Probably the first bushranger, even if he was not that successful, but certainly the first black person to bolt was John ‘Black’ Caesar, possibly born in Madagascar in around 1763. He had been transported for seven years for the not inconsiderable theft of 240 shillings and arrived with the First Fleet. From the time he landed in Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, Caesar was known as a good and conscientious worker. That is until he was again convicted of theft, this time of £12, and was then sentenced to transportation for life on 29 April 1789.
A fortnight later Caesar was off into the bush with a stolen gun. He was caught in early June and sent to work in chains at Garden Island in Sydney. Again he must have proved a satisfactory worker because the chains were taken off just before Christmas and Caesar repaid the kindness of the authorities by stealing a canoe and another gun. He lasted just over a month stealing from gardens and the Aboriginal people in the vicinity, until at the end of January one of them speared him and he returned to the prison camp.
This time he was sent to the penal settlement on Norfolk Island where, by the winter of 1791, he was allowed his own parcel of land and a pig to go with it. He then married and had a daughter but in July 1794 he made another short-lived break. The next year, after what was described as ‘severe punishment’, he was thought to be trusted enough to be sent to Port Jackson from where he made his last escape in the December. By now, as with many another after him, every theft and robbery in the locality was put on his shoulders and the somewhat curious reward of five gallons (23 litres) of spirits was on offer for his capture. On 15 February he attacked another settler and this time he was shot and died at Liberty Plains, Strathfield in Sydney.1
Black Caesar is credited with wounding another great escaper, an Aborigine named Pemulwuy, who in December 1790 killed Governor Phillip’s gamekeeper. Pemulwuy led a series of retaliatory raids on settlers who were suspected of kidnapping Aboriginal children. He was shot and captured in March 1797 in what was known as the Battle of Parramatta but, despite having seven pieces of buckshot in his head and body and being in leg irons, he somehow escaped. According to the Eora people, the first Australians from the Sydney area, this seemingly impossible feat was achieved by his turning himself into a bird—he was known as ‘Butu Wargun’, which means ‘crow’. He continued to carry out attacks on the settlers and was eventually shot and killed on 2 June 1802. His head was cut off and, preserved in spirits, sent to England.2
It did not take long for other convicts to start bolting. At the end of September 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood escaped from the stockade and began to rob the huts at night. They were caught after killing a Dr White’s goat on his farm at White’s Creek, near Sydney. The governor had them chained together and sent back to Rosehill to hard labour on bread and water. During the overseer’s absence they escaped again and after attacking a settler stole three pounds (1.4 kilograms) of beef, one pound (half a kilogram) of flour, a frock and a book from his hut. Recaptured, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death by the Sydney Criminal Court. The next day, on 20 October, they were rowed out to Rosehill where they were hanged from a tree in front of an appreciative crowd of settlers.3
Initially bushrangers may have been driven by the need for survival. The bush surrounding the settlements was unexplored, but this did not deter the convicts from escaping with the idea of making their way to what is now Jakarta or to China. The Irish convicts were principally the ones who believed that:
At a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly.4
In 1791 comforted by this knowledge, twenty male convicts and a pregnant woman set off on foot to build themselves a new life. One died of exhaustion, four were speared by Aborigines and the remainder stumbled back into Sydney a week later.
The belief that China was somewhere north of Sydney lasted for some years until, in 1803, Governor Philip King had two escapees hanged and fixed the punishment for bolting at a savage five hundred lashes and double chains for the remainder of the bolter’s sentence. After that the concept was less appealing.
Not all tried to make it to where they thought China might be. Many bolters died but others survived by joining up with Aboriginal tribes or by robbing the settlers of what little they possessed. One of the survivors and a man who might be described as one of the few success stories of early escapees was William Buckley. Convicted of receiving a roll of cloth and transported for life, he was taken to Port Phillip in April 1803 in the Calcutta with a party under Lieutenant-Governor David Collins. He and two other convicts promptly absconded from the camp. Later his friends tried to return to the vessel but were not heard of again. At first Buckley fed on shellfish and berries; later he met and was accepted by members of the Wathaurong tribe from the Bellarine Peninsula, who believed him to be a reincarnation of their dead chief. He learned their language and their customs, and was given a ‘wife’, by whom he claimed to have had a daughter. He lived with the Wathaurong for over thirty years until he gave himself up in 1835. By then he had forgotten how to speak English and was identified by the tattoo WB. Buckley was pardoned and given the position of tracker. After this he settled in Hobart and became a gatekeeper until he retired in 1851 with a pension of £52 a year. He had married Julia Eager in 1840, had two children, and died in 1856. Buckley’s life is said to be the origin of the phrase Buckley’s Chance.5
Another who escaped slightly later, in 1827, this time from the brutal conduct of the tyrannical Captain Patrick Logan, commandant of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, was Irishman John Graham, who bolted north. In a story similar to that of Buckley, when Graham meet a tribe he also was fortunate in that one of the Aboriginal women thought he was the white ghost of her dead husband. He lived with them for five years before returning to Moreton Bay and surrendering to the rather more sympathetic James Clunie, who had succeeded Logan as Commandant after Aboriginals killed him in 1830. Graham petitioned unsuccessfully that, because of the privations he had suffered at the hands of the tribe, nothing should be added to his sentence. In 1836 he guided the party that rescued Eliza Fraser from the Badtjaka (Butchulla) people after she had been shipwrecked when the Stirling Castle foundered on what is now known as the Eliza Reef, 250 kilometres north of present-day Gladstone, and claimed to have been captured by them. Other survivors in the group claimed they had been well treated but Fraser’s myth-making tales eventually led to the massacre and dispossession of the island’s local people. Graham was given a ticket of leave in 1837.6
The idea was that the transported did not return to England without completing their sentence and obtaining a ticket of leave. So far as officialdom back in Britain was concerned, even if prisoners escaped from the stockades they could rape and pillage as much as they liked. It was too far for them to find their way back to Blighty, which was all that mattered. In the eyes of the British government, the whole of Australia was one huge maximum-security prison. In Western Australia, Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was one of many who believed the Australian bush was a ‘vast, natural gaol’ that would discourage convicts dreaming of escape.
In the 1840s and 1850s some escapees did make their way to the west coast of America. They set up gambling dens and brothels on the waterfront in San Francisco, where they were known as the Sydney Ducks, but they never returned to England.
On 7 December 1835 an eighteen-year-old petty thief, Charles Adolphus King, was sentenced at the Manchester New Bailey for burglary in the city to fourteen years’ transportation. He arrived in Australia on the Lord Kennedy in 1836 and worked as a gentleman’s servant until his master left the colony eighteen months later, at which time King was returned to barracks. He worked on the roads and then as a shepherd at Appin, south of Campbelltown, not far from what is now the Hume Highway. In 1838 he helped a bushranger and for this was sentenced to twelve months on a chain gang. He was then sent to a new master, but when the man left for Perth he again went back to the convict barracks. He escaped, was caught in Sydney, given a modest fifty lashes and sent to an up-country estate.
Four months later King and a John Carney escaped from that estate. They returned to Port Jackson and hid in a ship’s hold. When they were discovered while out to sea, the captain intended to take them back to New South Wales but they jumped ship near one of the Fijian islands. Attacked by natives, Carney was killed but the daughter of a native chief saved King. He had been in Fiji four months when he and the young woman got away on the Angelique, a French whaler. They landed four months later in New Zealand. Fearing he would be arrested, he abandoned the chief’s daughter after a missionary promised to return her to Fiji and he then shipped on the Elizabeth to London.
King made his way to Salford in Lancashire where in 1840 he was dobbed in. In a long speech to the judge he begged to be hanged rather than sent to Norfolk Island, but on 23 March 1840 he was sentenced to penal servitude for life, the first ten years to be in chains. King was fortunate. Public opinion was with him and his sentence was commuted to five years’ penal servitude in London’s Millbank.
How much of King’s story was true is another matter. It smacks of the stuff of convict memoirs—the escape, the romance, the penitence—all of which sold well to the public. Indeed a booklet appeared in 1840 and another version followed in 1845. After his release King seems to have made something of a living lecturing on his experiences.7
It is hardly surprising that escapes were thick and fast in the early days. In June 1837 Thomas Smith was appointed jailer at the prison at Batman’s Hill, Port Phillip. The jail consisted of wattle daub walls and a thatched roof surrounded by a 2.43-metre timber fence. Smith had one assistant, a part-timer who carried out floggings. On 24 July Harry Smiley escaped by cutting through the roof boards during the night but, far worse, Thomas Clarke, who was being held in irons, escaped during the afternoon of 22 September. The irons were found in Smith’s office and he was promptly dismissed. Some years later the jail was burned down by Aborigines.8
In a breakout from Fremantle in Western Australia on 25 January 1859, John Williams, Peter Campbell, Henry Stephens, John Haynes and Stephen Lacey escaped soon after construction of the convict establishment had been completed. The five convicts, who were on a work party, absconded into the bush and made their way up river to Melville Water. With the aid of Aboriginal trackers, the police immediately followed in pursuit. At Point Walter the convicts seized a dinghy and returned down river, keeping to the cover of trees along the riverbank. Once reaching Fremantle they rowed past the harbour lookout and out to open water. The next morning they landed at Garden Island and robbed James Reid and his wife, stealing food, pistols, water, a sword and a compass. They loaded up the family’s whaleboat and set out to sea heading north. Meanwhile, the pursuit had been delayed. While the convicts were rowing out to Garden Island, the water police boat was being used to ferry Governor Edward Kennedy to Rottnest Island, where Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was also on holiday. By the time the water police retrieved their boat and sailed to Garden Island, the five had vanished.
The convicts landed ten days later near Port Gregory when their food and water had run out and were immediately seen by the water police and chased into the country. By this time Lacey was regarded as the weakest link in the party and suspected of stealing their rations. When the other four returned from a night-time fishing trip he was nowhere to be seen. When Lacey finally returned to camp, Williams gave him a beating and later fatally shot him. Lacey was buried on the beach.
Some weeks later, again out of food and water, the four men surrendered to George Clinton in command of a government schooner Les Trois Amis. On 14 July Haynes was acquitted of Lacey’s murder and Williams found guilty. They were all sentenced to death for the robbery and other crimes but were reprieved.9
On 29 May 1867, William Graham used a duplicate key to unlock his cell and free Thomas Scott and George Morris in another escape from Fremantle. With heavy rain muffling the sound of their footsteps the three men made their way to the East Workshops, where they stripped leather drive belts from the machinery, tied them together and used them to scale the perimeter wall. Their escape was not discovered until muster the next morning.
The trio soon began bushranging, stealing rifles and food as they moved through farmlands north east of Perth. Police and Aboriginal trackers caught up with them two days after their escape and, during a night-time shoot-out, George Morris died after being hit in the neck. Graham and Scott escaped by crossing the Causeway and it was not until several weeks later that four police officers and three Aboriginal trackers discovered the fresh tracks they had made east of Kojonup, south west of Perth. One tracker found Graham standing sentry outside an abandoned hut and he returned to the police camp, reporting where the men were. The police made a decision that was later said to ‘cast shame on the whole force’.
The trackers were ordered to return to the hut and open fire on the building ‘without challenge’. In the morning the police found that both men had escaped, albeit wounded. William Graham dragged himself twelve miles (just over 19 kilometres) through the bush until, believing he was about to die, he surrendered to a shepherd. Scott was captured a few days later near the Blackwood River. Both were returned to prison. The police involved were dismissed from the force for what was described in the Perth Gazette as a ‘disgraceful affair’.10
An escape too many also saw the end of Bernard Wootton, aka MacNulty, transported in June 1856, who absconded along with James Holmes and Henry Davies from a working party at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum on 23 April 1863. Wootton had been serving a nine-year sentence handed out the previous January for rolling a drunk in York, 97 kilometres east of Perth. The escape was short-lived. The three men returned to York where they bailed up an Elizabeth Martin, stealing three firearms, food and ammunition. They were tracked down and marched back to Perth.
The question was whether the robbery had been ‘with violence’. Henry Davies had placed his hands on Mrs Martin’s shoulders and it was asked whether that was sufficient to establish the charge. The jury, possibly sympathetically, decided it was not and the men were discharged after His Honour Chief Justice Burt lectured them about future escapes and the probable consequences. If Wootton actually listened to the judge, he did not heed His Lordship’s words.
A much more serious escape took place on the evening of 8 August 1867 when, after the working gangs of convicts including Wootton had been marched into prison for the night, the door of one of the wards was opened and from it emerged a party of eight men, apparently under the charge of another warder. In fact it was fellow convict John Smith dressed in a warder’s uniform. He halted his party while he reclosed and locked the door, and then, giving the order to march, took them to the gate of the work yard. On the way they passed a sentry just relieved from duty who, seeing an apparent colleague, took no notice of the party. The escape was a great success but for some it was relatively brief. Fremantle’s Herald was up in arms:
There can be no doubt that the successful evasion of the police by these men tends to encourage escapes. It certainly does not give us a high opinion of the efficiency of the police for these men, unarmed and half starved perhaps, to remain so long at large. The supposition that they are harboured by companions does not in any way account satisfactorily for their non capture. Let us hope that by the speedy capture of these nine runaways the police will endeavour to restore confidence in their activity and intelligence, which we can assure them is becoming somewhat shaken.11
Four of the men were captured without a fight near Pinjarra, south of Perth. Another was taken after a shootout with the police. Another two were captured near Beverley, attempting to make their way east towards the desert. However, after Wootton was captured Sergeant John Moyle released him from a handcuff so he could eat breakfast. Wootton repaid his kindness by hitting him on the head with a red-hot iron bar. Moyle’s Aboriginal assistant stepped in and disarmed Wootton. When Moyle asked Wootton why he had attacked him Wootton replied, ‘Would you not have done it? To get your liberty?’
The final two escapees headed south towards the ports of Bunbury and Busselton in the hopes of catching a boat. One was caught near the Murray River and the last, John Williams, drowned trying to escape from the pursuing police.
On 3 October Wootton was sentenced to death for attempted murder and when he was hanged a week later the Perth Gazette summed things up:
The condemned convict Bernard Wootton suffered the penalty of his crimes on Tuesday morning. This man was undoubtedly one of the most desperate and dangerous characters we have been indebted for to the mother country, and continued hardened to the last, rejecting all offers of religious ministrations. On the scaffold his last words were a shout for the Irish Republic.12
In Van Diemen’s Land in 1842, convict bushranger Martin Cash and two offsiders, Lawrence Kavenagh and George Jones, escaped from Port Arthur by swimming across the shark-infested waters, their clothes tied in bundles above their heads, to avoid the guard dogs at the isthmus Eagle Hawk Neck. Cash, who later had his autobiography ghosted, was an educated young man from a well-off Irish family. In 1828 he had been transported to Botany Bay for housebreaking or, by his account, rather more romantically for a crime of passion when he saw a man embracing his mistress. In 1840 in the Port Arthur jail he ganged up with Kavenagh and Jones, and Cash and Company was formed.
Their escape led to some twenty successful months of bushranging. Generous rewards for their capture went unclaimed as local support for Cash and Co. far outweighed the popularity of the authorities. Then on 29 August 1843 Cash was seen in Hobart Town where he shot and killed Constable Peter Winstanley. In turn Cash was shot in the face before he was captured. Kavenagh had already given himself up and both were sentenced to hang. An hour before their execution they obtained a reprieve—if a sentence of transportation for life to Norfolk Island could be called that.
The unfortunate Kavenagh would later be hanged along with eleven others within a year of his arrival on the island for his part in what was known as the ‘Cooking Pot’ uprising. Cash, revered by prisoners as a great bushranger, kept his nose clean and in 1852 he was appointed convict overseer. Two years later he married Mary Bennett, a transportee from County Clare and within months the couple resettled in Van Diemen’s Land, where Cash was in charge of the Government Domain gardens. He died in August 1877 at the then good age of sixty-nine.13
It was another repeat bolter, the ‘Gentleman Bushranger’, 26-year-old William Westwood, also known as ‘Jacky Jacky’, who had led the Cooking Pot revolt as a retaliation for an ill-advised confiscation of the men’s kitchenware.14 Westwood had been transported for theft after receiving fourteen years at Essex Quarter Sessions. Arriving from England in 1839, he escaped twice and was flogged three times. He then began to work for his master during the day and ‘for myself in the night’. In December 1840, when one of his mates dobbed him in, he fled to the bush, joining up with bushranger Paddy Curran, who would be hanged for rape at Berrima in New South Wales the following October.
Westwood had been caught in July that year, when he failed in an attempt to hold up the Black Horse Inn near Berrima. Foolishly, he put down his pistols and was jumped on by the customers. Sent to Van Diemen’s Land, he escaped six times and, after the seventh attempt, during which he stole guns and ammunition, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Norfolk Island. On his way there he tried, but failed to take over the brig the Governor Phillip and, after another attempted escape, he was ring bolted for a time to the cell wall by his hands, with his feet chained to the floor.
Under Westwood’s leadership, the Cooking Pot men made for the prison governor’s cottage but, still in irons, they were far too slow. By the time they got near the cottage they were met by a line of soldiers. They turned and ran back towards the Lumber Yard. Within half an hour the riot had been put down with some ease but four ‘minor officials’ were killed, including Constable John Morris and an overseer Stephen Smith, who was axed to death by Westwood behind the cookhouse. The rioters were identified by the simple expedient of picking out those with blood on their clothes. Fifty-two men were placed in irons.
On 23 September 1846 a judge heard the case against fourteen men. Twelve including Westwood were sentenced to be hanged. While awaiting execution Westwood made a final daring but futile attempt to escape, if only to see daylight one last time. He had partly sawed through a ceiling beam before he was discovered. The Anglican chaplain, the Reverend Thomas Rogers, then obtained a paper and pen for him and Westwood began to write his confession for the gallows. In it he claimed four others to be hanged with him for the murder of Morris were innocent and concluded:
My grave will be a haven. Flogged, goaded and tantalised, I have been reduced to a lunatic and savage. Out of my bitter cup of sorrow the sweetest draught is that which takes away the misery of a living death.15
In 1851 Victoria had just become a state and had just built a brand-new prison, Pentridge. Within months of its opening, forty-eight prisoners escaped. On 26 March seventeen of them were working outside the stockade and they rushed the warders. Nine were immediately recaptured but bushranger Frank Gardiner, then using the name Christie, lasted on the outside until 1854, when he was caught horse stealing in Yass. On 29 August 1851, twenty-three out of thirty-one of a party working in the quarry got away. One man was shot dead and the rest were immediately recaptured. After that security was seriously stepped up. But not sufficiently, at least in the short-term.
On 23 May 1854 the horse thief Edward Rider who was employed at Governor John Price’s house in Pentridge dressed up in Mrs Price’s clothing and, carrying her handbag and parasol and with her veil over his face, walked out past the saluting sentries. He was not missed for several hours. Apparently he did not change his clothes until he reached a safe house in Collingwood five miles away. He was never seen again in Victoria.16
Nineteenth century prison governors were often either corrupt or brutal, sometimes both. One-time naval surgeon John Stephen Hampton could easily fit into the third category. The year 1846 was a particularly bad year for convicts generally. Not only did the vicious John Price arrive on Norfolk Island—he was later murdered by convicts in Victoria—but Hampton, who was regarded as having done well on the convict ships, was also appointed Comptroller-General of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. He took up his position in the October and throughout the next nine years there were constant press allegations of corruption and ill treatment of convicts. In 1855 the Tasmanian Legislative Council established a select committee to inquire into the allegations. Hampton declined to appear and a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle took place to try to compel him. By the time the inquiry was completed and Hampton was found to have used convict labour for personal profit he had left for Canada.
The inquiry hurt him not in the slightest and, amazingly, he was appointed in 1861 as Governor of Western Australia, a state then in serious financial trouble. Because of this he used convict instead of contract labour for the expanding public building works and restored the colony’s finances. The Comptroller-General of Prisons, Edmund Henderson, resigned within the year and, before his replacement Captain William Newland arrived, Hampton assumed that position as well. Described as ‘tyrannical and harsh, and partook more of the methods of the “white overseer” of the slave plantation’, Hampton reintroduced solitary confinement and increased the floggings at Fremantle Gaol. A returned escapee could expect a hundred lashes, and six to nine months solitary, the first thirty days of which were on bread and water.17
In 1866 after a long-running quarrel with the new Comptroller-General, Newland, who favoured less harsh treatment of the men, Hampton dismissed him and appointed his own totally unqualified son George to the position. In the nine-month period June 1866 to March 1867 escape attempts trebled to ninety. In 1867 he abolished the Board of Visiting Magistrates, which effectively ended any complaints system for the convicts. In November 1868, with the colony’s budget balanced, he returned to England. His wife died almost immediately on their return and Hampton lived only until December 1869.
One of the men who had suffered under Hampton’s governorship was the Cornish-born Joseph Bolitho Johns, known as ‘Moondyne Joe’, sentenced to ten years’ transportation at Brecon (Wales) Assizes for the theft of food and other goods.18
On arrival at Fremantle as a convict in February 1853, Johns was immediately granted his ticket of leave. He worked as an animal tracker near Toodyay until 1861 when he was accused of stealing a horse. This earned him a three-year sentence in the convict establishment. It was not long before he received a remission of his sentence and another ticket of leave. He returned to the Moondyne Springs area near Toodyay but only four years later, in 1865, he was returned to prison after stealing and killing an ox. He escaped from a work party in that year but was recaptured and another year was added to his sentence. A year later he managed to escape once again but was recaptured with a further five years added. By this time the newspapers had picked up on Moondyne Joe’s story and were questioning the wisdom of adding more years to his now lengthy sentence.
Hampton directed his son George to build an escape-proof cell for Johns. It was reinforced with wood panelling and long nails to prevent him from digging his way out. Inspecting this cell Governor Hampton told Johns sarcastically, ‘If you get out again, I’ll forgive you’. In 1867, to give him fresh air and exercise, he was put to work breaking rocks in the parade ground. Working under strict supervision Johns broke them daily until a large pile of rubble had built up near the front wall of the prison. Now, partially hidden behind the pile, he quickly dug a hole through the prison wall with his pickaxe and emerged in the superintendent’s yard. He escaped through a gate and disappeared into the bush.
He was not recaptured until 1869, when he broke into the cellar of Houghton’s Vineyard in the Swan Valley where unfortunately a group of policemen were drinking. This time he received an additional four years but George Hampton was no longer in charge of the prisons and Governor Frederick Weld was more forgiving. Johns was given his ticket of leave in 1871 and became a free man two years later. He married in 1879 but the remainder of his life was punctuated with petty crimes and short sentences. He died in the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum in August 1900.
Another repeat escaper from Fremantle, Joseph Ralph, had been convicted of burglary and transported for twenty years, arriving in Western Australia in 1854. Described as a mild-mannered, non-violent man he became a favourite of Richard Alderson, the prison chaplain, who found him work in the prison library and, perhaps naively, described him as a sincere man who had the potential to be reformed, as long as bad companions did not tempt him. However, bad companions are difficult to avoid in prison. On 18 August 1857 Ralph received seventy-five lashes for making clothes out of prison property and attempting to escape through a gate in the northern perimeter wall. In 1864, after making several unsuccessful escape attempts he was placed in solitary confinement for six months. On 21 August 1865 Ralph again attempted to escape from his cell. This was his ninth recorded attempt. He continued his efforts over the next few years until, in 1874, the governor ordered Ralph’s cell to be reinforced in a similar way to Johns’. Additionally, prison guards were placed in the cells on either side and under the one occupied by Ralph. He was strip-searched twice a day. Unlike Johns, Ralph did not escape again and he died in the prison hospital in 1887.
At the end of the century, in 1892 in Geelong, former Corio Street barber Frederick ‘Josh’ Clarke, who had been transported for ten years for robbery in 1847 and who was a member of the Plum Gang, named after its leader Alexander ‘Plum’ Williams, tried to escape from the Old Geelong Gaol. During his time in Van Diemen’s Land Clarke had organised a conspiracy to steal a schooner and had received a hundred lashes on four occasions. He obtained his ticket of leave and sailed for Victoria in 1852 and immediately picked up two years for vagrancy. He was hardly finished with that sentence when he received ten years on the roads for horse stealing. Clarke was made of sterner stuff and he stole another horse, receiving another seven years when he was recaptured.
In 1892 two juries disagreed when Plum Williams, born in 1853, was charged with breaking into the Albert Park Railway Station and stealing £343. The prosecution, in defiance of convention to offer no evidence, pressed for a third trial, this time with a special jury. Convicted, Williams received eleven years. In his time he served sentences for house breaking, horse stealing and bank robbery. Since, he said, the sentence was more or less the same for a £500 robbery as for one of £50 he went for the higher prize. He knew how to pick his men and seldom made mistakes. Plum Williams grew his hair long, purchased a velvet coat and, as ‘Beauregard’, a wealthy artist, was soon invited to fashionable houses in the South Yarra and Toorak districts as an eligible suitor for the owners’ daughters. It was many years before he was linked to the burglaries that had taken place soon after his visits.
Williams’ downfall came through a young constable from the bush, Dick Guthrie, known throughout his career as ‘Dick the Needle’, and used for undercover work. By hanging around saloons and billiard halls he infiltrated the Plum Gang. Accepted as a member, he discovered two of the gang were operating a coining plant in Collingwood and, tipping off detectives by letter, he arranged they should swoop on a house. Guthrie had hung up his coat when the raid took place and was forced to leave it behind. When detectives asked who owned the coat, one of the other men claimed it and Guthrie could not break his cover to say it was in fact his.
On his release Williams worked on the docks and was said to have been a genuinely hard worker. He also had a fruit and vegetable stall which, said the police, he used as a cover for his less useful activities. Williams was known as the ‘Prince of Australian Criminals’ and at the time ‘the best criminal Melbourne ever had and as a pal there was no one better’. After his release from a two-year sentence in 1902 he seems to have reformed and worked as a labourer. He died on 26 April 1914 a pauper in the Melbourne Hospital.19
In 1854, when Frederick Clarke received ten years in Victoria for horse stealing, he had been working as a barber in the goldfields. Clarke’s first attempt to leave Geelong came on 8 October 1889 when he pounded on his Cell 6 door at 2 am and asked George Cane, the only warder, for a glass of water. When Cane left to get the water, Clarke unlocked his cell door with a key he had made from melted pennies. He then unlocked fellow prisoner Christopher Farrell in Cell 13, serving twelve years for shooting a detective. They beat up Cane before they made their escape, taking his watch with them.
Farrell lasted ten days on the outside until he was arrested at Lake Wendouree near Ballarat. He had, he said, not eaten for four days and had left Clarke seriously ill. The papers gleefully reported that when he was found he would be dead or dying from exposure. But Clarke was made of sterner stuff and when he was also captured near Ballarat on 18 October he put up a good fight. The pair received two years apiece with hard labour for their efforts. Curiously, at the time of their respective captures they were still wearing their prison clothes. Farrell died in August 1895 in the hospital section of Geelong Gaol. His death was certified as pneumonia and debility.20
Clarke’s second attempt to escape from Geelong came the year of his offsider’s death, when he was found surrounded by bricks and mortar that he had loosened from the walls of his cell with a piece of iron he had wrenched from a bucket. The story that his final attempt proved fatal when the bricks he was removing from the ceiling of his cell fell on him is romantic but sadly incorrect. He died in August 1904 at the age of eighty-four from what was reported as senile decay. Along with his old friend Plum Williams, he had been serving a four-year sentence for shop-breaking imposed in Melbourne the previous year.21
The naivety and ingenuity showed by early escapers into the vast wild prison of the Australian outback continue. As the new century began, though, escapees began to devise more and more ingenious ways to obtain their freedom.