CHAPTER SEVEN
Among Legends and Myths of the Bush
AUSTRALIA
— 1882–1886 —
The dominant thought of youth is the bigness of the world, of age its smallness.
Of all the McLoughlin children it was Thomas, the youngest boy, who was cause for greatest concern. Released early from the reformatory on grounds of ill health, Tommy never settled and was in constant trouble with the law during a decade noteworthy for ‘scuttling’ excesses. In April 1882, he and a friend used belts and buckles to tackle two other youngsters but, not content with their victory, went on to stab one of the victims. He was sentenced to two months’ hard labour but his accomplice was sent down for a full year. The warning signs were there early on: Tommy was a potential killer.
An older brother was as close to a father as Tommy ever got as a teenager. Despite problems of his own and a difference in age of six years, Jack tried to keep an eye on the lad and be as supportive as possible. Tommy, in turn, was in awe of his brother and twice followed him to the far ends of the earth – first, ‘down under’ to the antipodes in the 1880s and then, a decade later, to southern Africa. In an otherwise largely dysfunctional family, theirs was the only male relationship of notable meaning.
After leaving Manchester in 1880, and for some years thereafter, Jack McLoughlin kept contact with his brother and at least one other member of the old Blue Dot gang by letter. The globalising postal service may have extended the surveillance capacity of the Imperial Eye, but it also enabled antisocial elements to remain in contact via counter-flows of criminal intelligence across the hemispheres. Intercontinental postal exchanges increased rapidly after it was agreed by the Universal Postal Union, in 1878, to levy a flat rate on letters sent anywhere in the world. Within Anglophone territories this was supplemented by the introduction of the Imperial Penny Post, in 1898.1 Although not a regular correspondent, Jack used the postal services to stay in touch with Tommy after he deserted in Singapore, and, a decade later, with JW Brown when they were reunited in South Africa, in the 1890s.
In mid-1882, 12 months after deserting from the Albatross, he wrote to tell Tommy that he was in Australia. Where he was based and how he was earning a living were, like most things about him in this period of a secretive life, unknown. But the economy was growing fast and drawing in thousands of immigrants each year: casual urban or seasonal rural work was easy to find.2 From Tommy’s subsequent movements, it seems that the brothers entered Australia via the country’s pre-eminent gateway, ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.
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The roots of European settlement in Australia lay in the penal colony established at Botany Bay, in New South Wales, in the late eighteenth century. While the transportation of convicts from Britain and Ireland continued for decades thereafter, by the mid-nineteenth century the practice was falling into abeyance and formally ended in 1867. By then, the emerging colonies, including Victoria and its principal city, Melbourne, were set on a different path. Much of east-coast Australia could trace its escape from modest regional agricultural economies into a long cycle of increasingly balanced and vigorous growth back to the transformative effect of gold discoveries of the 1850s and, more especially, the 1860s. For most of the 30 years that followed on the mineral discoveries, Australia experienced an economic boom and increased urbanisation.3
The ability of gold to draw in immigrants and strengthen economic development started to wane in the New South Wales and Victorian hinterlands in the late 1870s. But then, new discoveries – in Queensland in the 1880s and Western Australia in the 1890s – proved that the yellow metal could still light the way to frontiers on a continent where size beggared belief. Queensland and Western Australia, partly because of their remoteness from the south-eastern hub of the country, later appealed to the McLoughlin brothers, who for many years shared a preference for the anonymity of frontier life and zones of economic turbulence.
In the 1880s, it was the more densely settled south-east that attracted the brothers. Twenty-three-year-old Jack, in particular, found the colonies much to his liking. Here was a male-dominated society, one where bush legends embodied the attitudes, beliefs and values that appealed to a criminal romantic who had fled the industrial world.4 Back in Manchester, the heroes of the distant past, such as Captain Dangerous or Rob Roy, had to be conjured up through books or the imagination but, in Australia, bushrangers and their exploits fell well within living memory. Even though the heyday of the bushrangers dated back 30 or 40 years, to the 1850s and the first gold discoveries, one could still sense the awe that men like Ben Hall, Dan Morgan, Harry Power and Jack Donahue – ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ – evoked among ordinary folk. Part of the longevity of such tales and myths, the feeling that they might have some on-going pertinence, could be attributed to the way that the sprawling outback continued to dominate the lives of many Australians. In ideological, manly terms the bush and its associated lore often eclipsed city life.
Under ordinary circumstances, time itself might have taken some of the gloss off bush-ranging tales. But then, out of the Victorian bush emerged an extraordinary anachronism, a larger-than-life man who was to achieve iconic status in the country’s folklore – Ned Kelly.5 For those so inclined, like Jack McLoughlin, the distance between legend, myth, place and time was miraculously foreshortened. When Jack arrived in Australia, 24 months after Kelly’s execution, in November 1880, the country was alive with tales, real and imagined, of the exploits of the Kelly gang. In their travels through rural New South Wales and Victoria between 1882 and 1886, the brothers from Ancoats moved in the footsteps of the last of Australia’s great ‘outlaw heroes’.
Like many young men, the McLoughlin brothers had more than an ideological diet of folklore to live on. Although tales about bank robbers and highwaymen-cum-bushrangers contributed centrally to the ‘Australian legend’, they were never as important as those strands that derived directly from the realities of everyday life in the nineteenth-century outback. The experiences of single working men, as perceived through gendered lenses in the most remote parts of what was eventually to become one of the most highly urbanised countries on earth, became pre-eminent in shaping an emerging national culture.6
An admiration for ‘bush-craft’ and the capacity to survive in the driest and most daunting of physical environments formed an important if not central strand of the developing legend. So, too, did the ability to divert modest economic opportunities into more promising entrepreneurial creeks that fed into far-off coastal markets. A suspicion of ‘authority and the established order’, in some cases attributable to the attitudes and experiences of Irish men and women who had been forced to bend the knee before an English aristocracy and the monarchy, contributed to an insistent egalitarianism with undertones of anti-clericalism and republicanism. In day-to-day interactions social solidarity in the face of harsh odds was expressed through a male camaraderie or ‘mateship’ that often included a measure of hard drinking and in its strongest form was rumoured not to preclude homosexual relationships.7
The Celtic underpinning of an emerging Australian ‘national character’ included a Scottish component, but was for the most part determined by an Irish input. Almost a quarter of the convicts sent south from the northern hemisphere between 1791 and 1850 were Irish. Most were drawn from the rural south-midland counties in Ireland itself or from Irish communities in industrial England. Many such involuntary emigrants, with experience of what they saw as political oppression and religious persecution at the hands of the English, were predisposed to challenge and dissent and were said to have a greater propensity to violence.
The move to Australia may have dampened but did not eradicate a streak of rebelliousness among most of the Irish. ‘Much Irish crime,’ one analyst suggests, ‘involved disorganised offences arising from drunkenness, homelessness and unemployment’ … ‘The Irish-born offenders were invariably more conspicuous in categories such as vagrancy, breach of the peace and drunken and disorderly behaviour.’ In 1889, one in four of those arrested in New South Wales was Irish. Nor were Irish-Australian attitudes palliated by the fact that many of the policemen in the new colonies were Irish too, some having gained their basic training and initial experience in the roundly detested Royal Ulster Constabulary.8
There were several traits in this emerging composite national character as manifested in antisocial activities that appealed to the half-English, half-Irish McLoughlins. Schooled in urban lawlessness, the brothers never became fully fledged bushrangers. They nevertheless went on to show signs of partial adaptation to Australia’s criminal sub-culture in town and countryside alike. Tommy, with his love of horses, took readily to working livestock in the outback and years later spent months on the run in Queensland. Jack acquired a ‘flashness’ associated with city dwellers and went on to absorb other, recognisably ‘national’ characteristics. Ten years later, in southern Africa, underworld informants described him as an ‘Australian desperado’ and ‘a ruffian of the larrikin type’ even though he was always more comfortable shifting between his formative ‘English’ and ‘Irish’ identities.9
When the brothers met in Melbourne, in the early 1880s, Victoria was set on an economic course that was the envy of the western world. The economic tempo and transformative powers of business had long since pushed beyond Melbourne and its satellite towns on the nearby goldfields. Capital had sharpened poverty and emerging class distinctions in the rural hinterland, creating the preconditions for Ned Kelly’s banditry in the late 1870s.10 The International Exhibition of 1880 had underscored the importance of a port housing a quarter of a million inhabitants with thousands of factories and workshops. The city also served as the financial centre for the continent as well as for investors around the globe.11 By 1890, the state was as populous and rich as California.
There was no shortage of entry points for young men interested in penetrating the local underworld. The city offered the usual array of brothels, drinking dens, gambling outlets and, with a well-entrenched tradition of horse-breeding, a racecourse already famous for hosting the annual competition for the Melbourne Cup. Victoria, albeit less so than New South Wales, was also a major exporter of horses. ‘Walers’ were much sought after by the armed forces in India because they coped better with the climate on the subcontinent than did horses shipped in from elsewhere. Jack McLoughlin, who got to know the city well enough to pretend to have been born there, later persuaded the authorities in India to deport him to Melbourne and they did so, placing him aboard a ship that had delivered just such a consignment of Walers.
By late 1882, Tommy, still only 18, was working as a groom in nearby Ballarat. He may have been accompanied there by his older brother who, for reasons of his own, was becoming more interested in mining towns. A few months later, in February 1883, Tommy was found guilty of having broken into a local shop and sentenced to 12 months in Pentridge Prison. The prison, close by Melbourne, made visiting easy and Tommy appears to have settled into prison life and routine with relative ease. He worked his way up and through the four categories that separated prisoners and was released early, in January 1884.12
Pentridge, however, was a prison with a pedigree stretching back to the era of the great bushrangers, steeped in tales about them that neither Tommy, as inmate, nor Jack, as a visitor, could have failed to hear about. Indeed, barely 24 months had elapsed since Ned Kelly himself had been executed in the prison, leaving behind a grisly reminder. The outlaw’s body had been interred in the prison yard but only after the head had been removed for purposes of scientific study. There were, however, other – older – tales about Pentridge that might have appealed to a young Irishman with a dreamy interest in highwaymen. Of those, Harry Power’s might have resonated.
Born as Henry Johnstone, in Waterford, in 1819, Power was raised across the Irish Sea, in Ashton-under-Lyne. As a lad he had worked in cotton mills within easy walking distance of Ancoats. In 1840, Power was found guilty at the Salford Assizes of stealing a pair of shoes and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Thirty-eight years later, when Jack himself had stolen a pair of boots, in 1878, he was given ‘just’ three months’ imprisonment with hard labour. On his release from Tasmania, Power made his way to Sydney and continued his career in crime. In 1869, aged 50, he escaped from Pentridge and made his way into the badlands of the increasingly unsettled north-eastern Victoria, where he took on 14-year-old Ned Kelly as an apprentice highwayman.13
Stories about Power’s exploits as highwayman, or those about other bushrangers, failed to encourage the brothers to strike up a partnership and follow suit. The tales may, however, have further softened up Jack’s thinking about the need to develop a more broadly based repertoire, because 48 months later he was involved in several highway robberies, albeit half a world away. At the time, however, he harboured serious reservations about becoming directly involved with Tommy, whose impetuosity continued to compromise his growing professionalism. Unerringly accurate with dates when it suited him, Jack later recalled that it was in 1884 – after Pentridge – that he took his leave of Tommy. He also remembered that just 12 months later the Australian police were searching for him personally.14
On leaving prison, Tommy, manifesting an ever-more-pronounced liking for life on the frontier, abandoned Victoria and struck out north, across the Murray River and on past Sydney. His brother, too, may by then have been in the north-eastern parts of coastal New South Wales earning a living as an itinerant labourer between criminal escapades under an unknown name. Rural New South Wales was booming, with new railway lines being built to connect previously isolated farming centres.15 Here, the brothers would have encountered yet more anecdotes about legendary bushrangers and there is indirect evidence to suggest that there was one, in particular, that Jack may have been struck by – the story of another recent Pentridge graduate, executed in Darlinghurst Prison, Sydney, in 1880.
Andrew Scott, son of an Anglican clergyman, was born in County Down, Ireland, in 1845. By the early 1860s, following the frontiers of empire, the family were on the Otago goldfields in New Zealand, when young Scott got drawn into the Maori land wars. Wounded and disillusioned, he then crossed the Tasman Sea to Victoria. In Melbourne, intent on following in his father’s footsteps, he became a lay preacher but, in 1869, sent to the small gold mining town of Mount Egerton, he embarked on a more interesting calling. Still in his early twenties and living in the Ned Kelly hinterland, Scott set about indulging his interest in younger males. He adopted the sobriquet ‘Captain Moonlite’ – a name not unlike those adopted by the leaders of agrarian secret societies back in Ireland – and recruited a gang of bushrangers that included a male lover and several adolescent boys. After several not especially noteworthy exploits and a spell in Pentridge, Scott and his boy-gang undertook a futile last stand against the New South Wales police near Wagga Wagga in 1879.16
The story of ‘Captain Moonlite’ centred on his devotion to his lover, Nesbitt, and formed an integral part of the lore and scandal of the day. Amazingly, the tale only ended 100 or more years later, in 1995, when the bones of the two men, in deference to Andrew Scott’s last wish, were interred in the same grave.
In the late 1880s, less than five years after his first passage through rural New South Wales, Jack McLoughlin and several other ‘wild colonial boys’ on the run from the police fled South Africa and crossed the border into neighbouring Mozambique. There, under the leadership of one John Hutchings, they worked as navvies for several months helping to construct a railway line.
John Hutchings, like many of his recruits, was a deserter from the British Army with some criminal proclivities and, on more than one occasion, literally signed off on his adventures as ‘Captain Moonlite’. If Hutchings did not know what other connotations his nom de guerre carried then there were several more mobile Irishmen in his gang, including Jack McLoughlin, who could have told him. And, if Hutchings and McLoughlin knew about Captain Moonlite’s sexual preferences, what does it tell us about the hidden lives of the Irish Brigade that McLoughlin had joined?17
Back in New South Wales, in mid-1884, however, Tommy and a friend were on the move. In the Hunter Valley, about 80 miles north of Sydney, huge tracts of trees and untamed bush cleared by ring-barking and scrubbing were making way for a more domesticated landscape that was developing a reputation for horse-breeding and wine-making. In early July, he and John O’Brian, who had been making a nuisance of themselves around Maitland, were ‘arrested on suspicion of being of unsound mind and remanded for medical treatment’. It may, however, have been an alcohol-fuelled misadventure that prompted their arrest. After a few days, and having been examined by the district surgeon, they were declared to be ‘in a fit state to be at large’ and released.18
Without resources to fall back on, Tommy and O’Brian were forced to turn their attention to stealing what they could. Professional livestock thieves – cattle duffers – rustled animals, changed the brands and then marketed them at a distance from where they had been stolen. But the pair lacked experience and time was not on their side. The police were on to them within a matter of days, but before he could be arrested, Tommy effected an escape that Ned Kelly would have been proud of. ‘He mounted a “half-broken mare”, without saddle or bridle, and having cleared a fence, dashed through the bush…’. He disappeared and in the months that followed worked his way north towards the point where the Clarence River flowed into the Pacific Ocean near Grafton. There, in December 1884, he was either recognised from a description in the Police Gazette or arrested for some new misdemeanour before being sent to Lithgow, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, to stand trial.19
With Tommy back in prison, Jack, operating under aliases that might never be uncovered, may have lingered in small town and rural New South Wales or just across the Queensland border for a considerable time. It was a part of the country – the core of it stretching from Bourke in the west to Tamworth in the east – that he felt comfortable in. Ten years later, in 1902, under radically changed personal circumstances, he traversed much of the same terrain while out on a safe-blasting circuit that followed the recently laid rail tracks.20 Not all of his exploits between 1882 and 1885 went unpunished, however. Much later, underworld informants in Johannesburg reported that he ‘graduated at the prisons of most of the colonies’ long before Australia ever became a federation.21
The same informants, however, hinted at the fact that caution and cunning may have enabled him to record successes that went unpunished, noting that ‘he is well known to the police authorities in Australia, where many a desperate act has been put down to his credit to this day’. Likewise, it was conceded that he only left Australia, in 1886, when he realised that he was ‘cultivating what seemed likely to become a too close intimacy with the police’.22 Whatever name he was operating under, McLoughlin was in danger of receiving a lengthy sentence.
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Even without knowing the exact details of Jack McLoughlin’s career as it unfolded in his mid-twenties, two things seem reasonably clear. First, given his subsequent sojourn in southern Africa, it would appear that it was his experiences in the antipodes that extended his repertoire to include a developing taste for frontier crime. Somewhere along the line between Ancoats and Australia, a few of his more romantic criminal notions were first actualised. Second, it is possible that the dominant legend of the time – that of Ned Kelly – lit up a part of his imagination.
The Kelly gang embodied a mutated form of ‘Irishness’, manifesting the sort of antisocial actions and political rebelliousness that was to be found in several British colonies. Kelly and three companions set the tone for much of the rural crime and dissent that characterised the contest between established land-owning ‘squatters’ and struggling, property-acquiring, ‘selectors’ in rural north-eastern Victoria between 1878 and 1880.23 Through their individual actions and collective efforts, members of the gang displayed the full repertoire of manly qualities approved of in Victorian societies. Brave, charismatic, loyal and young – just four years older than McLoughlin – Ned Kelly was an excellent bushman, a superb shot and an outstanding horseman. He repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary flexibility and sure-footedness while eluding the state police. A ‘bush larrikin’ raised in the backyard of the goldfields, with a preference for male company that precluded a premature slide into domesticity, Kelly was a horse-thief turned bushranger, blessed with the ability to think laterally. At home in the hills and valleys around Wangaratta, he and the gang lived off the bush for lengthy periods. When necessary, they invaded nearby hamlets or small towns, taking hostages and robbing banks that controlled hard-pressed farmers’ debt.
The Kelly gang’s mobility between centres along the newly laid railway and out in the open country was impressive. So, too, was its ability to pull a poorly led police force far and wide. Its almost military precision would have appealed to someone already partly trained in, and admiring of, the arts of war. Operating in bandit-like mode, Kelly depended on a broad-based network of sympathisers whose loyalty was carefully cultivated through everyday displays of considered action, generosity and support. This highly personalised network, in turn, rested on an underlying foundation of class, ethnicity and kin. A ‘bush-telegraph’ supplied the gang with a flow of counter-intelligence that did much to offset the usual effects of an extensive network of police informers and spies.
The widespread support of ordinary folk for Kelly over much of north-eastern Victoria was tested after he and three friends were involved in a series of shoot-outs with the police. The bushrangers were declared outlaws and huge rewards posted for their successful apprehension. During the early stages of the ‘outbreak’ – a term usually associated with contagion and disease – the outlaws were often successful in keeping one step ahead of the police. Aaron Sherritt – a close friend of Joe Byrne, one of the gang members – inveigled himself into a position as double agent, for a time supplying the gang with useful information and the police with unhelpful facts and false rumours.
Growing tensions and mounting uncertainty took its toll on the gang members. A plan to derail a train and capture much-needed police arms and equipment tested the network’s solidarity to breaking point. Byrne began to doubt Sherritt’s fealty and a decision was taken to execute him. Even then, Sherritt was given a warning, via his mother, that he was about to be shot. From that moment on, the double-agent had the choice of either arming and defending himself when the dreaded moment arrived, or taking the less honourable route and fleeing the community.24
In the end, it was not only the murder of the informer that was memorable for those who were deadly serious about loyalty, but the manner in which it was to be undertaken. It was Byrne – the man smarting most from a sense of betrayal – who was deputed to execute his former close friend. Byrne would approach the cabin where the newly married Sherritt, having sacrificed his bachelor status, was living under police protection, knock on the door and when he appeared – armed or unarmed – shoot him at point blank range. It was a plan which, with minor improvisations, was put into action. Answering to the voice of an acquaintance who was supposedly lost, Sherritt appeared at the door unarmed and was dispatched while the police cowered behind a partition in the cabin for some hours before leaving.25
For anyone with a long-standing interest in codes of loyalty and manly conduct the Kelly gang’s determination to avenge Sherritt’s alleged betrayal was as salutary as it was brutal. But there were other lessons to be taken from the ‘outbreak’, among them the hazards of being formally outlawed. In functioning democratic states criminals operated within a framework provided by the rule of law – assaulting, robbing, stealing or murdering within the parameters of established systems. The system itself guaranteed certain fundamental rights and delivered broadly predictable outcomes. There were legal limits to what the police could do while investigating crimes. Suspects had a right to know what charges were being preferred against them and writs of habeas corpus ensured timely appearances before properly constituted courts that handed down only penalties specified by the law.
But for those whom the state placed beyond the system and who were declared to be outside the protection of the law, things were very different. Outlaws could, like wild animals, be tracked down by any and all means at the disposal of the authorities or concerned citizens. With a price on their heads, outlaws could be brought in ‘alive or dead’, often with an unstated preference for the latter. The events at Glenrowan, site of the Kelly gang’s last stand, provided awful testimony as to the consequences for those deemed to be beyond the protection of the law.
The police, present in large numbers, directed fusillade upon fusillade of shots into the insubstantially built country inn in which the bandits and their hostages had taken refuge. Kelly – despite having donned armour fashioned from ploughshares – was seriously wounded in a skirmish in the grounds of the inn. A passing Catholic priest, Father Mathew Gibney, drawn to the site by the sound of gunfire, administered the last rites in the mistaken belief that Kelly was fatally wounded. Of the four outlaws, Kelly alone survived to be tried later and executed, in November 1880.26
McLoughlin, by his own account, came to understand only too well what it meant to be declared an outlaw. Dick Turpin and other eighteenth-century outlaws who had sallied out of books in the Ancoats library were one thing; those encountered in tales of bushrangers and the living legend of Ned Kelly were quite another. Australia had whetted his appetite for life on the edge but, unable to shake off the attentions of the police and unwilling to spend years locked away in some provincial prison, he looked around for other, more promising settings.
He wanted to be where the law functioned imperfectly and a man worth his salt stood a chance of making his fortune. He sensed that the economic centre of gravity in the southern hemisphere was undergoing one of its periodic shifts. Nobody knew how long the reported boom would last, but adventurers, clerks, prospectors and storekeepers were once again preparing to spread their wings. The shipping lines were standing by, ever ready to facilitate the mass migration of men, money and machines. The Aberdeen Line, which had once linked England to Australia by sail-driven clippers, had set up a new trans-Indian Ocean run. A regular schedule now linked Melbourne to Durban and Cape Town. In late 1886, he left Melbourne for Durban in the colony of Natal.
It was hardly a novel move. Indeed, South Africa owed its latest and greatest promise of prosperity and the gathering boom to George Harrison, an Australian prospector. In an era of accelerating economic development and cheaper international travel the distance separating Australia from South Africa was shrinking rapidly and the mind-maps of professional criminals, too, were being re-adjusted. Some claimed that members of the Kelly gang themselves had contemplated fleeing to South Africa. Many years later, two other members of the gang, Dan Kelly and Steve Hart, were rumoured to have been seen in South Africa, where they had supposedly enlisted with Boer forces challenging a British Army intent on expanding the empire.27 When Jack McLoughlin left, however, it may well have been the image of Joe Byrne shooting the informer, Aaron Sherritt, in his doorway that lingered longest in his mind. Sherritt had sacrificed gang loyalty for the love of a woman.