CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Great Walkabout
AUSTRALIA
— 1901–1904 —
Up jumped the swagman, leapt into the billabong,
‘You’ll never catch me alive,’ said he,
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong,
‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?’
The road ‘John Dell’ took to Bluff on the South Island, in late 1900, was thronged by labourers, sheep-shearers, ‘runaway sailors from Lyttelton and Dunedin’ and its share of common criminals working the great oceanic circuits of the day. Most of them, like him, were bound for Melbourne, from where those committed to earning a living would take the train up-country to Echuca or Albury – on the fringes of Ned Kelly country – to tramp about in search of seasonal work.1 The voyage across the Tasman offered the opportunity of striking up a few shipboard friendships that would help when he disembarked in Melbourne.
By then, ‘Dell’ would be out of sight of an Imperial Eye that was focused on the South African War. It was a lead he held on to for close on a decade. On 1 June 1900, Lord Roberts’s forces occupied Johannesburg, which then became a centre for British concern. Twelve months later the Eye – freed of the political grit that had impaired its vision since the Jameson Raid – swept the South Island, hoping to catch a last glimpse of its old quarry before he left Bluff. In late 1901, imperial law-enforcement agencies, concerned that the men shot at the Red Lion in January 1895 had both been British subjects, did as the Kruger administration had attempted to do five years earlier, and tried anew to establish the suspect’s whereabouts in New Zealand.2
By then ‘John Dell’ was no more. Like ‘Thomas Kenny’ of India before him, he had evanesced. Instead, ‘John Bourke’ was born, perhaps re-born, out on the Tasman Sea. It was ‘Bourke’ who disembarked at Melbourne in mid-1901.3 For reasons that are unclear, ‘Bourke’, like ‘Dell’ before him, insisted on 1862 rather than 1859 as his date of birth, leaving him a few years younger than really he was. A year later, in 1902, he told police in New South Wales that he was a ‘Roman Catholic’ and, still intent on concealing his southern African past, suggested that he had first set foot in Australia in 1887, arriving on the SS Mount Sirion (which was only built in 1895). Not much effort went into constructing ‘Bourke’s’ past because, when all was said and done, he bore the imprimatur of the Boers of Potchefstroom.
Back in the early 1880s, when McLoughlin had first entered Australia, before the police took an interest in him and he had to flee to southern Africa, Melbourne had been good to him. He had visited Tommy, locked up in Pentridge, and developed an underworld network that allowed him to live fairly well and avoid arrest. Back then, the state was in an economic upswing and making a living was relatively easy. But the boom had collapsed in 1891, and now, 10 years later, it was evident that the city and the countryside were still in the wake of a serious depression.4 Rather worryingly for him, early 1901 had also seen the birth of the ‘Commonwealth of Australia’; a development that encouraged police co-operation between the constituent states.
His second stay of a few months in Melbourne, in 1901, was pleasant and trouble-free enough for him to talk about it openly years later.5 Indeed, if it were not for his own voluntary testimony nobody would have realised that he passed through the city for a second time. He remembered his return visit for two reasons. First, he raised the money for a blacksmith to replace his old prosthesis. It had been bothering him ever since he had damaged it during the jump from the train and it had collapsed almost completely in Auckland. He replaced it with a metal hook that was tolerable in private but an embarrassment when out in public. He liked keeping up appearances and dressing well, and because he did not want to be seen as disabled, got a ‘cork hand’ attached to the hook which he again covered with a glove.6 It was functional but nowhere near as menacing as his first prosthesis which had so captured the imagination of Johannesburg journalists.7
Secondly, Melbourne was the base from which he re-established contact with Tommy. The inauguration of the Imperial Penny Post, on Christmas Day 1898, helped. It facilitated communication among ordinary men and women across the southern world – which, despite the extension of telegraph cables, still failed to match the interconnectedness of the northern hemisphere.8 His brother, having left behind a criminal record in New South Wales, was in the remote north-west of the continent. Also, and equally important, it was in Melbourne that he put together a team for one or other big job that raised the funds necessary for his 1 700 nautical mile ocean voyage to the west coast.9
There was much to look forward to, to share. The congestion and squalor of Ancoats had left the McLoughlin brothers with the marks of masculinity and poverty – or, seen from a more positive perspective, with a love of adventure, the countryside and frontier society. They had last seen each other in the grounds of the Johannesburg Hospital, in 1894, after Tommy had gone half-way round the world to see his hero. Six years later, Jack was returning the favour by looping around the southern ocean of Australia. Nothing is known about where or when they had their long-anticipated reunion, but the likely venue was Fremantle, around July or August of 1901.
From the moment he entered Australia in the 1880s, Tommy had shown a preference for working with horses, cattle and sheep. After a few misadventures out east that included the theft of livestock, he had worked his way up, through New South Wales, and then on into Queensland.10 Cattle-duffers – stock thieves – stood in relation to butchers as did gold thieves to jewellers, and it may have been through the illegal trade in sheep and cattle that Tommy first met the entrepreneurial Patrick Durack, whose forebears hailed from Ireland.11
In the mid-1880s the Duracks were among the state’s most successful cattle ranchers. They owned a string of properties in south-western Queensland and a butcher shop in Roma. But uncertain as to the long-term future of the region, Durack’s son, Michael, moved to the far north-west where, a decade later, he was joined by his father. The Duracks ‘opened-up’ a series of cattle stations along the eastern and southern fringes of the Kimberley Plateau and controlled huge properties, some straddling the border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory. They had lost none of their nose for business. In the mid-1890s, the family shipped cattle from the Gulf of Cambridge to Fremantle, profiting from the heightened demand for beef in the burgeoning mining towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. In 1902, Michael Durack shipped 3 000 live cattle to Durban as new trading patterns slowly spread across the southern Indian Ocean.12
By 1901, probably earlier, Tommy McLoughlin was up there in the Kimberleys, working as a stockman on the enormous Texas Downs cattle station around Turkey Creek. He and others guarded livestock belonging to the Duracks and other notables from theft by Aborigines who had been displaced and marginalised by the sudden expansion in commercial livestock farming. Going south to see his brother posed few problems. The Duracks were well disposed to an Irish lad, and there were any number of vessels ferrying cattle south. Moreover, Michael Durack’s southern commercial base was in Fremantle, where the new Irish-Australian firm of Connor, Doherty and Durack Ltd supplied hides, skins and beef to the new developing urban markets.13
If the trans-hemispheric meeting of the McLoughlin brothers in Fremantle was momentous in terms of expectations, then the outcome was probably disappointing for both. Tommy, whose impulsive and violent behaviour dated back to boyhood, may have been in awe of his brother, but was unwilling to join him in his retreat from the British, who were still very involved in a war with the Boers. He may nevertheless have given Jack some money to help with the great trek back across the width of Australia to the east coast. It is noteworthy that, for more than a year after his arrival in Fremantle with funds raised in Melbourne, and after his meeting with Tommy, ‘John Bourke’ managed to steer clear of the police and prison. Tommy may also have passed on the names of former east coast associates, because for a time after their meeting, ‘Bourke’ showed a strong preference for working the border region of northern New South Wales and Queensland.
For his part, Jack saw no point in joining Tommy, still living under the family name, in the north-west. Up there, on tropical stock farms, as down in icy New Zealand, he would be reduced to cooking for swagmen or working as a tin-smith. What he needed was the friends and dynamite necessary for his calling, and to reassert himself. It was not as if a few oath-bound mates, fellows with courage and a little wit, could not survive the depressed economic conditions of the outback.
In America, the great bandits of the post-Civil War period had made their name by milking the banks in small towns or robbing trains.14 And, when economic disaster struck Johannesburg in 1890, had not some of the best men in the Irish Brigade survived in the western Transvaal countryside by plundering government offices, post offices, or railway stations in out-of-the-way places like Rustenburg? ‘John Bourke’ was a long way from Krugersdorp, but Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie – indeed all Western Australia – had a familiar feeling.
So, when the reunion in Fremantle was over, the brothers went their separate ways. ‘Bourke’ went in search of things a travelling man like him could work with and took himself 400 miles east, to the gold frontier towns that he felt most at home in. Tommy, on the other hand, set off on the 2 000-mile journey north, back to the cattle frontier he preferred. They left respecting the differences that separated them but, unbeknown to them, were soon to share the worst pedigree that could befall men. The curse that had followed Jack McLoughlin since he lost his arm drew no distinction between family or foe, land or sea.
Back at Texas Downs, Tommy resumed his duties as a stockman. On 25 September, he and Thomas Durack were out on mounted patrol when, about 35 miles east of the telegraph station at Turkey Creek, they came across a party of Aborigines cutting up the carcass of a cow. It was the classic frontier situation – an expanding pastoral industry controlled by insurgent white settlers laying claim to the traditional preserve of older, indigenous, black hunter-gatherers.
When whites met blacks under those circumstances the ideology of the invaders encouraged – no, demanded – direct action and the meting-out of firm ‘lessons’. In contests between rifles and spears, caution and restraint were amongst the first casualties on the side of those enjoying technological superiority. In Tommy’s case, his weapon of choice, a Mauser, hinted at southern African experience; it was a rifle favoured by many Boers.15 Only those of phlegmatic disposition resisted the temptation to impose power and ‘justice’ in direct form. But out on the frontier, in small-scale confrontations, it was often the mad and the impulsive, rather than the brave and the thoughtful, who advanced the banner of ‘civilisation’. History, with its tendency to sanitise the deeds of the conqueror and neglect the vanquished, often privileges the former over the latter.
Abandoning Durack, young McLoughlin charged up to the Aborigines – who recognised him as ‘Tommy’ – and shouted at them, in the local dialect: ‘Stand up all black fellows and I will shoot all black fellows.’ For the carcass-cutters the meaning of this seemingly ambiguous exhortation was crystal-clear. Several shots rang out as they ran for cover, leaving two of their number – ‘Friday’ and ‘Jimmy’ – behind as dead. As the dust and smoke cleared, so too did the younger McLoughlin’s disturbed mind. Even Tommy, who had once cudgelled a cousin to within an inch of his life with a poker, realised that he had murdered two men. He lit a fire and, hoping to eliminate any trace of the slaughter, dragged the corpses into the flames. The bodies of the two Aboriginals were quickly consumed by the blaze, but not the skulls.16
Tommy’s salvation now lay behind the line of the frontier rather than on it. In the outback it took weeks for the police to be directed to, and find, the charred remains of the two murdered men. A warrant for the suspect’s arrest was issued in mid-November, and when Constable JC Thomson attempted to arrest him a few days later, McLoughlin covered him with a rifle and ‘scoffed that twenty bastards wouldn’t take him’, before escaping on horseback.17 It was a quintessentially ‘Irish’ response, one that his own Ancoats cohort, Ned Kelly or his one-armed brother would have applauded. It was also a signal to pastoralists to close ranks and protect their notion of frontier justice.18
Spearheaded by two generations of Duracks, the ranchers ostracised PC Thomson for nearly three years for daring to attempt the arrest of a foot-soldier in their war against stock thieves.19 More pertinently, the cattle moguls and their hired hands whipped-around and collected £300 to facilitate Tommy’s escape. Along the frontiers of empire, where time slowed and space allowed identities to be renegotiated, there was often little separating fugitives from itinerant labourers. Although far from ‘home’, the developed world’s southern refugees, working on farms and ranches, benefited from the collective brotherly actions born out of the experience of older industrial working-class culture in the north.20 The colonies may have been the distant economic cousins of their northern counterparts but some patterns of male behaviour pointed to their common origins.
For Tommy, frontier sympathies might not have ended there. The ranchers may also have given him a set of names on remote Northern Territory and Queensland properties. There, like Ben Bridge, another fugitive from state – as opposed to frontier – justice, a man might hide until the heat had dissipated and he could return to the district.21
Tommy took his leave of his Irish-Australian hosts on 25 November 1901, saying: ‘You might see me again’ – and then disappeared, so Aboriginal folk claimed, to somewhere across the state line, near Wave Hill in the adjacent Northern Territory.22 At some point over the next few months he may again have linked up briefly with his brother. But when he eventually did return to the Wyndham district in the Kimberleys, in 1905, and the state attempted to prosecute him for the murder of ‘Friday’ and ‘Jimmy’, the case was lost for want of sufficient evidence, including, it seems, corroborating testimony from sympathetic ranchers.23
By then ‘Bourke’ had long since passed through the eastern goldfields of Western Australia. We know that he left no trace of criminal activity in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie because, months later, when asked about his missing hand, he freely told the police that it was the by-product of a mining accident sustained ‘out west’.24 Still intent on avoiding the largest urban centres where the Police Gazette was read more avidly, he remained keen on getting an adventurer or two to join in a campaign of safe-robbing up and down a few reasonably prosperous rural towns connected by rail.
But to this end he now had to add a new and unexpected requirement – staying in touch with Tommy, who, if not in hiding around Wave Hill, was probably sitting it out in south-west Queensland. That meant that the terrain most suited to his needs lay 2 000 miles east – and he had only just traversed the width of the continent. To get to the part of the country he had in mind required crossing the western desert, the desolate Nullarbor Plain and the width of South Australia; all that before he even reached the starting point for his envisaged campaign, the silver-mining town of Broken Hill in New South Wales.
It was the best and the worst of times to be undertaking a trans-continental odyssey. The decade-long effects of the depression of the 1890s lingered, marked by the added handicaps of drought and a plague of rabbits. Employers responded with a push for cheaper, contract-bound labour and increased mechanisation, even of sheep-shearing. The result was a bitter, prolonged labour dispute across the country. The Amalgamated Shearer’s Union came out on strike in 1890, 1891–92 and 1899. With the courts, police and pastoralists ranged against the rural workforce and ‘sundowners’ who arrived at outposts in search of a bed and meal at nightfall, as well as swagmen, there was a marked increase in class-based social tensions through much of the rural economy and in most country towns.25
On the largest estates, where there was an increase in the number of absentee and company owners as property values slumped and long-term opportunities beckoned for those with capital, the escalation in socio-economic hostilities saw a decline in traditional bush hospitality. The flip-side of that was a significant extension and deepening of the cult of ‘mateship’ among working men and casual labourers. Shared hardships and vulnerabilities, or simply being out on the road together, tightened bonds between ‘mates’ and strangers alike while a scarcity of women in remote regions was said to encourage homosexuality.26 Jack McLoughlin, soldier, sailor and prison inmate, found himself in a sub-culture that he was familiar, probably even comfortable with.
After a long haul across three-quarters of the continent, ‘John Bourke’ slipped into Broken Hill in the opening weeks of 1902.27 After several months on the road the mining town came as a relief, freeing him from the sun and heat of the drought and the prices that sly grog shops charged swagmen for bad beer. Back in the milieu he knew best, he succeeded in recruiting Edward Hogan, 20-year-old William Day, and one James Mulholland, about whom nothing is known. Hogan, a former miner, had little trouble in procuring some dynamite in a mining town, while Day, born in Tamworth, would provide them with local knowledge about possible eastern hideouts as well as raw muscle-power.28 McLoughlin had once again assembled a group that included at least one young follower old enough to have been his son.
That summer was characterised by fearsome heat and drought. Cyclones and dust storms did enormous damage to property on the farms and in the remote New South Wales outback.29 His plan was to sit out the season of Satan and then head north, up along the Darling River, towards the town of Bourke.30 From there they would branch out east, into the upper reaches of the river’s tributaries, concentrating on state facilities in small farming centres where country newspapers often complained about police incompetence.31 Some of the journey would be on foot, swagman-style, but for longer hauls they would, along with the vagrants negotiating the state backwaters, ‘jump the rattler’ and stow away as best possible.32 They would take as much cash as they could, but use chisels, picklocks and skeleton keys for the small-scale burglaries that would give them access to food in kitchens or small household items that could be put to use or sold.33 Even though it was the closest thing to ‘a gang’ Jack McLoughlin had assembled since fleeing southern Africa, none of them carried revolvers. The real money would come via their safe-blowing exploits.
The four mates, of Irish descent and oath-bound not to betray gang members to the police should things go wrong, set off from Broken Hill for the Darling outback in mid-February. They seemed to have enough in common to be successful and to trust one another in potentially awkward situations. But was it sufficient? Two of them – Hogan and Day – seemed closer to one other than they were to Mulholland, or to ‘Bourke’, whose antecedents they could not have imagined, let alone believed if revealed to them. The one-armed man was an enigma.
* * *
Like Hermes, ‘Bourke’ was elusive, multi-faceted and shape-shifting. The ancient patron of gamblers, miners, travellers and thieves could be this worldly – a cairn of stones, a trail-blazer and a guide – but as Greek wisdom cautioned, he either ‘led the way or led astray’. As was fitting for the god who escorted the souls of men to Hades, Hermes was also the mythic ‘embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox’.34
There was more to Jack McLoughlin than met the eye. When stealing from those who frequently preyed on the working classes – bookmakers, mine owners, pawn- or stock-brokers – he often worked by night and eschewed violence. But his loyalty to friends had encouraged him to execute an informer. It was easy to see how, as a product of acute deprivation, some saw him as a sort of Robin Hood, a ‘social bandit’, disturbing the categories of ‘truth and property’ by exploring the changing boundaries of morality. Hermes, as Lewis Hyde notes, is amoral rather than immoral. The Trickster ‘embodies and enacts that large portion of our experience where good and evil are hopelessly inter-twined’.35 Hogan, Day and Mulholland trusted one another – but could they trust their leader, or was he about to lead them to Hades? And, conversely, could the one-armed fugitive rely on his new chums?
By late February 1902, the four were in the black soils of the Namoi Valley, a prosperous agricultural region focused on the small town of Narrabri. Narrabri had the usual facilities needed by rural folk in search of financial services or wider social connectivity, including banks and a post office, and, by no means unusually, also boasted a racecourse as well as an excellent little local newspaper. Part junction town, Narrabri was well connected by rail to other farming centres, including Moree, 60 miles to the north. It also enjoyed a weekend connection to Sydney, 300 miles south.36 For burglars there were plenty of small pickings, but it was the railway station and its postal packages that immediately drew the attention of ‘John Bourke’.
It took a week to set up the station job and establish what the best lines of approach and exit might be. The intervening days saw a few desultory attempts at burglary. Two attempts had to be aborted when the intruders were disturbed or encountered other problems, but they did manage to get into a room occupied by Mr Loder of the Bank of New South Wales and remove several small items. The police made no arrests, which added to mounting official and public dissatisfaction.37
The door to the main office of the station was breached at some time after 10.30 on the night of Wednesday, 5 March. The charge that blew the safe door was so expertly laid and detonated, and the noise of the resulting explosion so well muffled, that not even those people living close behind the ‘Refreshment Rooms’ heard a sound. It was the work of a master craftsman and a few energetic assistants. The safe yielded cash, cheques and stamps to the value of £34 as well as several other items that might come in handy, including some locks and keys and a pair of handcuffs. The room was ransacked and items to the value of another £20 or so removed from parcels destined for postal delivery. The intruders made off without ever being spotted; it was a perfect night’s work.38
When the stationmaster got to his office at 6.00 am, he found the place in disarray, with everything covered in a layer of fine dust. The police were summoned and Sergeant Clarke appeared with a ‘black tracker’ drawn from the local Aboriginal community, the Kamilaroi. They picked up a set of prints leading to the racecourse and the main road that lay beyond it. But that was all; the case was never solved.39
Doubling-back, the four retreated 200 miles west, to Bourke, the transport hub par excellence on the upper reaches of the Darling. It was a place from where a man could, if necessary, head off in any direction including into the deepest outback or, as the Australian saying has it, into the ‘back of Bourke’. But the hated blue-uniformed constables of the New South Wales police, sometimes still stigmatised as ‘Bluebottles’, never stirred from Narrabri.
The gang went through money like water. By mid-March the number of petty thefts, including food pilfered from kitchens, reached alarming levels; after dark, those on the streets felt menaced by ‘suspicious-looking strangers’.40 And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the threatening outsiders disappeared and doors could again be left unlocked. For all that anyone knew, or cared, they could have set off on one of the far interior routes serviced by Afghan camel drivers who hailed from the Hindu Kush mountains of another world. But the gang, which by then saw north-eastern New South Wales as its playground, was again in search of the better-watered black-soil areas where cotton and wheat underwrote sturdy local economies. In the first week of April they crept into tiny Moree, which, much like Narrabri 50 miles further south, was firmly anchored to the main railway line running to distant Sydney.
This time there was no advance warning of an approaching storm. There were no house burglaries or petty thefts. ‘Bourke’ had enough dynamite to focus four sets of eyes on the main prize – the railway station at the eastern end of the village. Three people lived in a cottage a few hundred yards off, but the stationmaster’s residence was a good distance away. The station was abandoned at the end of the day and night-shift constables did not include it in their rounds.41
At about 1.30 am on Tuesday, 8 April, the cottage residents heard what might have been the sound of a gunshot but apparently thought no more of it and went back to sleep. The safe had been blasted with minimum effort – a single charge had blown the lock and shattered the door. But the safe contained little more than £20 in cash so the gang, men given to travelling long distances, loaded up on railway tickets instead. It was hardly Narrabri, but would have to do.42
Even the police could see that it was the work of professionals, possibly from Sydney. But the robbery bore a striking resemblance to what had happened down the line only a month earlier, so they co-ordinated their efforts with the still-embarrassed Narrabri police.
But the Trickster was well-prepared for any counter-attack. He coached his lieutenants in their lines should they be arrested, emphasising the need for cohesion and group solidarity. In order to confuse the uniformed predators, they would split up. Where the Trickster chose to go to is unknown, but, from what happened subsequently, he may have moved about 250 miles north and spent the winter in the warmth of Queensland with Tommy. The others would separate and move south slowly, across the plains, down towards the Liverpool Ranges around Tamworth, where young Day hailed from. The theft of the railway tickets meant that they had to avoid the trains and rendezvous at Quirindi – ‘the nest in the hills’.
‘Bourke’ disappeared for nearly five months but was never far from a part of rural Australia that he had got to know back in the 1880s. Hogan and Day, too, disappeared; but only for five days. They avoided the trains but then, on passing through Narrabri, were arrested on the basis of information collected by the police at either end of the line. By 14 April, they were back in Moree, where they appeared in the Police Court. The case was remanded for eight days as the constables quizzed them about the whereabouts of the other gang members. Whether out of fear or loyalty they refused to reveal anything about ‘Bourke’ but may instead have let slip where the fourth man might be found. By 24 April, a uniformed constable had tracked Mulholland for 170 miles across the plains to Quirindi and arrested him before escorting him back to Moree.43
But the proof of a police pudding lies not in the arrests made, but in convictions secured – and their case was badly under-egged. James Mulholland was the first to walk, the prosecutor deciding that there was insufficient evidence to warrant even an arraignment in the Police Court. Hogan and Day had a less easy time of it. After appearing in the Police Court, in late April, they were committed for trial. But, when they appeared before the Quarter Sessions, on 12 June, they too were acquitted for want of evidence.44 The country police, it seemed, were no match for a quartet of well-led professionals. The police had not only failed to make any arrests for a string of burglaries committed in and around Moree and Narrabri that autumn, but had also been unable to obtain convictions for the robberies at two railway stations.
Conspicuous failure fed press and public misgivings and the higher-ups were in an awkward position. They responded as they often do at such times and shuffled their cards. On 1 August, Constable Dunshea of Moree was sent to Tamworth, on the River Peel, half-way between Brisbane and Sydney, and an ambitious young Constable Brodie transferred from Tamworth to Moree to shake things up a bit.45
With spring in the offing Trickster Bourke stirred from his hibernation somewhere among the former haunts of the Duracks in south-western Queensland. His off-season survival may have been underwritten by Tommy, still wanted for murder back in the Kimberleys. It had been a year or more since Jack McLoughlin had re-entered Australia and he had twice crossed the continent without colliding with the state police.
It was true that during his great walkabout, the British had been tied up by a Boer guerrilla campaign that had helped disrupt the sweep of the Imperial Eye. But, even then, his experiences in continental Australia contrasted sharply with those in the islands across the Tasman. Predictably, the war had ended in defeat for the Boers; the Treaty of Vereeniging was concluded on 31 May 1902. He would have to be more careful, but it would take time for the British to establish his whereabouts. It was tempting to return to New Zealand just to prove to himself – or perhaps to the police there – that, given a decent start, even those islands could be negotiated successfully by a man on the run. He was a survivor. Had it not been 10 years since he was discharged from prison in Pretoria, and the warder had taken his leave of him by saying ‘until we next meet’? But since then the power of the old Boer state had drained away into the sand and veld and it was unlikely that he would see Matthew de Beer again. Southern Africa was a lifetime away and he had to resume his travels ‘down under’. Even a journey to nowhere started somewhere.
He was nearly down-and-out when he re-entered Moree, in mid-August. He had no cash or food but knew that a break-in or two would set matters right – the town’s police were not the brightest. What he did have was the remnants of a safe-blowing kit, including one last explosive charge. Once he had settled in and done the necessary reconnaissance he would do what the police would least expect of him and return to the main prize, the station. Once the Trickster was fully fed he could head back to Broken Hill for more rest and dynamite.
Only days after his arrival the press, if not the constabulary, picked up on ‘a sudden impetus in burglary enterprises’.46 But he remained so broke that on the Friday night before the envisaged big job – Saturday, 23 August – he had to go out and raise some cash for breakfast the next morning. Night-shift work had its own rhythm and he seldom ate a heavy meal before a big job. Skeleton keys gave him silent, trouble-free entry into the premises of Messrs Barry & Stafford, outfitters. The till, fitted with a mechanical alarm, posed no problems but yielded less than £2 in cash. He slipped out of the rear of the shop and the whole operation went so smoothly that the proprietors had to be pressed to notice that they had been robbed.47 He had many more hours to kill.
Weekends were a favourite time for safe-blowing. It was around 2.00 am on Sunday when he approached the rear of the deserted railway station, found the ladder he had stashed away behind the building a few days earlier and propped it up against the ticket office window. The office housed a safe so small that even he would be able to manoeuvre it into position. After their previous job, that April, the inhabitants in the cottage were bound to investigate the sound if they heard an explosion. In the absence of a blanket, a section of tarpaulin would have to do as a container in which to drag off the safe. He found a suitable piece and took it around to the front of the building, leaving it on the platform, just outside the door to the ticket office.
The window took some encouragement before it popped open and he clambered into the office. Inside, he opened a holdall and removed a billy-can, a knife and the stub of a candle, setting them out on the floor in preparation for what was to follow. He got out the skeleton keys and went to the ticket office door, unlocking it so that once he had lifted the safe, he would have easy access to the tarpaulin on the platform outside. Closing the door, he checked his pockets for matches, fuse and explosive. He took a look around to make certain there was nothing that he might trip over.48
Constable Brodie, who had come on duty at dusk, had an idea as to why he had been transferred to Moree at short notice. By then, just about everybody in the rural NSW force knew about Hogan, Day and Mulholland and the botched police work. There had been a few burglaries in town and he did not want to get caught flat-footed so he decided to call in at the railway station when he did his last round for the night. He set out from the police station, he said, shortly after 2.00 am.
Inside the ticket office it was not all beer and skittles. ‘Bourke’ was irritated by a pile of papers that had been carelessly stacked on top of the safe and he swept them clear, leaving them scattered about the floor. The safe proved more difficult to move than he had foreseen. It reminded him why he had become so reliant on help. He hauled the safe away from its position up against the wall, dragging it to the centre of the room with some difficulty before tipping it onto its side. But it was hard work even for a strong man, so he decided to sit down and take a breather. Summer was only a few weeks away and the chill of the night discouraged the usual insect noises; all was deadly quiet.
Brodie entered the station grounds and, glancing down the platform, noticed a tarpaulin lying outside the door to the ticket office. Someone would trip over it. It was sloppy, the sort of thing one expected from young railway workers who took little pride in their work. The station master would not be pleased. He strode down the platform, heavy boots banging out the pace, making his way towards the tarpaulin. Outside the ticket office door he stopped and paused for a moment.
Inside, ‘Bourke’ heard the footsteps and became slightly flustered. He was unarmed and on his own. He did not know what to do. His craft relied more on strength and stealth than it did on tongue and dissembling.
Brodie lent down, turned the handle and, applying a little pressure, was surprised to find the door unlocked. At that instant:
He heard a slight noise and called out ‘Who is there’?, to which he received the reply: ‘It’s alright, it’s the stationmaster’. But the Constable did not think ‘it was all right’ and, after watching a little, sang out: ‘Come out whoever you are’! The man inside then peeped out and tried to close the door. Constable Brodie forced it in and drew his revolver. The suspect then rushed past, but the former called upon him to surrender, caught him and brought him back to the office.49
As a member of the fourth estate pointed out, the Constable had ‘made a promising beginning in his career of checking crime’. What neither Brodie nor the journalist realised, however, was that a small Australian country town with a modest claim to fame had just witnessed the apprehension of not only the most successful safe-cracker the world’s richest goldfields had ever known, but a bandit-outlaw, a coach-robber, highwayman, mercenary and a man who was wanted for murdering a police informer in Johannesburg.50
Brodie was no slouch. When he searched the one-armed man and found a £1 commercial banknote on him, in addition to burglary and safe-blowing paraphernalia, he concluded that the suspect may have broken into a shop earlier in the week. When he asked about the note and some small change, the man, who suggested that he had lost his hand in a mining accident in Western Australia, said: ‘It’s mine, no use you asking me any questions, for I’ll tell you lies.’51 ‘Bourke’ had to rely on his wits.
It was indeed a curious response; one that might well have elicited more official curiosity. But the constable was almost ready to bank his winnings, which, by Moree standards, were already considerable. But then, having thought it through overnight, he went around to Barry & Stafford the following day and made more enquiries. After establishing how the till worked, and conducting a few experiments using the skeleton keys found on the suspect, he had enough to charge ‘Bourke’ with theft as well as the intent to commit a felony on the premises of the NSW railway commissioners.52
The accused’s appearance in the Police Court three days later, on 26 August, had a predictable sequel. Knowing that the station robbery case was a lost cause, he pleaded guilty to intending to commit a felony but then did his best to sow confusion around the burglary at the outfitters. He had, he said, been found in possession of a stolen bank note and pleaded guilty to that charge but denied breaking into the store or rifling through the till. The argument was unpersuasive; both cases were referred to the Quarter Sessions.53
He was not optimistic and spent six weeks brooding in the cells at Moree, awaiting trial. But when he did eventually appear before the Quarter Sessions, in mid-October, things went better than expected – by comparison with his New Zealand experiences, positively well.54 Pleading guilty to two out of three charges against him went down reasonably well with a judge who could not have failed to notice that the accused man was without a lower right arm.
The prosecution, already frustrated by its failures to obtain a conviction in the Hogan and Day case, had to settle for an 18-month sentence, with hard labour, for the ‘break-in’ at the Moree Station. The state also managed to get a sentence of 12 months, with hard labour, handed down for the theft at Barry & Stafford’s , but the judge ruled that the sentences would run concurrently.55 It could have been worse – a lot worse. Unlike in New Zealand, where stories about his extradition on a charge of murder were doing the rounds in official and unofficial legal circles, the Australians seemed to be wholly unaware of ‘Jack McLoughlin’.
Moree had no facilities for long-term prisoners so he had to serve out his sentence at Tamworth. The jail had been built a decade earlier and conditions were tolerable enough to stay out of trouble. But, that said, he was locked up in there for all of 1903, having already spent 1896–1898 and most of 1899 in prison. Since the Red Lion shootings, in 1895, he had spent more time in prison than out of it.
He was released from Tamworth on 16 January 1904, days before his forty-fifth birthday. It may have been a good omen. He shed the moniker which, like ‘Kenny’ and ‘Dell’ before it, had outlived its usefulness. But it was not wholly forgotten. The New South Wales Police Gazette, like a lover scorned, remembered everything, forgot nothing. An alias was a shadow, not a phantom.
For the next 12 months he and Tommy – who had not bothered to change his name and was starting to think about returning to the Kimberleys – avoided the police and the courts. 1904 was a good year for the McLoughlin brothers and, judging from his movements a year later, much of it may have been spent in the comfort of southern Queensland – well away from Wave Hill and the Northern Territory, still administered from far-away South Australia.
By the time that he left Tommy, he felt confident that the British and the Boers had lost interest in the shooting at the Red Lion and he reverted to his own name. It was a relief not to have to come up with a contrived pedigree. In December 1904, he re-entered Broken Hill, where he had a few mates who had ready access to explosives.