turn, detailing all the changes he was going to wreak on the colonial social and political landscape
Trying to derail an entire police train and shoot all survivors
Clothing himself and his three fellow gang members in iron armour
Kelly’s key events
Kelly makes it difficult to put what he did into perspective, largely because so much of what he planned and carried out managed to defy all perspective. But here’s my attempt.
From 1877 to 1880, Kelly planned, executed and was involved in a series of escalating crimes, robberies and murders, starting with horse theft in 1877 and culminating in the Glenrowan showdown in 1880.
Euroa Bank hold-up — 9 to 10 December 1878
On Monday 8 December, the Kelly Gang rode into Younghusband’s pastoral station at Faithfull’s Creek, a few miles outside the town of Euroa. They took prisoner everyone who was on the station, locking most into a large storage shed. That night Kelly stayed up with the prisoners, keeping most of them awake until dawn, narrating the events that had turned him outlaw. Meanwhile, Joe Byrne wrote out two good copies of a letter to be sent to Donald Cameron, a member of parliament.
The next day, three of the gang rode into Euroa. Arriving just before closing time, the three held up the National Bank of Euroa. Picking up just under £2,000 in cash, thirty ounces of gold, property documents, two revolvers and a box of cartridges, the gang returned to Faithfull’s Creek station with the bank manager and his family in tow. The gang then left at 8 pm, with Kelly having threatened to track down and shoot anyone who left within the next three hours.
Holding up Jerilderie — 9 to 10 February 1879
Arriving in the NSW town of Jerilderie late on Saturday evening, the gang approached the police station, whereupon Kelly shouted, ‘Mr Devine, there’s a row on at Davidson’s Hotel! Come quick, or there’ll be murder!’ Constables Devine and Richards stumbled out onto the verandah only to find themselves staring down the barrels of some serious guns. The police were placed in the lock-up for the night. Next day, Kelly forced Richards to lead them around town (dressed in police uniform), introducing them to townspeople as police reinforcements on their way to take part in the pursuit of those dastardly Kelly boys in Victoria.
About midday on Monday, Kelly took charge of the Royal Mail Hotel, which was next door to the Bank of NSW. Using the bar as a depot for prisoners, Kelly and Byrne robbed the bank, netting about £1,400.
Through all his antics in Jerilderie, however, the man Kelly most wanted to find was the local newspaper editor, who he wanted to print and publish his second great public letter (his first not having got much further than a rather bewildered Donald Cameron). The editor had gone to ground, and Kelly had little choice but to leave the document with the bank’s accountant, who promised to see it published (he was to promptly hand it over to police).
Kelly returned to a now full and captive bar at the Royal Mail Hotel and gave a farewell speech. Leaning against the bar, he placed his gun next to his glass and said with a loud voice, ‘There’s my revolver. Anyone here can take it and shoot me dead, but if I’m shot, Jerilderie will swim in its own blood’. There weren’t any takers.
Showdown at Glenrowan — 26 to 28 June 1880
After the shooting of police-informer Aaron Sherritt (by Kelly Gang member Joe Byrne) in June 1880, the police sent through reinforcements in a special ‘police train’. The train was expected to pass through Glenrowan train station early on Sunday morning, and on Saturday evening, Kelly, having had four suits of iron armour built for the occasion, oversaw the tearing up of railway tracks just past the station. ‘I’m going to shoot every one of the bastards’, Kelly promised as the tracks were being torn up. The train, however, didn’t arrive on Sunday.
By early Monday morning, the gang was preparing to leave, and Kelly was giving his typical ‘lecture’ to the prisoners who had been gathered in the Ann Jones Hotel, when the sound of an approaching train became apparent. Instead of whistling through Glenrowan station and off broken tracks and plummeting down a steep precipice, however, the train slowed to a halt, before steaming slowly into the station. The gang disappeared into the back room of the hotel, and returned in armour.
In the subsequent shootout between the Kelly Gang and police, Dan Kelly, Hart and Byrne were killed. Kelly was brought down as he emerged from the scrub at dawn, trying to shoot his way back into the hotel to save his mates.
At his trial, on 29 October Kelly was found guilty for the murder of Constable Lonigan, and hanged on 11 November 1880. Some reports have him sighing ‘Such is life’ as his last words. They’ve become an iconic Australian phrase voicing a weary and slightly cynical acceptance that the world works as it works and there’s little a rebel can do to change it.
The man in the iron mask
Many historians have argued that Ned Kelly was an Australian version of an international sociological phenomenon — the ‘social bandit’. These bandits were individuals who took up arms against the law and received widespread support from groups or classes who saw themselves as having been oppressed by the law and the bandits as representing their interests.
In the Australian context, Kelly is often seen as a representative of the poor selectors in the north-east region of Victoria, small-time farmers who were victims of the hold that squatters had established both in the law and on the land itself. In this version of events, Kelly was the guy who stood up to the squatters and their puppets — the police and public officials.
When it came to land settlement in the Greta area, where Ned Kelly came from, no great squatter obstruction existed. Selectors in this region were largely part of the ‘second wave’ of selectors who had taken up land in the 1870s after the Grant Land Act of 1869 (refer to the section ‘Moving on from the selectors’ dust heap’ earlier in this chapter). Selection conditions had vastly improved by this time, and the selectors themselves had often gained valuable previous colonial farming experience before trying their hand in the north-east region. This led to an eventual selection success rate of 70 per cent. The public officials themselves were generally of the same generation and period of arrival as the selectors, and were often more sympathetic to selectors’ claims against pastoral tenants.
The war Kelly was conducting was not on behalf of selectors, but of the group of professional stock thieves known as the Greta Mob (refer to the section ‘Getting in on the action with the Greta mob’ earlier in this chapter). The Greta boys walked (and talked themselves up) as ‘fearless, free and bold’, and were largely contemptuous of the selector farmers plugging away, trying to establish their holdings on the land. They all wore the kind of ‘flash larrikin’ uniform that Kelly wore to the last stand at Glenrowan (underneath his armour): Strapped moleskin trousers, gaudy waistcoats and flashy riding boots. This group formed Kelly’s active support base once he became an outlaw.
Growing Towards Nationhood . . . Maybe
Two technological developments in the latter part of the 19th century worked to bring the disparate and self-governing Australian colonies into closer orbit with each other — the telegraph and the railway. The telegraph brought the world much closer to the colonies, demanding more immediate and coordinated responses. The railway brought the separate colonies much closer to each other.
A telegraph to the world
At 12:10 pm on 22 August 1872, two ends of wire were touched together, connecting the Australian telegraph line extending across the continent from Adelaide in South Australia to Palmerston (modern-day Darwin).
Someone who worked on the construction team that built the telegraph line across Australia later recalled how, the moment the wires were finally soldered together, ‘South Australia touched a key and spoke to the British Empire’, and ‘harnessed the world’. At a banquet held in Sydney to celebrate, people went even further. The NSW Governor called it ‘by far the most wonderful event that has ever occurred in the history of this country’. NSW Premier Henry Parkes declared the telegraph ‘a magical business, uniting us hand in hand . . . with the parent land’.
Now news and information could travel to Australia in hours rather than weeks and months. The thin wire promised to be a thread to the world that might help Australians overcome the overpowering sense of isolation they so often felt as a people who (along with their culture) had been transplanted from one side of the world to the other.
The telegraph dramatically drew the Australian colonies more directly into the flow of the world’s events, demanding immediate colonial responses. Previously, the great events, threats and disasters from the outside world, arriving after a significant lag, were often resolved or reacted to well in advance of news of it arriving in Australia, so a colonial government could leave the problems of the rest of the world to London to resolve. Now the outside world began to impinge — it wasn’t that the telegraph line had harnessed the world for Australia, but that Australia had been itself lassoed.
In 1883, Queensland, fearing German designs on the island to its immediate north, annexed New Guinea. Informed of this by telegraph, it took the British Government not much more than a few hours to perform an unholy smackdown on its presumptuous colony for thinking it could decide and then implement what was, in essence, British imperial policy in the Pacific region. In previous decades, the British wouldn’t have found out until the annexation was well advanced, making things far messier for the government in London (not to mention the people of New Guinea), but leaving the colonial periphery a good deal more freedom of action.
In February 1885, news arrived in Australia of the death of Britain’s General Gordon in Sudan. The news was current on its arrival and the effect it produced instant. City streets filled with people shocked and angry at the news, demanding that the colonies do something to revenge Gordon’s death. The next day, the NSW Government announced it would be sending a volunteer force to Sudan, which the British Government accepted four days later on 15 February, and the contingent left Sydney on 3 March. None of this could have happened without the telegraph. News from the world was now arriving so quickly that Australian colonies lost the luxury of inaction. The world’s events were becoming more and more Australia’s events, demanding reactions and actions that couldn’t help but involve Australia in global affairs.
It’s raining trains
Trains were the ‘it’ thing for the second half of the 19th century. Big gleaming metal behemoth monsters that promised to deliver whole towns, suburbs and nations into a new age. ‘There is nothing so extraordinary in history as this modern march of “progress”’, said the Melbourne Argus at the opening of the first big hinterland railway line (to Ballarat from Geelong) in 1862. And the steam engine was widely accepted as ‘the most important lever’ of progress.
In Australia, railways were expected to continue the trail-blazing work done by explorers in taking the modern world into previously unknown country. As construction began in 1850 on the first Australian railway line (from Sydney to Parramatta), the company manager said rail would help create ‘a civilized community in the wild and unpopulated parts of our country’. Fourteen years later, plans were becoming more comprehensive. The Argus said the ‘network of railways’ was ‘destined in the fullness of time . . . to bisect the Australian continent’.
Building up a good head of steam laying train lines
Railway lines first began to poke tentatively out from the hubs of colonial cities in the 1850s, as the gold explosion brought seismic shocks to what the colonial mind could conceive of as possible. New volumes of revenue and population meant everything in the modern world could and should be had at once, and the great train love affair began.
The first railway line to open in Australia was in Victoria — it was opened in September 1854, and ran from Flinders Street in Melbourne to Hobson’s Bay at its port. In June 1857, Geelong was connected to Williamstown; in October, Adelaide and the town of Gawler were connected in South Australia. The major projects in the 1860s were the lines built from the burgeoning Victorian goldfield towns to Melbourne and Geelong on Port Phillip Bay, and lines built from Sydney and Newcastle in NSW to their respective nearby hinterlands.
When trains really took off, however, when it looked like the ‘network of railways’ across Australia was really going to become a reality, was in the 1870s. As this decade progressed, the bulk of the Australian population gained ready rail access:
In 1873, the north-east line opened from Melbourne to Wodonga on the Murray.
In 1876, the Great Western Railway was opened from Sydney to Bathurst (following the route Wentworth, Blaxland and Lawson had taken in 1813 — refer to Chapter 5).
In 1876, a line opened from Brisbane to Ipswich.
In November 1876, a line from Hobart to Launceston opened (as even Tasmania got in on the act).
In 1878, the Great Southern Railway began operating from Sydney to Wagga Wagga, and three months later the Great Northern Line began from Sydney to Tamworth.
The construction of the railways was labour-intensive, requiring the services of
Architects
Builders
Engineers
Labourers
Planners
Quarrymen
Surveyors
Timber cutters
Between 1870 and 1890, the amount of railway line laid down in the colonies went from 1,657 to 15,290 kilometres, a staggering near-tenfold increase.
Trains bring (politically motivated) growth
The effect of all this immense railway-line-laying activity was powerful. For the first time, the bulk of small-time farmers who had either bought land or taken out selections were able to freight their produce to the major markets in the capital cities at reasonable cost. Wool ceased to be the only viable industry in the colonial interior. A wheat industry began to emerge in the Wimmera and northern plains regions of Victoria and the Riverina in NSW. Previous to this, the only viable wheat industry was in South Australia, in parts of the colony easily accessed by coastal shipping.
As the train network was extended in the 1870s, concentrated settlement and more intensive agriculture away from the coast and the goldfields got serious. And thanks to near-universal manhood suffrage (see Chapter 8), governments built the railway lines where the mass of voters wanted them rather than where the most profitable industry was.
The western region of the colony of Victoria was the stronghold of the hated and demonised ‘squattocracy’, the wool-baron pastoralists. To the north-east, were plenty of men and women taking out selections under a new Land Act to farm land. The 1873 north-eastern railway line that opened from Melbourne to Wodonga was built well in advance of the line to the Western District of Victoria, where the wool industry was based. The lines went where the votes dictated, not where the money wanted — a case of rampant pork-barrelling (with projects created purely for personal and political gain) or democracy at work, depending on whose side you were on.
In Australia, railways expanded very differently to the way they expanded in other parts of the world. Europe had a high density of settlement, so private companies could count on building railways and having immediate custom. But Australia, like the United States, had a vast interior without much settlement, so companies couldn’t rely on a pre-existing pattern of settlement to make the new railways immediately profitable. In the United States, this was solved by governments giving private railway companies large tracts of land along their railway routes, thereby providing a good profit source to the company. This would never have worked in the majority of the Australian colonies, however, where most colonial governments were campaigning with policies to take the land off pastoralists, then divide it up for ordinary people to select and to make farms and live on. The task of constructing railways, therefore, became the job of the state. Governments raised the loans to get the money for construction, and gathered the revenue to pay off the loans if receipts from the railways were not enough (often via high customs duties called tariffs).
In the last decades of the 19th century, critics of the railways being in government control thought too many lines were being put down simply to meet the demands of various electorates. This may be so but, nonetheless, colonial governments did ensure that travelling and freighting goods via the railway was considerably cheaper than in Britain. In the 1890s, at the end of the railway explosion, first-class tickets were being used by people who in England would be riding third class. Governments took on the job of building as many railway lines as possible, raising loans to do so on the London Stock Exchange, and the mass of voters seemed well pleased.