CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Fatal Circuit
AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, AUSTRALIA
— 1904–1909 —
I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,
And if you don’t like me, please leave me alone.
I eat when I’m hungry, I drink when I’m dry,
And if sunshine don’t kill me, I’ll live ’til I die.
Oh sunshine for dinner, oh sunshine for tea,
Oh sunshine for supper, it’s sunshine for me.
I eat when I’m hungry, I drink when I’m dry,
And if sunshine don’t kill me, I’ll live ’til I die.
Almost 10 years had passed since the shootings at the Red Lion and, bar a few desultory queries from officials in New Zealand, nothing of importance had transpired since. The Imperial Eye seemed to have lost interest in him and he felt composed and confident enough to enter Broken Hill under his own name. He sensed that Jack McLoughlin was a more mature and rounded man, and he had become accustomed to the routines of prison life, exclusively male company and life on the road. He knew that he was more at one with himself but realised that he could never settle down. He was, if not a gypsy or a tinker, then a compulsive wanderer, like the shaughraun, rooted in the culture of Irish nationalism.1
He did not linger in Broken Hill. He had had enough of rural New South Wales and wanted to get out of the state and into a city where he could raise the money for a few drinks, a decent bed, a little gambling and more travel. He left the mining town, with or without dynamite, in late 1904.
Adelaide, free from the usual English sneering, was a town laid out for immigrants rather than convicts. With a population of 150 000, the city offered the full range of possibilities he was in search of. As the only clearing house of substance for South Australia’s agricultural economy, it was a commercial and financial hub with well-established links to the eastern cities that dominated the continent. The place that interested him most, however, lay 10 miles farther south. In Port Adelaide a moneyed man commanded all of the southern ocean. He could sail west, to Fremantle and Perth, east to Melbourne or Sydney or, if not those, he could stretch across the world and disappear into Cape Town, Durban, Hobart or even Wellington. He had contacts in all those places.
Adelaide was not Melbourne, where the underworld clung to the city like a drunk to a bar counter, but it was becoming livelier. A burglar or two was always drifting in from up-country and the town, aspiring to better things, already had a few aspirant safe-robbers and even the occasional murderer.2 He looked around for a convenient place and, as ‘Jack McLoughlin’, booked into a small rooming house on Cannon Street, managed by Jane Irvin.
If he had the cash to cover the cost of his stay when he arrived, then he certainly did not by the time that he was told to leave a week later. It triggered an outburst of anger which may, in part, have been fuelled by alcohol and contempt for the no-nonsense proprietor. He ‘wilfully damaged’ four panes of glass and the lock on a door. Irvin could not have cared less. She had no interest in his drinking or his disrespect; all she wanted was what was due to her, and she called for the constables.
It was exactly what he had hoped to avoid; some unnecessary problem with the police. She insisted on his coming up with the rent as well as the cost of the repairs and, when he could not, he was arrested. When he appeared in court, on 12 January 1905, he admitted to having come down from Broken Hill and to having deliberately damaged property. The Magistrate ordered him to pay the rent of £2, 15 shillings in damages, as well as a fine of £1, or face a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.3 He did not have a mate in town or a penny to his name. The law could not help with cash, but it could direct him to friends.
The Adelaide gaol, like all such places, was a godsend for any visiting merchant of crime. It was a centre for criminal intelligence, a market place of ideas, a place where new projects could be put together. It was a stock exchange of crime, where each day’s intake of inmates revealed the ruling price for doing business as calibrated against sentences handed down by the judiciary. It was a great state-funded enterprise, one that had ruined as many men as it had ever rescued. It helped him find his way to a sizeable sum of money within just days of his release.
But the month in gaol also reminded him that, in the longer run, he was still up against the hangman.4 He was no layabout caught disturbing the peace in a doss house, but a man wanted for murder, and would probably face the death penalty if he were caught. It did not help that the cells in Adelaide were abuzz with a grisly tale, filled with awful detail and morbid vignettes, about the final hours of a youngster who had been executed in the gaol’s ‘hanging tower’ a few days earlier. William Borfield was a club-footed boot-maker with a jealous disposition, who had put three bullets into the breast of an estranged girlfriend whom he had spotted dancing with another man.5 It was love that was a problem.
It was, he thought, one more reason to take the information he had gleaned in the prison yard and put Adelaide behind him. Even though the authorities gave him no reason to think otherwise – his name had elicited not so much as a casual enquiry – he was infused with a sense of purpose, with the desire to make the best of such time as he might still have. What his immediate objective was, and how, where and when it was executed, all remain unknown. But, by mid-February, he was in the money, in port, and then literally off to the races across the Tasman Sea.
* * *
What was the fatal attraction that New Zealand held for Jack McLoughlin? The place had bewitched him from the moment he had first glimpsed its shores. It couldn’t have been gold, mining towns or wild frontiers, the magnets that never failed; they were long gone. Could it have been a yearning for relief of the sort that the sights, sounds and smells of rural Lancashire offered for a child labourer in Manchester?6 Perhaps the greenery, mists and rain of the islands offered some respite from the barren circuits of small-town Australia, India and southern Africa? We will never know – he never said – and, as with the mills of Ancoats, New Zealand had never offered him more than incarceration and much hard labour.
His point of entry on the North Island, possibly aboard the same Rotomahana that he had once stowed away on, was probably Wellington. But his destination lay elsewhere. This time he was moving around in comparative style. His vagrant-hunting nemeses would have no excuse to intercept him when he could afford hired accommodation. It was the height of the horse racing season and the Auckland Cup and other meetings offered a man the chance not only to make money but to launder it. It was another of Manchester’s lessons he had not forgotten.
But the dogs, vigilant as ever, barked even though they could not bite. On 22 February 1905, someone thought they recognised a one-armed man at the Auckland races. The law-enforcement authorities, whose records extended back to the failed attempt at extradition at the time of the Jameson Raid, in 1895, were immediately interested. A month later, they used the Police Gazette, which circulated across the Tasman Sea and among police forces throughout the region, to put out a second – special – enquiry about a fugitive with a prosthesis.
Jack MacLachan, alias McLoughlin, alias Thomas Kenny alias John Dell, is wanted by the Johannesburg police on a charge of having, in 1895, murdered a man there named Stevenson. Offender was seen at a trotting meeting at Auckland on the 22nd ultimo and was then clean-shaved with the exception of a heavy dark moustache, a dark tweed suit, hard black hat, white shirt and collar and black tie with thin white streaks. He was wearing a brown glove on his false hand.7
The Imperial Eye, effectively shut since 1901, suddenly had a light shone into it. But the news that he had been spotted was not as bad as it might have been. The New Zealand police knew nothing about ‘John Bourke’ or the station robberies in New South Wales in 1902. They obviously thought he was still on the islands – why else the local feeler? – but it would take time for them to put it all together. Until then, it was safe enough to return to north-eastern Australia. If he steered clear of ‘big jobs’ he could get by without the South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders making much sense of his movements.
At face value, the short excursion back to the North Island was a triumph. He was like a nineteenth-century ticket-of-leave man, a prisoner on parole as long as he respected the conditions attached to his ‘freedom’. He had re-entered the country under his own name without any difficulty, re-negotiated Auckland and enjoyed time away from the continental prison that was Australia. He had conquered a few personal demons and was ready to move on. Before the winter chill set in fully, probably around April or May 1905, he left the country, again without problem, and re-crossed the Tasman Sea for the third time in five years. But whether he realised it or not, the Imperial Eye had been roused from its long sleep and was, once again, scanning almost the entire region for signs of him.
Personality and profession meant that the principal cities of south-eastern Australia, Melbourne or Sydney, were the places most likely to attract him. But he was aware that urban magnets posed potentially the greatest danger, and so, while he re-entered the country through one of the east-coast ports, he did not tarry there. He had been all too active there two decades earlier and had again helped himself to a slice of financial pie in Melbourne in 1900, on first leaving New Zealand. His best bet was to remain in small places or on the frontier with his brother. It was never a stark choice. It may have been a combination of the two that enabled him to avoid attracting official attention for more than 18 months.
The intervening years, since the brothers had met in Fremantle, in 1901, had been good to Tommy. By 1905, he was back in the Kimberleys after having been on the run in the Queensland outback for some time. He appeared in court at Wyndham that year, but the charge of having murdered the Aboriginals was dropped for want of evidence.8 Frontier justice saw Tommy take up his old position as a drover-stockman; by 1906, he was sufficiently settled to take out a pastoral lease of his own in partnership with a man named Alfred Gregor.9 Late 1905 through to mid-1906 would have been an opportune moment for him to host his outlawed brother. Whatever the case, by mid-1906, Jack McLoughlin was back in the state he had long felt most comfortable in – Queensland.
* * *
From the mid-1840s through to 1900 various points up and down the mountainous coastal strip of Queensland, stretching from Brisbane in the south to Cape York in the north, had witnessed gold rushes. Most of the finds were alluvial and quickly worked out. But here and there, as at Gympie, sluiced diggings pointed to more substantial reefs and the need for mine shafts. The most significant find of all, however, occurred at Charters Towers, about 70 miles south-west of Townsville, in the 1870s. There, a cluster of 10 reefs supported a stock exchange and 30 000 people, making it the second largest town in the state at the time. A few of the Towers’ reefs were sufficiently profitable to be mined right up to World War I. But, for the most part, Queensland rushes were half-decade or less propositions that saw their heyday in the 1880s, leaving behind abandoned diggings and hamlets. In some such places, a few Chinese diggers, pioneers from the earliest rushes, such as that at Palmer’s in the 1870s, moved in and with customary focus and frugality made a living from working what others had long given up on.10
The village of Nebo and the longer-lived mine at Mount Britton in the Connors Range, a third of the way along the road from Rockhampton to Townsville, both fell into the abandoned category. In the early 1880s they had been small but thriving centres, but by the turn of the century they were already lapsing into what they now are – historical curiosities. Who knows what residual appeal they held for Jack McLoughlin, but, like Barberton in the eastern Transvaal and Ohinemuri in New Zealand before them, they drew him in on his way further north. In Charters Towers, another mining town already drained of most of its magic, surely an elderly fellow might be able to lay his hands on a little dynamite and some gold?
He was, he said, English and, less plausibly, a labourer. He had enough equipment to set up a camp that might attract a hard-pressed swagman. His preference for the company of younger men was undiminished, as was his desire to be in charge of some modest project. All he needed was a soul-mate on his journey to nowhere. Then, out on the road beyond Mount Britton, on a spring day in August 1906, he met George King. King was a strong, hard-up, 25-year-old without a criminal record, who sported a badly scarred nose, like that of a boxer.11 Who knows if the fellow reminded him of another George he had known, also a boxer?
Deciding that Mount Britton had nothing left to offer them, the two swagmen set off on a 50-mile hike out of the mountains, down onto the better-watered coastal plain and on to the port beyond it. Subtropical Mackay was surrounded by sugar plantations. The fields, worked by thousands of Kanakas drawn from the Pacific Islands, confirmed that the town’s economic backbone, once reliant on mining, now got all its stiffening from agriculture and the docks. But the scars of Queensland’s earlier gold sickness were still to be found in the town’s business quarter.
When Palmer’s Rush, in the far north, played itself out in the mid-1880s, hundreds of Chinese diggers decamped to coastal Cooktown. There, they got them themselves berths to Mackay, hoping to go on and profit from any new discoveries around Mount Britton or Nebo. Most of the newcomers settled into a predictably named ‘Chinatown’, and while many became shopkeepers, market-gardeners or labourers, a few more daring souls turned their hands to gambling and opium dens or small-scale prostitution to make a living. When the local economy faltered these supposedly ‘heathen’ vices caused Christian and settler prejudices to boil over and into a full-scale ‘anti-Chinese’ movement.12
But Mackay was not a town without hope for those intent on criminal mischief. Chinese, Kanakas and sailors were lightning conductors of the usual sort for a suspicious settler society, but they also provided enterprising burglars and thieves with possible channels through which to funnel stolen goods. McLoughlin & King set up their new business in a tent on conveniently sited public ground in the first week of September.
The need for an underworld fence, however, never arose because they ran out of money almost before they could plan, let alone execute, a burglary. Desperate times called for desperate measures. It reminded McLoughlin how, when the Irish Brigade entered Johannesburg in 1888, they focused on the boarding houses and hotels for small items that could be easily disposed of on the black market. But, because his partner was a tyro, McLouglin resorted to sneak-thievery of the sort that, in the past, was usually the preserve of youngsters like young ‘Stevo’.
On Thursday night, 6 September, Henry Forbes Wiseman, a district sugar manufacturer in town on business, retired to his room in the Prince of Wales Hotel. He left a gold watch and chain worth, he estimated, £17, along with 15s 6d in silver, on the chair besides the bed. Even if his room had been locked, as it probably was, it might not have helped if the post-midnight intruder had a set of skeleton keys. Wiseman woke to find the valuables missing.13
Back in camp that Friday morning, McLoughlin, who had pocketed the silver, decided against disposing of the watch immediately. He relied on the police not paying them a visit and, in a fit of vagrant-rousting, discovering the missing timepiece. By the next morning, with the weekend upon them, he was far readier to dispose of the gold chain at a knock-down price. He told King to go and explore backstreet Chinatown to see if he could get rid of the thing for about 30 shillings.
Yuen Sing was not interested in what was probably stolen property. Well, not at 30 shillings. But King was not wholly discouraged and returned to camp to get his partner to persuade Sing to up his offer. He, too, failed to persuade Sing to part with 30 shillings so they gave up, but not before asking for directions to a nearby jewellery store.14
With some silver already in his pocket, McLoughlin became as cautious as the Chinaman. He decided that he did not want to be seen in a jewellery store where a visit from a one-armed man may not have been an everyday occurrence. It was King who was in greater need of funds and so he left it up to him to sell the chain. The watch, more conspicuous and valuable than the gold chain, would be held back for sale on a real rainy day. He told King to try his luck in a pub, but warned him to steer clear of the Prince of Wales, which was situated close by the bridge.
King went to the Belmore Arms – a name with an Irish resonance. There he struck up a conversation with Barney McGuire, the proprietor’s son, and offered him the chain for 30 shillings. But McGuire was wary, sensing that he was being offered the most clichéd item of stolen property of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. He nevertheless entered the spirit of the bidding contest and attempted to beat the price down by suggesting that he was not certain that it was made of gold. When King, pointing to a stamp, protested that it was, McGuire expressed more doubts and countered with an offer of just 15 shillings. It was an outrageous offer but King, uncertain what to do, yet keen for his share of a sale, said he needed time to consider the offer and would return within the hour. By the time that King left the Belmore Arms McGuire was almost certain that he was dealing with a stolen chain and that beyond it there was probably not only a watch but a second thief.
In the camp, with only King’s version to go by, McLoughlin, cash in hand, failed to appreciate fully that hawking the chain could raise questions about the watch. He was in no mood to argue with an apprentice and told King to go back and accept the offer. King scurried back to the hotel and, half an hour later, told McGuire that he would take 15 shillings for the chain. But by then McGuire, relishing the idea of helping to bring two men to book, could not resist baiting the hook further. He told King that he still had some doubts about the authenticity of the chain but that it should be left with him and he would have it assessed. If it turned out to be genuine, King could return and he would then be paid in full.15
Taking it all in, King returned to camp with the news. His mentor was either so beguiled, narcissistic or selfish – or all three – that he failed to see that the apprentice’s efforts had placed them in danger. It was a mistake. Back at the hotel McGuire, who did not realise that a man’s life was at stake but was well pleased with himself, handed the chain, and a man’s neck, to the police. The constables did not even have to find the thief. He presented himself to them at the Arms the following morning.16
King, hopelessly out of his depth, was persuaded to point out where he had been dossing and accompanied the constables back to the site where they found McLoughlin. Caught unaware, McLoughlin had not had time to conceal the watch. He feigned surprise: ‘how the watch got there was a mystery to him’.17 On the way to the station he whispered to King that, if asked, he should say that he knew nothing about the watch. It was a self-serving instruction that tested the young man’s loyalty to breaking point.
On 10 September, McLoughlin was charged with the theft of the watch and chain, and King – who refused to implicate him – on the lesser charge of having received the stolen chain. McLoughlin made no effort to conceal his real name and was confident about the outcome if King did not reveal that he knew that the items had been stolen from a hotel room. The cases were referred to the next sitting of the Supreme Court in Mackay. King, who knew that he would probably have to share a cell with McLoughlin down the line, held out for more than a month. Then, on the day before his trial, on 11 October, he folded. He told the police that he knew that McLoughlin had gone to the Prince of Wales and stolen the watch and chain items because he had told him that he had done so.
The case before Justice Virgil Powers ran a predictable course. McLoughlin attempted some low-order dissembling in a short address directed at the jury. The unfortunate King simply accepted his fate. The jury, equally unmoved by visitations from the spectres of aged deceit and youthful earnestness, took five minutes to find him guilty of theft and King of being an accessory after the fact. Even then, the senior partner must have thought that, without any record of a previous conviction in Australia under the name McLoughlin, he might be entitled to the usual consideration extended to a first offender when it came to sentencing.
But it was not to be. Powers’s rooms had already been partially lit up by the gleam of the Imperial Eye. Items of information from police gazettes on both sides of the Tasman were coming together in a way that was potentially life-threatening. Sentencing McLoughlin to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour, the judge pointed out that the prisoner had previous convictions in New Zealand for possessing house-breaking tools and one, in New South Wales, under the name ‘Bourke’, for housebreaking. Powers, correctly, made no mention of any outstanding charges against McLoughlin and sentenced King to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour for knowingly attempting to dispose of the proceeds of a crime.
Powers either did not know that the man he was sentencing was wanted for murder in Johannesburg, or was constrained not to mention the fact because it bore no relevance to the matter before him. The luck of the Irish, in conspicuously short supply across the Tasman, seemed to be holding the line. But, whatever the reason, McLoughlin was grateful. He was in a world where reverse logic ruled. The South African War had provided him with peace of mind, and prison freedom from extradition. Resigned to his fate, he bore King no ill will and made no unfavourable allusions to the loyalty or masculinity of the younger man.18
The two got on well enough for neither to object to the other’s company. It was as well; they were about to spend two years together in three different prisons. The gaol in Mackay proved that sugar-farming towns could not compete with gold-mining towns when it came to producing hard-nosed criminals. The town’s first gaol, deprived of diggers and miners, had closed in the mid-1890s and the newest inmates were kept in a holding cell before being sent up-coast to Stewart’s Creek in Townsville.
Stewart’s Creek, serving the town, mines around Charters Towers and the outback, was the only prison in Australia with both male and female inmates. It did nothing to soften a forbidding appearance and daunting reputation. Upon their arrival there on 17 October 1906, the pair were processed with customary rigour. A record was made of McLoughlin’s appearance along with body markings, hair and eye colour, as well as his height and weight. He was content to have his religion recorded as ‘Roman Catholic’. His faith was not negotiable. It was all standard procedure and he thought nothing amiss when his photograph was taken. It was just one more image to match the one taken of him at Tamworth four years earlier. All that it would do was confirm again that he had once used the name ‘Bourke’.19
But, as with many things in life, the sharpest focus and greatest insight is often achieved at points where chance intersects with rigour. Ever since the Auckland Races the Eye had been scanning prison yards at both ends of the Tasman for a glimpse of him with increased regularity. The South African War was over and the drive for self-determination across the southern colonies was strengthening the sinews of imperial co-operation and integration. Only a few days after his arrival at Stewart’s Creek his photograph and others in the new intake were forwarded to the state capital for more routine processing and systematic record-keeping.
McLoughlin’s mugshot circulated through the detective division at Brisbane, where one of the more able – or idle – officers ‘was struck with [its] resemblance to a description which had been published some time back in the New Zealand Police Gazette. Old numbers of the gazette were hunted up, and the photograph and the description carefully compared.’20
They matched! For the first time in more than a decade, there was a real possibility that the law-enforcement machinery in Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa might be aligned without embarrassing British-Boer politics. Indeed, the McLoughlin case fed into the gathering imperial mood perfectly and showed precisely what might be gained from such useful exchanges of information. It predated the meeting of colonial premiers at the Imperial Conference in London, in April‒May 1907, by just six months. There, Jameson himself, by then Premier of the Cape Colony, with Alfred Deakin of Australia and Joseph Ward of New Zealand championed closer imperial co-operation before a more sceptical Louis Botha.
Pleased by such a handsome return from a mere paper-hunt, the Brisbane police sent a telegram to British authorities in the Transvaal alerting them to the fortuitous appearance of one of their fugitives in the nets of their own penal system.21 The Queensland detectives believed they had landed a big fish – one that law-enforcement agencies in southern Africa had made unsuccessful inquiries about in 1895, 1901 and 1905. This time there would be no slip-up, the man would surely be extradited and justice could run its course. The Australian enthusiasm was infectious.
In Johannesburg, Commissioner of the Police EM Showers was all action. In the third week of November 1906, a slew of updated statements were taken from witnesses to the shootings at the Red Lion in 1895. On the basis of these affidavits the Law Department became involved and within days a new warrant for the arrest of Jack McLoughlin was issued. On 21 December the Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, was informed of an impending extradition.22 The seasonal slowdown in southern Africa did not halt the gathering momentum. On Christmas Eve cables were still flying between the Governor of the Transvaal Colony, Lord Selborne, and his counterpart in Brisbane, Lord Chelmsford. The Eye was open, functioning perfectly, reading all, scanning every legal process, and the machinery of government on either side of the Indian Ocean was operating at a pace unheard of.23
It is impossible to tell from the surviving documents whether trans-oceanic activity at the highest level of government translated itself into more letters and notes within Queensland itself. It may have. On 10 December 1906, the Comptroller-General of Prisons drew up a list of names of 19 hardened prisoners to be moved from Stewart’s Creek to the more formidable St Helena Penal Establishment, on an island in shark-infested Moreton Bay off Brisbane. Among the names of those on the list were ‘Jack McLoughlin’ – probably already re-classified as ‘dangerous’ – and his camping mate on the old gold trails, George King.24
It had taken one slip, in coastal Queensland, for the imperial system to be brought into alignment in just eight weeks. It was primed and ready to deliver him, body and soul, to judge and jury in Johannesburg. Then, just as Great Britain was poised to strike at one of the sons of the thousands of Irish rebels it had created and helped spread across the world, everything went black. The Eye snapped shut. One of the most intractable powers the British had had to contend with since the loss of their American colonies in the seventeenth century was once again challenging the might of the empire, albeit not through force of arms this time.
* * *
In late 1905, Britain’s Conservative government had been replaced by Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals. The Boers, still smarting from the war, immediately invaded a more sympathetic political landscape, demanding the right of self-government for the Transvaal within a British South Africa. Lord Selborne, better disposed towards Afrikaner nationalists than his predecessor, was in broad agreement. By the time Selborne and Chelmsford swapped notes about McLoughlin’s possible extradition, in December 1906, a new constitution for ‘responsible government’ had already been adopted. By February 1907, a Het Volk administration under General Louis Botha was in control of the country’s destiny. Botha was more cautious about closer imperial co-operation than were most of his colonial counterparts when they met in London in late 1907. And, somewhere between the adoption of that new constitution and the emergence of the restructured state in Pretoria, another bureaucratic hiatus opened up. Could a threatened change in the political profile of the gold-rich colony come to McLoughlin’s rescue for a second time? If it could, he remained blissfully unaware of it for several years.
Established in 1867 and anchored in the heat and damp of the subtropics, St Helena prison was a Janus-faced institution. The island, five miles off the mouth of the Brisbane River, derived its name from an Aboriginal prisoner, one Nugoon, who bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon, who had died in the south Atlantic fortress of the same name in 1821. In its very earliest days the prison had a disproportionate number of staff and inmates of Celtic origin, giving rise to the customary English‒Irish hatreds.25 The full array of Victorian disciplinary devices and procedures – including flogging, the gag, confinement in underground cells and shot-drill – had contributed to the place being seen as ‘The Hell Hole of the Pacific’ or, more parochially, as ‘Queensland’s Inferno’.
When Jack McLoughlin was sent there, in 1906, earlier methods of institutionalised brutality had ceased to be used but the level of discipline expected of convicts remained attuned to the highest modern standards.26 At age 47 it was not crimes committed in Australasia that had got him sent there, but his reputation as a ‘dangerous criminal’, resting on a frontier shooting half a world away two decades earlier. It was a Police Gazette view of him as a murderer, even though he had yet to be tried or convicted; a view that was out of line with the opinions of prison authorities who had repeatedly granted him remissions for good behaviour, and out of keeping with his contemporary criminal career. The state was locking up an ageing, one-dimensional replica rather than a flesh-and-blood menace, forcing him to share the fate of men who had all been tried and found guilty of aggravated assault, manslaughter, murder or rape.27 A self-fulfilling prophecy shorn of all context and meaning had taken hold of the life of a man on the run.
In the sense that McLoughlin’s ideas about courage, loyalty and manliness remained firm, prison life may have suited him. He was a man among men in a male-only world. His reputation as a dangerous criminal stood him in good stead. It meant that there was little or no need, judging from the silences of his record, to protect his dignity or space by resorting to physical violence even though, when roused, he was still capable of displaying real anger. The shaughraun was not to be trifled with; all those who crossed him risked the tinker’s curse.
He adjusted well to confinement – he could do the time ‘standing on his head’. He was more measured and there were long periods of quiet thoughtfulness as he reflected on his past. Inmates respected him but knew almost nothing about his deep background. Indeed, judging by reports on his behaviour over the months that followed he was more introspective, always thinking about his past, and probably depressed.
Part of this accommodating behaviour could be attributed to a maturity that came with age and a diminution of his physical strength. It may, however, also have owed something to the other side of St Helena – its standing as a ‘model prison’ with a capacity to draw the best out of certain inmates. Throughout the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century the Queensland government insisted on the prison being as financially self-sufficient as possible. The island-prison once produced so much sugar cane that it ran its own refinery but, when the fields left prisoners with a site for proscribed activities, the operation was wound up. All other agricultural and pastoral pursuits continued apace, including cattle, sheep, sisal and vegetable farming on a scale and of a standard considered exemplary at the time. For a one-time vegetable-hawker, labour out in the fields was less supervised than in the workshops, and must have come as a relief as it offered more opportunities for solitude.28
Life in ‘the stockade’ – the prison proper at the centre of the island – followed a mindlessly predictable, utterly inflexible pattern. But not even that upset his composure. There was something reassuring about the way that body and mind aligned themselves to the demands of unseen forces, a bit like unthinking sheep returning to their pen at sunset each day. One year faded into the next almost unnoticed.29 In 1908, George King, the only person to have seen him outside of a prison, was released. Jack took leave of him at the wooden jetty on the south-west of the island, where the steamboat Otter called in twice a week as part of a circuit around the bay that included a stop at the asylum at Dunwich on nearby North Stradbroke Island.30 The only other thing of note that year was the arrival of another man on the island who shared his name. This ‘John McLoughlin’ was a former crew member on the busy little Otter, who, having tired of the life at sea, suddenly enlisted as a warder.
Jack McLoughlin’s retreat into an inner world gave the prison officers no cause for alarm and, as before, in early 1909, they suggested that the supposedly ‘dangerous prisoner’ qualified for a remission of sentence. Across the bay, where the state authorities had monitored his progress in prison more closely than usual in such cases, the remission was agreed to.
When McLoughlin was informed that his date of release had been brought forward by four months he was uncertain as to how to respond. He was again reminded that his life had telescoped into nothing. The past was gone, the present obliterated, the future unimaginable. His identity had shrunk into nothingness and there was no place he considered home. Time had hollowed him out and, with the exception of a brother living on a frontier that held no appeal for him, there was no one to turn to. He needed to speak to somebody, anybody, who knew where he came from, someone who understood that he had been a man who once commanded admiration and respect. He wanted his life back.
Instead, he struggled to imagine what he would do when the Otter crossed the blue water of the bay to collect him and he disembarked at the jetty at Wynnum, near where the Brisbane River entered the bay. There was something unfair about it. Like Houdini, he was being asked to wriggle free of three sets of constraints – the prison, the island and the continent beyond it. He had been trapped in them for close on a decade and had grown accustomed to them. It was only the external constraints that lent form and shape to body and mind; inside there was nothing. What would happen if they were removed – would he fall apart?
Two weeks before his release, inmates and staff, including the new warder who shared his name, began to rib him about his imminent departure. Another with access to the Otter’s schedule teased him, saying that, since he would be leaving on a Friday afternoon, he could bank on a weekend’s celebration in Brisbane. The fog of introspection that had been clouding his mind for months lifted slowly and the reality of the situation gradually came home to him. The worst of his fears dissipated and, on hot days, he began to imagine what a cold beer might taste like.
Autumn is poorly defined in the subtropics but it was noticeable that the days were becoming shorter. In Auckland it would have been terrifying, heralding a winter during which cold and damp would fight a long and bitter battle in an attempt to determine a winner. On 12 April, he took up his Monday morning duties knowing that it would be the last time he would have to engage with weekly routine. Tuesday and Wednesday, defying the season’s logic, seemed to go on forever and he was beginning to wonder whether it was all part of an illusion when, after lunch on Thursday, he was told to report to the prison administration. He was handed the few personal possessions that had been found on him in Mackay, years before, and shipped along with him to Stewart’s Creek.
The next morning a mate or two, anticipating their own release, shouted parting ‘good luck’ wishes as they walked past his cell where the door, as if to mark his special day, stood ajar. He put on his own clothing and, given that he had not lost weight and still matched his prison description as ‘stout’, was surprised at how well they fitted and felt. He screwed the cork hand onto his prosthesis and looked himself over to check on his overall appearance. His hair and beard were quite grey but, other than that, he looked quite acceptable when he made his way down to the jetty. He was early. There were two prison officials standing around chatting, waiting for the Otter to chug into view from Dunwich. Captain Junner brought her alongside. He was reminded how much he loved the sea, and he prepared himself for the short ride across the bay to Wynnum.
Almost all the prison supplies had been unloaded on the morning’s inward run. There was nothing to detain the vessel. A few formalities were attended to and he was told that he could board. He shook hands with one of the warders and was reminded of that day, in Pretoria, in 1892, when he had been released by Matthew de Beer who had said to him: ‘until we next see one another’. That had been 14 years ago and much had happened since. He wondered where De Beer might be. It was unlikely that a member of the State Artillery had survived the war.
The Otter cleared the jetty and headed south-west. In order to avoid the glare off the water a man would have to turn around, put his back to the sun and take a last look at the island. He watched approvingly as Junner went about his work. Although his own time on the Albatross had never been easy, he retained his respect for ship captains – they, more than most men, embodied courage, skill and leadership. The boat made good time in easy conditions and he heard the engine ease back as Junner brought the vessel alongside the Wynnum jetty. As always, there were men standing about on the dockside, waiting to grab the rope, take the strain and secure the vessel. Most of them were workers clad in everyday working clothes; only one, dressed in a suit, stood out. Unlike that day in Lyttelton, back in 1900, there was no one to meet him.
He waited for the passengers from Dunwich, folk who had somewhere to go and seemed to be in a hurry to disembark. He then made his way slowly onto the gangway and took a pace or two, but his way was then barred by the suited man. The man stepped forward and introduced himself as Sergeant Kenny from the Criminal Justice Branch, Brisbane. Kenny produced a provisional warrant for his arrest, for the murder of George Stevenson and Hadji Joseph Mustaffa, in Johannesburg, on 26 January, 1895. Half-surprised, half-resigned, he stood rooted and said nothing. Kenny, sensing that he was not going to resist arrest, ushered him back aboard the Otter, onto the deck leading to the cabin, so that his greying prisoner would not have to suffer the indignity of having to be handcuffed in full view of any passers-by or the workers moving about the dock.
Kenny told him that they were on their way to the Boggo Road Gaol, and he watched as the wrist of his left arm was joined to the officer’s right. It was going to be an uncomfortable ride into Brisbane. He suddenly felt the need to question what Kenny had put to him. What could, what did, some little plain-clothes man from nowhere know about his past life, about Johannesburg, about his relationship with Stevo? He blurted out:
That man’s name was not Stevenson, so far as I can remember it was Steve Davidson. He shelved me and two of my pals for a job in Pretoria, one of them got five years and I got away to Kimberley. Sometime after somebody handed Stevo a bit of lead, and a Malay man, who was there, got a bit, too. I happened to be in Johannesburg that Saturday night and they blamed me for it. I was told that whoever shot Stevo went to his room and pushed his door open and shot him through the stomach, in the bed. 31
Fourteen years after he had shot his collaborator-betrayer, friend-lover and alter-ego nemesis, he still could not help referring to his victim in anything other than the affectionate, diminutive form of ‘Stevo’ rather than ‘Davidson’, ‘Stevenson’, or even ‘the victim’. Stevo was long since dead, but his affection for him was undying.
At Boggo Road, it was the same old thing. Every detail about his person meticulously recorded in the ‘Prisoner Description Book’.32 He was, he said, ‘English’ and a ‘Roman Catholic’; all the rest was as recorded in two other Queensland prisons, one in New South Wales, and in several trans-Tasman versions of the Police Gazette. It was tedious rather than frightening and he was interested to see what the police had by way of real evidence. The following morning he was hauled before the Central Police Court and, as the Brisbane Courier informed its readers the following Monday morning: ‘An elderly man named J McLoughlin was remanded on a charge of murder…’33
That account and the fact that it was later reported that the suspect had been arrested on board the Otter caused some confusion. A few eyebrows were raised in the city and several readers drew the mistaken conclusion that the prisoner in question was the former crew member on the Otter turned warder. It required an intervention by Captain Junner and a letter to the Editor to clear the unfortunate warder’s name.34
McLoughlin was content for the case in the Central Police Court to be put on hold but concerned when Sub-Inspector Short explained that the state needed more time to prepare for the extradition. ‘All the necessary papers had been received through his Excellency,’ Short said, ‘but they were awaiting the arrival of an officer from the Transvaal.’ So, the Eye had not slept through his sojourn on St Helena! It had been open all the time, using its new-found telegraphic nerves to pass information back and forth across the width of the continent and the Indian Ocean.
The Eye had granted him three years in an island-prison reserved for the most violent of men, but only on the understanding that it would then have its day in court so as to get the chance to take what was left of his life. It made sense legally, as the law did, but for an uneducated man it was a travesty. The law and justice often did things together but they were hardly a Siamese twin, and the two could get badly out of step. The case was remanded until 24 April 1909, and thereafter, every week for six weeks. He sat it out in Boggo Road for close on two months waiting for the bureaucrats to get together something they had had three years to prepare for. Where did that sentence come from? And what was it for? He was not to appear before a full court until early June 1909. A curse on all of them.