Fire in the Blood: The Epic Tale of Frank Gardiner and Australia's Other Bushrangers

Part I G H O S TS f ro m t h e PA S T

CHAPTER 1

In for the kill

T

he moment he stepped off the neat little steamer Warrego and onto San Francisco’s Barbary Wharf, I knew it was Harry, the son of my old comrade-at-arms, Ben Hall.And I knew he had come to kill me. My sisters in Sydney had sent me warning, but I’d have known anyway. Once you’ve been hunted as I have, you never lose the instinct and Harry had all the earmarks of a young hunter after dangerous game: the set jaw, the tight carriage, the knuckles white on the hand that carried his carpetbag. As he approached in the afternoon light, I could see he had Ben’s good looks but his features were finer and softer than those of his father. Delicate almost. If he hadn’t been on a mission to kill Frank Gardiner, I’d have called him handsome. Hell, he was handsome anyway. 3

Fire in the Blood I watched him, waiting for the moment.The usual mix was scattered across the wharf: bustling business types, sharp-eyed customs men, the occasional strumpet and pickpocket ducking among the arrivals and the welcomers. Harry stopped, pulled a folded paper out of his back pocket and studied it—a mud map apparently, directions to some venue in the big city, The Twilight Saloon perhaps. The moment was right. I bowled up. ‘Howdy young fella,’ I said. ‘You look like a man just in from a long sea voyage in need of a drink and some directions.Welcome to America.’ He looked up, gave me a quick grin, then set that handsome jaw again. He searched my face and I saw him calculating. But he hadn’t laid those blue eyes on me since he was a babe in arms, and I’d changed a lot since they’d plastered that picture of me on every public building in the country, the one where I’m sitting with Johnny Gilbert, dressed to the nines and with the full waxed moustache. A bit of a dandy. I still look after myself, still take care of appearances, but that young dandy is long gone. ‘Curtis Allenby,’ I told him, introducing myself with a handle I had ready and with a Yankee accent so thick it would bog a duck. ‘G’day,’ he said.‘My name’s Taylor.’ He looked at me for a reaction. I gave him nothing but a wide smile and a pat across the shoulders. ‘And what brings you to San Francisco, Mr Taylor?’ ‘Cattle,’ he said. ‘Import? Export? Breeding stock?’ ‘Bit of everything . . .’ ‘Well, it’s a pleasure to have you here, all the way from Australia, I take it.’ ‘Just so.’ ‘That’s a place I have always wanted to visit. Nearly made it once 4

In for the kill in the big goldrush of the fifties. But family responsibilities kept me chained to hearth and home.’ ‘It’s a big country.’ ‘It is indeed,’ I said. ‘I have cargo aboard. It’ll be a while before they unload it; how about that drink?’ He hesitated then nodded. We strolled across the rough planks to The Hornpipe, Harry picking his way like a young prancer.‘Takes a while to get your land legs,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’ I set him at a table before I went to the bar, as I was pretty well known in The Hornpipe. But I needn’t have worried; the barman was new and he was good at his job—filled the beer mugs and my shot glass with the smooth speed of a professional. Back at the table Harry took a draught, replaced the pot on the table and wiped away the suds with the back of his hand. ‘Good drop,’ he said. ‘California’s finest.’ I jumped in with both feet.‘No doubt you’ll make the acquaintance of a famous countryman of yours—Mr Frank Gardiner, the proprietor of The Twilight Saloon.’ He looked up sharpish but gave nothing.‘You know him?’ I was tempted to spin a yarn about what a wonderful fellow he was—respected citizen, community leader, friend to the poor and homeless—but I knew it wouldn’t wash. He was Ben Hall’s boy, after all, and I could see that when those blue eyes started to flash he could become a handful. So I offered some vague words about Gardiner’s colourful past. ‘I’ve heard of him,’ he said. ‘Someone said the saloon was in Kearny Street.’ ‘I believe so—corner of Kearny and Broadway. Not more than a half a mile.’ He nodded.‘I probably won’t have time,’ he said. 5

Fire in the Blood ‘Where are you headed then? You looked like you were getting your bearings . . .’ ‘No, I’ll be fine. I’d better get going.’ He smacked the glass pot down and extended a hand.‘Good to meet you, Mr Allenby.’ ‘Likewise,’ I said, giving his paw a solid squeeze.‘You take care.’ He left without turning back. I finished my drink then ambled out to the dockside and breathed in the salt air. Fact is, I did have some cargo on the ship—letters from my sisters Archina and Charlotte, no doubt with the usual newspaper cuttings and memoirs from the men I’d dealt with and others who claimed some knowledge of me to squeeze their way into history.The girls usually sent them with the purser to be hand delivered. But the Warrego was a newcomer to the Pacific trade and I’d have to check it out below decks. Harry Taylor. Understandable, I guess—it was James Taylor who took the place of father in the kid’s life when Bridget walked out on Ben.And, after I’d been incarcerated, it was James’s young brother Richard who took my lovely Kitty to the New Zealand goldfields and the tragedy that followed. So, now he’s Taylor and he’s come to take his revenge.Well, we’ll see about that. I collected my letters and the small, chunky volume they’d sent to me: The Life of William Westwood (Alias Jackey Jackey),The Outlaw of New South Wales. It had been published last year and I’d read of it in the Sydney Herald. The girls had had it rebound in leather, beautifully smooth to the touch. I flicked to the first page: ‘Edited by the Rev. Thomas Rogers, formerly Chaplain of Norfolk Island. Published 1879.’ I knew of Rogers. He’d provided the pen and paper to young Westwood, the poor devil, in the few weeks he had left after he’d been sentenced to hang, back in 1846. He’d probably helped him with his spelling and grammar as he laboured in the shadow of the gallows. I knew Jackey Jackey’s story to the last detail. He was all the talk of my child6

In for the kill hood. As a young whelp I had been to the places where he roved. And later I had heard the chronicle of his life and death told and retold a hundred times by the lags on Cockatoo Island and in Darlinghurst. But I wanted to read it from his own hand, for at such a time a man’s words are touched by grace. I walked up Washington Street from the pier, passed Battery and over Sansome to Columbus Circle at the edge of China Town. I was well known among the Celestials and I heard my name shouted halfa-dozen times—‘Hey, Mr Flank’—on my way to The Scarlet Letter. I waved back to them—I have always found them square dealers and cheerful with it; they had a bad deal in Lambing Flat during the gold rush, a rotten deal, and I wasn’t too proud to say so. Such word gets about and it did me no harm at all in the dens when I needed a little something to while away the hours when the memories got too hard. I call it the Exile’s Companion.The authorities have a harsher name for it. When I reached The Scarlet Letter in Clay Street, I sent a boy to Fanny at the Saloon with a message. She knew I was meeting the ship and she wouldn’t rest easy until she heard from me. I had decided to give the Saloon a wide berth for a couple of days; let Harry stew for a while.When he turned up—as he surely would— she should tell him I was away on business but expected back soon. And she should be generous with the measures. He’d never been in a place as big and bold as ’Frisco. By the time I turned up, I wanted him wondering just what the devil he’d got himself into. Big Tess at the Letter had a warm welcome for me and not without reason; I had spent more than my share on the pleasures of the flesh over the years and I tipped the girls well. And there were other avenues of understanding between us. From time to time we’d been in a position to help each other out on matters that might otherwise have involved the unnecessary intervention of the law.We both knew that in our line of business it pays to have friends. So, 7

Fire in the Blood after a cup of coffee from her best chinaware in the fancy parlour, I betook myself to an upper room, intending to read my mail and flick through the fearful yarn of young Westwood before whiling away the hours with one of the young beauties from Tess’s stable. But, when I opened the envelopes of Archina and Charlotte, I barely got past the salutations before the script blurred with my own damned tears. Doesn’t happen every time. I used to be able to take their news from home in my stride, file it away in that part of the mind where lives the past in all its joys and regrets, and get on with the business of the day. But whether it’s the advancing years or, more likely, the arrival of young Harry Hall, I just couldn’t peg it.A great Pacific roller seemed to sweep over me and send me tumbling. Felt as though I was drowning in my own foolish emotions. Nothing for it but to make the call for a buxom young filly to distract me. Tess had one of Bell’s electrical speech machines in the room connected to her parlour. I spoke into it. ‘I’ll send Josie up right away,’ she shouted through the thing. ‘And a bottle of Bushmills,’ I shouted back. I would like to say that Josie’s munificent charms worked their magic and cast out the demons, but it would be stretching the truth. Fact is, I performed badly and, though she tried all the tricks of her roguish trade, I was not able to join in with my usual enthusiasm. I remained distracted. I never thought I’d say these words but I was glad to see the back of her. I poured myself a whiskey and took out the book. I opened it and read the first lines. ‘I was bred and born in the village of Manuden in the County of Essex,’ Westwood had written. ‘My parents were poor but honest. But I thought more of spending my time in rambling with those who like myself were fond of danger and enterprise. Often my mother’s advice was slighted and many a pang has my conduct caused her.’ That struck close to home.A picture of my own mother formed 8

In for the kill itself on the inner eye as she bustled around the kitchen of the homestead on Spring Plains Station. She was making pancakes on the griddle and she rolled a special one for me and filled it with plum jam. I could taste it again, the sugary jam and the melted butter running down my chin. Such memories came unbidden these days, a sign of age, perhaps.Ah well, at least I’ve survived long enough to be plagued by them, not like Jackey Jackey, the poor bastard. He was not even sixteen when, as he wrote, ‘I was taken for robbery with my companion and on the 3rd of January 1837 was transported for fourteen years.’ They gave him a final meeting with his parents and sent him off with 200 others on the Mangles bound for Sydney, New South Wales. On arrival, he was assigned to Captain King who sent him to his farm in the Goulburn district. ‘The treatment I received there was such that I would rather have met death in any shape,’ he wrote. That was an old story.That went right back to the earliest days when the bolters would break out from the hell they lived in and try to find some sanctuary in the bush—characters like Black Caesar, a negro from the Indies, and many others who either perished or were killed by the Blacks. Of course, most of them gave up and copped their 25 lashes—laid on hard—and returned to the iron gangs where the beasts of burden were treated a hundred times better by the scum who oversaw them. There, at least, they’d get a feed and they’d live on hope that some day the heavens might open and the fist of some errant fate descend on their tormentors and crush the very life out of them. I put the book aside. I knew the Goulburn that Jackey Jackey knew. I was there, almost within reach of him, but I saw it with the eyes of a small child. I can remember the triangle the troopers had set up by the stockade and the men who were flogged there till the flesh and blood flew from their backs and their cries rent the morning air. 9

Fire in the Blood It was no place for a sixteen-year-old boy like Jackey Jackey with his fair features—‘small white teeth, so small and so white as to give a somewhat feminine appearance, made more feminine by thin red lips, small mouth and well-shaped chin’—and gentle nature. His words penetrated my bones and not just with the sharp sadness for a young man so ill-used, but the kind of rage that simmers deep inside when life provides no court of appeal to natural justice, when the oppressors make the law and their lackeys take pleasure in its cruelties. I took a long pull at my glass. In the dusky afternoon it seemed as though I was suddenly in their presence.They were my mates, all of them, all the men of the road they lumped together as bushrangers, whether I knew them face to face or whether I’d made it my business to learn their stories. From young Westwood hanged on Norfolk Island to John and Tommy Clarke, hanged in Darlinghurst Gaol; Johnny Gilbert, my best mate, shot down at Binalong when that old bastard Kelly betrayed him; Henry Manns who had his face ripped off when the hangman’s rope slipped; Mickey Burke and John O’Meally, shot to death; Dan Morgan, the traveller’s friend, cut down and dismembered;Thunderbolt, John Dunn and, of course, Ben Hall himself, all of them shot to pieces or departed this place dancing the hangman’s two-step.They all passed before me in single file. I filled my glass to the brim . . . The rest of the evening and, indeed, the next day was lost to me. From time to time, no doubt, I called for a return match with Josie or another of Tess’s young ladies and no doubt I acquitted myself better than in my first bout for I have never found alcohol the impediment to performance that others do. However, the liquor drew a veil across the memory until the morning when I settled my account and made my way to Di Angelo’s for a shave and a hot towel, and thence to Granny O’Leary’s for breakfast. I left her table well fortified for the task ahead.When I entered The Twilight Saloon by the Broadway alley, Fanny was all business. 10

In for the kill ‘He’s been haunting the place,’ she said in her husky FrenchCanadian. Honting zee plaize. ‘Is he out there now?’ ‘Naw—ee stayed until three . . . but ee’ll be back. Ee is very . . . one-minding.’ I headed for my office.‘Let me know.’ ‘Frank,’ she said,‘Fr-o-n-g-k, what will you do?’ ‘Guess I’ll have to kill him first,’ I said and quietly closed the door. The office had become more like a library than a place of business, and when the curious arrived from home to see the famous desperado I took my pleasure when they gawked at it. They expected some snivelling, broken wretch. But I never gave them the satisfaction. Instead they got the bound newspapers, the books of history and memory, and the photographs in the polished mahogany shelves.They got the grey-green carpet the colour of gum trees and, above it, the tinkling chandelier that cast its soft gaslight across the leather chairs and the rosewood desk. It was my place. My final cave. And now this young buck wanted to invade it and finish me, Frank Gardiner, Prince of Tobymen, the great survivor. I don’t think so. The .32 Colt revolver was in the top drawer of the desk, newly cleaned and loaded. It was a beautiful piece of armoury, far superior to the weapons Ben and Johnny and I had carried in those wild days on the Lachlan. I took it from its holster and felt the deadly weight of it. Power. Just the feel of it in the hand and the power of the firearm returns—the power to put fear in the eyes of a stranger, to bend him to your will and, yes, the power to take a life. I ran a silk handkerchief over it and, with barely a backward glance, returned it to the drawer. I had never yet killed a man and I wasn’t about to start now.And certainly not with the son of my old mate. There were other ways of skinning that young possum. I could have Chicago Dan beat the bejesus out of him and run him back on 11

Fire in the Blood to the Warrego before she sailed. I could call in some markers from my friends in the constabulary and get him bundled into the pokey for a week or two till he came to his senses. In fact, I’d been bouncing between those two ever since I left him at The Hornpipe. But there was something about the kid that niggled me—those flashing blue eyes, that slim figure, that fire in the belly. It triggered a sense of fellow feeling I couldn’t toss. I knew what he’d been through. I’d witnessed the death of my own father and I’d felt the lash of a stepfather’s hatred. I, too, had been ready with my blame and quick to hit back at any handy target. I had my sisters to give me comfort whereas all Harry had was Bridget’s rage for companion all the months and years of his young life. She didn’t blame Ben, not the great Ben Hall, who’d become a bigger hero to the people with every passing year since the troopers shot him down. Ah no, not Ben. And she didn’t blame herself for walking out on him. She didn’t blame the slab-handed Taylor who slapped her down every time he took one over the eight and who flogged the boy till he couldn’t stand. She didn’t blame the coppers who never let up on anyone with the name of Hall. She didn’t even blame that bastard who’d taken her sister, my lovely Kitty . . . No, every slight and every blow turned her back to the figure of Gardiner, the Darkie, the evil spirit of the bush who began all their troubles with his siren call to a life on the road. According to my sisters, she even blamed me for Ben’s shocking end as the troopers emptied their guns into his lifeless body—bullet after bullet, 27 in all. From that moment, it seemed, from that very day when little Harry was no more than eight years old, Bridget decided I must pay. And, the worse her circumstances became, the more fiercely she pursued me. Damn her! I swung back in the swivel chair and banged my boots on the fine rosewood desk. I knew what I really wanted—to pin Harry down and tell him the truth of it. Because no one knew it like 12

In for the kill I did—the whole story of the Australian bushranger. I was there in the battle lines and, when I’d done my dash, I was in Darlinghurst Gaol where they’d all come to me with their stories, all the poor bastards condemned to the two-step, all the angry young bucks who threw off the crushing yoke of the pommy ascendancy and paid the price with their souls or their freedom. It was a story that cried out to be told. And now it was fair bursting to get out of me. Fanny knocked and opened the door. She was in her working togs, the bodice of her green satin dress low on the bosom, her skin like buttermilk and her lips rouged a pretty shade of vermilion, the very picture of a modern ’Frisco hostess.‘Ee iz eer,’ she said. ‘Chicago out front?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Send him into me.Then let the boy know Mr Gardiner is back from his business trip and will see him soon.’ Chicago Dan had been with me for six or seven years and a truer guardian would be hard to find. He was in poor shape when he first stumbled in to the Twilight, on the run from a misunderstanding with a loan shark in his native city, tanked to the back teeth with rotgut and tumbling toward the final precipice.We had our own little disagreement but he was in no condition to fight and, when I rolled him up, I let him sleep it off in the basement.There he stayed, eventually turning a rough dungeon into a passable billet. And, after I sorted out his troubles with the boys from the Chicago, Dan showed his appreciation in the only way he knew: with a promise to work it off until I told him the books were square.After that, I guess he’d caught the habit because nothing changed nor seemed likely to. He made his appearance at the door, a huge, hard-boned man with the makings latterly of a slim moustache that he fingered with pride. It did nothing to improve his looks—they were long beyond redemption—but clearly this was not an opinion he shared or would welcome, even from his employer. 13

Fire in the Blood I gave him his instructions then, taking my hat and coat from the mahogany stand, left again by the alley and walked around to the Kearny Street entrance. When I pushed the bat-wing doors aside, I allowed a moment or two for my eyes to adjust to the gloaming. A couple of the early risers were taking their heart-starters at a corner table. It was too early for the card players.They’d be along in an hour or two. Harry was standing stiffly at the bar with Chicago, not more than a couple of arm lengths away as instructed. Fanny was drying a tray of shot glasses and trying to keep his attention while he waited for Mr Gardiner to emerge from his office. It wasn’t working. He was jumpy as a cat. He hadn’t shaved or even washed, by the look of him, and when I gave a loud ‘Well now, Mr Taylor’, he spun around to confront me. ‘Curtis Allenby,’ I advanced towards him with my hand extended. ‘From the Barbary Wharf,’ I said to prod him. He had just raised his hand in response to mine when Chicago moved. He wrapped those great powerful arms around him and pulled him backwards. In that flash of a second, Harry knew he’d been duped. I reached beneath my jacket and drew the Colt to further discourage him but it had the opposite effect. Like a cornered tiger snake, he bared his fangs, half turned and, with the heel of his boot, cracked Dan a terrible blow on the shin, causing him to loosen his grip. Once he freed an arm, his own pistol appeared in his fist as if by legerdemain. There was a moment when I could have fired, just a moment, but I hesitated. Not so Harry. He fired once into Dan’s foot and the big man let forth a scream of pain and rage. Before I could intervene, he levelled the revolver at me. ‘Gardiner,’ he said and pulled the trigger.The impact on my chest just below the heart sent me reeling backwards and, before I passed out, I had just a flash of Fanny’s raised arm, a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey descending like a rock hammer to the back of Harry’s head. 14

CHAPTER 2

The boy from Boro

I

was only out for a few moments and when I recovered both Chicago and Fanny were bending over me. ‘Ooh . . . Frank,’ she said,‘what have happened?’ Fanny undid my vest, no doubt expecting gouts of blood. Instead, she found the leather-bound volume of Jackey Jackey’s autobiography, the bullet neatly protruding from the back cover. My ribs were bruised but otherwise I was unhurt. Blood seeped out from the toe of Chicago’s boot but that was nothing compared with Harry whose head had taken the full force of Fanny’s Bushmill’s club.Who would have thought the boy had so much blood in him? It streamed across the floor where he had fallen, his face a sickly grey. ‘Have you killed him?’ I asked. Chicago limped to him.‘He’s breathing,’ he said.‘I’ll break his neck.’ 15

Fire in the Blood ‘No Dan.’ The big man looked stricken.‘He was too quick for me, Frank.’ ‘Me too,’ I said. By now the early risers were starting to take an interest. ‘Close up,’ I told Fanny.‘Give ’em a few on the house; they won’t remember a thing.’ I pulled the towelling off the bar and wrapped it round Harry’s head.‘Come on, Dan, let’s get him into my office.Then you get off to Doc Warrener’s in a cab.’ ‘He was too quick for me, Frank.’ ‘Sure, sure. Now lift . . .’

Doc Warrener was fast and reliable.We’d had business before and he knew I paid over the odds. He took a hard look at Harry, still unconscious on my leather couch an hour later. The towel was now soaked.‘No bleeding from the ears,’ he said as he removed it. He felt around the skull with those soft fingers, carefully moved the base of the neck and turned the jaw from side to side. He pushed back the eyelids—only the whites were showing—and smelt his breath. ‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Fanny must have some right arm. I think she might have cracked his skull.’ By then the scalp had started to bleed again and Doc went to work with his sewing kit. Finally he said,‘Not much more I can do, Frank. Just have to wait and see. All I do know is, if he does wake up, he’ll have one hell of a headache.’ He stitched up what was left of Dan’s second toe, a grisly prospect, while Dan broke his pledge and took several steadying draughts of my medicinal brandy then emptied the bottle in a final gulp. He wanted to strap my ribs but I wouldn’t have it. I’d always been a quick healer and the bruising would go in a few days. So I paid the man and ushered him out with all the usual obsequies.The Yanks love a bit of appreciation. 16

The boy from Boro Back in the office I thought Harry’s complexion a little more lifelike. He’d be shaky as blazes when he woke but I thought it best to take precautions anyway. I dragged down a pair of leg irons— souvenirs from a different life—and fitted them to his ankles.Then I handcuffed one wrist to the leg of the couch. After that there was little to do but wait. Fanny and Bessie the maid had cleaned up the bar-room floor and The Twilight Saloon was open for business. Chicago Dan was down in his dungeon sleeping off the brandy. No doubt when he recovered he’d resume his chair at the door with some suitable fable to tell of his bandaged foot. My presence was surplus to requirements.And, to tell the truth, I was feeling a little shaky myself. I’d been shot at many times but only once before—in that scrap with Middleton and Hosie at Fogg’s shanty—had I been hit. It was not an experience I’d ever cared to repeat. I opened the bottom drawer of the desk and pulled out a twelve-year-old Bushmills—at least Fanny had used the blended firewater on Harry—and poured myself a celebratory nobbler. I raised it before me. ‘Here’s to you, Ben. Here’s to your handiwork, you bastard.’ Maybe it was unfair. But, if Ben had only kept his hands to himself instead of chasing every skirt in the district, Bridget would have stuck with him. He couldn’t help himself. Every woman he met was fair game and they couldn’t get enough of him. No wonder Biddy cleared out. But that didn’t justify the madness in her that blamed me for it all. My sisters had felt the power of the woman’s spite when they were petitioning to have me released. She wouldn’t sign and she tramped the district from Grenfell to Cowra urging others to reject their plea. She wanted me to serve all 32 years of my sentence or be carried out feet first. When they were successful and I gained my freedom, the hatred deepened in her bones. Old Henry Parkes decided he’d mark the 17

Fire in the Blood end of the era when he set me loose by pardoning 23 others—just boys most of them—serving their sentences on bushranging charges. This put Biddy in a spot. Many of the lads came from the Lachlan and the release was popular among the small settlers of her acquaintance. What’s more, my freedom came with the condition, never before imposed, that I be exiled from my country for all time. Everyone knew what a torment that would be. So she had this hard knot in the belly; no one would listen to her rage, no one but the child of her loins, now all trussed up and in pain on the devil’s couch. As I sipped, I took up the book that had saved my life. I pulled out the deadly little lead pellet and weighed it in my palm: next to nothing, yet it had the power to end everything. Maybe I’d have it mounted and returned to young Harry, a symbol of the indestructibility of Frank Gardiner.Yeah, I liked that. I took another sip and couldn’t help but smile—he was in for some surprise when he woke up; the last thing he knew before the roof fell in was that he’d shot Frank Gardiner in the heart. As the time passed, I dozed briefly—a reaction, I suspect, to the events of the morning—and, as I woke, it struck me that the slim young fellow on the couch resembled Jackey Jackey in almost every particular: fair, bright and quick to action. In a world where justice prevailed, they would be lauded as fine young representatives of their race. But, in a British world, where one family was placed above another for all time and where the privileged guarded the entrance to their favoured circles and used up the strength of the lowborn to maintain their mastery, such young men were doomed. No one knows that better than I. I was not born in the Goulburn district, as the common usage has it.The legend that my mother was an Aboriginal woman whom my father tupped in the months before the rest of the family joined him as settlers is just so much blather. I knew the stories but never 18

The boy from Boro bothered to deny them; they did me no harm among the currency lads and lasses who were our bush telegraph and our protectors when the troopers ventured too close. The fact is, I was born in Rosshire, Scotland, the third child after brother Charlie and big sister Robina, of my da, Charles Christie, and his lovely wife, Jane, both born in 1800, the first year of the new century.When we arrived in Australia in 1834 on the sailing ship James, I was five years old, my younger sister Archina four and little Charlotte only twelve months. I have no memory of that journey. I recall the stench of Sydney Town but we merely passed through on the way to Boro, 30 miles south of the few ramshackle houses, shanties and the rough stockade that went by the name of Goulburn. My da was contracted as overseer to Mr Henry Monro who had come from Scotland himself the year before and taken up land on Boro Creek, closer to Bungendore than Goulburn. Monro had about a dozen convicts assigned to him and they built yards, the sheds and the rough homesteads. Under my da’s watchful eye, the convicts tended the sheep and cattle and chased off the Blacks. At first they did all their work on foot; there were very few horses in the colony and the troopers claimed most of them. Not that the horses were much good to the law in the early days; most couldn’t raise a canter, they were so old and rough. But it wasn’t long before the squatters around Parramatta imported some good bloodlines and, in just a few years, the whole place changed. New South Wales rode on the horse’s back.You couldn’t make a go of farming or anything else unless you had a good supply of horses. We youngsters took to them like flies to treacle and that’s how I met old Henry Gardiner. He arrived one day with a string of horses for sale. Da was very suspicious about the methods old Gardiner had used to acquire them; he reckoned the bill of sale looked as if it had been written with a burnt stick. But Monro was cunning; he bought the lot on condition Gardiner stay and break in 19

Fire in the Blood the two young colts. That way, if the Traps were chasing him, he’d still be around when they turned up. Old Gardiner didn’t hesitate; next thing we knew he was camping in the saddle shed and there he stayed the whole time we were at Boro. I suppose you could say I idolised him. He was nothing to look at—a straggly beard stained with tobacco; big ears like tent flaps waving in the breeze; elbows that stuck out and bumped into things; and a twisted way of walking that came, he said, from an encounter with a bull’s horn when he was just a boy. But he had a way of telling stories that grabbed you by the throat and held on. And he was a marvel with horses. He talked to them in that soft, gravelly voice and I’ll swear they talked back to him. I was only eight years old but I remember, clear as day, when he broke the little chestnut gelding we called Budge. Old Gardiner let me be part of it from the very beginning when we cut him out of the mob and yarded him. He never stopped talking—soft words that had no proper meaning in the English language.When I asked him, he said he was talking ‘horse’ and I believed him. Still do in a way. It wasn’t the words; it was the tone of them, firm and calm, and, at the end of it, he heaved me aboard. I could feel the young horse trembling and Old Gardiner just talked to him a little more, patted him on the shoulder and set him off round the yard. Soon it was like we’d been born that way. I was never off him unless I was eating, sleeping or doing my lessons with Ma. It was Old Gardiner who first told me about Jackey Jackey. By then he was a terror to the squatters and Monro would not speak his name without a curse. But one day Old Gardiner and I took some horses the twenty miles to Bungendore for the sale. And all that way along the track he talked of his own life as a convict and the way landowners treated them like slaves.Then he said, ‘I know that Jackey Jackey like he’s my own kin. His spirit be too strong for his own good.They will beat him until he breaks.’ 20

The boy from Boro ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘They cannot abide a man who will not accept the place they’ve made for him.’Then he shook his head and the tears flew out of his eyes.‘They are the devils of the earth,’ he said.We rode quietly for a long time after that. The old man was full of silences when you’d know he was thinking about some terrible thing that had happened. Then he’d pick up a story where he’d left off, even though it might be hours or even days later. On the property, our family had our own hut made from slabs on a rise above the creek about halfway between the convicts’ quarters and Monro’s place. Ma cooked for Monro and Robina took his dinner over to him each evening before hurrying back to tuck in with us. Every day was like an adventure and I suppose you could say I lived wild.The land seemed to go on forever and the sky was a fierce blue.You could ride all day without seeing another soul but we’d meet up with the workers on the nearby properties in the big paddocks, at the Goulburn markets and when we went to church at Christmas. Everyone knew each other. We were a close family. My brother, Charlie, was quiet and often poorly, but my sisters and I loved meeting up with other kids. In the town, the Taylors were the liveliest.They were from convict stock— their father, William, had done his time at Windsor before moving to Goulburn as a constable then opening a store; the youngsters, a whole tribe of them from Mary to James—the same James who would later become Harry Hall’s stepfather—were good, knockabout people. Mary was special. Even as a kid she had a heart as big as New South Wales. Next door to us was Mr Turner’s place and it was there I got to know Billy Fogg. He was a young convict who’d been transported for stealing hats, he said, but he was the happiest bloke I’d ever met. He’d taught himself to butcher, and when Turner killed a beast for 21

Fire in the Blood the table he’d quarter it for us and the other neighbours. I loved watching Billy with his knives and cleavers. He was like a sword fighter of old, blades flashing so close to his fingers you’d wonder he didn’t do himself an injury. But mostly I loved riding. I raced Budge along the river flats and climbed him up the ridges through the thick wattle and the rough flinty ground where the iron barks stood like they’d been there forever. Even now I can see those mighty trees—hard and tough like the land itself.They’re like a part of me, a good, strong part, because they’re surrounded by warm memories of hearth and home—so different from the bad times ahead.

22

CHAPTER 3

Westwood Ho

T

here was a rough gargle in Harry’s throat that snapped me back to the present. I rose and looked more closely; his breathing definitely came deeper and steadier. Then I settled back with my Westwood volume, more precious now than any other, and tried to read. When he finally cleared out from King’s property, Jackey Jackey fell into the company of Paddy Curran, who had been, he wrote, ‘a terror to the settlers’ for eighteen months past. I was well pleased to meet him because I knew him to be a resolute and determined man, and one that knew the bush well. I said,‘If you want a comrade, here is my hand and my heart too. I will share your fate, whatever it may be.’At length he said,‘I agree to your wishes, my lad.’ We then started for the Bungendore Road.

23

Fire in the Blood But Curran, it seems, was a scoundrel with women. He’d been transported for life in 1834, the same year that my family arrived from Scotland and, when he and Jackey Jackey held up Woden Homestead on the Limestone Plains beyond Bungendore,Westwood caught him molesting the lady of the house.The youngster intervened and saved the woman’s virtue before they parted and Curran left the district. Jackey Jackey remained for a while, lending great heart to the convicts of the area whose conditions under the settler Klensendorlff were just as bad as any endured by the slaves of the Confederacy. Working alone, he held up mail coaches, homesteads and the more wealthy travellers until he had a bank of more than 200 pounds. His friends gave him shelter and intelligence as the need arose. But, at only seventeen, he wrote, ‘I began to get tired of this game and resolved to see Sydney and to taste the pleasures of the town—at the same time to cheat the police who were now more than ever in pursuit of me.’ And what a rollicking time he had. ‘I put up at an hotel in George Street where I remained for a month or better, regaling myself with all the good things that Sydney could afford.’Then he got bored with it and went back to the road, calling on Bullyo, a station run by one Cordeaux whose superintendent was notorious. ‘Many a man by his tyranny he drove to destruction.’ He rode up to the station homestead and Cordeaux came to the door. He bade me a good evening. I put a pistol to his head to let him know what I meant.There were three men at the place. I ordered one of them to tie his hands behind him and fasten him to the verandah post. I then searched the house and found a fowling piece and four pounds in money. I made a man load my horse with what I wanted. I then unfastened the superintendent and bid him to kneel down. He prayed me, for God’s sake not to shoot him and

24

Westwood Ho said if I would spare his life he would never get a man flogged again and that he would be kind to prisoners for the future. I think the men were well pleased with the way I served him.

I put the book aside.That man, I believe, was John Sherriff who lived in the Goulburn district during the time my family was there. Whether he kept his promise I cannot say, but I doubt it. He worked for the McArthurs and to them the flogger was just as important as the bullock or the convict slave. Overseers who failed to employ him were dismissed out of hand. It mattered not if they had the richest run in the district; the McArthurs believed it would be richer still with the laying on of the lash. They first captured Jackey Jackey soon after his caper with Sherriff. He’d gone to Bungendore to visit a friend. ‘When I came there I was treated with great kindness,’ he wrote.‘I sent one of the females to a public-house to get some rum to make merry with and someone saw me that knew me.They went and gave information to the police and when I was three parts drunk had me taken.’ Jackey Jackey was a terror to hold. He was put in a parlour with four men with loaded pistols to guard him. I rushed one and took his pistol from him and the others ran out of the door. I made for the bush but before I could reach it I was surrounded by horsemen, well armed, and retaken. ‘I was brought back and tied with as many ropes as would have rigged a small cutter. I was then put in a cart to be taken to gaol, tied up like a bundle of faggots for the fire.The magistrate,‘Black’ Francis McArthur, tried all he could to hang me by trying to make the witnesses swear to more than they knew.

Justice Stephen, who in later years I would come to know better than either of us wished, officiated at his trial and sentenced him to 25

Fire in the Blood bondage in the colony for life. Jackey Jackey thanked him in the open court then that night made a break from Berrima Gaol, removing the shingles from the roof and slipping off into the darkness with no one the wiser. He was soon back in the bush and making a tollway of the Great Southern Road from Sydney.The troopers combed the countryside but to no avail; the convicts and the ticket-of-leave men would do anything they could to help him. They were in common cause against the McArthurs and their ilk. The authorities posted a reward of twenty pounds for his capture, but of course there were no takers. In fact, his mates took the greatest pleasure in his tweaking the noses of the toffs.And Jackey Jackey was up for anything. On one glorious occasion he actually held up Black Francis as he returned from church in Goulburn. ‘His life was now in my hands,’ he wrote.‘It was my firm intention to tie him up to the wheel of his carriage and make his driver flog him. But through his sister being with him he escaped this punishment. ‘When I had picked up the money and watch I got on the back of his carriage horse and left him to his reflections. From the top of the hill I looked back and had the pleasure to see the coachman leading the one horse up the hill and Mr Black Francis pushing the carriage behind—a sight that gave me real satisfaction.’ By now, Jackey Jackey had been seven months a bushranger and was one of the foremost names in the colony. But the forces of the Ascendancy were closing in. Though he doesn’t tell it himself, everyone knows to the last syllable the favoured tale of his capture at the hands of Mary Gray, the daughter of the landlord at the Berrima Inn. The lad had finished his meal and was sipping a glass of wine on a couch in the parlour when he looked up and saw Mary surveying him from the doorway. 26

Westwood Ho ‘Is there anything special about me?’ he smiled.‘I ask because you look at me in a way—well, in a way I’m not used to.’ Mary Gray nodded. ‘What is it—do I affect you?’ Flushed, the girl moved over to him, her eyes bright and amorous. Jackey Jackey glanced at her full sulky mouth, her proud bosom.‘You want to give me a little kiss?’ he said, reaching out and grasping her hand. ‘You mustn’t,’ she said as the bushranger’s hand climbed up her back. Then, as he pulled her down, she said, ‘Stop it. Dad might come.’ But, just the same, she made no attempt to stop Jackey Jackey pulling her down on him. Indeed, she appeared to be facilitating his progress. Had he been in a less happy mood he might have been warned that good girls don’t yield quite so readily to strangers. Just as his head touched the cushion behind him, the girl, a pretty hefty wench, suddenly jumped on him and yelled,‘Dad! I got him!’ Seeing the landlord rush in, Jackey Jackey pushed the girl off him and leapt up, punching the landlord in the face. The girl screamed and clung to his back. Gray got up and struck the bushranger in the chest. Mary Gray fell down, still screaming. Her father and Jackey Jackey were fighting furiously now. Mrs Gray ran in, opened the window and screamed, ‘Help! We’ve got Jackey Jackey!’ Henry Waters, a carpenter, rushed in and struck him savagely on the head with his shingling hammer. The bushranger’s knees buckled. He swayed drunkenly and then slewed over and fell like a sack of corn meal onto the sofa. Finally the game was up.What followed, as I well knew, was almost too terrible to contemplate . . . I put the volume aside and checked my young assassin. Evening was closing in and I turned up the gas to see him better. His breathing was deep and regular and his eyelids appeared to flicker in the 27

Fire in the Blood gaslight.A hammer for Jackey Jackey, I thought, a whiskey bottle for young Henry Hall. Suddenly his eyes sprang wide open, focusing on my face with the starlight chandelier behind. The colour drained from him. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.‘I’m dead.’

28

CHAPTER 4

A mother’s hate

I

was sorely tempted to string him along. Had I done so he would have deserved no less and in earlier years I’d have taken a fair pleasure in it. As it was, I let him stew while I stared him down. ‘Explain yourself,’ I said. ‘What’s your game?’ He moved to rise and found himself well haltered. Then he saw the book and bullet on the desk and the little jigsaw clicked into place. ‘Gardiner,’ the word rasped out of him like a curse. He struggled against the handcuff. ‘You bastard . . .’ His head swayed to one side and his eyes glazed over. ‘You should have rotted in Darlinghurst, paid the price you levelled against my father . . . oh God . . .’ His outburst faded to a whimper as his hands clasped his head. I felt the gorge rise in me. I responded, louder than I’d meant. ‘You’re parroting your mother’s lies! Think for yourself, man. It was no fault of mine that Ben Hall got himself shot to pieces. He 29

Fire in the Blood was his own master. He made his own trouble and I’ll tell you this— he gloried in it. He didn’t need Frank Gardiner to lead him. He had another party more than willing to take that role and, if you want to know, it hung between his bloody legs.’ That shut him up, quick smart. Though I’d not planned to confront him with it, never a truer word was spoken.‘I’m not saying he deserved to die like that,’ I said.‘He was a mate of mine, a good mate, a close mate . . .’ Damn it, just thinking of him, all our time together, and that shocking end to his life brought a lump to my throat. ‘No one deserved that,’ I said. ‘But he pushed it too hard, stayed on the road when he could have made the break.The excitement got to him; he couldn’t give it away.’ Harry stared at me through bloodshot eyes. ‘Where could he have gone?’ ‘He was a grown man. He made his own decisions.’ ‘You led him on.’ ‘You know nothing. Nothing . . .’ ‘Prince of the Tobymen, you called yourself; General Gardiner, King of the Road.’ ‘And so I was.’ ‘With your clever words and your wild ideas.’ ‘Listen to yourself. That’s not a man talking. It’s your mother. You’re whining like a drover’s bitch . . .’ He struggled with his chains. ‘What kind of gutless way is this? You’ll throw me in the Bay, I suppose.’ ‘I ought to. By Christ, I ought to.’ ‘Who’s the man now?’ he shouted, up-ending the couch and pulling his hand free. How he crossed the space between us I’ll never know but in a flash he was on me, his hands groping for my neck, and as they closed around the throat I struggled to get at my revolver.We crashed to the floor, locked together, knocking out what little breath I had 30

A mother’s hate left in me.The room began to spin as my fingers touched the pearl handle and I squeezed it up between us until the barrel reached his eye level, my finger on the trigger.When he saw it his hands eased their grip, and I drew a mighty breath as I rolled away. I sat against the upturned couch, the gun levelled at his heart, dragging the air into my lungs. Finally I said, ‘It’s not in me to kill you, Harry. I loved your father like he was my own kin.’ He stared at me with those wild blue eyes. Then I took a chance. I turned the gun around, held it by the barrel and passed it to him. He grabbed it and for a split second his eyes widened and I was a dead man. But then as I looked him full in the face his gun hand began to shake and the muscles of his cheeks trembled. He took a mighty breath then let it all out.‘Damn you,’ he said quietly and put the gun down. Then he wept like a man weeps—softly and from the very heart of him. All his strength seemed to leave him with the tears. In a while, I undid the ankle chains then got a shoulder under his arm and lifted him up. He was barely conscious. I carried him up the stairs. Fanny came out of her bedroom and lent a hand. ‘You wake me up,’ she said.‘What are you doing down zair?’ ‘Sorting out the past,’ I said. She shrugged in a way that said ‘Men’, and opened the door of the spare room I used to accommodate associates who’d rather not go home to their wives. It had a big comfortable bed and we rolled him into it and stripped him down. He had a good body, wiry and well muscled. ‘He should have a bath,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’ Blood seeped through the bandage on his head but there was not much more we could do that time of night. ‘I will stay ’ere wiz him,’ she said. ‘No need. He’ll sleep now.’ 31

Fire in the Blood Again the shrug.‘He won’t kill us in our beds?’ ‘Not tonight,’ I said,‘but please yourself.’ She stood and gave me a peck on the cheek as I headed for my room.There had been a time when we shared a bed but it got in the way of friendship.And it was bad for business.This way was a lot more comfortable. In my room I washed in the basin, peeled back the crisp white sheets and passed into nothingness. Next I knew it was one of those foggy ’Frisco mornings and Fanny was coming through the door with a big cup of coffee and a sweet roll. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Is he awake?’ ‘Yes. I think he is a sick boy.’ ‘He’ll live.’ ‘I have made him some soup.’ I almost spilled my coffee.The idea of Fanny making soup was a bit like Johnny Gilbert shaking hands with a trooper—it just didn’t happen.‘You mean you bought some soup from the Polacks.’ ‘No, I went to the market while you were sleeping and snoring to wake the world. Now I have zings to do.’ She turned on her heel but not before I caught a glimpse of her ears blushing fire. Well, I’m damned, I thought. Women. There was something about the Halls they just couldn’t resist, some chemical in the blood and sweat of them. When I looked in on him, Harry had very little to say for himself.‘I’ll get the doc back today,’ I said. He remained sullen. When the medico arrived that afternoon, he seemed pleased with the lad’s condition but for the one bloodshot eye and the fierce headache. ‘No question about it, the skull is cracked,’ he said. ‘Not much we can do—the bones have to knit together and that takes time.’ 32

A mother’s hate ‘How long?’ croaked the patient. ‘Three weeks minimum, on your back,’ Doc Warrener said.‘Then a couple more walking about getting your strength. After that, you should be good as new.’ He began to protest but it died in his throat. Doc turned to me.‘I can recommend a sanitorium . . .’ ‘I thought you said he shouldn’t move around.’ ‘That’s so but—’ ‘Let’s talk about it in a few days,’ I said. ‘Certainly. Entirely up to you, Frank.’ I ushered him out. Fanny just happened to be passing.‘She’s been making soup,’ I said as she ducked through the open door. ‘Good Lord.’ Doc called after her:‘All excitement’s bad for him,’ he said and we both had a good laugh. He had a look at Dan’s mangled pedal extremity—brave fellow, Doc—then took a drink with me before he parted.‘Are you going to tell me the story, Frank?’ ‘His father was a mate of mine in the old days,’ I said.‘Name of Ben Hall. Quite a man.’ ‘One of your bushbasher gang,’ he said. ‘Bushranger, Doc.’ ‘Like our Jesse James, eh? Robbing banks, holding up trains . . .’ I prised him away from the bar and walked him to the batwing doors.‘Ben Hall would eat Jesse James for breakfast.’ Doc thought that an uproarious idea and you can’t blame him. Jesse James had survived on the road for much longer than my boys. In fact, I was nearly two years in Darlinghurst by the time Jesse and his brother Frank pulled off their first big job, the Clay County Bank in Kansas City in 1866. Nice haul too—some 62 000 dollars, though only a fraction of the take on my big one, the Eugowra gold escort. Still, they stayed in the game with the Iron Mountain train robbery in ’74, the same year as I arrived in ’Frisco. And they were still at it 33

Fire in the Blood down Colorado way, earlier this year.That’s a mighty long time to outwit the Pinkertons. ‘Eat him for breakfast,’ Doc wheezed, his face the shade of a ’Frisco sunset.‘That’s a good one, Frank.’

34

CHAPTER 5

South by southwest

W

e bade our farewells and on the pavement I decided I too should head out into the byways of the Barbary Coast. I had been neglecting my business—the facilitation of that impulse among men to test the affections of Lady Luck on the green baize of a card table. It is not, I freely admit, an endeavour approved by officialdom. But, here in the Coast, officialdom may be persuaded to turn a blind eye to many an endeavour that fails to find favour among the Yankee Rechabites. It’s a skill that’s been forced upon me, you might say. Indeed, it’s a rare week that passes when one of San Francisco’s officers of the law doesn’t try his luck in The Twilight Saloon; and it will surprise no one to hear that he generally walks away from the table a winner. Such are the wonders of the game of poker, particularly when one such as myself, with a fair head for liquor and a modicum of dexterity, deals the cards. 35

Fire in the Blood Most of the time I do little more than supply the venue, the cards, the dealer and the refreshments.The house takes a modest cut of the pot and keeps cockatoo by way of Chicago Dan and the ’Frisco version of my old bush telegraph, just in case the Vigilance Committee is on the prowl. But occasionally I take a hand in the game—my preference being seven-card stud—and that provides a little spending money and the chance to reward my friends in the constabulary. If I detect a grifter (and there’s no shortage of that breed in the Barbary), I’ll generally move him along; but, if he’s made a hole in the banks of my regulars, I’ll sit in and give him a dose of his own medicine. I have three blackjack tables for the visitors and half a dozen young dealers to tend them and the poker players. Dealers are a footloose crew seldom staying more than half a year; in the last six years since I opened the saloon I must have employed two score of them. You have to watch them like a hawk, particularly when they begin to show signs of restlessness. Fanny and I share the overseeing duties and I don’t mind admitting that she can pick a sweeper even quicker than I. This is not surprising, I guess, since she was a rolled-gold expert herself when she came aboard the Twilight in the early days. A female dealer was a rare creature then, particularly one with her looks and spirit.The punters came from near and far, as I knew they would.Within a month,The Twilight Saloon was up there with The Boar’s Head and The Bella Union as one of the top spots of the Barbary Coast. Trouble was, Fanny knew her own worth. Had she not fallen for the Gardiner charm and tumbled into the upstairs cot with me, I have little doubt she would have plucked my feathers one by one. Fact is, you could say she grabbed a handful and gave a mighty heave when she threatened to leave if I didn’t part with a piece of the action.You could also say she bared the parson’s nose when I signed over twenty per cent to her. 36

South by southwest The last woman I partnered up with was my lovely Kitty Brown and that was more years ago than I care remember. But on both occasions, I have no doubt that I was the winner in the deal. Fanny was good for the business and good to have around. She only dealt occasionally and then just to keep her hand in. But, there’s no substitute for the master’s touch to bring in the patrons. So I put on my hat and went for a walk. I started up Kearny Street to Pacific Street and across to Grant Avenue. It was getting on in the afternoon and the Barbary Coast—that special world bounded by Pacific near Montgomery through to Stockton via Hinkley, Pinkley, Bartlett, Murder Point, Bull Run and Dead Man’s Alley— was starting to come alive again.There’s a particular smell to it—the kind humanity gives off at moments of high excitement. It enters the nostrils like a whiff of opium and sets the hair rising on the back of the neck.There’s a new spring in the step, a sudden glint in the eye that roves among the open doors of the pretty-waiter-girl bars and the melodeons with their rough old songbirds who’ve seen much better days. I headed for The Hose and Garter, my main opposition, run by the ‘Honourable’ Herbie London, a name as phoney as the bumptious little British bastard that wore it. The footpaths were getting crowded as I passed Solomon Levy’s establishment on the south side of Pacific Street. In front of his door was a huge pile of blankets for sale, chained and padlocked so the passers-by wouldn’t mistake them for a free sample. Above it hung an oversized woollen overcoat resplendent with brass buttons and a great moth-eaten fur collar. It carried a sign, ‘Bought & Sold—Solomon Levy’. Inside, the place was packed with sailors spending what little they’d put aside from the grog shops to outfit themselves for some maritime venture into the Arctic Circle. The garments would surely fall to pieces by the time they reached the upper latitudes but at least they’d have their little card from old Levy with the words printed in fancy type.They 37

Fire in the Blood put it to a shanty tune that they sang as they staggered round the streets, and no doubt as they hauled on the mainbraces or whatever it is sailors do in the wildness of the sea. The damn thing stuck in the brain. My name is Solomon Levy And I keep a clothing store Away up on Pacific Street A hundred and fifty-four. If you want to buy an overcoat A pair of pants or vest, Step up to Solomon Levy And he’ll sell you all the best.

Damn fool thing. I roused the old brain to ignore it but without success.Then I thought on young Harry back on the bed, a creature from the past who had suddenly leapt across the decades to stir the embers of my early life. As I walked through the bustle, the shouts and the smells of the Barbary Coast, the memories of another journey returned to me with an irresistible strength. I was only nine years old.The year was 1838 and we were leaving Boro Creek with Henry Monro and all his goods and chattels to follow Major Mitchell’s line west and south. The explorer had been through the district two years before and had published the report of his wondrous discoveries of fertile soil well watered by clear streams feeding into the mighty Hume River, far off in the Victorian colony. Australia Felix, he called it. Monro wouldn’t rest until he had a piece of it, as big a piece as he could capture. In February, as the heat of high summer tempered a little, we set off in a long caravan, Monro leading as we followed the blazes on the tree trunks and the bullock-dray tracks that took us into the 38

South by southwest frontier country where the Blacks still ruled. He was quite a sight at the head of our party. He usually rode Belle, a surefooted bay hack with a mane like a lion’s and hairy fetlocks. He had an imported saddle with holsters in front and a valise and Mackintosh behind. At one side was a shotgun, its muzzle resting in a leather boot that was attached in the same way as the stirrup leather. A tether rope 50 yards long was coiled around the horse’s neck to secure him at night. On the journey he wore a shooting coat, straw hat and trousers strapped with leather and moleskin. His boots were spurred and he kept a short clay pipe clenched between his teeth— altogether a fearsome sight. Mitchell had warned about the Aborigines but that only spurred the devil in Monro who couldn’t bear to be thwarted by man or nature. My da was different. He had no quarrel with any man, whether pink or sable, unless the other struck first. Even then, it took a hard knock to rouse him to anger. Once there, he’d give an account of himself before the rage subsided; but it happened rarely. Monro had enough prickliness for both of them. Da’s job was to keep his employer on the straight and narrow and, on that southward trek, the rest of us together as we made our way through landscapes that Mitchell had been the first white man to gaze upon. Monro had built up the breeding stock before we set out from Boro Creek, so we were a big, untidy mob with Ma and the six of us kids (little Maria had been born at Boro), half a dozen convicts, four shepherds to tend the sheep, and seven general hands under the charge of Ferrier Liston, the junior overseer. Two of the convicts drove drays while Ma and Charlie took turns at the reins of the wagon. Charlie had never been strong.There was something wrong with his lungs and that journey seemed to take the heart out of him. Old Gardiner came along with us as far as Yass but then decided he’d had enough of Monro’s ways. He never said goodbye. One day he was with us, the next there was an empty space. Da told me 39

Fire in the Blood Gardiner and his like were not big on farewells but I remember even now that it hurt when I pictured him and looked around a dozen times a day, only to recall that he’d gone from us. I rode Budge mostly, but switched to other horses when he needed a spell. I rounded up the stragglers and kept watch for Blacks. When I spotted any I’d spur up to Da and he’d come back to keep an eye on them till they melted away into the bush. ‘They’re simple people,’ he said.‘We must be like strangers come into their homes without asking permission. It’s natural they’re not happy about it.’ Monro had a different way. If a group of them appeared nearby, he’d draw the shotgun out of his saddle holster and let go a charge over their heads to knock twigs and branches out of a nearby tree. ‘Get out of it, yer heathen bastards!’ he’d shout and follow it with another cartridge into the ground before them or the trunk of a tree beside. As a nipper, I have to say I preferred Monro’s methods, especially when he laughed, for there wasn’t much that amused him. Only later, when some terrible things happened, did I come to appreciate my da’s ways. After Yass, we crossed the Great Dividing Range and came down to Gundagai then struck south through the little village of Jerilderie and along the Moulamein River to the mighty Hume itself. It was later called the Murray by the squatters but always for the currency lad Hamilton Hume by the battlers and the emancipists. We slept under the stars, or in rough gunyas, setting branches against the trees, or in tents if it rained. Sometimes I’d snuggle up to Da to stay warm. It was hard on Ma. Baby Maria was not well and she took very pale and weepy. Then, soon after we crossed the Hume, our tiny sister died.We buried her beneath a river red gum and my da wept. Finally we crossed a ford in the Coliban River and reached the Campaspe Plains where Monro took up the 50 000-acre run and 40

South by southwest named it Monro’s Plains. By then we’d been travelling for nearly four months. As we neared the Coliban, Monro and Da rode ahead to survey the claim and Ferrier Liston took charge. He had a loud voice, did Ferrier, but somehow the louder he shouted the less anyone heard him. We camped near Wild Duck Creek below Mt Alexander while the men knocked up a headstation hut for Monro and us.The shepherds took the flocks out to grazing areas west and north around Myrtle Creek and Mia Mia Creek where the builders made huts for them to shelter from the cold and the night wind. Each day, Ma brought us together for reading-and-writing class and sometimes one of the convicts, Tom Clarke, who had been a teaching assistant in England, gave us arithmetic lessons and read from Monro’s library of books.The girls preferred Pilgrim’s Progress but my favourite, by far, was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. I still recall the day I was able to read it alone and unaided. Monro was, in many ways, a hateful man but I have to admit he treasured those volumes more highly than the food he ate. In the evenings, he would go straight to his chair after supper and, if he wasn’t drinking, he would read by lamplight far into the night. Sometimes we would hear him playing a mournful tune on his flute, but not often for it set the dogs howling and he would stop and curse them while we giggled under the blankets. My sisters and I didn’t mind the long trek once we got into the daily routine, and for the first little while on the Campaspe we were a happy family. I loved it. I rounded up the milkers each afternoon. I worked at the shearing shed when they were shearing or crutching. I was never still. My da said I was worth two convicts and then some. Even Monro had a kind word for me now and again.There were times when I wished nothing would change, ever again.

41

CHAPTER 6

A mate indeed

I

chuckled and suddenly came to my senses. So absorbed was I in the reverie that I’d lost all forward motion. I found myself standing at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets, not half a chain from The Hose and Garter, with a foolish grin on my face and an urchin pulling my coat and asking for a handout. I gave him a dime before I knew it. ‘Now be off,’ I said and stepped between the traffic of carts and sulkies, push barrows, pedestrians and the occasional cyclist and into the gaudy entrance of Herbie’s ‘premier premises of prestidigitation’. The magic show was an attraction for his gambling parlour, but in my view it was a bad mistake. He had a regular troupe of third-rate prestidigitators who did card tricks and other feats of legerdemain on the stage while his serious customers lost their money at his gambling tables. I wouldn’t have a bar of it at the 42

A mate indeed Twilight. The last thing I wanted my customers to know was the ease with which a player could be fooled by a card sharp. But, as ever, Herbie figured he knew best. Arrogant little sod. On the Lachlan, we called it ‘riding for a fall’. I pushed through the doors and immediately spotted Herbie in his fancy waistcoat, sitting in on a poker table with some of the regulars. Herbie had a weakness for the game; saw it as some kind of test of his manhood. Once you knew what powered him, you could turn it against him in the great game of bluff and bewilder. Silly fellow, but you couldn’t tell him. I know. I had tried. He’d turned up out of the blue at The Twilight Saloon two years ago, asking for a job as a dealer. Said he’d worked the tables in the grand establishments of London which had not only given him his start in life but the name to go with it. His real moniker, he said, would have to stay a secret since he’d been born to a belted earl but on the wrong side of the blanket.As a result, he’d had more than his share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and, when his circumstances had sunk to their lowest ebb, he’d been lured into a scheme of questionable lawfulness only to be double-crossed by his more illustrious and ‘respectable’ relatives. Hence his enforced departure from the sceptred isle and subsequent arrival on the shores of the Barbary Coast. It was a load of tosh, of course. But, by chance, the Honourable Herbie had picked his mark well.There were enough echoes of my own story to ensure a ready ear and, despite a niggling doubt or two, I took him aboard.At first, he was a splendid asset—attentive to the players, easy on the Bushmills and nice as pie to Yours Truly. I ignored the warnings from Fanny and Dan, thinking there was professional jealousy at play. We became thick as thieves. Herbie spun me his yarns and I told him a little of my career on the road. He was full of good intentions, eager to learn the trade and, though he could be a pain in the arse 43

Fire in the Blood with his bogus airs and graces, and a mite unreliable with the greenback, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I have always valued mateship. Perhaps that’s my weakness, but unless you can rely on a mate there’s little in life worth the candle. So I told him the secrets of the trade, introduced him to the coppers who had to be greased, the politicians who welcomed a little something in skirts in exchange for their support, and some of the high rollers who provided for my retirement bank. Then one day he didn’t turn up for work.The following week he opened The Hose and Garter, with free champagne for the blackjack players, a bunch of pretty waiter girls and a regular bordello upstairs. That wasn’t my style at all. I’ll admit I took it hard for a week or two. It was not the act of a mate. For the next few months his place was packed out while at the Twilight you could have fired a Gatling gun without hitting a customer—except for those early starters seeking that first fine flush of rotgut. Only lately had my crowd started returning, looking for a more congenial atmosphere in which to seek the favours of Lady Luck. I ambled across toward him and Herbie looked up from his hand. ‘Frank, old boy,’ he said.‘Come to steal my players?’ The other men at the table turned to me. I knew three of them well. They had been around the Barbary Coast for years—‘Patch’ Wilson with his black eye-patch covering a shocking clash with a longshoreman’s hook;‘Silent Abe’ Rubens who never took off his hat and barely spoke except to raise or fold; and Sam the Rancher in his cowboy outfit. No one knew Sam’s other name. Claimed he was just passing through on his way back to Montana. But, to my certain knowledge, he’d been passing through for four whole years and showed no sign that he’d actually get to the other side any time soon. ‘Relax Herbie,’ I said.‘It’s quality, not quantity, at the Twilight.’ The other player was new to me—and he looked like the reason the pros were so attentive. Moneybags written all over him. Plump, 44

A mate indeed well-fed figure. Nice suit of eastern cut, gold chain across the belly, diamond stickpin in the cravat beneath a second or third chin that overflowed his collar, a smart hickory cane propped against his chair. He had about him the air of a man in a state of excitement where nothing but the job at hand seems real. I’d seen that before plenty of times among the boys as we prepared for a hold-up—the razz of the road, I call it.This patsy had it in spades. I nodded my way around the table.When I got to moneybags, Herbie reluctantly made the introductions.‘Mr Norbert Graves,’ he said,‘this is Frank Gardiner, the notorious Australian bushranger.’ Mr Graves glanced up from his hand.‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘I’ll raise 30.’ Up close, I noticed a dark swelling on his cheek topped by a fearful pus-head. Horrible thing, and he was clearly suffering as he fingered it. I could almost feel the pain myself. ‘Have a libation, Frank,’ Herbie said.‘I’ll be with you in a couple of ticks.’ A few minutes later, he dragged himself away and ordered a belt. ‘Fleeced him yet?’ Herbie grinned.‘Not quite, old boy. Don’t rush me.’ The grin widened.‘I heard you were shot.’ Amazing.The place was a village.‘Do I look like I was shot?’ ‘Who was it?’ ‘Just getting to know the son of an old mate,’ I said. ‘Ben Hall’s boy.’ ‘Ah, the great Lothario as I recall. One of your boon companions of the saddle.’ ‘That’s the fella.’ ‘So . . .’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘with business the way it is, it occurred to me we might pool our resources for a poker championship . . .’ ‘You and me?’ ‘Yeah, get a little excitement back into the place, run for a week, 45

Fire in the Blood one day here, the next at the Twilight, nice big prize—say 2000 dollars, winner take all.’ Herbie took it in. I could see him looking for angles. ‘I don’t think so, Frank. I mean, the championship’s not a bad idea, but why would I want to share it with you?’ ‘I don’t know. Old times’ sake?’ ‘How much would you put up?’ ‘Half and half—’ ‘No way. I have the customers already.You need me more . . .’ There was a commotion at the poker table. Moneybags had hit a lucky streak and was pulling in a big pot. In fact, both Patch Wilson and Sam the Rancher were leaving the table. ‘Better get back. Nice try, Frank.’ He actually sneered. Couldn’t help himself. Sam the Rancher fronted the bar and ordered a Bushmills. ‘Didn’t see it coming,’ he said.‘Like some damn wall-eyed steer, hit me outta nowhere.’ ‘Luck of the cards, Sam.’ ‘Yeh. Goddamn it, Frank. He shouldn’t even be playin’, with that terrible carbuncle. Man’s in agony.’ He took a swig. ‘Anyway, serve him right.’ I finished my drink and was about to leave when Herbie beckoned.When I reached the table, he said,‘Mr Graves wondered if you’d like to take a hand.’ I could see Herbie didn’t like the idea one bit. In fact, it was his reluctance that tempted me in. ‘I don’t usually—’ ‘I’ve heard of you,’ said Mr Norbert Graves, still flushed from his big win. I couldn’t tell whether it was an insult or a compliment. ‘You have the advantage of me,’ I said. ‘I take it you’re from the east.’ ‘Yes, it’s rare that I can enjoy the pleasures of our frontier society,’ he gave a gentle smile, then winced as he moved his facial muscles, 46

A mate indeed ‘such as a hand of cards away from the strictures of one’s usual milieu.’ Silent Abe looked at him carefully, as though trying to figure out what language he was speaking. Herbie beamed.‘Quite so,’ he piped. ‘Quite so . . . oh yes, indeed.’ ‘What’s the brand?’ Herbie looked embarrassed. ‘Straight poker, five-card draw, 50-dollar limit,’ he said. No wonder he was embarrassed. Five-card draw was for amateurs.You bet your opening hand, drew on your discards and bet the result.Where was the challenge in that? But Mr Graves burned with expectation. ‘Okay,’ I said.‘I’ll take a hand with our distinguished visitor. But I can’t stay more than an hour, Herbie.’ ‘Sure, absolutely,’ he said, and threw me a wink. In an hour, it said, we’ll have this fellow’s roll and we’ll both be happy. I pulled out my gambling float from the money belt and one of Herbie’s pretty waiter girls turned a couple of hundred into chips. I played it straight, watching Mr Graves as he tried and failed to keep his emotions in check while he uncovered his cards and discarded one. I figured him for two pair. And, from the wince of disappointment, there was no way he made the full house. But that didn’t stop him pushing out a ten-dollar chip.Abe called for two and that looked like a stab at an inside straight. Long odds, but he covered Graves’s opener. Herbie took three and raised ten dollars. I was one short of a queen-high flush in hearts. Without looking at it, I dropped the card face-down on the table with the other four and made my bet: twenty dollars. Abe tossed in and there we were, Mr Graves against me with Herbie on the side and me with the deck of cards in hand, just in case. The easterner was pressing like some high-strung prancer, following me up through 100 to 130 dollars while Herbie came along for the ride. I picked up the table card: a four of clubs. 47

Fire in the Blood No flush.‘Raise 40,’ I said.Any higher and he’d know I was bluffing, but I calculated it was just low enough so he’d figure I’d made the flush or the straight and was drawing him in, going easy so as not to frighten him off. Herbie tossed in, leaving me to take the running. But then Graves surprised us both. ‘Too rich for my blood, Mr Gardiner,’ he said and threw his cards into the centre. But, as he did, so he touched his ugly boil and groaned slightly. Herbie shuddered and looked away just as Graves held up his cards for a fraction and I caught a glimpse of a pair of aces.When I looked back at him, his eyes were on mine like a pair of miners’ lamps.The message couldn’t have been clearer.‘I’m on to you,’ it said.‘I am not at all what I appear. I knew you were bluffing. And, if you’d care to change sides, the two of us can take Herbie for his shirt.’ I returned the look with the merest semblance of a nod.‘Never mind, Mr Graves,’ I said.‘Perhaps your luck will change.’ Herbie chimed in.‘No doubt about it. No doubt at all.’ Ah, how right he was.We took Abe out within three hands then slowly and methodically Norbert Graves and Yours Truly made advances on the shirt, the cufflinks and the gold studs that adorned the person of the Honourable Herbert London Esq. Graves was a master of the art.When he was strong, he touched the inflammation and I pushed Herbie into deep waters before baling out and leaving him at the visitor’s mercy.When he was weak, I went in hard and Herbie came along for the ride, only to watch his investment vanishing into the capacious Gardiner pocket. I jollied him along while the pile of chips rose like tombstones, you might say, before the Gardiner and the Graves. It was all I could do to stop myself chortling. Herbie started to look desperate. By now he was nearly 1000 dollars in the red.This was big money, especially with Herbie’s overheads. He’d be lucky to make 1000 dollars in a month. The only thing for it, he figured, was to take the stranger out in one big hit. 48

A mate indeed ‘Okay, Frank,’ he said,‘the hour’s up.You probably want to make this the last hand. All right by you, Mr Graves?’ ‘Oh, if you say so, sir. I suppose I should quit while I’m ahead.’ ‘Fine by me,’ I said. Herbie called for a new pack. ‘And you should have that, um, pimple seen to, Mr Graves.’ He looked over to me. ‘Maybe Doc Warrener—’ ‘Yes, he’d look after you.’ While Herbie engaged him in animated conversation on the qualifications of our favourite medicine man, a pretty waiter girl brought the pack. It was one of Herbie’s specials. They carried the same pattern as the regular packs but they’d been doctored by experts. I took a chance.‘Gentlemen, would you like to check the pack?’ Herbie was startled but I tipped him the wink.There was no way, it said, that the easterner would pick the shavings that allowed the dealer to identify the court cards. Graves took them for a moment, turned them about and handed them back to me. ‘I assume all 52 are there, Mr Gardiner?’ ‘I certainly hope so, Mr Graves. Herbie?’ He checked them, that tendency to slaver once again almost overcoming his spittle buds. ‘They’re fine,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, since it’s the last hand, why don’t we take the limit off—end the session with a little excitement?’ Graves pursed his lips and adjusted his cravat.‘Oh dear, I’m not sure,’ he said.‘It might change my luck.’ ‘No way,’ Herbie said,‘It’s a Barbary Coast tradition. Know what they say; when in Rome . . .’ ‘Oh well, why not?’ He started to laugh then gasped with the pain in his cheek. I anteed a 100-dollar chip. Herbie followed. Graves hesitated, but only fractionally. I dealt quickly and deliberately. Herbie, on my left, picked up his cards as they arrived: four lovely 49

Fire in the Blood queens and finally an ace of spades. He studied his cards like some scholar opening a brand-new book on his favourite subject.You’d have thought he was calculating some fearsome mathematical puzzle. Then he placed them face-down on the green baize. He was a man at peace with himself. Graves waited till his were all dealt then picked up and rearranged them. My own hand didn’t matter but for the record I dealt myself a pair of tens, a nine, a six and a four. Herbie opened with 100 dollars, Graves matched it, and I raised him 200. Graves just stared at his hand. Herbie tossed in two 100-dollar chips and, somewhat reluctantly, Graves followed suit. Eight hundred dollars in the pot. Not bad for openers. ‘So, gentlemen,’ I said, turning to Herbie for his discard. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, placing his hand firmly on the cards. ‘Mr Graves?’ He gave me a swift look as I ran my fingers along the pack.‘I’ll take two, thank you.’ As he discarded, suddenly his hand flew to his cheek. ‘Oh God,’ he said. Blood appeared on his fingers as a small stream shot between them toward Herbie who reared back.Too late. A spray of droplets appeared on his shoulder and collar. Graves grabbed his kerchief from his top pocket, and in the confusion, staunched the flow. ‘Dear Lord,’ Herbie said with fierce distaste. ‘Oh dear, dear.’ He wiped the blood away with his own kerchief. ‘I apologise,’ Graves said.‘I really will see your doctor . . .’ ‘Frank will take you there himself,’ Herbie said. ‘Won’t you, Frank? Just as soon—’ ‘Thank you, Mr London,’ Graves said. ‘Like so many of your countrymen, you are a true gentleman.’ Herbie didn’t even have the grace to blush. ‘Two hundred,’ he said and tossed in a pair of chips. Graves somewhat distractedly raised him 100 dollars; I raised 200. 50

A mate indeed Herbie consulted his cards. The pot was now 1500 dollars, of which Graves had contributed 600. I could see him thinking: he could take the patsy now but that wouldn’t get him back his 1000 dollars, especially if he had to split the winnings with me.And, since Graves had been chasing a fourth and fifth card, that meant at best he’d have a full house or a flush; either way, it was time to lower the boom. ‘Your 200, Frank, and up 800,’ he said. I didn’t hesitate. I tossed my cards into the centre just as Herbie expected me to. By now, the pretty waiter girls were gathering and there was an excited chatter in the room. Graves held his handkerchief to his cheek. ‘I wonder if I might have a drink of water,’ he said.When the girl brought it, he sipped and set the glass down. ‘Your 1000,’ he said to Herbie, ‘and raise 2000.’ Herbie’s jaw dropped. He glanced in my direction. I didn’t move a muscle. His chips were now all in the middle. Then he shook himself, reached into his jacket and pulled out his roll. He peeled off twenty bills, then another twenty. His eyes darted from one to the other of us. ‘Raise 2000.’ ‘Oooh,’ said the pretty waiter girls. Again, Norbert Graves wiped his face.‘I would like to carry on, Mr London, but I’m afraid I can’t . . .’ Herbie’s face contorted between the sheer joy of winning and his pretended concern for the health of his visitor. He reached out to pull in the pot.‘Oh dear, that’s too—’ ‘I’ll just have to see you,’ Graves said weakly and pushed his remaining chips and into the centre, all 2000 dollars worth. Herbie stopped dead but quickly recovered and laid down his four queens in quiet triumph.There was even an air of the magnanimous about him. 51

Fire in the Blood Graves barely looked at them. ‘I really don’t feel at all well,’ he said and, for a moment, I thought he would faint.Then, as he turned his cards over with a frail and trembling hand, I caught the look on Herbie’s face. He was dumbstruck. It was the only hand that could beat four of a kind—a straight flush, seven to the jack in hearts. Herbie seemed carved in stone. Then he lunged at the hand, grabbed it and felt the sides for shaving.‘But . . .’ he said. He stared at me, at the hand, at the faint and trembling Graves.The cards were unmarked.‘But . . .’ I was almost as surprised as Herbie. But what could I say? I could hardly complain that these weren’t the cards I’d dealt him. Graves looked to me and gathered his hickory cane. ‘Mr Gardiner, perhaps you’d be so kind as to cash my chips in for me. I will take you up on that offer to see the doctor.’ Herbie didn’t move. I, on the other hand, left my chair like a bolt of lightning.The sooner I got out of there, the better. When I returned with the cash, Graves spoke to his host in a faltering voice. ‘I envy you, Mr London,’ he said. ‘If you don’t have your health, all the money in the world doesn’t make one blind bit of difference.’ Still Herbie stared. I helped Graves out the door, hailed a passing cab and gave directions to Doc’s surgery.As we clipped away, Norbert Graves suddenly seemed a whole lot better.Then he peeled the awful fistula from his cheek, tossed it out the carriage window and rubbed the healthy pink flesh beneath. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he said. ‘No need for your medico; I think a bottle of celebratory champagne might be the order of the day, don’t you?’ I did indeed. In fact, I roared so loud the bloody carriage horse broke into a canter. As we drove along, he loosened his braces and drew out a false belly then turned his jacket inside out to its more colourful pattern, 52

A mate indeed stuck out his jaw and lost ten years in age. I tell you, he’d have fooled his own mother.The man was a marvel. ‘I should be offended,’ I said.‘I had you covered in that last hand.’ ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘but if your Mr London had found them marked, you’d have had an enemy for life.’ Damn right I would. ‘What the hell,’ I said.‘I can handle Herbie.’ ‘No doubt, but isn’t this way preferable? Just a little neater?’ I couldn’t argue with that. I offered my hand. ‘Graves,’ I said, ‘you’re a man after my own heart. In fact, I’d be proud to call you a mate.’ I woke the next morning with a very sore head. The celebratory bottle of champagne that we took at his hotel uptown spawned a second then a third and, after that, goodness knows. Mr Norbert Graves proved himself a splendid drinking companion and all-round good fellow. Good listener, too. I had a vivid picture of him sitting in the big chair in his suite as I told him yarn after yarn about mateship in the bush, the kind of mateship that the Herbie Londons of the world would never know. Norbert was full of surprises. They began, of course, with his production of that straight flush. ‘Where the devil did it come from?’ I asked. ‘A little insurance,’ he said. ‘When we changed packs.’ Then he showed me a little box of those horrible boils. He’d had them made up by a novelty company in New York, some awful things, others quite mysterious, and a remarkable range of moustaches, beards and mutton chops. I’d never seen anything like it. In the early hours I insisted he come back to the Twilight. He quickly saw the advantage of avoiding that tiresome business of checking out of the hotel.‘You don’t think Mr London will be lying in wait?’ ‘Not tonight,’ I said.‘By now he’ll be weeping in his gin.’ 53

Fire in the Blood Just thinking about it got me chuckling again.And that brought me back to the reality of a throbbing skull. I groaned my way out of bed and poured the water jug over my head into the basin. I towelled myself and threw on a robe then went down the stairs to the office where I’d left him nicely tucked in on the leather couch. Empty.The bird had flown with the dawn.The office was just as spic and span as if Bessie had done a job on it, the blanket and cushion neatly folded and stacked at the foot of the sofa.There was a note on top.‘You are a gentleman of trust,’ it said.‘You should be more careful . . . N.G.’ My eyes flew to the safe. Damn it, the door hung ajar. I rushed over and yanked it open and quickly checked the shelves.Amazing, everything remained exactly in place—the box of nuggets, the float for the Saloon, the mementoes of yesteryear. But then followed the big surprise—a package tumbled out. It was the hand I’d dealt him—four kings and an ace of diamonds—held by a band to a roll of notes. I pulled off the band and counted them: fifteen hundreds, my stake in the game, plus seven hundred from the final pot. ‘A grifter of honour,’ I said aloud.Then I discovered the message inside the notes, neatly printed on my own notepaper: ‘A mate in need is a mate indeed,’ it said. ‘Well, I’m damned,’ I said.Then I said it again.

54

CHAPTER 7

Black and white

B

ack up the stairs, I looked in on Harry. The world was full of surprises this morning—there was Fanny fast asleep, her backside on a chair beside the bed, her pretty head resting on the coverlet beneath which lay Harry with his mouth open like a Murray cod. My copy of young Westwood’s autobiography rested beside her open hand. I quietly closed the door. In my room, I made myself a medicinal pipe of the Exile’s Companion. Best cure for a hangover yet invented. In a little while it worked its magic. I was drifting away, over the years and over the mighty oceans, back to the days when my dark-haired older sister, Robina, would read Monro’s books aloud, stumbling over the big words until my da helped her out, all of us sitting quietly round the kitchen fire as the wind whistled outside and threatened to lift the shingles off the roof. 55

Fire in the Blood It was July 1839 and we were in that first little settlement on the Campaspe Plain near Mt Alexander. We’d soon learned that the mountain was a special place for the Blacks.They gathered there for their corroborees and we’d hear them dancing and cooeeing at night. In the daylight my da talked to them with signs and tried a few words he’d picked up in the Boro area. But they talked a different lingo on the Campaspe so he didn’t get very far. Monro figured my da was wasting his time.The Blacks couldn’t understand that a man could own land. It was like saying you owned the air; it didn’t register in the Black man’s skull. But the real problem was the stock. It was a pretty dry season and in winter, with not much of their native tucker about, they quickly developed a taste for mutton.The shepherds began reporting that they were taking the sheep like they had some right to them, and that set Monro off. Of course, what the shepherds didn’t say was that they probably started it by trading a sheep or two for a Black woman to spend the night. Natural enough, I suppose, but a bit confusing for the Blackfella. Then one of the men from Bowman’s place to the south told us there had been a big fight on the mountain not long before we arrived. Eight or nine white men from Bowman’s and Yaldwyn’s stations had chased the Blacks off after they had pinched some sheep and run to the hill.The men went in with their guns and scored a great victory. In fact, they dubbed it ‘Waterloo Plains’. I won’t say Monro was looking for trouble but one day he and my da were returning to our headstation hut when they came face to face with a big hunting party of Blacks armed with spears, boomerangs and nulla-nullas. Monro lost his head and spurred his horse toward them. But the beast was flighty and bolted directly into the hunters. They reacted as you would with a madman charging down at you—they threw their spears and boomerangs. Monro started firing his pistol. My da took after him but, well before he could catch him, Monro was among them and at least two of the 56

Black and white Blacks’ spears struck home—one taking down his horse, the other striking him in the back. We all ran out to see the commotion. The Blacks had Monro surrounded and were about to finish him when my da thundered through their ranks. Though badly wounded, Monro was able to scramble onto the back of Da’s horse and the two of them galloped away toward us.The natives chased them; Ma grabbed the guns we kept loaded in the sitting room and gave one to Tom Clarke, the convict who worked the vegetable patch; the other she fired herself as the Blacks came closer. Two spears fell near the hut but no one was hurt, and by then Da and Monro had reached us. Ma fired a second shot and the Blacks scattered. My ma dressed Monro’s wound and at first it seemed he would recover quickly. But it was not to be. Soon it became badly infected and it would be six months before it finally healed. By then, he had taken his vengeance on the Blacks with raiding parties on Waterloo and down the Coliban. How many he killed I cannot say. My da would not speak of it. It was too dangerous to stay in that area so Monro had the men build a big place on the other side of the property near Wild Duck Creek. It was made of upright slabs and plastered inside and, when we moved in early in the following year, I thought it the grandest house. It was divided into half a dozen rooms, a special one for my ma and da, another for us children.The kitchen where Ma spent her days and where we ate was detached from the main building and beside it was a big storeroom. In the dining room, Da and Monro ate together, discussing the events of the day and planning the morrow. Ma would sometimes join them. But, if there were visits from the other station owners, Ma and Da would leave the gentry to themselves and tuck in with us. For a time, Monro’s brother David came out from Scotland for a visit, and they explored the country to the north that Major 57

Fire in the Blood Mitchell called Australia Felix. (David was looking for a place of his own but he wasn’t impressed and left after about four months.) While Monro was away, Da ran the property. In the afternoons, if I’d done my books, I would go with him. I had four or five horses to choose from now and there was nothing I loved more than riding flat out across the plains and through the scrub, dodging this way and that as the yellow box and she-oaks flashed by. I rode like the wind. Soon after we were set up in the new house, something happened that made Ma famous. It was mustering time and all the men were out. Even brother Charlie was away from the homestead, pottering about the shearing-shed yards, when a traveller arrived at the kitchen door and asked for a feed. Jack Bolton was his name and a fair lump of a man he was, too. Ma let him in and tossed some chops into her big frying pan. But, when he saw there was no one else about, his manner changed and he started through the house collecting things to take with him, not least a brace of Monro’s pistols he found in the sitting room.Then he returned to the kitchen table and demanded the tucker quick smart. She gave it to him, too. Right across the side of the head—pan, chops, hot fat and all.Then she whacked him a few more times till he was senseless, tied him up and covered him with her shotgun while he bawled and moaned with the pain.That’s the way Monro found her when he arrived back for the midday meal. He undid the ropes, took out his stockwhip and gave Bolton half a dozen stripes as he set him off down the track. Monro thought it a rollicking tale and told it to every visitor that came to his table. Bolton carried the scars ever after. In fact, he was known henceforth as Frying Pan Jack. I wasn’t really surprised; Ma was not a big woman but she was full of spirit. And she was always busy.That night, as we sat around the kitchen fire with Robina reading, she was darning a pair of my 58

Black and white da’s moleskins that had been ripped on a stake while mustering Monro’s shorthorn cattle. I remember it very well. Fair-haired Archina sat one side of me, dark-haired Charlotte the other, snuggling up together. It was the last night that we were all a family. The next day would see a tragedy that began the pattern for the rest of my life.

The door opened and Fanny’s pretty head appeared. She took in my pipe and the makings at a glance.‘Frank,’ she said as I roused myself. ‘You have a visitor.’ ‘Let me guess. Herbert London Esquire.’ ‘Yes. He is . . . thunder.’ I took a long draw on the pipe. ‘Bring me the keys to the safe,’ I said.‘There by the wash basin . . . and that pile of silver dollars.’ When she retrieved them, I said,‘Now stick them in a leg of my long johns and belt me across the head.’ She stared like I’d taken leave of what remained of my senses. ‘Frank . . .’ ‘Quick.’ She shrugged in that way of hers then dropped the money and keys into the cotton pants that were hanging over the chair, twisted the ends and approached the bed. ‘Just here.’ I indicated the side of my noggin.‘Not too hard, just enough to—’ Whack! I saw stars. For a moment, I thought I was going to pass out, but then the pain brought me back. ‘Hard enough?’ she asked, readying herself for another slug. ‘Yes, plenty,’ I said quickly.‘Give me that mirror from the dresser.’ The lump was rising nicely.‘Okay, that’ll do. Send him up.’ ‘You are a crazy person, Frank,’ she said as she left. ‘Why I stay here, I do not know.’ 59

Fire in the Blood ‘How’s Harry this morning?’ I asked. ‘Two crazy persons,’ she said. ‘I think it must be your crazy country with the animals that hop.’ I would have laughed but the throbbing burst through the opium fog, and when Herbie entered I was no longer play-acting. I was in pain. ‘Where is he? Where is the thieving bastard?’ Herbie demanded. I tried to focus as the room spun around him. ‘I have no idea,’ I croaked. ‘But, when you find him, I’ll hold him while you blow his brains out. Look what he did to me.’ I slumped sideways on the bed. Herbie inspected the damage above my temple.‘Dear Lord,’ he said.‘What did he do?’ ‘The hickory club,’ I said.‘We got halfway to Doc Warrener’s and I don’t know; I woke up in an alley off Geary Street. I think he pushed me out of the cab and kept going.’ ‘The sodomite,’ Herbie said,‘the unprincipled sodomite.’ ‘Herbie, look I’m—’ ‘How did he do it? Where did that hand come from? Frank, if you double-crossed me . . .’ I roused myself in spite of the thumping in my skull. ‘Herbie, because of you, I’m out more than a thousand bucks. He was your mark.You should make up my losses.’ That hit home. Any mention of money and Herbie played a different tune on his melodeon. ‘Not my fault,’ he said.‘You dealt the cards.’ ‘Cheapjack rubbish they were, too. Who shaved them, the Waddling Duck?’ He didn’t like that either.The Waddling Duck was a singer built like a barn door who sometimes graced Herbie’s little stage between magic acts. It was said she could shatter a champagne glass at ten paces. ‘No need for that—’ 60

Black and white ‘Now get out or I’ll have Dan throw you out,’ I said, wondering in my pain if Fanny had cracked my skull, too. Not often was Herbie short of a word or two but now he was flummoxed. He turned back at the door as I moaned and closed my eyes.

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CHAPTER 8

Dark days

O

ne of the privileges of middle age, I have discovered, is the freedom to set your own timetable and, when Herbie departed, I took full advantage of it. I stretched out in the cot, sure in the knowledge that Fanny and Dan would keep the place in order. But there’s another sidelight to the greying of the whisker that’s maybe not so desirable and sneaks up on you. It’s the habit of slipping back into the past and particularly to those times in the far distance when everything was happening for the first time, so each new adventure—be it good or bad—branded itself onto the very heart of you. And so it was that I returned to that day of tragedy in 1840, when all the men were turned out washing sheep to make ready for shearing. Monro had a big flock by then—over 4000 woollies—and we washed them in the several creeks that ran through the station. 62

Dark days There was a big body of water running hard in the creeks because we’d had good rain that season and my da went from one washing place to another to keep an eye on things. Brother Charlie usually stayed around the house since a full day in the paddocks mustering or working cattle was too much for him. But he was now sixteen and wanted to be out with the men, especially since we were shorthanded. He pleaded and Da said,‘Come along.’ Ma said it would be okay for me to help too so I climbed up behind Charlie and we rode down to the nearby Wild Duck Creek where Tom Clarke and two shepherds were washing the sheep. Charlie was a gentle soul and everyone knew he needed a hand with the heavy work. So Tom was in the water with him and me; my da was on the bank just about to leave when Charlie slipped in the current and, almost before you could blink, he was washed under. Da spurred his horse into the water then threw himself out of the saddle in Charlie’s direction. Charlie’s long, thin arm came up out of the brown water and Da splashed and struggled toward him. But the current was too strong and Da was swept away too. I ran along the bank shouting and yelling at them but round the corner the rushing tide foamed onto rocks and, when I reached them, Charlie was gone and my da was being dragged under. There was nothing I could do. ‘Da!’ I cried. ‘Da!’ He looked in my direction, his eyes wide with fear, then his face disappeared into the brown water. Tom Clarke came running up behind me but he couldn’t swim either. ‘Oh dear God,’ he said. ‘Oh dear God.’ Over and over. I just bawled and shouted and cried and Tom grabbed me and held my face into his belly. I was eleven years old. That night in bed, I cried for the first time since I was a little kid. Archina and Charlotte climbed in with me and we all sobbed together.Then we just held each other and quietly drifted away. 63

Fire in the Blood We found their bodies the next day. The men brought them back on the cart, wrapped in blankets. They made some rough coffins and buried Charlie and Da side by side in one grave. Ma said they were company for each other. It was high summer and we couldn’t wait for a parson so Monro read from the Bible. Afterward, Ma gathered us together in the kitchen—Robina, Archina, Charlotte and me. She said she had spoken to Mr Monro and we would be allowed to stay on. She would do the cooking and the rest of us would have to pull our weight. I, in particular, would have to help the men and do every little thing that Monro asked of me quickly and without complaint. If he turned us out, she said, there was no telling what would become of us. My sisters and I talked long into the night.They were afraid. I was too, but I didn’t let on. I told them I would look after them, no matter what. A few weeks later, I came in at lunch time to find a man sitting at the kitchen table talking to Ma and, for a moment, I thought a miracle had happened and Da was back. It was Uncle James, just arrived from Scotland to join his brother and his family in the great south land. At second glance, he was shorter than Da and his face was rounder. He lacked a front tooth and some buttons were missing on his shirt and jacket. His accent was so broad it was hard to be sure you understood him.Though he was broken-hearted to hear of his brother’s fate, Ma said he’d decided to stay. That evening he talked to Monro who signed him on, not as overseer—that job went to Ferrier Liston—but as a leading hand to give him experience in the ways of grazing in the Antipodes. He bunked with Liston, though they never seemed to have much to say to each other. I asked Tom Clarke what he thought of him.‘Not a patch on his brother,’ was all he would say. Monro seemed to take a shine to him. He would have him over to the house after dinner and most evenings they opened a demijohn 64

Dark days of rum from the storehouse. Rum or gin, they didn’t mind, just as long as it was good strong liquor. There were times after they had been drinking when I would hear noises coming from the direction of Ma’s room.And more than once she came into my bed and I could feel it shake with her sobbing. I wanted to ask her why she was crying but I think I was afraid to hear the answer. Then one day, right out of the blue, she said,‘Robina, I’m putting you in charge of the kitchen for a few days. Your Uncle James has asked me to marry him and I have accepted. I’m going to Melbourne to make the arrangements.’ We hardly knew what to say. She seemed more relieved than happy. Uncle James came by just then and he was beaming with the joy of it. ‘James will follow in a few days, won’t you James?’ she said and he smiled his broken smile. ‘I’ll get Tom to rig the sulky,’ he said and hurried out the door. However, once the horses were harnessed, there was a sudden change in plans. Henry Monro said he needed to be in Melbourne and offered to take the reins. He threw a bag in and then he and Ma were gone. James skipped about the property as if he owned it. Once the crutching was done, he saddled up and headed off. We never saw him again. Next we knew, Monro and Ma were back. We could hardly believe it—Monro himself had taken her to wife though he was only 30 years old at the time and Ma had just turned 41. Ma showed us the certificate.They were married by the Reverend Adam Compton Thomson at St James Church on 22 January 1841.They had their honeymoon at Liardet’s Pier Hotel, three whole days, with no work at all. But Ma’s eyes were red, as though she had been crying. She said that while they were at the hotel Monro had given her 65

Fire in the Blood a wedding present—a gold Geneva watch. But it was stolen and this explained why she was so upset. Neither Ma nor Monro would speak of Uncle James and his disappearance, but last year my sisters sent me a book by Edward Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, and there it was. Toward the end of January 1841, it said, Curr and his friends had stopped at the Bush Inn, near Gisborne, halfway between Melbourne and the Campaspe.There they saw a man sitting on the side of his bed, his shirt unbuttoned, his hair dishevelled and his eye wild, haggard and restless. ‘Now and then he strode to the fireplace,’ Curr wrote, ‘and wrung his hands with the air of a maniac giving vent sotto voce to a string of bitter imprecations.To judge from his appearances it only required the presence of a sharp razor to ensure a case of suicide by morning.’ It was Uncle James.The previous evening he had arrived to bed himself at the inn on his way to Melbourne. But there, returning from their honeymoon, were Ma and Monro.The result, wrote Curr, was a stormy encounter. The married couple, my mother deeply embarrassed, pushed on home. ‘The disappointed lover had flown for consolation to brandy-and-water,’ Curr wrote. And, thereafter, I believe, Uncle James ne’er drew a sober breath. Certainly, he never again darkened the door of the Monro homestead. Later, William Riley, the ostler at Liardet’s, was arrested for drunkenness and Ma’s watch was found in his possession. Riley was tried and sentenced to transportation for seven years. Altogether it was not a good beginning but, after the wedding, there was a change in the way Monro treated my sisters and me. Before, we were not much better than a nuisance. Now we were part of the family. He arranged for a governess, Miss Carroll, to come up from Melbourne to take our lessons. My sisters thought she was wonderful. I didn’t mind her but I was more interested in working in the 66

Dark days paddocks with Monro, Ferrier Liston and the men than in doing sums or learning the steps of the schottische from Miss Carroll. I didn’t mind writing compositions, reading Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott or reciting the poems of Robbie Burns—she chose the more respectable ones like The Mouse and Auld Lang Syne. But, given my druthers, I’d definitely be out in the paddocks. Monro’s attitude toward us affected the men. I was no longer that mischievous little spalpeen. I was Master Frank. I was the heir to the Campaspe Plains, and one day they might find themselves working for me. And when Ma fell pregnant there was real joy and pleasure in the household. Monro took to playing his flute in the evenings and Ma and Archina sang the songs he played. He bought me a new pair of boots, not the heavy bluchers I’d been used to but fine leather boots that reached almost to my knees and strapped my moleskins inside so they wouldn’t catch on the Tarry a’whiles that lined the creek banks. One day he said to me,‘Frank, you have true potential,’ and, as he did so, he put his arm across my shoulders. I had barely broken the boots in when our second tragedy struck. Ma’s baby was due and Monro was worried that her age might be a problem, so he took her in the dog cart to Melbourne for the birth. Robina was fifteen and she went along to help Ma. In the hospital at Collingwood, she gave birth to a little girl. But almost at once Ma was struck down by fever and within a week she was dead. Monro came back alone. Again we wept the night away and all returned to Melbourne with him for the funeral. Ma was buried at the St James’ churchyard on 21 October 1842, the same church where she’d married Monro only nineteen months before. He gave one pound to the church towards an organ. Our little sister survived. Robina stayed for a short time in Collingwood with the baby and a wet nurse then Monro drove down again and brought them both back. Before Ma died, Monro had agreed to call the baby Maria after the child we lost on the way 67

Fire in the Blood to the Campaspe.When he got the little one home, he tried to watch over her and keep her from harm. He spent time in the house when he should have been in the yards or the paddocks. And he began drinking more than was good for him. There was a terrible restlessness in him and it seemed as though the rest of us reminded him of things he wanted to forget. Finally he made up his mind and, without a word to us, he put the station up for sale.Then, in December 1843, he bought the Crawford Station, 70 000 acres about 25 miles from Portland on the south-west coast. I think he got a bargain because the previous owner, a man named Bassett, had been killed and mutilated by the Blacks. Wooden pegs had been hammered into his eye sockets.That didn’t bother Monro. By the time the Campaspe was sold and we arrived there, the tribes had been torn to pieces by the pox and the measles, anyway. It was hard work setting up a new station, especially as the whole country was on the verge of bankruptcy and wool prices were down. But I was never afraid of hard work, provided I knew there was a point to it.We looked after Monro as well as we could but on Crawford Station, while he doted on Maria, he grew away from the rest of us. Then he married Catherine Power, the daughter of one of his squatter friends, early in 1846 and suddenly we were surplus to requirements. He may not have meant it so; he made the pretence of including us from time to time, but we knew it.We had no part to play in his future. Miss Power was a pretty thing whose hands had never touched a washing mangle or a butter churn. If Monro’s attitudes were double-tongued, hers were surely not. She had to accept Maria since she was Monro’s true kin, but she wanted naught to do with the rest of us. If forced to by propinquity then ours was the role of the lackey, hers the queen of the manor. First she removed us from the dining table, then from the homestead entirely to our own rough hut. My sisters became her maids and Monro turned his face away. 68

Dark days She presented Monro with a new child each year and my prospects descended accordingly.When we talked now, it was only about the work on the new place. His place. However, the fact that we were only 25 miles from Portland did have one great compensation—we could find the company of others also in the first flush of youth.There were dances in the town hall and half a dozen pubs served beer brewed in Melbourne.There were sailors from all parts of the known world, men with tales as tall as the masts on the ships they crewed. And there were painted ladies that set my young heart thumping in my chest. On one occasion I took Robina to a town-hall dance where she met Billy Mitcham whose people owned the Portland dry-goods store, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail they were wed. Robina asked Monro to give her away at the church and he agreed. But Mrs Monro prevented it.When the time came, she took one of her turns and Monro was held to her bedside. I stood up for Robina instead, and was proud to do so. But it was one more bone of contention between Monro and us and the time was coming when they would all add up to a wall that separated us altogether. I tried to break through it.Time and again I would steel myself for a conversation but, when the time came, I could tell his mind and his heart were closed to me. One look at that square face with the hard eyes, the down-turned mouth covered by a reddish moustache, and I knew there was no part of him left to respond. So I put off the evil day. When it finally came, it was not of my choosing. In my weekend trips to Portland I had met some mates—John Stuart, a Scotsman and John Newton, not long out from England. They were good hands and, after a hard week in the paddocks, it was a pleasure to meet up in a pub and down a noggin or two. But then first Stuart and later Johnnie Newton lost their jobs. Times were tough. Occasionally they’d find a few cattle or horses 69

Fire in the Blood gone wild in the bush and bring them in for breaking or sale. Sometimes they found them before they were lost. I asked Monro to give them a job but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You’ll think more of yourself and your own work if you have any sense to you,’ he said.‘And you’ll give their likes a wide berth.’ ‘I have worked my hands to the bone for you,’ I said. ‘As have my sisters.’ ‘You’ve been paid.’ That’s when I should have walked away but the gorge rose within me and, before I knew it, the words roared out of me, ‘I’ve been paid . . . for my brother, my father, my ma who died in your service? I’ve been paid? How have I been paid, you bastard? What price a man’s dearest kin? What price a mother’s life?’ ‘I kept you when you were a worthless brat,’ he shouted back. ‘And I kept your mother from the poorhouse or the whorehouse—’ He never finished it. I threw a round-arm right that collided somehow with the side of his skull and he came back at me with fists flailing. I went down, got up and went down again. ‘Now get back to work or get out,’ he said. I packed my bags—there was little enough to take—and bade a tearful farewell to Charlotte, Anchina and little Maria. I would not be far away, I told them. I would take work in the district or in Portland. I would stay in touch with Robina and they could reach me through her. I rode through the night and reached Portland with the dawn. At twenty, I was on my own. It was a new beginning. It was February 1850.

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CHAPTER 9

Rough justice

I

didn’t see too much of Harry Hall in the days following The Great Herbie Square-Off. When I looked in on him, he was either sleeping or had his head buried in the Westwood book. But, according to Fanny, he was on the mend. When I did manage a reasonable conversation with him, he seemed much improved, if a mite despondent. At first I took this for the after-effects of his concussion mixed with a dose of home-sickness. But, when we talked, it became clear he’d been moved by the tale of young Jackey Jackey. He was by no means a practised reader but it seemed Harry had developed a sense of fellow feeling for the poor devil. I wasn’t really surprised. Westwood was, as I have said, a fine-boned youth, not unlike Ben’s boy. I sat at the side of his bed. He closed the book and looked up at me. 71

Fire in the Blood ‘When they brought him to trial for escaping Berrima Gaol, his first sentence was to be soundly flogged,’ he said, ‘but they stopped the flogging when he was unable to bear any more lashes.’ I nodded. ‘Every lash is its own universe of pain,’ I said. I spoke from hard experience.‘Some men could take it, others were driven nearly mad by a single stroke. But it was very rare for a flogging to be halted.’ ‘Then they took him to Cockatoo Island.’ ‘Yes.’ Memories of that cursed place flooded through me. I was about to acquaint Harry with its special charms but he was not to be interrupted. He opened the book and ran a finger down the page. In the rough accents of the Lachlan, he read with the fluency of a man caught up in the tale. ‘In March 1842, I and 25 others took to the shark-infested Sydney Harbour and almost reached Balmain before the boats picked us up,’ he said. ‘So they shipped me to Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land . . .’ I had never been there but I knew it by reputation.They didn’t come much worse. It was set on a peninsula cut off from the mainland by a narrow neck that was all but impenetrable. It was run by a bunch of brutes led by the vicious Captain O’Hara Booth and they outdid each other in the cruelty they visited upon the men in their charge. Within two weeks, Jackey Jackey and seven others escaped. He was recaptured, lashed—this time without mercy—and still he tried again. Harry’s voice measured the pain as he read out the words of Westwood himself: We were then heavily ironed and chained to a ringbolt in separate cells. This was to preserve men from killing each other, as the tyrants thought our misery was such that we would rather be hanged than endure it.

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Rough justice I was this way, breaking stones, for twelve months. I was then released and sent with the other men again. Soon after, I took to the bush again.When we made the place we started for I could see the mainland two miles distant. I was a bad swimmer and it was a long swim for a beginner. My comrades plunged into the sea and I followed, resolved to reach the mainland or perish in the attempt.After swimming about a mile my comrades were seized by sharks or other monsters of the deep. I struggled on and at length reached the mainland but was ignorant of the bush and naked as I was born.This did not weigh with me a moment when I thought of the fate of my comrades, taken in the moment when they thought their release was sure.

Harry looked up from the pages.‘It’s a true wonder he survived it,’ he said. ‘There are some who would say it’s a pity he did,’ I replied. ‘There was little but horror in his life thereafter.’ But Harry had moved on to Jackey’s recapture once again after five days without food. And then a stroke of luck—O’Hara Booth was replaced as commandant and a new man, Mr Champ, recognised the lad as a cut above the usual run of villains. He assigned Jackey as a member of his boat crew where he distinguished himself in the rescue of sailors who had capsized their yacht in the harbour. This earned him probation for six months, after which he hoped for a return to Sydney and a ticket of leave. But evidently some new brutality was visited upon him and he absconded. He walked north through rough country and, at the point of exhaustion, the troopers caught up with him.They returned him to Hobart Town Gaol, where he was tried and found guilty of robbery and sentenced to be transported to Norfolk Island. Harry put the book aside. I could see he was becoming tired. ‘You were never there, were you?’ he said. 73

Fire in the Blood ‘No, thanks be to God.’ ‘I fear he won’t escape it.’ ‘Very few did, Harry,’ I said. ‘And nothing will tell you more about the reason for our rebellion than the story of Norfolk.When you have finished with Westwood, I’ll give you some others to read. It’s all there, the whole sorry tale.’ He nodded. He still couldn’t bring himself to thank me. But that time was approaching, despite his best efforts to keep me at a distance. ‘In the meantime, rest yourself,’ I said. He nodded and closed his eyes.

Norfolk Island. No man on the distaff side of society could say those words without a chill in the bones. In all the history of English viciousness to the men and women who dared transgress the laws of their class, no place on earth was its equal for torture and depravity. In my office, I touched the volumes that stored the atrocities, all the more shocking because the island itself was a kind of earthly paradise. When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney, the governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, immediately sent Lieutenant King there with a handful of men and women whose fate it would be to colonise the place. The English were then engaged in the American War of Independence and their supplies of timber for ship-building and flax for sails were almost exhausted. Norfolk, with its great pine trees and arable land, would be a suitable source of supply. Or so they hoped. King lost no time in taking a mistress, a dressmaker named Ann Inett, who, for stealing a few clothes, had been sentenced to death by hanging, but reprieved and given seven years’ transportation. On 8 January 1789, she presented King with the settlement’s first child, whom he proudly named ‘Norfolk’. 74

Rough justice Fecundity seemed to be the watchword of the place. By April of ’89, King could report that food crops were very promising.The land was proving much more productive than that around Port Jackson. Hopes were high. The population had swollen to 150 and it was soon to quadruple. Then came another 183 convicts, 27 of their children and two companies of marines.They arrived in the Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet. But Sirius was wrecked on the teeth of a nearby coral reef and lost with all provisions, leaving the island with hundreds of additional mouths to feed. The promising agricultural start turned sour. As more convicts arrived, a succession of commandants took more and more recourse to the cat o’ nine tails. At no time did it occur to them that men suffering from bestial conditions and deplorable hunger cannot work indefinitely.To eat, they stole.To retain some vestige of self-respect, they were insubordinate.This brought more punishment, condoned, according to all accounts, by the chaplains who conducted Divine Service every Sunday. Eventually, the place fell into chaos and the authorities in Sydney decided to end it. In February 1814, the island was abandoned and its inhabitants transported to Van Diemen’s Land.To ensure that no foreign power should inherit them, the buildings, constructed with such grinding labour, were burned or razed.A dozen dogs were left on the island with the express purpose of killing the remaining cattle and pigs.When starvation approached, they would turn and kill each other. Norfolk Island would return to paradise. But, only eleven years later, in 1825 came the true horror. Norfolk was re-settled, this time with the terrible purpose of breaking men’s souls.All women were banned from the island and Governor Thomas Brisbane wrote:‘I wish it to be understood that the felon who is sent there is forever excluded from hope of return.’ Among my volumes is Reminiscences of Thirty Years Residence in NSW and Victoria, by the judge Sir Roger Therry, published in 1863. 75

Fire in the Blood He writes of a group of Norfolk Island convicts sent to Sydney to give evidence at the trial of one of their brethren: Their sunken glazed eyes, deadly pale faces, hollow fleshless cheeks and once manly limbs shrivelled and withered up as if by premature old age, created horror among those in court.There was not one of the six who had not undergone, from time to time, a thousand lashes each and more.They looked less like human beings than the shadows of gnomes who had risen from their sepulchral abode. What man was or ever could be reclaimed under such a system as this?

Such depravities are destined to culminate in rebellion and many occurred. Following one uprising in 1844, a priest on the island, later to become Bishop Ullathorne, wrote in his journal: I have to record the most heart-rending scene that I ever witnessed. The turnkey unlocked the cell door and then came forth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies of the men confined therein. I announced to them who were reprieved from death and which of them were to die. It is a literal fact that each man who heard his reprieve wept bitterly, and each man who heard his condemnation of death went down on his knees and, with dry eyes, thanked God they were to be delivered from this horrid place. The morning came, they received on their knees the sentence as the will of God. Loosened from their chains, they fell down in the dust, and, in the warmth of their gratitude, kissed the very feet that had brought them peace.

It was common for Norfolk prisoners to murder each other by arrangement. Sometimes three would draw straws, one to be the 76

Rough justice victim, one to commit the murder, the third to be witness.Thus two were released from the island’s grip; the third’s existence dragged on or he joined another lottery. Sometimes murder was prompted by hope.A capital trial meant transfer to the Supreme Court in Sydney, which meant there was always the desperate chance at escape during the 700-mile journey, or at least a brief respite from Norfolk before facing the gallows. Knowing this, the authorities changed the system to permit criminal trials on Norfolk itself. By 1845, when Westwood arrived, the population had surpassed 2000 and conditions became ever more hellish.The new commandant, John Price, with his haughty air and foppish monocle, was the worst commandant of all. His atrocities have been revealed and their record is safely stored on my shelves. Most damning is the report of Robert Pringle Stuart written in 1846, not long after Jackey’s arrival: At the gaol entrance stands the gallows, so placed that you cannot pass the doorway without coming almost in contact with the engine of death. It is never removed. The gaol is crowded, badly ventilated, low and damp. I visited the wards unexpectedly at night, at eight o’clock, and found them oppressively hot. On the doors being opened, men were scrambling into their own beds from others in a hurried manner, concealment being evidently their object. It is my painful duty to state that atrocities of the most shocking, odious character are there perpetrated and that unnatural crime is indulged in to excess; that the young have no chance of escaping from abuse and that forcible violation is resorted to.To resist can hardly be expected. A terrorism is sternly and resolutely maintained and threats of murder are made more alarming by the general practice of carrying knives.

77

Fire in the Blood What the devil did he expect? When a group of men, penned together in extremis, are denied the natural exercise of their instincts, their hearts and minds will find other outlets, however unnatural and disgusting to Mr Stuart and his ilk. But Norfolk was special in that the prisoners so outnumbered the guards and the marines that it was ruled as much by a group of the most violent inmates—known as The Ring—as it was by the gaolers. The month after Westwood arrived, the prisoners refused to go to work for five days on account of the disgusting quality of their food and conditions in the gaol.They began raiding the government stores, ripping vegetables out of the gardens and killing the sheep they were charged with tending. By July the situation had deteriorated further and verged on anarchy. And, in the interim, Westwood had been so brutalised by floggings that, according to Martin Cash, one of the few to survive Norfolk to tell the tale in his book, The Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land, ‘He had been goaded and tantalised till he was reduced to a lunatic and a savage.’ On Sunday 1 July he finally broke. They gathered in the big lumber yard in a mob of up to 800. Westwood took the lead. Cash wrote: Jackey Jackey headed a mob of some twenty prisoners, all of whom were armed with staves and bludgeons, and having entered the cookhouse Jackey killed a free overseer named Smith with a single blow of the cudgel. The gang again returned to the lumber yard and in making their egress through a covered archway leading out to the mechanics shops where there was a watchman stationed on duty, Westwood, on passing him, spattered his brains against the brickwork near which he had been sitting, crouched and paralysed with fear.

78

Rough justice Westwood, having by this time exchanged his brain-spattered bludgeon for an axe, entered the hut and clove the skull of one of the constables. Another constable happened to be in bed there. ‘Mind, I saw that,’ he exclaimed. He had scarcely uttered the sentence, however, when Westwood struck him down to the earth and afterwards literally cut him to pieces. The party then returned to the lumber yard and within a few minutes Westwood and some of the others of the gang were taken to the gaol by the military.

These were shocking acts by any count, but Jackey Jackey’s own words will be forever writ on my heart: You, gentle reader, will shudder at my cruelty. But I took only life. They inflicted on a man many a lingering death. For years they tortured men’s minds as well as their bodies, and after years of mental and bodily torture, sent them to a premature grave. This is what I call refined cruelty and it is carried out—and I blush to own it—by Englishmen, under the enlightened British Government.Will this be believed hereafter that this happened in the nineteenth century? I did not shed blood till I was driven to it; my mind was not formed for cruelty. I injured no one willingly that had not by repeated acts of wanton injustice called down on themselves the vengeance of heaven. I and others were the instruments that God employed to execute it.

When in solitary confinement, he tried, as ever, to escape from the stone cell in which he was chained. In fact, the Reverend Rogers was suspected of colluding with him to provide a steel springsaw he used to cut his irons. He had almost finished a hole in the ceiling when he was discovered. 79

Fire in the Blood However, the parson was permitted to comfort him in his cell throughout his final night on earth. His end came on a Tuesday morning, 13 October 1846.The public works overseer on the island, Aaron Price, recorded the scene in his diary, which was later published. Mr Rogers conducted a burial service while the six men due to hang were still alive beneath the beam with the ropes secured round their necks. After this, Price wrote, Rogers and another minister, Reverend Murray,‘had close communication with each of the prisoners of a very affecting character applicable to the awful situation to which they had brought themselves.’ Then, ‘all united in singing a hymn and after it finished, one of the condemned men, Kenyon sang one alone. The last moment came at a quarter past eight. The drop was six feet. One or two severely convulsed for a few minutes but all appeared to die almost at once.’ Jackey Jackey had written a final letter in his cell just before he went dancing. It was addressed to the only man besides Rogers who had shown him kindness in all the years of his travail in the penal colony—the former chaplain of Port Arthur. These, his final words, will always remain with me: Sir, out of the bitter cup of misery I have drunk from my sixteenth year—ten long years—and the sweet draught is that which takes away the misery of living death; it is the friend that deceives no man; all will then be quiet—no tyrant will there disturb my repose. I now bid the world adieu, and all it contains.William Westwood.

The horror and the misery abided on every man’s horizon in that terrible time. In 1846 I was seventeen years old and I would soon get my own first taste of the devils who ran the British class system and the prisons that supported it.

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CHAPTER 10

Rough company

B

y the time Harry was ambulatory he had finished the book and was full of questions.We developed a daily routine of walks in the afternoons, each one taking us a little further if his headaches permitted. We were passing through the waterfront area where Broadway meets Pacific Street, now the very heart of the Barbary Coast but only known by that sobriquet since the sixties. In the decade before then, I tell him, it was Sydney Town, for the simple reason that it was populated, by and large, by our countrymen. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘It’s a fact.They came in their hundreds then thousands as news of the California goldrush reached our shores.They broke their ticketof-leave conditions and jumped aboard any ship coming this way. They were known as the Sydney Ducks because of the convict cut of the pants they wore, or Sydney Coves from the address they gave.’ 81

Fire in the Blood We were passing across the road from a melodeon hall now called the Cats Whiskers. ‘That used to be the centre of it and the most notorious establishment of all,’ I said.‘In the 1850s it was called The Boar’s Head and the major attraction involved a very big pig and a woman, ah . . .’ ‘No,’ he said, eyes wide. ‘That’s by repute only. It was well closed by the time I arrived.’ I hurried on. ‘It had to compete with The Fierce Grizzly, so called because they kept a live female bear chained beside the door.’ ‘Really?’ ‘They fed it their famous milk punches, heavily laced with gin or rum and their own patent knock-out drops. In fact, there’s a story that when a visiting preacher was whipping up a protest to the civic leaders, they invited him in and fed him a draught of that milk punch. ‘He was overwhelmed. He proclaimed it the nectar of the gods. “What a glorious cow,” he cried, and, in an excess of affection for all God’s creatures, made to embrace the bear and bring it into the fold of his congregation, much to the delight of the other patrons. Happily, before he reached his new parishioner, he fainted dead away.’ Harry laughed aloud. It was the first time I had heard such a sound coming from the heart of him and it was a fine pleasure. ‘One of the favourite tricks of these Sydney Ducks,’ I said, ‘was to set fires in various parts of the city then loot the place during the confusion. The most notorious were Jack Edwards and Ted Lewis who led gangs of fire bugs in at least four major conflagrations that I’ve heard about. ‘They were brought to trial but such was the venal nature of the judiciary in those days that after a certain donation was made they were all promptly freed to return to the arms of their loved-ones.’ ‘All the richer for the experience,’ he said, joining in the jollity. ‘Quite so, Harry. Quite so.’ 82

Rough company ‘They must have been rough company,’ he said, as much to himself as to me. Rough company, indeed. A silence fell between us.The Sydney Ducks were long gone by the time I arrived in ’74. But I had known plenty of hard men in my time, though I had no special leaning to such society. Nor have I ever had patience with the sneak or the whiner. It’s not my style and never has been. From my upbringing, I had the manners to deal with all levels of society since I had tasted life on the ruling side. But, in truth, that was my curse for the taste lingered and I knew I could never aspire to another draught. From the day Monro turned his face away, I knew I would never own a piece of my country; I was cast out from the circle of privilege.As a youth with the sap rising, that realisation brought such a rage upon me that I cared nothing for the consequences or the company I kept. I’d worked as a ringer on half a dozen properties since I’d left Monro. I couldn’t settle. I could see no point to it. I met my sisters occasionally in Portland and I could see they worried for me. Indeed, by the middle of 1850, after the crash of land prices, it seemed the whole country lacked a future worth battling for, especially since all the financial reins were in the hands of our colonial masters. The whole continent felt like one great gaol, cut off from the rest of the world and on the way to tearing itself to pieces like the dogs on Norfolk. And I was damned unlucky. In my first outing to the other side of the law, I picked the wrong man to relieve of his team of horses. William Lockhart Morton. Even now, I can hardly form the syllables of that name without cursing my damnable luck. I knew him only by repute as a cranky bastard, miserly with his men and newly married to an English woman. Morton himself was a Scot, of no particular family but of the temperament lampooned throughout the world as ‘careful with a penny’. 83

Fire in the Blood Johnnie Newton had worked for him on a muster and he’d kept them at it from dawn to dark for a few measly pennies and lamb shanks for dinner. We paid him back by rounding up a mob one night on his side of the Loddon. It turned out he’d have followed us through the gates of Hades itself to get those bloody horses back. As it was, we took our time. We drove them well out of the district, way up north to Mount Sturgeon where we ran two of them in the local races and did pretty well. It was there I wrote the letter that would cause me such grief in the next few weeks. I planned to sell them at the regular auction in Portland. Stuart would shave his beard and, under the name of William Troy, offer the 33 mounts for open sale on behalf of his ‘employer’, supposedly a squatter from Lake Mingo up on the Murray River.To pave the way, I’d send the letter to the auctioneer, Mr Crouch. It would authorise him to sell the horses and pass the proceeds to ‘my superintendent’, Mr Troy. I knew that an official letter coming from the north would give Crouch all the authority he needed. I signed it William Taylor. I gave it to the publican at Mt Sturgeon to post but the damn fool delayed and it was still in his possession when Morton arrived two days later.We had no idea that he was in pursuit.We had made it all the way back to Fitzroy, only eighteen miles from Portland, when Morton, his man Will Mercer and a trooper named Thornton caught up with us.We were bunking at Bilson’s Hotel and they burst into the room when we were all asleep.We made no resistance and the next day were taken to the magistrate’s court in Portland and were bound over for trial four months later in Geelong. Robina was in the court that morning and she and the others pleaded with Monro to intervene. He wrote to Morton asking him to drop the charges against me, but to no avail. Indeed, I’m told the letter sent him into a state of high dudgeon and he called it ‘highly improper’. The week before our trial, I’m happy to report, Stuart broke out. Newton and I were not so lucky. My letter damned me and the 84

Rough company judge sentenced me to five years hard labour at Melbourne’s new Pentridge Stockade. There I found enough rough company to last a lifetime.We were joined by fourteen others, all from Van Diemen’s Land, and they had been so ill used they were little better than brutes.We were the first occupants of the place and the huts used for prisoners’ quarters resembled the cages used for the conveyance of wild animals.To the Vandemonians it was luxury compared with Port Arthur but not, I found, so appealing that they wouldn’t prefer freedom when offered. It took me just five weeks to escape. I organised a scuffle among my fellow prisoners and when the constable in charge of our work party took a hand I knocked him down and took his piece. Six others joined me in the bush but I travelled better alone and soon put Melbourne far behind me. I cannot say what became of the others. I preferred my own company. I made the break on 26 March 1851 and for the first few weeks, with the authorities on my trail, I had to look lively. But then came deliverance. It arrived in a cry that echoed around the world and, at its sound, men from half the nations of the globe came running. Gold! Suddenly the place went mad. Men everywhere began to walk off the job and head for the goldfields.And when, in August, Reagan and Dunlop discovered the mother lode in Ballarat, the entire colony of Victoria caught the fever. No one cared much for the task of chasing a young escapee from Pentridge. In fact, half the troopers themselves swapped their uniforms for a digger’s kit and headed to one or other of the new strikes that seemed to be coming in each week. I made for Bendigo, which was not far from the Campaspe where I knew the country well. I found my sisters and we had almost a week together before I had to make tracks. Archina and Charlotte had become beautiful young women and both were 85

Fire in the Blood following the teaching path. I was sorry to part with them but it was for their own good. I gave some thought to the idea of burrowing for nuggets but that would mean presenting myself to the authorities to get a miner’s licence.Also, I had no feeling for the digging game. My attitude was if you couldn’t do it from a horse, it wasn’t worth doing. In any case, once the rush started and the new towns sprang up, there was real money to be made by supplying the men with meat and that was a game I knew well. It was in Bendigo too that I first discovered the game of poker. For once the sun went down and the lamps were lit in the tent and shanty towns there was every kind of devilish activity known to man and beast. The miners grubbed in the earth all day to wrest the precious gold from its hiding place then practically gave their winnings away to the harlots, the card sharps and the bootleggers at night.‘That,’ I muttered,‘was rough company indeed.’ ‘I can believe it,’ said Harry. He startled me from my memories. ‘What happened to them in the end?’ he asked finally. ‘Oh, you mean the Sydney Ducks?’ I said.‘Gold.The same thing that brought them here called them away again, first to Victoria in the fifties and then in the sixties to the Lachlan—our own neck of the woods, Harry.’ We turned our steps back to The Twilight Saloon. But, once started, I found it hard to drag myself away from the memories of those wild days and nights on the goldfields. I took a hand of poker from time to time and with practice I came to realise it wasn’t so much the luck of the cards but the reading of your opponents that counted. It was a lesson well learned and I have found that it applies to most every venture and activity known to man. But at the time I preferred my own company. I never camped in the shanty towns; I made my own camp by a creek bank or on a 86

Rough company nearby station where they were so grateful for a hand to break young horses or to muster and brand cattle that they asked few questions. Of course, I had to drop my family name; that’s when I first began to call myself Gardiner in honour of the old fellow who had taught me well. I employed his methods and, while I don’t say I was his equal in those early years, I knew I had the knack and I worked to develop it. The station owners liked me because I gave them good and willing mounts. Their daughters liked me too and I mounted my share of them as I made my way north. I discovered another strange fact of life: the ladies love a man who’s loved by horses. Must be something in a true horseman’s manner, some special combination of boldness and attentiveness that weakens their knees and sets their hearts aflutter.Whatever it was, I was happy to have it, though over the years it has caused me one or two scrapes I’d rather forget. It was during this journey that I happened upon Uncle James Christie. He was a cook with a surveying party and, as I rode into the camp at dinner time, I recognised him at once. He’d gone downhill fast and he knew me not at all so I said nothing. He made a fair mutton stew but, once the dinner was eaten, he settled himself with a flagon and quietly faded away. Once I was back in the Goulburn district I met up with the mates of my childhood. Billy Fogg was as lively as ever—not surprising since he’d won the heart of Mary Taylor, the girl with the biggest heart in New South Wales. In fact, they had married in 1842, about the time my ma had died.They had a small place at Reid’s Flat, in the hills between Goulburn and Cowra, and it did me good to meet up with them again. It was Billy who told me that old Gardiner had gone to that great horse paddock in the sky. I shouldn’t have been surprised—he’d always seemed ancient to me—but it came as a blow. He was like those old Iron Bark trees; you expected him to go on forever. Billy didn’t know the details of his passing and I didn’t 87

Fire in the Blood press him too hard. Instead, I went for a ride along the ridges where once we’d galloped, flashing through the hardwood like days of old. I broke horses for stations in the Reid’s Flat district and I covered a lot of territory, from the Abercrombie Ranges west to Grenfell and south to Gundagai. I made many good mates in the district and, for whatever reason, some of the young bucks gathered around me. I was always up for a bit of excitement—a race along the flats, a target shoot with rifles or pistols, a session at a shanty where the grog flowed and the stories followed, or a barn dance where Miss Carroll’s training in the schottische came in mighty handy. I was happy to take the lead. And my mates were happy to follow. Occasionally we’d do a little night work among the thoroughbreds and when a racehorse went missing we’d offer to find him—for a price. We were not always successful—that would give the game away—but more often than not we’d retrieve the squatter’s pride and joy and be well rewarded for it. And from time to time we’d run across strays that were fair game for the finder. Others, of course, just came our way and half the fun of it was to whip them away, make the sale and clear out before the owner realised his loss. I had done just such a deal with a young mate, Teddy Prior, whose father, Henry, owned the best hotel in Goulburn, when we tarried too long.We’d made a killing at the Yass saleyards and were celebrating at the Royal Hotel in Cooma Street when Chief Constable Robert McJannett walked into the bar with his Colt Navy revolver cocked. My own pistols were fully capped but the odds were against me so I went quietly. I cursed myself up hill and down dale for my foolishness in hanging about at the scene. I wouldn’t make that mistake again—ever. But my resolution didn’t help me at the time. Officer McJannett, it seemed, had been compiling a list of my transgressions. I gave the name Francis Clarke when arrested but that was no use. He knew I was really Frank Gardiner, he said.What the hell, if he’d twigged the 88

Rough company truth, I’d have been in much bigger trouble with that Morton business and the gaol break still outstanding. So, on 14 March 1854 at the Goulburn Circuit Court, the judge, one Afred Stephen, sentenced me to two terms of seven years, hard labour, to be served on Cockatoo Island. I was 24 years old and the sentence meant that more than half the life I’d led so far was to be taken from me. I’d hurt no man. I’d done no more than grab a small share of the wealth that others like Monro and his squatter mates were raking in without thought to the rights or wrongs of their actions. And for this I was condemned. In the days that followed, I could barely hold my rage inside me. It felt like there was a fire in the blood. In the nights, besieged by thoughts of my family and my fate, I nearly despaired. Two weeks later, I was rowed out from the Sydney Harbour shore to the island, there to join the endless stream of men who spent their days in durance vile on that damned rock.They were, I suppose, the ordinary person’s idea of rough company. But, the truth is, the prisoners were men like any other. ‘Harry,’ I said as we approached the Saloon,‘You’ve got to understand something about our country.’ We stopped and the spivs and merrymakers walked around us. ‘It’s run by a pack of bastards. Australia started as a bloody big gaol. There were the convicts and the gaolers, split in two.Then came the English aristocrats, and they took all the good land so the rest of us had to make do with their leftovers. They still run it—the gaolers and the landowners—and they make the laws that keep the rest of us down. Understand? But then, along came gold. And everything changed. See, until then it was all about the class system.You were rich because you were born that way; they reckoned you deserved to be. But once any Tom, Dick or Harry could luck on to it, the whole class thing was a joke. So they changed the laws to keep grinding us down.’ ‘Some of us said,“Bugger it, we’ve had enough.We’ll make our 89

Fire in the Blood own bloody laws.We’ll go for gold, anyway we can get it.”’ I could feel myself getting worked up.‘Rough company has little to do with location.You never judge a man by the place you find him. Just because he’s on the wrong side of a prison wall doesn’t mean he’s not a person of quality. Most I met there were game and many were decent.’ ‘Their crime was that they didn’t tug their forelock to those who claimed the privilege of class.They wouldn’t be slave to any man or any system that denied their manhood.’ ‘On Cockatoo, the real bad company were the gaolers,’ I said. ‘Leave one or two aside, the rest were the lowest of the low.’ Harry seemed lost for words. He just nodded. But I could see something had changed between us.We were not yet mates. But we were getting there. When we entered the Saloon, business was good. Fanny had the operation under firm control so I took Harry into the office and uncorked the Bushmills. The time had come to tell him the story, the real story about life on the road and the part his old man played in it. But it’s more than that, it’s the story of a time and place that will never get a fair hearing from the schoolmasters and others of their ilk.They see it from the side of privilege.They don’t know what it was like for the rest of us and, even if they did, they’d lie about it; the truth is that we were fighting a kind of war. It was never openly declared but the Ascendancy knew it well enough. They knew it when we crossed the divide, when we broke the laws they made to keep us down.They waged the battle without quarter and without mercy.Yes, it was war, right enough. They even called me General Gardiner. And it was a rank well earned.

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Part II B LO O D on the WAT T L E

CHAPTER 11

The battle plan

T

hat evening I began the tale, and for the most part Harry sat silent. In the days and nights that followed, I found myself taken back in time so that I could hear the voices, see the great landscapes of my country and even smell the gum leaves of our native forests. Often I drifted off and lost the thread and Harry had to bring me back. I cannot represent that long journey exactly as I told it. But, because the telling of it meant I revisited that time and those places, I believe I am able to bring it together much as it happened. I am not writing these words in my beloved cave at the Twilight. My new location and the manner of my reaching it is part of the tale still to be told. But I am surrounded by all my papers,Archina’s clippings and the books of history and memoir. So bear with me now and I believe I will not disappoint . . . 93

Fire in the Blood I was five and a half years on Cockatoo Island, I told Harry, and little stands out to catch the light of special remembrance except for the friendship I found with Johnny Peisley. But he didn’t arrive until I had been there for more than two years—years of cutting the sandstone blocks from which the island was made and loading them onto whaleboats for transport to Sydney Town.When we were not cutting blocks, we were building silos and docks from the same material, all through the days until they merged into one. I made a single attempt to escape. Soon after my arrival, I roused some other newcomers and we slipped our bonds one night but were caught even before we’d reached the water. My punishment was 50 lashes laid on hard, and, if I put my mind to it, I could re-live each stroke to this very day. It was an agony that struck to the marrow. I determined, that bright morning, it would never be repeated. Thereafter I kept to myself. I made a place of my own where none could reach me. I discouraged all company from the 200 or so serving time on that cursed rock and I backed it with whatever action was needed to ensure my peace. I took care of my appearance. I used the hard work on the sandstone to strengthen my muscles. I measured my time with activity. In the workshop of an evening, I gained permission to carve oddments from the bones of sheep and cattle slaughtered for the pot. And, when given the privilege, wrote to my sisters and to the station owners of Reid’s Flat who might intercede on my behalf. I gave every appearance of the model prisoner. Only in the deep recesses of my being did I fan the fire of rage. Then, in late 1857, Peisley arrived.At 21, he was a couple of years younger than I but he’d already served time on the mainland for horse stealing. He knew the Abercrombie Ranges west of Goulburn like a native and some of the settler families in the area sent him letters.We were about the same height at five feet nine and he had light sandy hair and a healthy outdoor complexion. His eyes were 94

The battle plan grey and they almost disappeared when he laughed, which was a rare sight in that place of so much anger and pain. At first he bunked in the cell next to mine but, when a new intake arrived, Peisley was pressed upon me and by then we had exchanged a few well-chosen words. He too had received an education. Indeed, he took pleasure in both reading and writing so I found his company more than tolerable.We were mates. He too had the rage. And he knew, too, how to keep it well disguised in that place. We served our time. We kept our counsel. And we helped each other in our letter-writing to that other world where men rode free on the battleground that our country had become. Free to fight for that which the forces of privilege would take from those without the means to defend themselves—the small holders, the emancipists, and all the youngsters born without connection to the few who lorded it over the land itself. We made our plans in the quiet nights. I sought out the prison poet, Owen Suffolk, and had him pen a quatrain that set our aspirations down to my satisfaction: Place me in a forest glen, unfettered, wild and free, With fifty tried and chosen men—a bandit chief I’d be! ’Tis there when fighting with my foes amid my trusty band I’d freely leave this world of woes and die with sword in hand.

Until that happy day, we waited.We bided our time.Then, all at once, my writing bore fruit.Two landholders from Reid’s Flat and Wheeo, Edward Ledsam and Henry Newman, spoke well of me in petitions to the authorities. Billy Fogg told me later that he had pestered them and I am sure that’s true. He and Mary were almost as close to me as kin. The very day I was released—27 December 1859—I set out to visit both men to thank them for their actions. In time, I would make fair response to their favours. 95

Fire in the Blood It was a condition of my ticket of leave that I remain in the Carcoar district and regularly report to the troopers in the town. But that was miles from Reid’s Flat and I did so once only.The coppers were low characters who spent their days on the grog and hounding the ticket-of-leave men to part with a contribution or find themselves back in prison serving out their sentences. I would have no part of that and they never saw me again. Besides, Johnny Peisley was due out the following year and our plans did not include a regular intercourse with the Traps. I stayed with Billy and Mary who were breeding kids as fast as she could pop them out. By now, they had 30 acres of vegetables and fowl houses at Reid’s Flat where the headwaters of the Lachlan are known as the Fish River, and they were pleased to have me.Theirs was the only place that gave me a feeling of home. From there, I wrote to the governor seeking a pardon but nothing came of it. By then, the gold fever had reached the mountains on the Victorian border and I knew I had to move far from the Traps at Carcoar. So I got a grub steak from the Foggs, a halfway decent mount that I would soon swap for a better, and headed to the latest find, Kiandra. It was a good ride through Jackey Jackey’s stamping grounds on the Limestone Plains to the mountain country. I liked the solitude of the bush and, if needs be, I could live off the land. The whole country was full of game birds, especially wild ducks and swans. One day, I watched a mob of Blacks catching them in a lake near Cooma. They hollowed out paddy melons, made holes for seeing and breathing, put them on their heads and slowly swam toward them.When the birds came to feed on the melons, they pulled them under and broke their necks.They are a generous people and, when I left them, I had enough meat to keep me going for a fortnight. But I had no special liking for the cold—the wind off the snow damn near froze my fingers to the reins.The Kiandra field was rough 96

The battle plan and tumble but so cold that many of the usual followers stayed away. I didn’t tarry long myself and would not bother to mention it but for the mate I found there. He was just a kid when I first saw him but so full of fire and flash that he’d have the whole shanty laughing at his antics. His name was Johnny Gilbert and, though he was Canadian by birth, he was as much a currency lad as any of us. He had been ten years old when he arrived with his family in Melbourne in 1852 and he told us his father had married twice, siring more kids than you could count. Johnny cleared out when he was no more than fourteen.‘They didn’t know I was gone until bath night a week later,’ he laughed. He worked as a stable hand at Kilmore, on the way to the Campaspe district, and we swapped yarns about the place and the people there. He watched me at the card table and, when a big pot was on offer, he stood behind the sharpie opposite and tipped me the wink—the mark was bluffing. In the bunkhouse later, I split the winnings with him and we talked. I told him of the plans Peisley and I had made during those long nights on Cockatoo and his eyes flashed at the prospect. The next day I left, but I knew I’d made my first recruit.

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CHAPTER 12

The rush for gold

I

took my time travelling back to the grazing country, calling by the places where I’d find a ready feed and a place to sleep in exchange for a little work on the horses. It was at one such place that I heard the news, a bolt from the blue: a big strike at Jim White’s station only 25 miles from Boorowa on Spring Creek, a tributary of the Lachlan. I knew White well enough. He’d taken up land in the mid 1820s, named his run Burrangong, and ran sheep till he came to his senses and turned to horses—where the real money was. His son-in-law Denis Regan and an American cook we called Alexander the Yankee were mustering horses on his old lambing flat. They were crossing the creek when Alex spied a flash in the water. They washed two handfuls of dirt in the lid of a billy and collected about six shillings’ worth of gold. 98

The rush for gold As luck would have it, another mate of mine, Michael Sheedy, was tracking his own horses in the area and at the first show of colour he raced back to his place at Binalong, rounded up a few mates and some shovels and pans. He was back next day and, by that afternoon, he’d panned five pounds’ worth of gold nuggets.The rush was on. Almost overnight, everything changed.The half-frozen bastards from Kiandra streamed out of the place which was running out of the easy pickings anyway.They headed for ‘Lambing Flat’ and, by the time they reached it, teams were arriving from the surrounding towns and half the inhabitants of Sydney were on the way. I headed back to Billy Fogg’s place and we made a plan. Mary would stay on with the younger kids while Billy and Billy junior, together with a butcher we knew, Tom Richards, would set up a butchery down on Spring Creek near the miners. I would supply the cattle while Billy and Tom would slaughter, trim and sell the beef. Mary wasn’t too happy about being separated from her man and the boy but it was no place for a family. Not then, anyway. Conditions were rough as hell at the beginning but later, as the extent of the find became clear, a town began to rise. By July, there were three stores and half a dozen grog shanties. By August, the entire town of Boorowa was deserted. Everyone had gone to the goldfields. Gold was being found in small gullies and on the hills by shallow sinking and surfacing but, despite the many small creeks, the place was badly watered.That would turn out to be a real problem, especially when the Chinese moved in. They came in mobs of twenty or thirty, jiggling along in single file from the south where they had worked the Victorian fields. Others walked overland from Sydney and other parts of the coast where they’d been dumped by the ships’ captains who had brought them out from Cathay and were hell bent on getting back for another load. 99

Fire in the Blood They camped together at one end of the Flat and they worked like the coolies they were—sun-up to sun-down and seven days a week.The white miners didn’t like them.They reckoned they used too much water. And, when they pushed the Chinese off a promising field, a bunch of them went over to Wombat about twelve miles away and found a strike of their own. Later, the Europeans moved in there too. I had little to do with them but Billy said they were tough bargainers in the butcher shop. He didn’t mind; they wanted the offcuts that didn’t interest the Europeans anyway. But what they really craved was vegetables and it was this that finally changed Mary’s and Billy’s minds about her coming down to the field. She’d been travelling back and forth the 50 miles to Reid’s Flat every few weeks. But there was a ready market for everything they could produce on the Spring Creek river flat and, with all their kids, they could tend a fair patch and still not keep up with the demand. Supply was my problem, too. At first, I was able to buy up the old cracker cows in the district and do deals with the men I’d come to know from my horse work. But soon gold was fetching three pounds fifteen shillings an ounce—a bloody fortune—and there was so much of it that damn near every miner was eating high on the hog and I had to go further afield to get what I needed. And I had to take on some good young bucks I could trust to find the mobs and drove them into the butchery. That’s when Johnny Gilbert turned up from Kiandra and, with half a dozen other young sparks, we covered a lot of territory. Not only did we get to know the country, we made good mates wherever we went. By December 1860, when Lambing Flat was officially proclaimed Burrangong Gold Field by Governor Denison, the population was about 3000 and hundreds were arriving every week. Big stores were being built on both sides of the street and The Diggers Arms had a ballroom as big as a barn. The town was a 100

The rush for gold mixture of tents, bark huts, weatherboard buildings and grog shops that extended for at least a mile. There were bowling alleys, skittle grounds, dance halls, bordellos and enough booze to float the First Fleet. I’d never seen anything like it. Sometimes we’d organise a race meeting and that was always good for a lark. Johnny Gilbert was a hard man to beat. He even did me down a couple of times but he was lighter framed than me. Then the French escapologist, Robert-Houdin, turned up. He was a marvel. Nothing could hold him, not cuffs nor chains nor the tightest ropes.After the show, Johnny Gilbert bailed him up in a back alley and asked him for a close-up show on how to escape the mangles.The Frenchie was a good sport and spent half an hour with him. Johnny practised for days and became pretty good at it.Waste of time as it turned out because, unlike the rest of us, Johnny never spent a moment under lock and key. He’d rather die. In the whole place there were just three troopers. So, when about 700 miners decided they didn’t want the Orientals anywhere in the vicinity, there was no one around to protect them. The miners formed themselves into a Vigilance Committee, burned a few of the rougher shanties, then, with a German band that had arrived the previous week belting out some marching tune, bullocked their way into the Chinese camp. Two of the poor buggers were killed and another ten wounded. They cleared out to Wombat, about twelve miles away, and found their own mother lode. But they soon got pushed out of that too. Not much they could do about it—the authorities hardly lifted a finger.And only one of them really fought back, a little bloke called Sam Poo. He took up bushranging in the Mudgee district. Couldn’t ride a horse, so did it all on foot. He even fell in love with a white girl, Emma Golding, but it couldn’t last. They hanged Sam in Bathurst but they never found his stash. In the middle of 1861, the lid really blew off the billy. By then, there were about 9000 Europeans and 6000 Chinese miners, with 101

Fire in the Blood only seven troopers and two detectives in the whole district. It was Rafferty’s rules. It was Sodom and Gomorrah. By comparison, the Barbary Coast was a Sunday-school picnic.The miners fought each other; they drank themselves insane; they went wild with the fancy women and the old slags day and night and without the slightest concern for privacy. There was never anything quite like it in the whole world. I stayed out of it as much as I could, except when about 3000 of us watched the fight between Tom Davis, who called himself King Pippin, and Izzy Barnett, the Jew Boy. Hell of a scrap. It went for 47 rounds and lasted over an hour. And, when the Israelite won the 50-pound purse, he was so hot he began fighting the front row of spectators. We all got another laugh when Lambing Flat was renamed Young, after the new governor, Sir John Young, a stuffy pommy bastard who later became Lord Lisgar and Governor-General of Canada.We reckoned that was the best joke of the year. It was about this time, as I was bringing a small mob back from the Murrumburrah district, that a couple of troopers rode up with a complaint that I’d stolen some of the horses we were riding and the cattle we were droving. It is hard to credit—there was murder and mayhem on every side yet they picked me out to persecute. Luckily, the troopers were blow-ins and they charged me under the name I gave them—Francis Jones. I made bail and that was the last they saw of me. By June, the miners had worked themselves into such a frenzy against the Celestials that the premier himself, Slippery Charlie Cowper, arrived to try to hose them down.They practically ran him out of town and, next we knew, the miners made a full-scale attack on the Chinese camp, ripped off their pigtails and killed God knows how many. Captain Henry Zouch arrived from Bathurst with about 102

The rush for gold 70 mounted troopers and arrested some of the ringleaders but, when the mob gathered, he lost his nerve, released them and did a moonlight flit with his entire force riding the 65 miles to Yass.There wasn’t a policeman left in town. Governor Young ordered a military brigade assembled; it had to be seen to be believed.The 12th regiment of troops arrived with a brass howitzer! The next day more than 200 sailors from the HMS Fawn marched in and began pitching tents on the Flat in pelting rain. Johnny and I watched them from the crest of the hill overlooking the diggings.‘The place has gone mad, Frank,’ he said.And there was never a truer word spoken. It was certainly no place for a self-respecting horseman.We cleared out for the Weddin Mountains where we’d met some young Irishmen who were making a go of it raising cattle in spite of the Ascendancy taking all the best land.They were a good bunch—the Daleys, the O’Meallys, the Walshes and an English family from the Hunter Valley whose father had been transported in 1825 for seven years for some trifling offence. I later learned it was no more than a little shoplifting with a couple of lasses still in their teens.That man had the same name as his son who’d make it famous throughout the country and who’d sire the lad who sought to be my assassin. It was Ben Hall. I recall it as though it were yesterday—that tall, rangy figure limping through a rising cloud of dust in his cattle yards, heading toward me with his hand extended, that wicked grin on his face. I reached down from my horse and gripped his hand. ‘G’day, Ben.’ ‘Hearda you, Frank,’ he said, returning the pressure.‘They reckon you know a thing or two about horses.’ A red-letter day, that one, for in the afternoon I first laid eyes on the love of my life: Kitty Brown.And, even now, all these years later, I cannot write her name without a trembling in the hand and a thumping of the heart. 103

CHAPTER 13

Shot in the heart

W

hen I first met up with Ben, he was partners with his brother-in-law, John McGuire, in Sandy Creek, a 16 000-acre cattle station about ten miles from Forbes. John was the son of a convict transported from Dublin for the crime of being Irish. Old man McGuire served his full sentence, slaving for the Reverend Samuel Marsden in the Hawkesbury Valley.Young John came west and found work as a stockman for John Walsh on ‘Wheogo’.There he met and married Ellen, the eldest of the three Walsh girls, Ben’s Bridget being the second and my Kitty the third. Ellen and Bridget were as chalk and cheese—the elder tall for a woman and quick to laughter; Biddy sharp and intense. Kitty was different again, her face an open window to her heart. Old man Walsh died in 1858 and, in her grieving, Kitty accepted the offer of marriage from John Brown, the property manager. She 104

Shot in the heart was only sixteen at the time and quickly learned the truth of the old adage, ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’. The evening I met her— seated around the dining table of the Sandy Creek homestead after John McGuire, Ben and I had done our business and sealed the transaction with a nobbler or two of rum—her eyes were flashing sparks that lit up the room. Sandy Creek backed on to the Walsh property and John Brown may have been there briefly; but, whether in his presence or absence, I couldn’t help be aware of the lady’s small white teeth, her wellturned ankle and her figure like that of a pocket Venus. But it was her eyes that really held me—sparkling blue eyes shaded by long, dark lashes and overarched by jet brows on a soft complexion.They set my blood racing and my arms aching to embrace her. It was late when I left her at Ben’s house; Johnny Gilbert and I camped at the head of a gully overlooking the creek. I had barely settled by the fire when she appeared from the shadows of the bush. Johnny saw the lay of the land quick enough and, ever the gentleman, betook himself well away to the other side of the gully.There will be those, I know, who will say we were victims of the devil’s lust. And I’ll own that there’s some truth to it for never before had I known the power of such unbridled passion. But, when we’d slaked ourselves, there followed a conversation like no other I had ever held with a living soul.We talked the night away and in every word and gesture there was a harmony that seemed beyond the workaday world. We were enclosed in a place of our own where none had gone before and no other soul could reach us. Johnny and I left with the cattle the next day but something had happened that I could not put a name to. It was beyond my ken. Kitty and I had made a binding that only death would part.What I couldn’t know then was that she would be the one to die. As we returned with the cattle down the track between Forbes and Young, with the distant Weddin Mountains rising darkly from 105

Fire in the Blood the plain, we were hindered by travellers in the opposite direction. By now it was August 1860 and there were strikes reported all up the Lachlan.Young was emptying out and, in a year or so, its days as a gold centre would come to a close. But the great rush that had started there was spreading across New South Wales and it was changing everything. Before the rush, the underdogs knew their place.Afterward, they knew that nothing was set in stone. Wealth abounded in the land and it could come to any man on the whim of chance. Family and class had naught to do with it.The prize went to the fortunate and the fleet of foot.When the diggers who struck it rich moved on to the land or into Sydney Town with their big investments, they became living proof of the hypocrisy of the English class system. They showed that it was not about breeding; it was all about wealth. Possession was not just nine-tenths of the law; it was the whole kit and caboodle.And, once you’d grabbed your share and were part of it, you took the side of the ruling class and fought like the devil to keep the rest of us from coming on board. No wonder the battle lines were forming. Then suddenly Peisley was out. What’s more, he announced himself in a way that was sure to reach me. He held up some squatters on the road between Carcoar and Bathurst then melted back into the ranges.The troopers went in pursuit but no one in the area would say a word against him. I pulled out the mud map Peisley had drawn for me on Cockatoo and set course for the Abercrombies. His camp was in a mountain cleft and you were almost upon it before it was visible, yet once you’d reached it you could see the approaches on three sides with the mountain at your back. Peisley was there when I arrived on a hard, bright morning, and what a sight he was. With his takings, he’d bought himself some grand Napoleon thigh boots and fitted himself out in a splendid set of breeches, a fine 106

Shot in the heart waistcoat and a fancy duck coat.As I dismounted, he embraced me and I responded in kind—two free men in the wildness of our Australian bush. Laughing, I recited the quatrain from Cockatoo: Place me in a forest glen, unfettered, wild and free, With fifty tried and chosen men—a bandit chief I’d be! ’Tis there when fighting with my foes amid my trusty band

Peisley joined me in the last line: I’d freely leave this world of woes and die with sword in hand!

Our laughter echoed down the mountain but it was then I had the first inkling of the trouble that was to follow. For, though it was early in the forenoon, the man was already half cut and the smell of brandy almost knocked me over. He held the open bottle in one hand while he thumped my back with the other. He offered me a swig and I took it, but soon he was rambling, and when I made some tucker he barely picked at it. All he wanted was the grog. Next morning I got him to the creek and held his head under. He came up fighting but not for long. I talked hard to him. ‘If you don’t have your bloody wits about you,’ I said,‘you’ll be back on that damned rock before you know it.Where’s the sense to you?’ In a while, it took effect.‘Yeah Frank,’ he said finally and together we smashed every last bottle in his store. At least, I thought we did. Unbeknown to me there was another small depository in a nearby cave. But at the time I took him at his word and, when he’d made himself presentable we set forth on the great adventure. The very idea of it set my blood to tingling. Peisley knew the drill, and in those first few days I was willing to follow his lead.We would find a thicket of scrub near a turn in 107

Fire in the Blood the road from Louisa Creek to Hill End and, when a likely traveller appeared, we would burst out, one before the other, with guns drawn. Then Peisley would roar, ‘Bail up, you bastard, or I’ll put a bullet through your brains.’ The reaction was always the same.The colour would drain from their faces, their hands would fly skywards and they would babble a plea that no harm befall them. But, once they were disarmed, Peisley’s tone would change to that of the courteous businessman. Our first big score was a bumper.We relieved a squatter named Richard Cox of his Navy Colt pistol and 565 pounds. It was enough to keep us in fine style for a goodly time, though we made sure that our allies and helpers were well looked after. This was well calculated.The first rule of warfare is to stay one step ahead of the enemy and that can only happen if you care for your supporters. In fact, in the weeks after these ventures, the police magistrate in Carcoar, Owen Beardmore, told the local newspaper, ‘Peisley is decidedly a favourite in the district among a large proportion of the inhabitants. All his robberies have been conducted without the slightest violence and he is fast assuming a sort of Dick Turpin notoriety which makes it very difficult to catch him.’ There were plenty of small fry in between but in May of 1861 we made another big score—the Cowra mail coach. The cash and valuables in the letters alone replenished our coffers while the passengers contributed a fine bonus. But by now Peisley was becoming unreliable with the drink and I knew it was only a matter of time before it tripped him up. However, as it turned out, I was the one who damn near lost my footing on the rocks of fortune when Beardmore decided he wanted me brought in to answer the cattle-duffing charges laid at Young. He sent two troopers, John Middleton and William Hosie, out to Billy Fogg’s place at Bigga, whence he and the family had returned after the rush ended.As luck would have it, I had parted from Peisley that 108

Shot in the heart very morning at Billy and Mary’s place. It was a coincidence that would curse me for the rest of my days. Middleton and Hosie were nothing special. Middleton was the sergeant, a former soldier in the British Army, about 35 and fairly beefy with it. Hosie, the constable, was taller and leaner, a Scot who had been in the force less than a year. It was drizzling rain when they rode in, tied their horses at the sliprails and approached the door of the four-roomed house. Mary was first to spot them as Middleton bowled up. Though his uniform was covered by a poncho, she picked him immediately as a copper and called me a quick warning before gathering up the kids to get them out of the firing line. She and Billy knew I’d rather take a bullet than return to Cockatoo and they both skedaddled out of the place as Middleton reached the door. They were quickly followed by two other visitors, Mary’s brother James Taylor and his mate, Jim Barney. I grabbed my Navy Colt and retired behind a calico screen. It afforded no protection against gunfire and Middleton knew damn well I was there but I wanted no blood shed on either side. If he didn’t lay eyes on me, he could report his mission completed with no harm to his reputation. I heard him reach the open doorway. ‘Don’t come in,’ I warned.‘I am armed and I will shoot you.’ He hesitated, but with Hosie coming up behind pride got the better of him and I heard him cock his pistol. Next thing, he lifted the screen aside and levelled his gun at me. Bloody fool. I had no choice—as he fired so did I. His shot missed but mine struck him in the mouth, knocking out a couple of teeth and exiting through the cheek. He dropped the screen and once again I shouted at him to back off. But he recapped and raised the calico.This time I shot at his gun hand and hit the target, the bullet coming out the back of his hand and striking him on the leg. He staggered back out the door and, if only there’d been a back entrance, I’d have been out like a shot. But 109

Fire in the Blood there was not even a sizeable window, and when Hosie arrived, he bowled right in and we blasted away at each other at nearly pointblank range. I took a shot across the top lip and replied with a glancing ball across his thick skull. That knocked him unconscious and my way was open to get out, but once through the door Middleton came at me again, belting at me with a hammer-headed riding crop while I sought to beat him off with the handle of my revolver. I still had bullets in the chambers and could have ended his life there and then. Many a man in my position would have done so but instead I spared him and struggled to get clear. Behind me, Hosie came to and leapt at my back, pinning my arms and giving Middleton full rein to bash me about the head with that iron crop. I felt the darkness descending and his own words taken in evidence later tell the tale better than I.‘Gardiner struggled like a tiger,’ he said,‘and knowing as I did the desperate character we had to deal with, I deliberately took aim with my heavy whip, intending to knock his brains out. But for the interference of Fogg, who interposed my arm, I have no doubt I should have effectively put an end to his career in this world.’ I went down, and when Hosie clipped a handcuff on to my wrist I heard him say, ‘My God, Gardiner, you are a game fellow.’ And then I passed into darkness. Next I knew I was in the shade and handcuffed while Middleton demanded Billy give him a horse to take me to Bigga. Billy said none was available—my own mount being corralled well away from the homestead—so Middleton set out on his own with the notion of reporting my capture and sending reinforcements back for me. Hosie would stand guard till his return. That was a mistake. Hosie was no match for Billy and Mary Fogg when it came to the gentle art of persuasion. When there was no sign of Middleton or his mates after a couple of hours, Billy, Mary 110

Shot in the heart and I had worn him down with an honorarium of 50 pounds and a fanciful yarn that had Peisley riding to my rescue as he escorted me along the Bigga road. As soon as the deal was done, I struggled away with Billy junior to a cave in the Abercrombies where I rested, recovered and pined for Kitty Brown. My association with Peisley was over. And the sad fact is that from that time the poor bastard went downhill fast. On Christmas Day he started a three-day binge at Tom McGuinness’s pub at Bigga and at the end of it made his way to the farm of two lifelong mates, the brothers William and Stephen Benyon.There the heavy drinking continued and Peisley became enraged at some sleight from their teen years when William, he claimed, had cheated him in a horse deal. The result of the argument was a sordid affair that ended only when Peisley shot his mate in the neck. Bill Benyon survived seven days, paralysed and mute until he passed away. The Traps went after him in force and, in January ’62, they almost took him outside Bigga when three of them met him on the road. Peisley challenged them to a fight.This was the action of a man well taken with drink. One accepted the challenge and dismounted. Peisley spurred away, leaving the coppers to shoot their bullets into the wide blue sky. Indeed, the coppers had nothing to do with his final capture. That came on 29 January at Mundarlow when Jock McKenzie, the innkeeper, and two of his guests, took him at table. Peisley was well in his cups but he fought long and hard till they finally secured him. Next day they took him to Gundagai and thence to Bathurst where he was tried and convicted of Benyon’s murder. On 25 April 1862, he and a Black, Jimmy Bullfrog, shared the dance floor at the back of Bathurst Gaol. But, before he launched into the hangman’s two-step, Peisley had a word to say about Hosie’s cover story. ‘All lies,’ he said. ‘I call on God to witness that the charge I rescued Gardiner is utterly groundless.’Then he gave chapter and 111

Fire in the Blood verse of our 50-pound bribe to the copper, even to the details of Mary collecting a few pounds from Taylor and Barney to make up the total. Thus absolved, the damn fool forgave his enemies, bade the assembly ‘Goodbye, gentlemen and God bless you’, and stepped his way to eternity. As the Sydney Mail put it,‘Peisley did not appear to suffer much nor long; but the poor blackfellow was for several minutes frightfully convulsed.’

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CHAPTER 14

Rules of the game

B

y then, I’d recovered from the gunshot and the bashing. In the cave, I had two welcome visitors—Kitty Brown and Johnny Gilbert.They came from different directions; Kitty the first to arrive. She had ridden through the night and when she reached my hideaway it was just after dawn and the sun rose behind her.Young Billy was still sleeping but I saw her silhouette fringed with gold. There was no mistaking her and, when she spoke, it was as if we were continuing the conversation we’d begun those several weeks ago in the misty gully by Sandy Creek. ‘I was so afraid they’d done for you, Frank,’ she said, and laid a soft hand in mine. For the next couple of days, she tended my wounds and made a fuss. At night, once she knew I was still of this world and likely to remain so, we talked in the secret language of lovers. Did she tell her husband where she’d gone? I cannot say for 113

Fire in the Blood whenever I raised the subject she shushed me. But a plan was forming in my mind even then that would provide a way out for us. It was so big, so bold, that I barely hinted at it. But, if successful, it would not only set us up in a new life, it would so stun the forces of privilege that our people would have the laugh on them for evermore. And laughter is a deadly force. The affray at Fogg’s had set tongues wagging and chuckling across the district and the Gardiner name was gaining the kind of recognition that, I must admit, gave me a fair measure of satisfaction. When Johnny arrived, I was pretty well repaired and he said,‘They talk of you like Bold Jack O’Donohue. Everyone has a story to tell.’ ‘Then we’ll really give them something to mag about,’ I replied. ‘You will be my lieutenant and we’ll run our show like it should be run—no boozing, no violence upon women and no fighting among ourselves. Our people are with us; the time has come to turn the tables on the bastards who would deny us our share.’ ‘I’m with you, Frank,’ he said and we shook hands on it. But, as usual, the little bugger couldn’t resist a joke. He nodded at the new thigh boots I’d had young Billy pick me up in Cowra. ‘They don’t call them Napoleon boots for nothin’,’ he said. He could talk. He was soon the flashest young buck west of the Great Divide with his white moleskins, bright blue Crimea shirt, black cabbage-tree hat and knee boots buffed to a silvery sheen. And why not? Armies everywhere take pride in their outfits and we were no exception. In this, as in so many ways, we put our enemy to shame. Our horses were better by a country mile; our knowledge of the terrain a thousand times superior; and, while they had all the forces of law on their side, we had the people on the ground and in short order a system of signs and calls that would confound our pursuers at every turn. But, though I say so myself, we had leadership while they had Sir Frederick Pottinger. Ah, Sir Fred. What a character. If I’d been 114

Rules of the game asked to construct a rival made from all the most hated elements of the British aristocracy, I’d have come up with something very like our Potty. I made it my business to know my enemy, the son of a baronet raised to the peerage for his service in opening the Chinese ports to opium.Young Freddie was schooled at Eton and found a congenial billet as a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. His only campaign medals were earned on the green baize of London’s gaming tables, his only contact with military leadership his membership of the honour guard at Lord Wellington’s funeral in 1852. Thereafter, he returned as quickly as possible to the racetrack and the card tables until his mother was forced to sell her jewellery to pay his debts. His commission went the same way and he scraped along until his old man died in 1856, leaving him the title and the magnificent sum of 100 000 pounds. Potty took to that mountain of cash with a will and, in short order, lost the lot. But even that was insufficient spur to mend his ways and he plunged back into debt. Soon the bailiffs were chasing him. A single stroke of luck—a win on the American mare Prioress—provided him with 500 pounds to escape England for a refuge 12 000 miles away in Australia. He reached Sydney Town at the end of ’56 and immediately made for the Victorian gold fields where his courting of Dame Fortune proved no more successful than it had among the lounge lizards of the Old Dart. Indeed, the closest he came to a payload was when he abandoned prospecting and joined the New South Wales constabulary under the name of Parker in 1860 and escorted the gold coach between Goulburn and Gundagai. But rescue of a sort was at hand. For, in November of that year, Her Majesty’s mails tracked him down with a letter addressed to Sir Frederick William Pottinger, Bart, and, upon his identification, the Bunyip Aristocracy fawned at his feet. Captain John McLerie, 115

Fire in the Blood Inspector-General of Police, immediately promoted him to the ranks of officialdom as Clerk of Petty Sessions at Dubbo and then to Assistant Superintendent of the Southern Mounted Patrol at Young with the additional duties of magistrate. Potty was in clover. But good fortune was hard for such a fathead to sustain and the following month, after drinking champagne and playing billiards with a motley crew at Young’s Great Eastern Hotel, he got into a fight with Tom Watt who was betting on his opponent. Sir Fred cracked Tom across the head and shoulders with his billiard cue and knocked him halfway through the saloon window. Watt sued, the jury found for him, and only the Pottinger title saved Sir Fred from the sack.TheYass Courier, whose pages figure large in Archina’s scrapbooks, took him severely to task.‘Authority in hands such as these,’ they said,‘must necessarily lose half its power.The subordinates, many of whom conduct themselves far better than their chief, must look upon the man with unmeasured contempt; and if they obey his orders it is not because they have a respect for him but because they regard him as a puppet of some superior power. The affair is as scandalous a one as was ever brought into a court of justice.’ Slippery Charlie Cowper, the Premier, who would have dismissed an Australian-born son for such an offence, merely delivered a public rebuke. But it was enough to set the people sniggering in their cups and, in February 1862, McLerie transferred the miscreant to the Lachlan where he was put in charge of a detachment of troopers with the express purpose of hunting down me and my men. For, by now, Johnny and I had been joined by young Jack Davis, Dan Charters, John McGuinness and John O’Meally, as flash a bunch of young bloods as you’d find anywhere in New South Wales. And we were doing a roaring trade. We’d taken the Bogolong pub in January, relieving the entire company of their purses. I took a special pleasure in lightening the 116

Rules of the game wallet of James Torpy, the pusillanimous bastard who’d fired up the miners against the Celestials when the Lambing Flat rush was at its height.Torpy was a blatherskite of the worst order. I first spotted Pottinger himself at the Cowra races where he swanned about in his inspector’s uniform, doffing his cap to the ladies, quaffing champagne and spreading his largesse among the bookmakers. It was high summer and, by the end of the day, he was much the worse for wear. He’d swapped his helmet for a lady’s bonnet, to the great delight of his hangers-on. Had I been so minded, I could have ended his career there and then. Far better, I decided, to preserve him as my enemy. The next few days we were on the road between Young and Forbes, and Henry Greig’s regular coach brought us a fair bounty. Once again,Torpy was present and, once again, I relieved him of his wad. But three troopers came upon us and we scattered crosscountry. Dan Charters and I made for Feehily’s station which was owned by Dan’s widowed sister.As we neared it, my horse went lame but we were pretty sure we’d given them the slip. I dismounted and made for a creek to wash and refresh myself. I was still at my ablutions when the troopers, together with Torpy and Greig, bowled up and rushed the house. All they found inside was the widow Feehily for Dan was rounding up fresh horses.Then they spotted me and the troopers and civilians alike loosed of a dozen shots. One ripped through the sleeve of my coat but otherwise I was unharmed, and, when I called to Dan to bring a horse, the troopers were out of ammunition so he made it through. It was a near-run thing but I was damned if I’d let on how close it had been. Especially when it was followed a few days later with an announcement in the Police Gazette that a reward of 170 pounds had been posted for my capture. The charges were that I had ‘attacked and severely wounded’ Middleton and Hosie, when the fact was they had attacked me. 117

Fire in the Blood I penned a letter to the Lachlan Miner and General Advertiser in which I twisted the tails of my tormentors. A young scrivener who wrote under the alias of ‘Bullfrog’ had been seeking an interview so I had Johnny Gilbert arrange a meeting at which he handed over a letter to the journalist.They printed it in full and later it was taken up by the Yass Courier and finally the Sydney Mail. ‘I can teach you something about men and things that never entered into your philosophy,’ I wrote young Bullfrog, ‘and then you’ll judge for yourself all the frightful things I’ve done.’ To tell you the plain truth I should not have done anything to either Greig or Torpy only I took them for a pair of Traps and Torpy was so horrid bounceable I couldn’t for the life of me help taking a rise out of him.Torpy does seem to fancy himself some. I took him for Sir Fred P and Greig for the common Trap and I thought it wouldn’t be amiss to jolly well rob a real live barrownight. But when I found it was only Torpy I confess I was disappointed. So now Sir Frederick (whom by the way I met the other day in a rather peculiar rig) has come to this road, I must keep away.

Of course, I did the exact opposite. In March, with Johnny Gilbert, O’Meally and McGuinness, I scored more than 250 ounces of gold and nearly 150 pounds in cash from the Horsingtons, storekeepers in Young, who were bleeding the people dry with their high prices. It was a good haul but it came at a price. As we bailed them up, McGuinness fired a shot that damn near hit Mrs Horsington. The action was strictly against my orders and I had no choice but to dismiss McGuinness on the spot. The lesson was not lost on those who were lining up to be part of Gardiner’s Gang. Nor, indeed, was the one to follow. Young bucks were taking to the road all over the south-west and travellers everywhere cried ‘Gardiner’ at the first sign of a mask or a 118

Rules of the game revolver. I’d warn them off when they trespassed on my patch or sell them the rights to an area if I was so minded. But it suited me well enough to have that cry go out for it kept Potty and his men at sixes and sevens, never knowing where I or my men would strike next. Then came the incident at Brewers shanty, twelve miles from Young, when, on 10 April 1862, a small party of police under Sergeant Sanderson arrived by coach with three prisoners aboard, thieves from the goldfields with no connection to my men and our cause. But my good mate Jack Davis was drinking at the shanty with Patrick Connelly and McGuinness, who was trying to wheedle his way back into my good books.They were just leaving as the coach drew up and Sanderson recognised my men and called them to stand. Instead, like a coward and a fool, McGuinness leapt aboard his horse and cleared off into the scrub, leaving Jack Davis without a mount.The traps fired at him and he stood his ground, firing back until they cut him down with bullets to the thigh, the wrist and the side of his head. He survived the fusillade but they tethered him to a coach horse and brought him in to Young and thence to Goulburn Assizes, where they gave him fifteen years. He was a good man, Jack Davis. Only a week before, we’d held up Crowther Station, owned by the Honourable Mr Pring, to put them all on notice that nowhere was safe from the Have-Nots. Jack had played the concertina and sung ‘Ever of Thee’ to the lord and master while the rest of us sampled his cellar. Yes, a good man. I would not rest until he’d been avenged, and in the next few days I held up Greig’s coach half a dozen times in search of the coppers who shot him.Wisely, they stayed in barracks. McGuinness was not so prudent.The Sydney Mail of 8 May carried the following: There are strong reasons for believing that McGuinness was shot at the instance of Gardiner himself for deserting Davis during the

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Fire in the Blood late fight. McGuinness was standing in the bush, looking down at a fire, with his hands behind him when a bullet from a distant piece killed him on the spot. McGuinness lay unburied where he fell by the hands of his mates for three whole days.

Well, I suppose you have to believe what you read in the newspapers. Fact is, however McGuinness might have met his end, the word went out that when you rode with Gardiner you accepted his discipline. And that’s what scared the enemy most.While ever we operated as a disciplined force they could never make the brand of ‘common criminal’ stick. The newspapers wouldn’t let them and nor would the people who gave us shelter and kept cockatoo for us as the troopers blundered in our wake. We had become a force to be reckoned with.

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CHAPTER 15

Prince of the road

I

worked my way back to Wheogo and my lovely Kitty.When we met, it was like the time between meant nothing. And thereafter the intervals became ever shorter. She stayed in Brown’s house for I could not take her on the road with me. But she moved out of his bed and he copped it on the chin because he had no choice in the matter. It was a tense time all around Sandy Creek because with the money flowing from the miners and the high cattle prices there were temptations aplenty for all the young men of the district. None more than Ben Hall himself. He was 25 at the time and full of wild oats. The limp he’d acquired when a horse kicked and broke his leg while still a boy only enhanced his romantic air, like some Byron of the bush. He and Bridget had married in St Michael’s in Bathurst when he was nineteen and young Harry was born the following year.They 121

Fire in the Blood lived it lively when the gold came and there were dances, picnics and the races as well as the shanties where the men gathered to pass the time. Kitty told me that in the early days when he strayed—and he was very democratic in his choices—her sister Bridget would forgive him. She would say nothing to him, or to anyone else, for a couple of weeks, then she’d relent and say they were nothing more than passing fancies. Kitty couldn’t understand it. ‘She keeps it all inside,’ she said. ‘That would not be my way, Frank.’ I laughed aloud at the notion that I would ever stray. But Ben was made of different clay and in ’62 there were 30 000 souls in Forbes as the earth gave up her golden bounty to the raucous cheers of the men and the wild squeals of the camp followers.Temptation was the name of the game. He took up with Betsy Bird, a bright young thing well connected in Sydney for her father was Captain Thomas Bird, a master mariner. She was as flighty as befits her name but Ben was well taken ’tween her claws and she held on tight. He stayed away for days at a time, and, when he did return home, it was with a fancy tale that he’d been adventuring with Yours Truly. Then to lend conviction to his tales—and for the sheer devilment of it—he did join us in some capers on the road. I had a favourite spot between Young and the Lachlan where a sharp rise slowed the coaches and drays and it was here that he teamed up with Johnny Gilbert and me on the day a pair of drays owned by William Bacon came by, packed with a good store of provender for my troops. I warned him to keep himself masked but he wouldn’t listen. If Johnny and I let ourselves be seen, he would do no less. In vain did I explain that our identification was tactical—so hard were our reputations that the very sight of us was usually enough to turn travellers philanthropical. That way we avoided gunfire of any kind. But no, 122

Prince of the road he would have his own way and no doubt he was gratified when word passed around that he’d joined up. Biddy was well taken in—or so her hatred of the Gardiner name would tell you. But, as you know, I have my own opinion on that. In any event, Bacon and his two drivers certainly attested to his part in the operation when they gave information to Sir Fred, who tracked him down at the Wowingragong racetrack near Forbes. Pottinger laid charges of robbery under arms and Ben was committed for trial at Orange the following month. Meantime he was held at the stockade in Forbes and it was there, I believe, that Biddy found him in earnest converse with sweet Betsy Bird. She could take it no more. By the time Ben’s trial was over (and he was acquitted, thanks to a donation from John McGuire to the welfare of the witness Bill Ferguson, one of Bacon’s drivers), Biddy had taken young Harry and hared off with James Taylor, the same who had been at his sister’s place the day of my battle with Hosie and Middleton. Taylor had a small station north of Wheogo and there they lived while Biddy’s rage simmered on the fire of jealousy. James was nothing special. He was a few years older than Bridget and had married a woman named Emma Dower in ’49. She’d left him after he’d roughed her up once too often. He claimed to be a reformed character but, in my experience, once a man raises his hand to a woman he declares himself a coward and a scoundrel for all time. Some blame it on the grog, others on the mad fancies that overtake a woman’s better nature, but these are no more than paltry excuses for the bullying toad. For a couple of weeks, Ben took it hard. He sought me out for the advice of an older man but there was little I could say to ease the pain of it.And, to tell the truth, I doubt if he’d have thanked me if I’d worked a reconciliation by warning Taylor off. For all his boyish charm, Ben had a streak of the warrigal in him. Married life was a ball 123

Fire in the Blood and chain.When he slipped the lock he felt fair and fancy free. He was not about to give that up in a hurry. But in that time we became close—Ben and Johnny and I—and, if ever I found myself under fire from the enemy, those were the two men I wanted at my side. Gilbert and I had a narrow squeak when we rode down through my old stamping grounds at Boro to Tarago, where the Braidwood Gold Escort passed between a narrow cutting on the way to Goulburn.We surveyed the area in the heat of the day and found it made to order. So we decided to cool off in Lake Bathurst while the rest of the team—Alex Fordyce, John Bow and Harry Manns—took a quiet nobbler at the Tarago Pub. Between adventures on the road, Fordyce was barman at the O’Meally shanty in the Weddin Mountains, Bow was a fine young horseman, and in civilian life Henry Manns ran his own bullock team carting goods to the goldrush towns. Henry was a simple man and he would have no bar of the privileged, who all his young life had treated him like common dirt. We were having a fine time in the cool water when all at once the coach appeared through the cutting with an escort of five troopers.We rushed from the lake, gathered what clothes we could, leapt aboard our mounts and galloped off toward the pub where we roused out the others. We were in no shape to hold up the coach which, it pains me to say, had been carrying some 4000 ounces of gold. They had left Braidwood early after rumours circulated that ‘Gardiner and his mob’ were in the district.We laughed about it later but it was no pleasure at the time. It would have been much worse had I not by then acquired the most steady and loyal companion that ever came the way of a road warrior. I called him Darkie, the name I knew that others used of me—though seldom in my hearing—and when we first got together he was no more than a three-year-old. He had a fine streak of thoroughbred in him and I saw the fire in his eye when I first cut him 124

Prince of the road out of a mob we’d mustered on Springfield Station, one of the Faithfull properties. I knew the country well. Springfield was between Goulburn and Boro.William Faithfull had come out as a private in the New South Wales corps in the very early days of the colony and by doing the bidding of his superiors had acquired both favour and fortune. By now his descendants lived as if to the manor born, their humble beginnings banished from view. My Darkie was only half broken but that was no bad thing. His spirit was strong and I gave him all the time he needed to adapt to my ways. In two weeks he’d stand on my command. In three he’d come when I called him and in four he’d carry me through the gates of hell itself with no more than touch of my heels to his flanks. He had a rare turn of speed and we’d fly through timber with never a break in stride, simply a sway to one side or the other as the trunks flashed by on left and right. Darkie and I became such a team that, in some of the stories that spread of us, horse and rider were one and the same, a dark centaur from ancient days. And stories there were aplenty. The newspapers were now full of them and I didn’t mind at all, except when they cast me in a mean light. In fact, on 19 April I penned a letter to the Lachlan Miner myself.‘Having seen a paragraph in one of the papers, wherein it is said that I took the boots off a man’s feet,’ I wrote,‘and that I also took the last few shillings that another man had, I wish it to be known that I did not do anything of the kind. The man who took the boots was in my company and for so doing I discharged him the following day. Silver I never took from a man yet. As for a mean, low or petty action, I never committed it in my life. A word to Sir F.W. Pottinger: It has been said that it would be advisable to place a Trap at each shanty to put a stop to the

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Fire in the Blood depredations done on the road. I certainly think it would be a great acquisition to me for I should then have increase of revolvers and carbines. Three of your troopers were at a house the other night and got drinking and gambling till all hours. I came there towards morning when all was silent. The first room I went into I found revolvers and carbines to any amount but seeing none as good as my own I left them. I then went out and on the verandah found the troopers sound asleep. Satisfying myself that neither Batteye nor Pottinger were there I left them as I found them, in the arms of Morpheus. Fearing nothing, I remain, Prince of Tobymen, Francis Gardiner, the Highwayman.

I could just hear Potty squeal as he read that. In truth, the letters were a splendid use to me for they gave heart and pleasure to our people. As one correspondent wrote in the Yass Courier, ‘Of all the people in the triangle from Young to Forbes to Cowra, scarcely half are true subjects of the Queen and free from the taint of harbouring and, directly or indirectly, encouraging bushranging.’ When Slippery Charlie Cowper threatened us with his presence, the same newspaper said,‘As an interview with the Prince of Tobymen would not be gratifying to the Chief Secretary, a strong escort of mounted police will in all probability accompany the honourable gentleman through the particular domain of these rollicking bushrangers.’ Rollicking indeed. And soon we’d so rollick the place that the name Frank Gardiner would redound to every corner of the land. The means to this end—and the key to all my aspirations—was bailing up the Lachlan Gold Escort from Forbes, the headquarters of Sir Fred and his fine body of men, to Orange, where it was loaded for Sydney Town. It left each week at exactly the same time and, with mining at full swing in the Forbes area, the cargo was a golden treasure trove awaiting. 126

CHAPTER 16

The big strike

T

he place I chose—Eugowra Rocks—was perfect for the task. Located between Forbes and Canowindra, it was named for the mighty boulders that decorated both sides of a rise in the road, and with scrub all about a small army could conceal itself in ambush. And a small army was just what I had assembled. Johnny Gilbert, my trusted lieutenant, was in charge of firearms; Ben Hall was by my side; Dan Charters, who was godfather to young Harry, had nominated himself my aide-de-camp; and John O’Meally would enforce discipline. But every element of the operation was under my personal control. I selected the other men from those who had proved themselves loyal and able—Fordyce, Bow, and Henry Manns. Thus there were eight of us and everyone knew that once we struck there would be no turning back. My plan was a simple one—we would stop the coach with a 127

Fire in the Blood show of arms, set the troopers loose in the bush, and clear out with the biggest take in the history of the colony.We’d carry it by packhorse to my camp above Wheogo and there divide it between us. Then each man was on his own, either to hide his share and go about his business till the flurry subsided, or to make his way out of the district in any way he chose. Johnny Gilbert, I knew, was bound for New Zealand. He’d sailed across the Tasman before when he felt the Traps were getting too familiar. The young fellows—Fordyce, Manns and Bow—would pocket their share of currency and bury the gold for a later time. Dan Charters and Ben said they would buy land and more land to become cattle barons. I could believe it of Charters. His people had good holdings already and he fitted the picture nicely with his fancy rig. But I couldn’t see Ben ever settling down. By then, he and Johnny had the razz of the road.They were hooked by the throat on the sheer excitement of the take and the chase. I felt it myself in the early days but I learned to hold it in check for I could see it led to ever greater danger until only the foolhardy risk would bring satisfaction. For me, Eugowra held the answer to all my ambitions. I knew by then that there was a limit to the company I could recruit, and the idea of leaving this world of woes to die in that forest glen with sword in hand lacked the appeal it had held for me on Cockatoo. Now that I had Kitty, a whole new prospect had opened before me. Yes, Eugowra held the key. Little wonder then that I was so particular about every detail of the ambush. I sent Alex Fordyce and Johnny into Forbes on the Saturday to buy six new double-barrelled shotguns, rations, an American tomahawk to chop open the bullion boxes, blacking for disguise and camouflage, our customary red scarves for masks, and plenty of ammunition. We had our rifles and revolvers and a couple of packhorses at the ready when they returned.That afternoon we set off for Eugowra. 128

The big strike We camped by a creek about two miles from the Rocks; Henry Manns made the tucker and we kept the fire going all night to ward off the winter chill. Next morning I was up early and led the boys to the Rocks where I selected a position for each man with a clear field of fire. I personally supervised the loading of all the longarms. I left nothing to chance. By noon when the coach left Forbes, my organisation was complete.There was little to do but go over the action once again then settle down and wait.As the hours passed, we stayed hidden and let travellers by without interference.Then came a stroke of luck— two drays hauled by bullock teams came trundling along the road headed for Forbes with supplies for the miners.A show of arms was sufficient persuasion for the bullockies to unhook the drays on the road itself and give their teams a rest in the shade.The gold escort would be nicely blocked in. We knew the troopers who’d be travelling in the coach—the usual half-trained servants of the British upper classes. Sergeant Condell would be in charge, sitting up on the box beside the regular driver, John Fegan. John wasn’t above passing the odd nugget of information our way and for this he was well rewarded.The Fegans were good people. Inside the coach would be Senior Constable Henry Moran and troopers John Rafferty and William Havilland. All were former soldiers who would shoot us down for the Queen’s shilling without turning a hair. Well, we’d see their mettle this day, and no mistake. Just before the coach was due, around four that afternoon, I passed around the gin bottle to quell the nerves.Alex Fordyce was most affected by the wait and swigged the most gin. Silly bugger. I had to snap him into line.Then the coach was upon us and I held my men until Fegan saw the drays and heaved on the reins. ‘Now!’ I cried.‘Fire!’ 129

Fire in the Blood It was a fusillade worthy of Wellington.The shotguns roared like cannon in the confined space and echoed round the rocky peaks and gullies. I used small shot in the longarms as I had no wish to take their lives. I wanted them off and running. As it was, Condell took a piece of shot in the ribs and Moran thought he’d lost his manhood. But the fact is they were barely scratched and, when I loosed a second volley, they ran like startled piglets into the bush and kept sprinting as though followed by the furies of hell itself. My lads gave a cheer and Johnny ran to take the lead coach horse who was thrashing in his harness after the coach itself turned on its side. Fegan had leapt from his box, still holding the reins at the first blast, and quickly joined the bullockies under the dray. When the coppers decamped into the scrub, I bade the drivers out and gave them fair compensation for their trouble. Fegan stuck his finger through a hole in his old cabbage tree hat and claimed a bullet had passed through as he jumped from the coach. ‘Get out of it,’ I said. At least he had the grace to laugh. ‘Well, it sure felt like something whistled past my head.’ ‘Here, I’ll do the job for you,’ I said and tossed his hat in the air, fired a single round from my Navy Colt, and ventilated it. Fegan ran after it and plonked it on his head. ‘You’re a gentleman,’ he said.‘It’ll be the most famous hat in New South Wales.’ That, at least, was true, a rare go among all the tales that have been told of the great Eugowra Rocks robbery. Perhaps this is not surprising for it suited most everyone involved to spread a particular tale.And the truth of the matter can easily get mixed when there are so many parties involved. So I will speak only of the things I know to be true. They started simple.We lugged out the four iron strongboxes and harnessed them to two of the coach horses.Then we cleared out of 130

The big strike the area about two miles into the hills where I called a halt. The coach horses were starting to knock up. No point in carrying the extra weight of the boxes so we unloaded them and smashed the locks with the tomahawk. Gold. More gold than I or any of us had seen in one place. Bag after bag of nuggets and dust. The treasure of the land. The boys whooped and jumped about, belting each other on the back.Then I opened one of the bigger canvas bags—banknotes tumbled out like manna from the gods and set the boys dancing another jig. Ben made a fire and, after a celebratory nobbler, I told them all to burn their scarves, caps and anything else that might identify us from the ambush. That done, we saddled up for a long ride back toward Forbes and beyond to my camp above Wheogo. Forty miles we rode that night, stopping once to rest the horses and have a feed ourselves and once for a short spell on Green’s Station at the base of the Weddins.There I gave them another issue of grog and, after the horses had grazed, we saddled up once more for the final seventeen miles to my cave. In fact, to call it a cave is perhaps to give the wrong impression. Certainly there was a substantial hollow back in the mountain that was so perfect a shelter that I have no doubt the Blacks had put it to good use long before the coming of the white man. But, like Peisley’s, it was one of several indentations in the mountainside and from a nearby pinnacle you could see down to the plains and the tracks that travellers had to use to reach you. I had fixed it up with some of the comforts of home and when I was away young Warrigal, Kitty’s kid brother, would keep an eye on things for me. I had a good supply of Weddin Mountain Dew put aside and when we arrived I broke it out for the boys.They had performed well, though Fordyce and Charters had not the nerve of the others and I told them plainly their cut would suffer for it.They made no argument. 131

Fire in the Blood However, the next day when I weighed out the shares, I relented. I had made my point and there was more than enough to go around. Truth is, when you added the banknotes to the gold, the haul would buy you half of Queensland if you had a mind for it—more money than a score of coppers would earn in a lifetime. I sent Johnny Gilbert down to McGuire’s place for rations and when he returned we had a slap-up feed and more than a few nobblers before Ben, O’Meally and Henry Manns loaded up their horses and made off to their own cribs. By then it had started to rain hard and I was desperate to see Kitty. But Johnny had run into the Warrigal on the track and Brown, it seemed, was in residence for another 24 hours before heading off with cattle to the sale yards. Another time and I’d have confronted him, but to do so now would have risked the whole enterprise and all the planning that went with it. So I held my ground and passed around the Mountain Dew as the rain tumbled down. Next day, Warrigal took my message to her: load up the sulky with whatever you need and by Thursday, come what may, we’re taking off. I didn’t know it then but Lady Luck had dealt a couple of wild cards to the enemy. First, when the troopers skedaddled from the hold-up, they had run in the direction of Hanbury Clements’ station and that young worthy galloped off to Forbes to break the news to Sir Fred, reaching him by midnight on the Sunday night and finding him sober. No doubt he turned a little paler than usual when he heard he’d been bested once again. Indeed, the sound of a colony’s laughter would be spur enough to any man and by 2 a.m. he was on the trail. He reached the Rocks by morning. There he found our fire with the remains of a scarf or two. Then the rains came and for a while they floundered around, looking for our tracks and finding their own. 132

The big strike Potty divided his forces, heading south himself with three troopers and young Richard Mitchell, the son of the explorer whose track I’d followed with Monro to Spring Plains all those years ago. The other team under Sergeant Charlie Sanderson headed our way. Meanwhile the troopers Condell, Havilland and Moran, little the worse for wear, returned to the coach with a couple of fresh horses and John Fegan sporting his ventilated hat.They righted it, collected the mailbags we’d cast aside, and set off to complete the journey to Orange. On the way, they picked up three females at Keenan’s Bridge and Havilland entertained them with the tale of his encounter with the fearsome Frank Gardiner. ‘I wasn’t born to be shot,’ he said. ‘I ought to live a hundred years.’ He scored a good laugh from the ladies, I’m told. But it turned out to be his last. As the coach rounded a corner at Orange’s Commercial Bank, he picked up Moran’s loaded revolver from the floor of the coach and the thing discharged.The bullet took him in the neck and he died without uttering another word. Many a time I’ve heard it said he did himself in for the shame of the robbery. There are plenty who said it was further proof of the foolishness of clashing with General Gardiner. This was so much tosh, but understandable in the wake of Eugowra, for, at a certain point, the stories and the legend tangle up and the truth comes panting along behind like a blown nag. It’s the same with Pottinger, who met his fate in similar fashion . . . but that’s to get ahead of myself. And, at the time, my problem was that suddenly I wasn’t as far ahead of his troopers as I thought. In fact, on the Thursday morning as I was getting ready to leave Mt Wheogo, I sent Johnny down to McGuire’s again to grab a couple of extra saddlebags. He was back in a flash. ‘Bastards are everywhere,’ he shouted. He leapt off his horse, grabbed a bag of rations and remounted. 133

Fire in the Blood ‘You know what to do,’ I said.We all knew the drill—split and run. Fortunately, we were just about ready to roll. Kitty would be waiting in vain with the sulky but, when she saw the coppers, she’d understand. We cleared out over the other side of the hill then divided our forces, with Gilbert, Fordyce and Bow heading south while I took Dan Charters with me—with the packhorse in tow—and headed down the other side of Mt Wheogo. We’d gone no more than a couple of miles when we hit boggy ground. The packhorse was holding us back so I let him go in thick scrub and made for higher ground where I could get a bead on our pursuers. The reason I kept Charters with me was I didn’t want to risk him being taken on his own. He was a friend of Ben’s and that was good enough to get him in on the big one. And he liked to stick around with me and share in the excitement. If Johnny was my lieutenant, he was my batman. But his connections with the gentry and the way he aped their manners gave me pause. As it happened, my instincts were right. At the time, however, we were both damned angry at having to leave the horse and fit to be tied when Sanderson’s tracker, Billy Dargin, sniffed him out. I knew Billy and liked him, the little black bastard.Always had a bloody grin on his face. He’d track an ant through a hornet’s nest if you gave him a quid. In fact, he’d do it just to show you he could. Pottinger treated him like a pet marsupial but Sanderson appealed to his better nature and convinced him we had broken the tribe’s taboos by taking up arms. More than once, I’d got into his ear about the spirit of sharing. ‘The pommies want the lot!’ I told him. ‘All we want is our fair share.’ ‘You plurry good rider, Frank,’ he’d say, changing the subject completely,‘but you outside the tribe.That why you gotta gun.’ You can’t win. At least, that’s how we felt that bloody Thursday 134

The big strike when Billy led the troopers to the packhorse and we watched them reclaim more than a quarter of the gold—about 1200 ounces. I was more than half inclined to ride back with guns blazing and challenge the whole party of five. But I knew Charters wasn’t up for it and, even without the pack, I’d still done mighty well. Besides, Kitty was waiting back at Wheogo station.

135

CHAPTER 17

Potty by name

P

ottinger and his men went 200 miles south before he realised he was chasing ghosts and turned back. Eight days later they were back in the Lachlan area near Merool Creek when they happened upon a party of three horsemen—Johnny Gilbert, his brother Charles, who had come to the district from Victoria, and young Henry Manns. Pottinger noted their fine mounts and asked for receipts. That was signal for Johnny to vacate the scene but Charles and Henry were not so quick off the mark and Pottinger drew his pistols. A search of their packhorse unearthed 200 ounces of gold dust and their pockets gave forth more banknotes than they could easily explain, so Potty claimed his prize. Not for long, however. For Johnny set out for reinforcements. By then, Charters and I were well ensconced in the Weddins and I was passing my days at O’Meally’s shanty. It seemed that the 136

Potty by name identity of the Eugowra Rocks fusiliers was a well-kept secret and might just stay that way despite a reward of 1000 pounds and a free pardon to anyone who would pimp. So, when Johnny arrived at O’Meally’s with the news of Henry Manns’ capture, we set out immediately. We found them on the track to Young at about one o’clock the next afternoon and, well hidden by our red mufflers, soon put Pottinger and party to flight with a dozen shots in their general direction. Henry, along with Charlie Gilbert, came back to the fold while the coppers took shelter at Sprowle’s Station. Unfortunately, Pottinger still had the gold in his saddle bags but at least we’d rescued our men. Potty finally made it back to Forbes a week later but by then he’d heard tales all along the track that the mastermind of Eugowra had been Yours Truly. Johnny and I had a serious confabulation. He reckoned the time had come to make ourselves scarce. I didn’t try to hold him back, not that it would have done any good if I had. He was a mild fellow usually—Happy Jack, we called him—but, once he’d settled on a course, only a damn fool would stand in his way. We were not much for sentimentalism but I have no shame to say that, after we’d shaken hands and thumped each other on the back, there was a fair lump in my throat. And when he passed into the soft grey evening, well set on a glossy bay thoroughbred, I sought my own company for an hour or two. Johnny and his brother went south. By chance, their other brother, James, was working on Coliban Station next to Monro’s old place on Spring Plains.They made the sort of arrangements that big families do to share the wealth, then the three boys took off for the land of the Long White Cloud—Kiwi country. Johnny’s timing was perfect.Two weeks later, Pottinger rounded up Ben Hall, Dan Charters, John O’Meally, John Bow and Alex 137

Fire in the Blood Fordyce, together with Ben’s brother Bill, John McGuire, John O’Meally’s father, Patrick, and—I enjoyed this—John Brown, the wimp of Wheogo. He billeted them in the Forbes stockade on suspicion of armed robbery while he went to work on them, probing for a traitor or a low-life tattletale. Looking back, what happened next was the beginning of the end for Sir Frederick Pottinger, Bart.The events of the night of 9 August 1862 would set up a howl of laughter across the entire colony and burn his moniker into the language of Australia. And no downfall was ever more richly deserved. Of course, I am no dispassionate onlooker in this matter; had it gone the other way, I would have been dead as mutton. It happened at Wheogo Station, where I spent many an hour with Kitty. I could have slipped away with her while Brown was a guest of Her Majesty in the Forbes lock-up, but that was not my way. I knew I couldn’t explain to such a damp squib the power of the thing between Kitty and me. But, at least when he got out, I would face the man and let him know his time with Kitty was over. Old Mrs Walsh, Kitty’s fearsome mother, had a twinkle in her eye where I was concerned and no love whatsoever for Brown. She knew the score with Kitty and me and our plans to leave. And she sometimes joined us for supper with young Warrigal in Kitty’s hut. Saturday 9 August was one of those nights. We had a roast of beef with potatoes and turnips from Kitty’s vegetable patch. Afterward they left us, and then about 10.30 Warrigal returned to sleep on the couch in the living room, on guard for his sister. I got up shortly after and left Kitty in the bedroom while I yarned with the lad. I liked him a lot—quick as a whip at seventeen with a ready smile and a clear eye, the best kind of currency lad. Then Kitty came out and wrapped a shawl round herself before she went outside for another log for the fire. In a while,Warrigal dozed off and I got myself together for the ride up the mountain to my 138

Potty by name own place. If Pottinger was on my trail, I didn’t want him busting in and putting Kitty in the line of fire. Soon after midnight, I kissed my lady goodbye and strolled out to the saddle shed. I was giving Darkie a spell that night. I had a white stallion, Rosemount, that Johnny had left behind when he departed on his holiday across the Tasman. Lovely big brute, about seventeen hands and all muscle. I mounted and rode into the bush toward the looming shadow of Mt Wheogo with its crescent of blazing stars above. Unbeknown to me, I was riding directly into the guns of Pottinger and his men. They had arrived not long before—nine of them led by Potty, Sub-Inspector Nolan and bloody Sanderson, all the way from Forbes for the single purpose of catching me at Kitty’s place. But they hadn’t the brass to front me; instead, they waited like snakes in the grass for me to head their way. Next I knew, not five yards before me, Pottinger himself rose from a crouch and levelled his carbine.‘Stand in the Queen’s name!’ he cried. I don’t know who got the greater fright, me or Rosemount. But the horse reared on its back legs, whinnied and turned as I reefed the reins, all to the accompaniment of a delicious ‘click’ as Potty’s gun misfired. ‘Shoot the wretch,’ he screamed at Sanderson, who immediately loosed off a couple that came uncomfortably close. ‘Shoot him. Shoot him down!’ Bullets came from everywhere but too late. Rosemount and I were away, and I paused only to cooee a signal to Kitty before giving the stallion his head. The troopers didn’t even bother to follow. This was Potty’s law: no trial in case of error; shoot on suspicion and leave the explanations till later, since, as they say, dead men tell no tales. So much for British justice in the Colony of New South Wales. It served the bastard right that within two days he was the laughing stock of the district, then the whole damn country. 139

Fire in the Blood First came a bush ballad, ‘The Bloody Field of Wheogo’, that quickly did the rounds of the shanties: Equipped for a fight, in trappings bright, came a band of warriors there. By gallant Sir Fred, right gallantly led, the Ranger to seize in a snare. They spread all round, and the house they surround, nine men with revolver and gun. ‘A reward’s on his head!’ cried the gallant Sir Fred,‘And we’re nine to the Bushranger’s one!’ At gentle speed, on a snow-white steed, and singing a joyous song, A stalwart man, was he to scan and flushed with ruffian pride. In many a fray he had won the day and the ‘New Police’ defied. Up started then Sir Fred and his men with cocked carbines in hand, And called aloud to the Ranger proud on pain of death to ‘Stand’. But the Ranger proud, he laughed aloud and bounding, rode away, While Sir Frederick Pott, shut his eyes for a shot—and missed in his usual way.

There were many more verses and in a few weeks there were half a dozen other works of the poet’s art doing the rounds, all of them laughing the bastard to shame. But then came the final blow. The phrase ‘blind Freddy’ gained instant popularity, and whenever it was repeated a rollicking roll of laughter followed. Kitty and I headed for Victoria in the sulky, not more than three days after Pottinger’s attempt on my life. By then, purely for spite, he had taken young Warrigal in for ‘bushranging’, without a scrap of evidence to support it. The poor kid would catch fever in the stockade and die a terrible death. Then too, just as I feared, Charters started to blab.The turncoat with the toff ’s taste in trousers, the flash bastard who’d called himself my aide-de-camp, named Gilbert, Bow, Fordyce and Manns as members of the hold-up gang at Eugowra, with myself as leader. He 140

Potty by name also named John McGuire as an accessory. Then he stuck out his hand for a free pardon and a thousand pounds. Whether he actually received the cash, I cannot say, but no amount of blood money could serve to compensate for the hatred he brought on himself from the people of that time and place.The only thing to his credit was that he didn’t name his best mates, Ben Hall and John O’Meally. Instead, he made up the numbers with two characters named ‘Charlie’ and ‘Billy’. Most of the men Pottinger had rounded up were soon released for lack of evidence, but the three Johns—McGuire, Bow and O’Meally—together with Alex Fordyce were taken to Bathurst where Charters’ evidence cleared O’Meally but the others were committed for trial. Poor Henry Manns had been picked up in Wombat as a ‘suspicious person’—dobbed in by another pimp who wanted his pound of flesh—and he joined them in Bathurst Gaol. Meanwhile, Kitty and I made our way down Major Mitchell’s line on much the same track that I and my family had taken many years before. It was like a journey into my past and I was guide to the woman who, I was sure, would share the rest of my life with me. We had Darkie between the shafts and two mares following.We had the bright stars at night and the warm earth for a bed. We kept to ourselves and Kitty shaved off my whiskers so I wouldn’t resemble the picture that soon adorned police stations from one end of the country to the other. Behind us, New South Wales was in such a high state of excitement that people were reporting the depredations of Frank Gardiner in parts into which I’d never even ventured. Every man jack who was held up from Grenfell to Wagga Wagga claimed the highwayman was none other than Yours Truly. They couldn’t abide the thought that they’d been jacked by some lesser Tobyman.Well, that suited me just fine.The coppers were wearing themselves out galloping from one Gardiner hold-up to another. 141

Fire in the Blood We made it to the Portland area without the slightest inconvenience and there I took pride in introducing Kitty to my sisters. It did my heart good. She and fair Archina were friends from the moment they met. And at a bush picnic, far from prying eyes, we gathered and remembered the world of our childhood. Kitty entered the fold as though her place there had been long prepared and waiting. From that day forward, I knew myself again as Francis Christie and that is the way we lived—as Mr and Mrs Christie, bound in natural love and in the eyes of a vengeful law. We didn’t tarry long.There was a new life to build and we had to be far away from any who might recognise and point the finger. So we caught a coastal steam and sailer, the Lady Jane, loaded my Darkie and our chattels on board, and the captain set course for Queensland.

142

CHAPTER 18

North and south

K

itty hated the sea and was weak and trembling by the time we reached Moreton Bay. I did my best to jolly her along for I took well to the bounding main, perhaps because of my remembrance of it as a wee bairn. But victims of the mal de mer have no capacity to be jollied. It took two days before she was restored to her sprightly good humour. I was pretty damn humorous myself. Queensland had become a colony in its own right only three years previous and the settlers were flocking in. So, too, were the prospectors and we soon heard of a new gold strike west of Rockhampton. We had the choice: a coastal steam packet or overland. One look at Kitty’s sweet face decided me and we stocked up the sulky, found another mate for Darkie, and set out for the Tropic of Capricorn which runs directly down the main street of Rockhampton. 143

Fire in the Blood We were in no great hurry. I had enough put aside in gold, jewellery and banknotes to last us five years or more, provided we were careful, to say nothing of the crib I’d buried on Mt Wheogo. There was plenty of company on the track if we wanted it—teams heading north and west to populate a mighty territory and each mob as peaceable and friendly as you could wish. Caution was our watchword at first, but as we travelled ever further from the company of coppers and the privilege they defended, and as we found the joy of togetherness, the rage left me. Maybe the Queensland sun baked it out of me. But I remember to this day the morning I woke with Kitty on the bank of a wide stream with Darkie and his mate munching nearby and for the first time for many years the tension was gone from my bones. I was relaxed. I was a new man. The river was the Fitzroy and that was the day we met the Craigs—Archie and Louisa—who were heading toward Apis Creek, a township that supplied the miners at the Peak Downs field. The Craigs were up to their axletrees in mud when we came upon them. I harnessed Darkie beside their little mare and they were out in half a shot. We had no particular destination in mind but, as we got yarning to the Craigs, I could see some real possibilities in prospect. That night we supped together and later Kitty and I talked low and long in our tent as the rain poured down and the bullfrogs gave a balladeer’s chorus in the undergrowth. ‘Archie is pretty well heeled,’ I said.‘He tells me he’s going to put up a small hotel at Apis Creek. If we wanted to, we could go halves with him and build a general store beside it and run the two together.’ ‘I fancy myself as a storekeeper,’ she sighed. ‘We could have a stock of dresses for the women, little outfits for the kids . . .’ ‘Canned food,’ I said,‘flour and sugar and beans; salt for the beef. I could do a little butchering—’ 144

North and south ‘I don’t think so, Frank.You’ve done enough in that line.’ ‘Oh, you think so, do you, Mrs Christie? You’ve decided a man’s future without even a by your leave, my lord and master.’ ‘Ha ha, that I have,’ she chuckled and we put aside our dreams and gave over to the pleasures of the moment. Next day, I shook on the deal with Archie. He could front the business, get the licence in his name and look to all the other deeds of authority while I supplied my half of the capital for the building and then a little more for the stock. By March of 1863 we were well and truly in business.We lived on the premises in a comfortable place with a timber floor. Kitty kept it spotless and, when there was need of it, she helped Louisa with the dining room. Soon the place was a thriving concern. Peak Downs was a good mine and the prospecting population kept rising. I gave credit to those whose luck had yet to strike and, almost without exception, the miners proved as good as their word.When they did hit paydirt, they showed their appreciation. In fact, several of them took to storing their gold in my safe while waiting for the coach to take it to Rocky. Kitty and I couldn’t help but chuckle to ourselves when we thought what might happen if we told them who it was that was standing guard over their valuables. There was laughter aplenty in that place but I wouldn’t wish it thought that it was all a butchers’ picnic. There were times, I must own, when a black cloud descended on me and I took to the bottle for a day or two. As the months passed, it happened less, but from time to time a traveller would have news of the lads of the Lachlan and I’d find myself tossing around in that other world I’d left behind. The worst of it were the trials of McGuire, Manns, Fordyce and Bow. At the time, I heard only dribs and drabs, but later in Darlinghurst I heard it all in the finest detail and two years ago John McGuire wrote me a long letter that once more brought the whole thing home. 145

Fire in the Blood They were taken from Bathurst Gaol handcuffed and bundled on to the train for the journey to Sydney. It was 24 January 1863. ‘Nearly all the population was out to see us desperate men,’ McGuire wrote. They were kept back by about 50 or 60 mounted troopers but the black maria disappointed them for we were rushed into it out of sight of the crowd as it was backed up close to the platform. We started from that platform in the coach with 50 troopers all with white gloves and white reins on the horses. One would have thought it was a Royal Equipage and a King and Queen was being carried through.

When they reached Darlinghurst, where the gaol is connected to the court by an underground passage, there was another big crowd waiting.And, when the court case began on 3 February 1863, the place was packed with spectators, from the high-born defenders of privilege to the good people who came to lend their support. The trial was held before Justice Edward Wise, and the charge, according to McGuire, accused them of assaulting the troopers of the gold escort at Eugowra and stealing 2719 ounces of gold, 3700 pounds in cash, and all that was contained in ten mailbags. All pleaded not guilty but then Henry Manns’ case was separated from the other three and he was led away. The Attorney-General, John Fletcher Hargrave, prosecuted the Crown’s case himself.A Cambridge man, Hargrave had lawyered in London where it all got too much for his nerves and he found himself in an institution. New South Wales was his rest cure and our sunny climes did him good service. He arrived in Australia in 1857 and by 1860 he was the first law officer of the colony.The defence lawyers were Irish-born James Martin QC assisted by Robert Isaacs, two vigorous gentlemen with a reputation for going it hard. 146

North and south According to all the reports I’ve collected, Hargrave went straight to the nub of it. ‘Her Majesty’s mail was deliberately stopped on the high road by a number of persons who banded together to make war, as it were, upon the government,’ he said. And, in the telling of his tale, Hargrave made clear the terrible consequence to the lads if they were convicted.‘I, in my capacity of public prosecutor, place before you the evidence that tells against the prisoners, and I do so unhesitatingly, despite the consequences. Did I,’ and here he hesitated,‘did I allow myself to think of the consequences to these prisoners . . . I can assure you, gentlemen, that I . . .’The nervous man broke down before drinking from his glass of water and recovering his wits. He had no love of the Hangman. First to be called was Pottinger who said he found 213 ounces of gold and 135 pounds in banknotes on Henry Manns when he arrested him at Merool on that first occasion before we rescued him. But the bag in which the gold was carried had no connection with the escort robbery. And, as Martin pointed out, Henry Manns was not on trial so Potty was left with very little to say. Sanderson followed and told the story of his ride after two horsemen—myself and Charters, though he made no identification. He did, however, secure that bloody packhorse with its 1200 ounces of gold. Nothing much of consequence then happened until Charters the turncoat came to the witness box, too ashamed to look upon his former friends in the dock. He gave his address as Humbug Creek and that brought the first smile of the day to the lads.Then he told his tale and, like all good liars, he kept enough of the truth in to make it plausible yet give himself the role of the innocent bystander. As he told it, I was the martinet, Johnny Gilbert my loyal lieutenant and Ben Hall and John O’Meally nowhere to be found. John McGuire was a shadowy figure somewhere in the background 147

Fire in the Blood though Manns, Fordyce and Bow were nailed to the cross by the lousy sodomite. Under cross-examination, Martin made a fool of him, particularly when he compared his testimony with the story he’d told at Bathurst at the committal. But it could hardly be argued that Charters was not present, so things were starting to look grim for the lads. They were not greatly helped or hindered by the next witness, Tom Richards, the brother of the butcher who worked for Billy Fogg and me at Lambing Flat. He now made and sold lemonade in Forbes, though I doubt that enterprise paid his bills. I knew him as a lazy loafer and a vicious bastard with women. In fact, Martin brought out in cross-examination that he’d been charged with rape in Adelaide, and Richards didn’t like that one bit. Nor, I fancy, did the twelve good men and true. Other Crown witnesses had nothing of importance to add, and, for the defence, Jimmy Martin had only one to put on the stand— Dr Hans Slidell, a sawmiller who swore he’d seen Bow and Fordyce miles from the area when they were supposed to be robbing the Escort. God knows where they found him or why the Prussian would tell such a tale. But that was the end of the case. The lawyers then had their say and Judge Wise summed up and sent the jury off in the late afternoon of 5 February. At ten o’clock, he called them back in and the foreman announced,‘Your Honour, I think there is very little probability of the jury agreeing to a verdict.’ Next morning, he was more definite. ‘There is not the slightest possibility of the members being likely to agree.’ By now, there were a thousand spectators in and around the court house. Judge Wise spoke some words of legalese and, to the delight of the crowd, he discharged the jury. But the proceedings were not quite done. It seems that court officers had discovered ‘stones, brickbats and missiles’ in the gallery for loosing on Richards 148

North and south and Charters should the lads have been found guilty. The judge wagged his finger at the crowd who filed out in good humour and joined the mob outside. That very night, Slippery Charlie’s government posted a 1000pound reward for Francis Gardiner alias Clarke, and John alias Johnny Gilbert, who, they said,‘are charged with the commission of numerous and serious offences and have hitherto eluded the efforts to apprehend them, principally by their being harboured, assisted and concealed by parties resident in the districts they frequent.’ They gave our descriptions. Johnny was ‘between 22 and 24 years of age, boyish appearance, between nine stone and ten stone weight, slight, light brown straight hair worn long in native fashion, beardless and whiskerless: has the appearance and manner of bushman or stockman, and is particularly flippant in his address and appearance’. I was a more sinister character, 32 years of age, five feet eight and a quarter inches high with black hair, brown eyes and scars aplenty. That same evening, Sir Frederick Pottinger was strolling along King Street after a lengthy meeting with his superiors when he noticed three men following him. According to the Sydney Morning Herald,‘Shortly after, Sir Frederick received a severe blow from behind and was knocked off the pavement into the mud of the street. No one went to the Inspector’s assistance and all the officer could say about the incident was that when he recovered from the blow he saw several men at a distance apparently laughing at his misfortune.’ Alas, a hung jury was not enough to save the lads from the Ascendancy.The law of England gave the forces of privilege another crack.Wise was replaced on the bench by the Chief Justice, Sir Alfred Stephens, whose hatred for the men of the road knew no bounds. And, in the second trial, Hargraves learned from his mistakes. The lads could no longer afford the services of Martin QC.They had to make do with Isaacs as their only barrister. And, this time, Henry Manns was included in the dock. 149

Fire in the Blood The evidence was much the same as in the first trial, but Isaacs was not even in the court for most of the prosecution’s case.When Pottinger gave his evidence, Henry Manns, in his ignorance, damned himself in open court.‘It is all correct,’ he volunteered.‘On Saturday last at Mr McLerie’s office, I pleaded guilty to Sir Frederick Pottinger.’ Only when it came time for Charters’ evidence did Stephens adjourn the court until the defence counsel could be present. Isaacs said little enough during his evidence in chief but then on crossexamination he chopped the lying hound to pieces, especially when Charters insisted that his friend Ben Hall was not among the Eugowra riflemen. In fact, Charters got himself so tangled in lies that a different judge would have thrown the case out there and then.At one stage, Isaacs shouted,‘You can’t even remember your own lies!’ John McGuire turned white in the dock when it was revealed that Charters had taken his wife, Ellen, off to the Harp of Erin Hotel in Forbes for a night or two of fun and games when the poor bugger was in the lock-up. But when it came to Henry Manns’ part in the caper, Isaacs couldn’t shake him. And, at the end of it, Stephens let Charters blather on about what a wonderful God-fearing fellow he was. Nothing showed the judge’s determination to build the case against the lads more clearly than that. British justice is all show. When the talking was done, Stephens sent the jury out at 8 p.m. and demanded their return with a verdict by 9.30. They duly complied and, first up, John McGuire was acquitted to a rumble of approval from the public benches. Bow and Fordyce patted him on the back and he left the dock. Henry stood mute. The three remaining would fain have followed their mate but in the next minute each of them was condemned. ‘Guilty!’ Bow and Fordyce protested their innocence; Henry had nothing to say. Then Stephens revealed himself and more when he said, ‘I tell you 150

North and south candidly that if the sacrifice of your lives will be the means, in any degree, of checking the present lawlessness that prevails, the cause of society will be served by your deaths. I can feel for you as men but the interests of society are paramount. ‘John Bow, Alexander Fordyce and Henry Manns, the sentence of this court on you severally is that you be taken back to the place whence you came and thence on such a day as may be appointed by the executive, to the place of execution, and that you be then and there hanged by the neck until you are dead. God have mercy on your souls—I advise you to look alone to Him for mercy, for I cannot hold out, and you yourselves can scarcely expect, the exercise of mercy here.’ There was great disquiet among the people and two months later the government commuted Fordyce’s sentence to hard labour for life. In quick time, petitions were raised for the same treatment to be dealt John Bow and Henry Manns. Governor Young stepped in and let Bow off the hook but Manns remained consigned to his fate. His mother and father in nearby Campbelltown were struck down by the anguish of it. James Martin QC wrote seeking mercy, and, as Henry’s execution day approached, citizens from around the colony banded together to plead for commutation. Most prominent among them was the leading phrenologist of the time,Archibald Sillers Hamilton, who examined both Bow and Manns and discovered that ‘in point of intellectual and moral qualities, they stand in favourable contrast with men generally condemned for such grave offences’. This was accompanied by a petition from no fewer than 14 072 people of Sydney who had put their names to it in only 24 hours.The leading petitioners met Young personally on 23 March and that same afternoon he gave his decision. Henry would hang. My yellowed copy of the Sydney Morning Herald records the shocking end of Henry Manns, aged 23, on the gallows at 151

Fire in the Blood Darlinghurst Gaol.Their reporter called it a ‘sad and terrible spectacle’. It was all that and more. Though open to the public, he wrote: There were only about 30 persons at the distressing scene, and the execution was delayed for nearly twenty minutes beyond the usual hour of 9 a.m., probably with the humane object of allowing any communication in the shape of respite or reprieve to reach the gaol. However, no such document arrived and the prisoner was pinioned and brought forth. He walked firmly and erect, and though somewhat pallid in expression he displayed no want of fortitude—still less anything approaching bravado or recklessness. Arrived at the foot of the gallows, he remained in prayer for five or six minutes with the reverend attendants and then ascended the ladder in company with the Venerable Archdeacon McEnroe and the Rev Father Dwyer. Arriving at the drop he spoke briefly to the 30 persons assembled stating that he had nothing further to say beyond what he had already told; adding that he was thankful to his friends and the good people in Sydney who had exerted themselves to save his life, for which service he hoped God would bless them. The clergymen then parted with him, praying as they descended from the platform, while the executioner proceeded to perform his terrible office. On this occasion, whether it arose from nervousness or excitement on the part of the executioner, there ensued one of the most appalling spectacles ever witnessed at an execution.The noose of the rope, instead of passing tightly around the neck, slipped completely away, the knot coming round in front of the face, while the whole weight of the criminal’s body was sustained by the thick muscles of the poll. The rope, in short, went round the middle of the head and the work of the hangman proved the most terrible bungle.The suffer-

152

North and south ings and struggles of the wretched being were heartrending to behold. His body swayed about, and writhed, evidently in the most intense agony. The arms repeatedly rose and fell and finally with one of his hands the unfortunate man gripped the rope as if to tear the pressure from his head—a long guttural noise the meanwhile proceeding from his throat and lungs while blood gushed from his nostrils and stained the cap with which his face was covered. This awful scene lasted for more than ten minutes when stillness ensued and it was hoped that death had terminated the culprit’s sufferings. Shocking to relate, however, the vital spark was not yet extinguished and to the horror of all present the convulsive writhings were renewed—the tenacity to life being remarkable and a repetition of the sickening scene was only at last terminated at the instance of Dr West, by the aid of four prisoners, who were able to hold the dying malefactor up in their arms while the executioner readjusted the rope, when the body was let fall with a jerk, and another minute sufficed to end the agonies of death. The executioner expressed his sorrow to the jailer and undersheriff for what had happened, assuring them that it was from no fault or intention of his, but solely the result of accident.

Mrs Manns in Campbelltown tearfully took possession of Henry’s body and had it decently buried in the Catholic cemetery there. At the time this occurred, I knew little of the detail and what came to me in Apis was third- or fourth-hand in the telling. But it did not suffer for want of horror for all that. And, though I feigned only passing interest, behind the respectable curtains of our living quarters at the store, I went on a bender that lasted for a week or more and left me a trembling wreck at the end of it. The only saving grace to the whole episode is that it marked the 153

Fire in the Blood end of public hanging in New South Wales. Thereafter, witness to the awful deed was confined to the officials and those members of the press with the stomach for it—a grisly breed, they.

If Judge Stephen thought the hanging of Henry Manns would put an end to bushranging in New South Wales, he could not have been more mistaken. My absence meant the rebels lacked a leader who could organise his forces on a grand scale. But, because I had disappeared without trace, my legend grew with each passing week. My continued freedom was an encouragement to the young bucks of the bush— I was living proof that you could make a powerful score and get clean away. And such was the rage and the hatred between the Haves and the Have-Nots that in no time at all they found a new figure to lead the push: Ben Hall.When he was released from the Forbes stockade, he returned to Sandy Creek to find nearly a hundred head of his cattle dead of thirst and starvation in his yards. Bridget was long gone; his partner, McGuire, was locked up, and Ellen McGuire was playing footsie with Charters in Forbes, so no one was around to hear the poor beasts perish in the heat. Ben always believed the police themselves had penned the animals out of spite; whatever the truth of it, he would never again draw a lawful breath. For the next three years; he would be protected, defended and even beloved as the handsome young cattleman who’d fallen victim to the twin devilments of police persecution and a faithless wife. But while he would lead Pottinger and his troopers on a merry dance, his deeds being told and retold from one side of the country to the other, he never led a cause. No one ever called him General. The real firebrand among those I left behind was Johnny Gilbert. It was only when he returned from his holiday in New Zealand 154

North and south toward the end of 1862 that the gang really made the colony sit up and take notice. Until then, Ben and John O’Meally had only held up travellers. Once Gilbert was back in the saddle, they took on the troopers themselves. Starting in February 1863, they took special pleasure in taking prisoner individual constables and occasionally groups of two and three.They stripped them, took their horses, and left them to walk back to town in the altogether. The police knew them as Gilbert’s Gang and, as well as Ben and John O’Meally, they recruited Patsy Daley with Fred Lowry joining in from time to time. Lowry was a big man who’d made his name as a buckjump rider and, like O’Meally, was inclined to lose his head after one too many nobblers. He rode with Johnny and Ben toward the end of 1862, then on New Year’s Day he left them and, with a mate, bailed up McQuirk’s Pub in the Abercrombies, north of Goulburn. A young bloke braved Lowry’s pistols, grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go till the others dragged the bushranger down. He was committed for trial at Bathurst but organised a breakout from the yard.The prisoners used a pickaxe on the wall and half a dozen escaped before anyone sounded the alarm. He made his way back to the gang, and in June 1863, he and Johnny Gilbert were taking tea at the lean-to of an elderly widow lady at Duffers Gully, not far from Young, when they spied a man walking down the road in his Sunday best. Lowry took him for a policeman and called him to stand. Instead, the churchgoer—one John McBride, a luckless prospector—drew his revolver in protection of the few shillings he’d brought for the collection plate. A bullet from Lowry took him in the thigh and he went down. Johnny Gilbert sent word to Young that there was a wounded man on the track and Dr Henry Wilkinson left the church service 155

Fire in the Blood McBride had been heading for to treat him. To no avail. McBride expired on the journey back to Young. Lowry left the district for Mudgee where he was mortally wounded the following month in a shootout at Crookwell. Detective Camphin, whom he knew from his time in Bathurst, made history, for it was he who recorded Lowry’s famous last words, a message for his mates on the Lachlan:‘Tell ’em I died game.’And, at 6.30 the following morning, he did just that. That same month, Dan Morgan made headlines when he and his mate, German Bill, bailed up Henry Bayliss, the Wagga Wagga police magistrate.When they learned who he was, they returned his purse and let him go on condition he forget about the incident should they ever appear before him. Bayliss declined and next day returned with a police party to hunt for them. When they reached the bushrangers’ camp, they went in with all guns blazing. German Bill was hit and one of Dan Morgan’s bullets struck Bayliss. However, the magistrate survived. German Bill was not so lucky and the loss broke Morgan’s heart. The police claimed it tipped him over the edge of sanity. Morgan was a wild figure who barely knew either parent and who had a sentimental streak. He declared himself the champion of the swagman and the itinerant worker. He hated the big squatters with a passion and, when he heard that they were mistreating shearers and stations hands, he would raid the properties and exact his revenge, often by burning down their woolsheds. But the real battle was being carried on by Ben Hall and Johnny Gilbert with John O’Meally who were everywhere and nowhere— everywhere there was gold and banknotes to be lifted and nowhere Pottinger and his troopers sought them. Or, if they came upon them by mistake, the Lachlan lads routed them in one gun battle after another. They were soon joined by new recruits John Vane and his little 156

North and south mate, Mickey Burke, and, as their confidence grew, the rules of battle changed. Where once they robbed the mail and gold coaches and salted their takings away, now they expanded their operations and began to take on entire towns. During a hold-up in bustling Junee, Johnny Gilbert announced that they had passed a ‘bushrangers’ law’ by which anyone found giving information to the police would be punished with 50 lashes for a first offence, 100 for the second and death for the third. But, while Johnny and Ben were good men, they didn’t have my knack of keeping their men in line. And O’Meally was tough to control.When he and Gilbert met John Barnes, a storekeeper who had rubbed him up the wrong way, O’Meally shouted,‘I know you, you bastard. If you stir, I’ll put daylight through you.’ Barnes wheeled his horse and galloped off. O’Meally easily rode him down and shot him dead. Had I been in charge, O’Meally would never have dared. A few days later, the government posted a reward of 2000 pounds for those responsible. The boys left the district in a hurry. However, within a week, Hall, Gilbert, O’Meally,Vane and Burke appeared at Canowindra, a thriving centre of at least 500 souls, and bailed up the entire town, starting at Robinson’s Hotel.Then, with the pub as their headquarters, they took the local trooper, Constable Sykes, from the police station, robbed all the stores in the main street and brought their proprietors and customers back to the hotel. Johnny Gilbert found two young women eager to play the piano and festivities continued until nine the next morning, when the lads rode off. ‘That was a grand night,’ Johnny shouted as they left. And no one in Canowindra would argue with that—except, perhaps, poor Sykes. By now they were cock-a-hoop and Ben and Johnny decided on an assault on Bathurst itself, a town of 6000. The five rode in together, bold as brass. First stop was Pedrotta’s gun shop then 157

Fire in the Blood McMinn’s jewellery shop.Vane and Burke called for a dozen oranges from Mr Chilvern, the fruiterer. Ben and Johnny went in search of the racehorse, Pasha, from Mr DeClouet’s stables and while they were there the police rode by in formation. Pasha was elsewhere so they headed out and ran into the police party, who had turned back. The coppers gave chase but it was a hopeless cause and the lads soon outdistanced them. The authorities were outraged. Next day, they called a public meeting in Bathurst and swore in no fewer than seventeen special constables in case the gang returned. But, by then, they were long gone. In fact, they paid a return visit to Canowindra, first to Robinson’s, then the pub over the river and next morning the entire town. Constable Sykes heard they were about and ‘went for reinforcements’. Ben overtook him on the road and escorted him back to Robinson’s, where he joined about 50 others. As before, Johnny Gilbert bought bundles of cigars, which he threw on tables for the company to enjoy, and a pile of sugar plums and bon-bons.Then he organised target shooting and other entertainments by the pub piano.Three of their captives wanted to go home so Gilbert wrote out passes for them, valid for one hour.When they had not returned in that time, Hall went looking for them, and found them returning to the pub. By now, the number of special constables in Bathurst numbered 27. The forces were rising against the lads but they seemed to be leading charmed lives. Alas, that was about to change.

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CHAPTER 19

Cops and robbers

T

hough I knew nothing of it at the time, in the first few days of February 1864, a pimp by the name of Mark Brown climbed the stairs of police headquarters in Sydney. He had a mission—to claim the 1000-pound reward offered for my capture. He asked to see Inspector-General McLerie but as he was not there he had to content himself with Fosbery, the Secretary of the New South Wales police. It was to him that Brown, who called himself a commercial traveller, broke the big news: he’d recognised the notorious villain Frank Gardiner during a recent trip to Queensland. If Fosbery would guarantee payment of the 1000 pounds, he’d reveal the exact location of the Prince of Tobymen. Fosbery, no doubt palpitating with the thrill of it, checked the file. No such guarantee could be made. The current reward was 500 pounds. But, since that was ten years’ earnings for Brown, the 159

Fire in the Blood tattler would make do with it. He then spun his yarn on condition that his identity be protected for evermore. Fosbery could give that guarantee, or so he thought, and proceeded to do so. He knew that once the truth of it surfaced, there were plenty who would damn the informer with hatred and contempt and some who would act upon it. I did not learn of it until long after.The coppers spread a story that they discovered my whereabouts through a letter Kitty wrote to her sister Bridget. They said James Taylor took a peek at it and spilled his guts to a clever detective. It was a foolish story since neither Biddy nor Taylor could read—and my dear Kitty was not one for writing; that she left to me. But it served to disguise the bounty hunter and throw suspicion on others. When I heard the true story, I was in no position to do anything about it, even if I had wanted to. My only thought was that it was more than passing strange that Brown bore the same surname as the lump of lard who had claimed my Kitty for wife. But, so far as I know, there was no other connection and, after all, it was a common name. Perhaps they all carried a streak of the weakling and the squealer. In any case, he told his tale to Fosbery and Detective Inspector Wager that the week previous he had been in Apis Creek and had called by our establishment where he recognised me. I have no memory of the man but it seems his story was convincing enough for McLerie to choose his best detective, Daniel McGlone, to mount the assault. McGlone, in turn, chose his best men, Detective James Pye and Constable Harry Wells, and made his plans for the expedition. First priority was disguise. There was no way they were going to confront me openly. Instead, they’d pretend to be miners and, when they reached the location, they’d execute a sneak attack.This meant they had to exchange the official-issue Navy Colt revolvers, which 160

Cops and robbers were too difficult to conceal, for the American Sharps four-barrel pistols. They could be easily hidden and, as a .32-calibre weapon, they’d make a nasty hole in any man. Thus armed and equipped, they set forth on 6 February on the steam-sailer Balclutha. Only then did McGlone confide to his confederates the identity of their quarry. Meantime, I was concerned with other things. Kitty was 25 and I would soon be 34. Now we were settled and the business was prospering, our thoughts were of the future and this included a family. Kitty had hinted at it once or twice but the truth is the first move came from me. I didn’t mind if we began with a son or a daughter. Perhaps it was the experience with my little sisters but, when I thought of a child, it was a baby girl that came to mind. However, if we did have a boy I was sure of only one thing—I would stick with him. I wouldn’t leave him to be grabbing at the coat-tails of a stepfather who hated and abandoned him. I’d set him up in some business where he could reclaim the pride of the Christies. I would show him off to dear Archina and Charlotte. And I would make sure that he did his mother proud. Then came news from the south of an attack by Ben, Johnny and their men on the homestead of the Gold Commissioner, Henry Keightley.The whole country was talking about it. I knew Keightley. He was a leader of the toffs and a belligerent bastard who had been making rousing speeches to the newspapers about ridding the land of the cursed bushrangers.They were worse than cowards, he said, they were vermin to be exterminated like rats in a grain store. If only they would pass his way, he would take on the task himself. To this end, he had remodelled his homestead at Dunn’s Plains, four miles from Rockley, into a fortress against attack. It was a challenge that Johnny and Ben should have resisted. What could they 161

Fire in the Blood hope to gain? I could only think they were caught up in the razz of the road.

The attack on Keightley marked a turning point, one I never would have approved. For the first time, a woman would be placed in mortal danger.This was unacceptable. It didn’t matter that Keightley was a blowhard with a very spotty record as a public servant. As Clerk of Courts in Tamworth, he’d been caught with his hand in the till.When this was revealed, the newspapers called for his removal as Assistant Gold Commissioner, but support from the upper classes saved him. As the boys approached the homestead fortress, they called on Keightley to come out. At the time, one of his wife’s relatives from England, Dr Pechey, was staying with them and the two men bolted the door and loaded their weapons.The lads fanned out in a semicircle in front of the homestead and again called on Keightley to open up. Keightley’s response was a volley of shots from himself and Pechey. The bushrangers returned the fire. Keightley made for his rooftop fortifications. From his vantage point in the special barricade, he spotted Mickey Burke behind a cask. And, when next he rose, the commissioner fired a volley from a double-barrelled shotgun that he’d loaded with heavy shot. The blast struck Burke deep in the stomach and he went down in terrible agony. In fact, the pain was beyond his power to endure. In a few minutes, unbeknown to his mates, he put the barrel of his revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger. The ball passed out at the top of the head. But even this was not fatal, so he put the revolver to his right ear and fired again. Keightley and Pechey on the roof now had a problem—on the way up, Keightley had dropped his powder horn and now he was 162

Cops and robbers out of ammunition.To get more, he’d have to return downstairs and expose himself to the bushrangers’ fire. Gilbert called on him,‘If you lay down your arms and come down, we’ll not touch you.’ Keightley:‘Honour bright?’ Gilbert:‘Honour bright.’ Keightley:‘Very well, we will come down.’ He and Mrs Keightley, their infant, their maid, Mrs Baldock, and Pechey came out into the yard in front of the homestead. Only then did the lads realise that Mickey Burke was mortally wounded.Vane, ran and knelt by the dying man then leapt up and rushed at Pechey, belting him over the head with his revolver in the mistaken belief that he was Keightley. When Pechey protested,Vane turned on Keightley.‘You bloody wretch, you’ve shot my mate.’ They shoved him over to where Mickey was breathing his last. The boys had a quick discussion and Johnny Gilbert announced their decision: Keightley was to be executed. ‘Say goodbye to your wife.We’re going up the hill.’ Keightley pleaded for his life. So did his wife, and Mrs Baldock interposed herself between him and John Vane, who was prepared to carry out the sentence there and then. Suddenly there was a noise from Mickey Burke. He was still alive. Dr Pechey volunteered to ride to Rockley for his instruments if they’d delay the sentence on Keightley.At Gilbert’s nod, he jumped on his horse and set out. However, he was only just out of sight when Burke breathed his last. Again,Vane made to finish his killer but this time he was saved by the arrival of three men over the nearby hill. O’Meally rode up and took the men prisoner.After that, the heat went out of the argument and, by the time Pechey returned, it was decided to hold Keightley to ransom for the 500 pounds he’d receive as reward for Burke’s death. Dr Pechey and Mrs Keightley would go to Bathurst for the money. 163

Fire in the Blood This they did and they returned next morning at ten o’clock accompanied by Henry Rotton, Mrs Keightley’s father.The money was paid over; the boys departed. Mickey Burke’s body was taken to Carcoar where nine balls were removed from his stomach. The shooting of Burke evidently preyed on Vane; he left the gang, wandered about in solitary fashion for a month and occasionally met Father Timothy McCarthy, who persuaded him to surrender, which he did in Bathurst on 19 November. He pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery under arms and was sentenced to fifteen years’ gaol. The authorities then offered a reward of 1000 pounds each for the capture of Gilbert, O’Meally and Hall.Their every move made headlines in the newspapers. The squatters declared war and, like Keightley, threatened to wipe the blackguards from the earth. The brothers David and William Campbell of Goimbla station between Canowindra and Eugowra were the loudest in their threats and condemnation. Again Ben and Johnny responded to the taunts and, as they rode up with John O’Meally, the Campbells were armed and ready; soon the rifles and shotguns roared from both sides.William was clipped by bird shot and after that took no further part in the proceedings. David Campbell’s wife,Amelia, was made of sterner stuff. She slipped away in the darkness to the workers’ quarters about 100 yards from the homestead and tried to get them to join the fray. But the men would have none of it. On her return, Johnny Gilbert offered terms.‘Surrender or we’ll burn the barn and stables down!’ But the Campbells had enough arms and ammunition to last for a week and, whatever brother William’s attitude, David Campbell cursed them to hell. Soon the out-building was ablaze but all that did was throw light on the bushrangers and David Campbell took the chance offered. He slipped out of the house and, from the corner of the building, 164

Cops and robbers fired his shotgun at the figure standing just beyond the paling fence watching the fire. O’Meally took the full blast beneath the ear on the right side of the neck. Seeing him fall, Hall and Gilbert fired another volley at the house and ran to retrieve him. It was too late. By the time they carried him into a clump of she-oak trees, John O’Meally was a dead man. For the next four hours, there was silence at Goimbla, and when the Campbells ventured out at 3 a.m., Ben and Johnny were gone. When the sun rose, they found O’Meally’s body and, not waiting for any of the usual formalities, they buried it without even a coffin. Later, the O’Meally family asked permission to move the body and this was agreed to. The O’Meallys dug him up and reburied him at Forbes cemetery. The government gave David Campbell 500 pounds. His fellow squatters doubled that and then more. Though their numbers were depleted, Gilbert and Hall took to the road again and next month bailed up 40 people outside Boorowa, then commandeered the mail coaches between Boorowa, Binalong and Bowning.And, by all accounts, Happy Jack revived his natural spirits. In fact, they robbed so many mails that throughout New South Wales people cut their banknotes in half before sending them away. Johnny found it amusing. He told one group of passengers,‘This means we’ll just have to rob twice as many coaches.’ Henry Morgan, of the Burrangong Star, reported an encounter on the Binalong road: ‘Gilbert treated the affair in a very sporting manner, exchanging hats with myself and politely enveloping Mrs Morgan in his poncho, asking her at the same time what she thought of herself dressed in the fashion of the bushrangers.’ Then they took a holiday—Gilbert to Victoria with his family, Ben Hall with his new woman, Susan Pryor, who was with child. Nothing more was heard of them until the end of January 1864.

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CHAPTER 20

Trapped

M

cGlone and his party of scalp hunters arrived at our little settlement on 30 January 1864. They had been delayed in Rockhampton by floods and it was a boggy track, the 100 miles to Apis. They pitched their tent about 100 yards from the hotel and that same evening McGlone strolled over to the store where I was sitting outside looking up the road towards Rocky. I barely noticed him. I had other things on my mind. I was hoping to see the doctor coming along, because two days before we’d sent word that a visit would be appreciated. For all the signs were that Kitty was with child. So my thoughts were far away when he gave me a greeting and passed into the store.Then I heard Kitty’s voice and there was something in it, a sharpness, that brought me round. I went inside where McGlone was asking for some sago to treat a stomach ache. Kitty 166

Trapped said,‘We have none left,’ but I knew that wasn’t the case and found a tin with a bit at the bottom. I offered it to him and he accepted. He wanted to pay but I waved him away. I could see Kitty was nervous but in my new life I’d become soft and I put it down to her condition. However, even she seemed to relax when McGlone invited me into the bar for a drink. I made him a brandy and warmed it for his stomach pain. I had a quiet one myself and we were chatting about nothing much when I spied a police party passing by—Lieutenant Brown and a bunch of Aboriginal constables. I knew Lieutenant Brown and asked him if he would be staying the night. But no, he was headed for McLennan’s Apis station about a mile away. McGlone said he felt a lot better—between the brandy and the sago, my ministrations would get him back to form; so he headed off to his camp. What I didn’t know then was that in the night he went over to McLennan’s and enlisted Brown and his men in the plan to take me. Next morning, McGlone and his two coppers rolled up their tent, packed their gear and headed our way. I was yarning to a couple of mates who were grinding an axe when I saw them coming. At the same time, Brown and his Blacks hove into view, the Aborigines singing one of their corroboree songs. I didn’t suspect a thing until they were almost upon me. But then something in their manner set my blood thumping and I started toward the store. They rushed me. Trooper Pye grabbed me from behind and McGlone leapt and tackled my legs from the front. My mates thought we were being robbed and dashed to my assistance but Brown, living up to the scurvy nature of his breed, covered me with a rifle and his Black trackers jumped around like it was some kind of tribal celebration. Then Kitty came out the door and, for all my life, I will remember the scream that flew from her lips that morning. Her cry, 167

Fire in the Blood ‘Frank! No!’ came from the very depths of her and the echo of it will never truly fade away. There was nothing I could do. They clipped the handcuffs on me and trussed me till I could scarcely move. Then they barrelled into our quarters behind the store, grabbing more than 2000 pounds in currency, though Kitty stood guard over her jewellery. Next they went for Archie and Louisa, who were watching the proceedings in amazement. We had a mate in the district, Cuthbert Featherstonehaugh, who was a bit of a toff but decent for all that. He turned up soon after and, whatever may be said of my account, Cuthbert cannot be accused of special pleading for the bushranger cause. He wrote the truth as he saw it in his book, After Many Days, one of many that came across the sea to me from Archina, and no man can gainsay it. ‘I noticed signs of a commotion,’ he wrote. There were several black police boys and their lieutenant, a Mr Brown, whom I knew. Close by, sitting down and handcuffed, was Craig, and beside him his little wife weeping bitterly. The lieutenant came over to me and I said, ‘What’s up?’ He whispered, ‘We’ve got Gardiner, the bushranger.’ I burst out laughing and said, ‘You’ve got your grandmother. That’s not Gardiner. I knew him in South Australia when Gardiner was bushranging.’‘Oh,’ he said,‘we know that’s not Gardiner—we have him up at McLennan’s station secure with two New South Wales policemen and also his reputed wife.’

To Featherstonehaugh, this was almost as unbelievable. They were well liked and were successful and respected. And I really believe that if he had not been discovered, Christie might easily have attained ere long to the dignity of a Justice of the Peace!

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Trapped The next day in pouring rain quite a cavalcade of us left Apis Creek bound for Rockhampton. Gardiner was put on a led horse, handcuffed, his ankles tied under the horse. He rode along quite quietly and as easily as if free.The black boys rode alongside with their carbines ready; the trooper was in front while McGlone, myself, Mrs Christie and a young friend of mine, Mr Finch, brought up the rear. McGlone was mounted on a big powerful black horse, well known by the name of Darkie . . .

That was a sad thing. McGlone did it for spite and Featherstonehaugh knew it too. Finch and I took a great dislike to the detective and we asked Mrs Christie if Darkie would resent a stick under his tail. She said he would assuredly go to market, whereupon for a considerable time strenuous efforts were made to insert a twig under the tail, the only result being that McGlone dropped a square bottle of gin he was carrying for Gardiner . . . That is one of my few memories of that cursed journey. I heard Darkie snort and look around to see him pig-rooting with McGlone hanging on for dear life. Featherstonehaugh held up the stick he’d used to tickle Darkie’s private parts. I laughed aloud, at least till McGlone lost the gin. On arrival at Marlborough pub, knowing the landlord, I borrowed some dry clothes for Gardiner and took them to the police who stood over him with two revolvers at full cock while he changed.The old spirit had left the bushranger or no doubt he would have chanced all and made a dash for it. The next day the troop made Yaamba, it being a sea of mud and water. Here Mr Peak Downs Stewart, a Justice of the Peace and well-known squatter who had known Christie well at Apis

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Fire in the Blood Creek got very indignant—said he could not be Gardiner and demanded that being the nearest magistrate they bring the prisoner before him.

The police refused. McGlone was perfectly willing to break the law himself when it suited. But that’s the way of coppers everywhere. Next day the cavalcade proceeded. Finch and I and the native police swam the creek on our horses; the others got over in a boat. In Rockhampton no one would believe that we had got Gardiner and they simply laughed me to scorn. However, next day when brought before the bench he was duly committed to stand his trial in Sydney. I, of course, attended court to speak for Craig who, from my evidence, was at once released.

Kitty stayed at The Bull and Mouth Hotel and, that same morning, that low creature, Sub-Inspector Foran, called on her and politely asked if she would like to see me at the police station. Naturally, she jumped at the chance and Foran told her there was a dray waiting to take her there. She grabbed a few things and eagerly climbed aboard. The moment she arrived they turned on her, cast her into a cell and charged her with ‘assisting and concealing Frank Christie, alias Frank Gardiner’. She was alone with none to take her part. However, before Foran had arrived, Kitty had taken the precaution to send 300 pounds to Featherstonehaugh with a note asking him to post it to someone he knew in Sydney. She would collect it from him when she reached there; otherwise the police would leave her penniless and unable to afford a lawyer. Our squatter mate was as good as his word. He sent it to his agent in Sydney and there it awaited collection. That day in court I was remanded to appear in Sydney, but when they tried to keep Kitty in irons the magistrate would have none of it. He discharged her as a free woman and she was determined not 170

Trapped to leave my side. Despite her hatred of the sea, three days later she sailed with the rest of us on the coastal steamer Queensland, bound for Moreton Bay. I could not tell her to leave me and travel overland. Had I done so, I believe, she would have refused, even if she knew that as the sickness came upon her she would lose the chance to bear our child. There never was a truer love than that which she bore for me and I for her. Such speculation is of little value and I wish I could put it from me. But, as a prisoner and as an exile, such matters prey on the mind through all the hours of unwanted reflection. On the second morning of the voyage, when I saw her at the breakfast table on the other side from where I was manacled, I knew at once from her red eyes and her ivory face just what had occurred. I strained in silence against my chains and the blood flowed from my wrists and ankles. I said not a word. When we arrived at Moreton Bay I was to be taken by coach and escort to the Brisbane Gaol and it was then I gained some understanding of the public interest in my fate. For, when the boat docked, there were crowds on the wharf waving and pointing as though some royal personage were about to disembark.And on the way to the town, overlooked by its hated windmill, there were people at many corners calling encouragement to me. Alas, I was unable to respond, not because of the bonds that held me captive but because I was downcast within. Kitty recovered her spirits almost as soon as her feet touched dry land but I was overcome by a terrible pall of hopelessness.When she flew into action with the lawyers, I looked on like some fool spectator at a funeral. First she found a solicitor, Daniel Roberts, who briefed the best barrister in the place, Joseph Lilly. He mounted a powerful case that I had been illegally taken, without even a warrant for my arrest nor any proper charge of criminality. And, by damn, the fellow won! Justice Lutwyche ordered me released on the following Monday. 171

Fire in the Blood Kitty was overjoyed and filled with plans. But I’m afraid I could not share her happiness. For I knew that, at best, we’d have half an hour on the streets of Brisbane before McGlone and his bounty hunters had me re-arrested, and this time they’d do it legal. I saw the hurt in her face when I told her. She watched her dreams depart when I turned my eyes away. But I knew the coppers and I was right.Well before Monday, McGlone said the writ of habeas corpus ‘was only worth the paper it was written on’ and had me transferred from the gaol to the army barracks where civil law—such as it was— held no account. No doubt he earned his bounty. In the end, the New South Wales government paid him a pitiful twenty pounds while Pye and Wells split thirty pounds between them.They complained and Pye even resigned from the force in protest. But, three weeks later, he snivelled his way back. McGlone tried to keep my Darkie but the law wouldn’t have it and eventually they brought him to auction in Sydney, where he made 122 pounds. By coincidence the buyer was a man named Peisley and he sold him almost at once to a Victorian, Peter Beveridge, for a 50-pound profit. I wrote to Beveridge later and he responded that he was well pleased with his purchase. He complimented me on Darkie’s gentle nature and his will to please. But that was in the future. On the morning of the seventeenth, they bundled me aboard the steamship Telegraph for the journey to a hangman’s noose in Sydney. And, once more, Kitty braved the ocean’s swell to be at my side. Such was the measure of her love and loyalty.

By now, some of my closest friends were also in trouble. Billy Fogg and his lad had been convicted at Yass of cattle stealing.The two had fallen out and young Billy gave evidence against his father. This 172

Trapped played into the hands of the authorities and they not only gave Billy Sr twelve months, they put the boy away for seven years and confiscated more than a thousand pounds from the family’s accounts. Mary Fogg was devastated. Ben Hall’s elder brother, Bill, had looked after young Harry when Bridget and Taylor were fighting (which was most of the time).This allowed Ben to see the boy occasionally. But, when Bill tried to keep him and shelter him from the constant warfare, his mother went to court. On the day of the hearing, Bill surrendered the little bloke. Then Ben fell out with Susan Pryor and was often on his own. However, he still had his supporters.The same day the Foggs were sentenced, 13 February, he rode up to Sandy Creek station, by then the property by mortgage of John Wilson. Ben was limping and wearing only one boot. He’d been bitten by a centipede and had been to a doctor at Cowra. But the foot swelled and apparently it was hard to keep a boot on. Wilson later told the newspapers of the buffoonery that followed. It seems the troopers under Sub-Inspector Shadforth were on his trail and, though he came and went three times in the next two days, it wasn’t until the Monday morning that they decided to close in. Ben was in the kitchen at the time while Wilson was cooking him some eggs. Suddenly he spotted a strange dog outside and started to run for his horse. The yard was fenced in with a gate at each side. Shadforth had stationed two men at each and Ben burst out, jumped on his mare and made for the gate guarded by a trooper and a Black tracker. Wilson said,‘The blackfellow fired at Ben and Ben fired at them. I should think that the trooper and blackfellow could not be more than five yards from Ben as he passed them. The trooper that fired at Ben first told me he was that close to Ben that he saw “No. 4” on Ben’s revolver. 173

Fire in the Blood ‘I looked up and saw Ben on his grey horse, making towards Wheogo. Shadforth came in the house and before I could scarce speak, he said,“I arrest you in the Queen’s name for harbouring Ben Hall.” ‘When we got about 300 yards from my place, Trooper Tooley said to me, “We sent Ben Hall a long way for breakfast this morning.”’ Trooper Tooley was kidding himself.Wilson’s stockman,William Roebuck, told the Lachlan Miner that about twenty minutes after the police had taken his boss away, I heard the dogs bark. I was in the kitchen at the time. I looked out and saw Ben Hall leading his grey mare through the slip rail towards the house. He came to the kitchen and said to me,‘Good morning, old man. I have been watching them take my cook; I suppose I must cook myself.’ He took and fried five eggs, drank two pints of coffee and ate some bread and butter. He told me to tell the troopers that he had been back, wished me good morning, and went.

Soon after Wilson’s story appeared, Shadforth was suspended from office. A few days later, Ben visited the Wowingragong Pound seeking news of one of his horses. The Bathurst Free Press reported that he threatened the pound-keeper. This caused the keeper himself, William Elliott, to write to the paper: Sir, Will you be kind enough at your earliest convenience, to contradict a telegraphic report of your Forbes correspondent in one of your last week’s issues, which states that ‘Ben Hall threatened to burn down my residence here.’ Such is very far from the truth. On Thursday evening, the eighteenth instant, about 7 p.m.,

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Trapped Hall called at my house during my absence, for the purpose of obtaining information relative to a horse which I had in my possession, and which he said was his. He asked for me and was told that I was not at home; he then asked for and saw Mrs Elliott, to whom he behaved in the most courteous and civil manner. He asked if I was expected home soon, and being answered in the affirmative, he said he would remain until I came. During his stay, some two hours or more, so far from using threats or in any way disturbing my family, he made himself quite a favourite with my children; he sat down and had tea with them, and afterwards got them all around him, and chatted and joked with them the whole time he remained. Finding I did not return as expected, he left, leaving word for me to take care of his horse. Those, sir, are the facts of Ben Hall’s visit to Wowingragong; and by giving them to the public through the same medium as the report of your Forbes correspondent you will oblige.’

When Ben did return to the fray, Johnny was still away and he was accompanied by Jim Gordon, who he called ‘The Old Man’, and James Dunleavy, a young station hand from the Weddins. On 1 March they robbed the mail between Wellington and Orange. In spite of my absence, life was returning to normal on the Lachlan.

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CHAPTER 21

Trials and tribulations

T

he Telegraph reached Sydney Harbour in the dead of night on 19 March 1864.Yet still a crowd awaited. My arrival in the colony’s boom town was the sensation of that time and place. I was a diversion for the Sydneysiders from their perennial pursuit of wealth and liquor. The place was full of bustle as a building spree changed the face of Woolloomooloo. But all eyes were on the General of the Outback. To minimise the opportunity for disturbance, they unloaded me into a Water Police tender before the Telegraph docked, and when we reached the timber wharf of Circular Quay they had a cab waiting to take me straight to Darlinghurst Gaol.There I was thrown into a single cell and manacled with leg irons. If they thought this meant I would be undisturbed, they were soon disabused of that notion. Every man jack in Sydney Town felt 176

Trials and tribulations the need to feast his eyes on the notorious rebel.The account by a special correspondent in the Border Mail has it well enough. He is naturally a good deal dejected though he strives to appear unconcerned.The man’s face at each visit seemed to present something new in it. This may be a reflection of his mind or he may possess great mobility of feature. He sits for hours with his head resting in his hand, insensible to all passing around him. What thoughts must crowd upon the wretched man as he reviews his past and thinks upon the dark future!

What thoughts, indeed. At first, they were all for Kitty. But that soon became unbearable and I asked my visitors for news of Johnny, Ben and the rest.The answers were many and various but one thing was clear—Ben Hall was not half the man of the road without Johnny Gilbert at his side. In fact, his jobs with Jim Gordon and Jack Dunleavy were gaining him little return for a great deal of danger. There was no current news of Johnny and I later learned that his brothers, Charles and Frank, had once again persuaded him to give up the game for a while and to take his leisure in Victoria and New Zealand. At some stage, they took me from my cell through the underground tunnel to the Police Magistrate’s court where I was remanded. Still the thoughts crowded in and I went from a place of terrible despond to one of high hopes and back again, all within the space of a single day. Sleep was almost beyond me. When all the sightseers had gawped their fill, I was introduced to the rough regime of Darlinghurst. Fordyce and Bow were the first to come my way and I half expected that they would rage against my recruiting them for the job that put them inside—Eugowra Rocks. But they were not inclined to blame me. On the contrary, 177

Fire in the Blood they both declared themselves four square and, if I was charged with leading the team, they would refuse to give evidence against me. ‘You don’t look at all like the fellow I once knew,’ Fordyce said with a grin. ‘In fact, I can’t even remember meeting a man named Gardiner.’ Then he was serious. ‘The day they carved up Henry Manns, I forgot everything about Eugowra.’ John Vane was also there and I listened hard as he filled me up with the tales of his ventures with Ben, Johnny and the rest, some of which I’ve recounted here.Vane was still badly troubled by the death of Mickey Burke and blamed himself for getting the little bloke involved. I gave him what words of comfort I could but the truth is that the Keightley affair was a badly managed show with little profit on offer, even if the Keightleys had surrendered at the first volley. Vane’s trial was almost due and though he’d pleaded guilty to four charges—including the Keightley imbroglio—he wouldn’t wear a fifth that he’d taken part in the ambush of the Carcoar mail. But, any way you looked at it, if he escaped the hangman’s two-step, he’d be spending many long years in Darlinghurst. And that would sap the spirit of any man. Young Billy Fogg, I learned, was on Cockatoo. He’d had time to repent his foolishness in crossing his father and I would like to say that on his release they came together once more as a close family. But alas, young Billy would not survive the rigours of the rock and would fall victim to gaol fever in ’66, before he reached his 21st year. He was not the only one, not by a long shot. It was worse at Darlinghurst, which had been built more than twenty years before and had been allowed to fall into disrepair as the overcrowding became ever more desperate.The place stank to high heaven.This, too, did nothing to raise my spirits. For that, I had to rely on visits from the legal team Kitty had 178

Trials and tribulations assembled on my behalf—Redmond and Roberts at the magistrates’ hearing; Robert Isaacs and William Bede Dalley at the Supreme Court.There were none better in New South Wales and, when they learned of the 2000 pounds held illegally by the authorities following the attack on our quarters at Apis, they had no fear that their fees would go begging. Kitty sent me messages through the lawyers and one gave me such heart that for days I lifted myself out of the pool of darkness that surrounded me. Little sister Archina was in Sydney and had finally married, not more than two weeks previous. Her husband was Henry Griffiths, a fruiterer, born in England 39 years years ago and a widower.They were respectably established at 283 Pitt Street and Archina was helping in every way she could. Moreover, young Charlotte had also made her way to Sydney. She was now Mrs Hyams, though her husband had died in Tasmania. She had come to New South Wales to be near to Archina. So now the three women I loved best in the world were all within a half-hour’s ride. In my circumstances, that was as pleasing as it was painful. But it did mean that I could see them when I was called to court. The charges themselves came as a surprise to me and my lawyers. Everyone expected that I would be called to answer for the biggest ambush ever perpetrated on the authorities in the history of the colony—the hold-up at Eugowra Rocks. However, it seems, there was a want of witnesses. Fordyce and Bow had lost their memories and, when they approached him, so had snivelling Dan Charters. He was still working for the Police Department as a stable groom, for he didn’t dare show his face in the Lachlan. He had no stomach for a repetition of the cross-examination that had exposed his lies the last time, much less in the presence of Yours Truly. Pottinger made a visit to John McGuire in Forbes; he now had a share of The Pride of Erin where his wife had dallied with 179

Fire in the Blood Charters and, bless me, the marriage partners were back together. Potty offered 300 pounds from the reward money if he’d identify me as the leader of the caper. ‘I know nothing about the Escort Robbery,’ McGuire said.‘Why don’t you get Charters again?’ ‘Because he won’t do it,’ Potty said. ‘Why not?’ ‘He says he can’t identify Gardiner.’ ‘Well,’ said John,‘he was one of the gang and I wasn’t. If he can’t identify Gardiner when he was there, how do you suppose I can when I wasn’t?’ This left Potty stroking his beard. It also meant that the AttorneyGeneral had to look elsewhere if he wanted to fit me for the hangman’s noose.And there’s the rub, for the Attorney-General was none other than James Martin QC, who had defended the lads during the first Escort Robbery trial. He knew what a hollow case they began with. He knew too the horror that had been visited on poor Henry Manns.That had more than slaked the public thirst for vengeance. In fact, the cry for revenge was notably absent in the weeks after I reached Sydney. A regular trade grew up in Gardiner mementoes. A Pitt Street engraver was making a small fortune from copies of a photograph I’d had taken with Johnny Gilbert a few years before. And one enterprising fellow made a life-size wax dummy of Yours Truly and customers were queuing at his door. So, on 4 April 1864 in the Darlinghurst police court, I was charged that I ‘did feloniously shoot and wound, with intent to kill and murder, John Middleton and William Hosie at the Fish River on 16 July 1861’. The magistrates went through the motions and, despite the best efforts of my team, I was committed to stand trial the following month. I took little notice of the proceedings. I was much more interested in my dear Kitty, who looked beautiful and brave as she 180

Trials and tribulations sat between dark-haired Charlotte and fair Archina. Our eyes locked and I tried to convey to her all that was within my heart. She was so filled with hope; she followed every word of the legal puffery. When it was done, I tried my best to give her an encouraging smile as they led me away. But I fear it died on my lips. The days were long and the nights longer. I kept my own company, save for the occasional quiet word with my former companions of the road. The following week, John Vane’s trial was held in the Central Criminal Court and each evening, when he returned, he contrived to speak to me. I was particularly interested because his barrister, William Dalley, was part of my team.Vane was hopeful that the jury would see through the charge of wounding the copper, for he was clearly not guilty. As it happened, his trust was well placed; they declared his total innocence in the matter. But that weighed little with the Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephen who fancied himself as the bushrangers’ nemesis. He came from a long line of legal factotums sworn to uphold the rights of the privileged. His father had also been a judge in the early days of the colony and Alfred had been on the bench since 1839. He showed his colours very clearly that day when he sentenced John Vane, and the newspapers carried every word of it. It didn’t matter a damn that Vane had given himself up to the priest and repented the main action that brought him there—the attack on Keightley. ‘Why should mercy be shown to one who has warred against his fellow creatures in a career of crime, outrage and ruffianism?’ he declared. ‘I cannot understand why a young man like you should choose such a wretched existence as that of a bushranger. The bushrangers must necessarily live in a state of watchfulness and anxiety, dreading retribution and distrustful of their acquaintances. They lie down at night to rest in dread and they arise the next 181

Fire in the Blood morning in fear. Their hands are against all men—and all men’s hands are against them.’ How little the man knew of mateship, how little of the support we enjoyed against the forces of privilege. But Sir Alfred was not done yet. ‘The crimes of the gang of bushrangers to which you belonged are of a type unique,’ he said. ‘Nowhere else in the world is there such a state of affairs as exists in our own colony of New South Wales.The brigands of Naples have no comparison with Australian bushrangers since there is some political meaning in what they do— as there was also in the case of Robin Hood. But in the case of you and your associates there is no motive except ruffianism.’ In those words, you have the measure of the man. Garibaldi’s men and the rebels of Sherwood Forest, he concedes, were driven by circumstance against the powers of authority; yet New South Wales was that most perfect of worlds where only black-heartedness would suffice as motive for crime. Did he stop a moment to think what the Sheriff of Nottingham might say? Or the King of Naples? Would they not find reason aplenty for the rage against privilege in far-off New South Wales? And not one whit of reason behind the actions of their own dissenters. He was, however, right in one particular. Life on the road and in the bush was not for the frail-hearted; only a special breed could handle the rough conditions and, in time, it wore you down, whoever you were.That’s why Johnny took such long holidays. He needed a spell in the top paddock with the sweet grasses. Anyway, John Vane would not have any such worries for years to come. Sir Alfred would see to that.‘I sentence you to ten years’ imprisonment with hard labour on each of the three charges of robbery under arms to which you have pleaded guilty, and fifteen years’ hard labour on the charge of feloniously attacking Mr Keightley.’ 182

Trials and tribulations Vane was stunned.‘Forty-five years?’ he croaked. But no, in his ‘mercy’, the judge made the sentences concurrent so he only faced fifteen years’ hard time. Only fifteen! It was not a good omen for me and I could only hope that I would score Judge Wise in my trial. Archina, who believed in such things, consulted my horoscope and declared that the signs were in my favour. And blow me down if it didn’t come to pass. Sir Alfred had assigned the case to himself but, on the day, he was caught up in another trial and it passed to Judge Wise. The indictment was that on 16 July 1861, at the Fish River, I ‘had fired at one John Middleton, with the intent thereby to kill and murder the said John Middleton’. And this was the fellow who had pulled the gun on me! However, the first order of business was the 2000 pounds McGlone had seized from our quarters at Apis Creek and, though the Crown opposed it, the bounty hunter was forced to hand over the notes to me right there in the court. I counted them. I didn’t care how long it took. McGlone and the prosecution hated it but for me it was a moment of pleasure in a dark time. I think the spectators enjoyed it too. When that was done, Jimmy Martin QC gathered his robes, adjusted his wig and presented the case against me. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t seem to matter much what I was charged with. I was Frank Gardiner—that should be enough to secure a guilty verdict, whatever the facts of the matter. And, since it was a capital offence, I would soon be dancing and, in no time at all, gone and forgotten. Middleton’s evidence was pretty much what we expected—a recitation of the story he told three years before in Carcoar. He described how he’d confronted me at Fogg’s house with his revolver aimed square at my head.Who fired first he couldn’t be sure but he opined it was me. 183

Fire in the Blood My man Isaacs really put him through the mill in crossexamination. He admitted they had arrived in ponchos and cabbagetree hats with no police identification whatsoever. They had not called on me to surrender in the Queen’s name. They might have been anyone with a grudge against me and violence in their heart. Hosie followed and the damn fool stuck to his story about Peisley coming to my rescue on the track to Bigga. But, since Peisley had denied it on the gallows, it seemed pretty clear that he was making the whole thing up. Isaacs ripped him to pieces. By the time he was finished, Hosie didn’t know his thumbs from his fingers or his fingers from his toes.All he knew was that he’d employ any and all of them to escape from his torture in the witness box. When Isaacs let him go, the Crown closed their case and we opened ours with just one witness: Mary Fogg. Dear Mary, we had known each other since the very early days and, in the times when I’d travelled alone, she’d been a sister to me. Now she was showing her loyalty once again. She told her story simply and without varnish. She described the police disguise and that in her mind there was no doubt—Middleton fired the first shot. Martin QC couldn’t shake her and she left the box with her head held high. Kitty and the girls welcomed her to their pew. The next day, the prosecution tried to bring up my committal to Cockatoo so that if all else failed they could get me for breaking my ticket-of-leave. But Robert Isaacs jumped on the law books and exposed their tactic as the sham it was. And, blow me, when the judge knocked them back, the spectators gave a burst of applause. Judge Wise banged his gavel and threatened the full force of the law against the perpetrators of that terrible crime. The subjects of the Queen should be seen but not heard. However, it was about this time that I began to feel a shiver of hope. And, when Isaacs thundered his final address to the jury, the shiver became a shake. ‘The 184

Trials and tribulations simple fact is that Gardiner fired in self-defence,’ he said.‘He had no way of knowing that his two assailants were policemen. ‘You would do the same and I would do the same, gentlemen. The evidence of the police themselves has shown you that they failed in their duty by not announcing their identity and by not calling on the man to surrender. Have we reached the stage where servants of the Queen can shoot down a civilian like a dog?’ Powerful brew. By comparison, Jimmy Martin was watery gruel. In fact, he was so sure I was for the two-step that he spent much of his time assuring the jurors that they should not concern themselves with my fate and excusing himself from any blame.‘It is not my duty to obtain a conviction, but only to place the facts before you,’ he said. ‘Nobody would be more pleased than I if the prisoner were acquitted—but gentlemen, you have a duty to do and I am sure you will do it.’ Nobody more pleased? I could think of several in the body of the court, to say nothing of the poor bastard in the dock! The judge’s summing-up was an endless drone. Like Martin, he seemed more concerned with his part in the inevitable conclusion: that gallows’ terpsichore for Yours Truly. Finally at five o’clock he ended the dirge and the jury retired. But, as they did so, the spectators surged forward and surrounded the dock, all wanting to say something to me as I waited for my death sentence.These were no riff-raff from the streets but, as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, ‘professional gentlemen and men with respectable positions in society’. To hell with them. I had eyes only for Kitty and, as the coppers ushered me below, we were locked together in each other’s vision until I started down those stairs and the side of the dock came between us. The next 90 minutes were torture of the soul. But then the word came that the jury had returned and I was dragged back up the ladder to the lighted courtroom.The judge had his little black cowl ready to place upon his wig for the sentence of death. 185

Fire in the Blood ‘How do you find?’ asked the clerk of the court. ‘Is the defendant guilty or not guilty.’ The foreman rose in his place.‘Not guilty,’ he said and the entire courtroom erupted. ‘What?’ said the judge. ‘Not guilty!’ Kitty, Charlotte and Archina rushed toward me from the side and I was able to touch Kitty’s outstretched hand. There was shouting and clapping as the judge banged away. Finally he ordered the court officers to grab a young fellow who refused to heed his call.When he could be heard, he said, ‘I am shocked, inexpressibly shocked at this disgraceful and unseemly exhibition within the walls of a court of justice on so solemn an occasion as this. The people of New South Wales are disgraced by such a demonstration of joy at a jury’s verdict, acquitting this prisoner. Things have come to a shocking state . . .’ He could not go on.To do so would have revealed the truth of the matter—that British justice is something they boast about only when it suits them. By all the principles they hold so dear, that should have been an end to the matter. I should have been released to resume my life with Kitty. Our record together spoke for itself and there were many in Queensland and elsewhere who would speak it loud if called upon. But that was not their way. In a trice, Martin was on his feet,‘I apply to Your Honour that the prisoner be kept in custody.There are other charges—many more charges—to be preferred against this man. I apply for a remand.’ The words had scarcely escaped his lips when the judge complied.‘Very well,’ he said.‘The prisoner is to be held in custody pending further charges to be referred by the Attorney-General.’ In fact, they brought the same charges against me. But this time in a way that guaranteed my conviction. Even now, I find it painful to tell of it. The Sydney Morning Herald gave the viewpoint of the 186

Trials and tribulations Ascendancy. ‘New South Wales should not be held responsible for the demonstration of joy which followed Gardiner’s acquittal,’ the editorial column read. ‘It is our duty, in the interests of public morality, to protest against the wicked sympathy often expressed for criminals and crime and to vindicate, if possible, the community at large from all responsibility of such sympathy.’ The people thought otherwise. Booksellers did a wild trade in the rousing tale The Life of Gardiner, which was so full of nonsense that it gave me the best laugh of 1864.The waxmaker expanded his horizons and opened a shop with dummies of me for sale, to which the ladies of Sydney beat a steady path. And oh, the ballads that suddenly sprang up. Kitty and the girls sent me copies via my lawyers. My two favourites were the song, ‘Frank Gardiner at Eugowra Rocks’ and the ballad ‘Gardiner’. The song began: You can sing of Johnny Gilbert, Dan Morgan and Ben Hall, But the brave and reckless Gardiner, he’s the boy to beat them all.

The best verse of the ballad went: Farewell, adieu to outlaw Frank, he was the poor man’s friend The Government has secured him, the laws he did offend He boldly stood his trial and he answered in a breath: ‘Yet do what you will, you can but kill; I have no fear of death.’

While I waited for the next trial, Ben was doing my cause no good at all. In April, the Yass Courier took the police to task: ‘For the last six days nearly all of this district’s police have been scouring the bush in search of Hall; but it is not necessary to comment on the result. ‘Hall and his exploits—more particularly his apparent contempt of, and escape from, the police—are sources of almost endless 187

Fire in the Blood conversation and ill-concealed delight to far too many of that numerous corps of youthful and agile stockriders which inhabit the extensive plains of the Bland.’ Early in June, he and his mates robbed Charles Clements’ station and followed that up with a return visit to Canowindra, where the police ignored them while they held up their favourite store. Then, on 6 July, they held up a Cobb and Co coach between Carcoar to Bathurst, the same day I went to trial! Dan Morgan was also making headlines.At Tumbarumba, in the Southern Highlands, Sergeant David Maginnity and Constable Charles Churchley were about fifteen miles down the track from the town when they came upon a lone rider. As they reached abreast of him, Morgan pulled out a revolver and shot Dave Maginnity in the chest. Maginnity’s horse took off with him but Churchley went after Morgan. However, his horse knocked up and, when he returned, Maginnity was nowhere to be seen.Three days later, they found his body in the bush. Just before they buried Maginnity, they raised the price on Morgan’s head to 1000 pounds, dead or alive. And they charged Constable Churchley with cowardice and neglect of duty, then sacked him from the force. Morgan was not without his supporters, like the Corcoran brothers who joined up with him as the New South Wales police sent party after party of troopers to bring him down. Time and again, Morgan was seen and chased by the troopers, but every time he eluded them.Their horses knocked up or they lost him in thick scrub.And, by now, the Victorian police were giving their northern colleagues a hard time. It seemed as though the fates were conspiring against me. Every time another clash occurred west of the Divide all eyes turned to the man who started it all. It didn’t matter that I had run a different show on my own set of rules; they lumped all the hold-ups and 188

Trials and tribulations gunfights together and called it ‘Gardinerism’. It was damned unfair and there were times when I raged against it. But that way lies madness, and that was a road I would not travel. Too many good men—the Jackey Jackeys of the world—had gone there before me.

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CHAPTER 22

Two verdicts

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itty and the girls printed pamphlets and poems to alert the people to the way I was to be made to pay for the actions of others. I blessed them for it, but I knew that the lawmakers would not rest until they had put me away, preferably for ever at the end of a rope. I talked it over with Isaacs. He was quite certain they would never bring Eugowra against me—they just didn’t have a case.The only other problem was the hold-up of the Horsingtons when that bastard McGuinness fired the shot that damn near hit the woman. He was long gone but the Horsingtons were still around and would be more than happy to give evidence against me. In any case, I was not happy to have that on my record. McGuinness had disobeyed strict instructions. So I set to and wrote a letter to the authorities that would put the matter fairly, whether I was convicted 190

Two verdicts of the Middleton charge or not. I hoped it wouldn’t be needed but best that it be held in readiness. Sir Alfred Stephen this time ensured that he would personally oversee my case.As we suspected, the government simply reworded the original charge and substituted Hosie for Middleton.They gave the jurors a choice—either I attacked him with intent to murder, which meant an immediate appointment with the hangman, or I attacked him ‘to cause grievous bodily harm’, which only carried a prison term. Then they added the Horsington matter and we knew we were in trouble. It didn’t matter that they had the facts completely wrong in the charge, there was just no way we could win and we knew it. So when the Clerk cried ‘How do you plead?’, I said ‘Not guilty’ to either of the charges involving Hosie but ‘Guilty ‘to the robbery of the Horsingtons and their friend Hewitt. All I could hope for was that we would beat the death sentence. And all Sir Alfred hoped for was that he’d have me dancing the twostep before the month was done. He didn’t even bother to pretend. He wanted Frank Gardiner dead and he didn’t care who knew it. The evidence from Middleton was much the same as that of the previous trial but they had gone to work on Hosie and he made a better fist of his lies this time round. By the time they had finished their case on the first day, we knew there was little point in calling Mary Fogg again. Instead, we relied on Isaacs’ eloquence and on my reputation and demeanour in the courtroom. For it was true, as I had written, that I never did a mean thing, never took an innocent life and never harmed a woman. It was also true that with Kitty I had found a new way of living and a decent place in the community. If given the chance, I would return to that place and let the rest of the world go by. To give him his due, the barrister excelled himself. ‘This is no ordinary case, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The prisoner has already been 191

Fire in the Blood tried for the commission of this very same offence—or an offence so identical that only a technical line of distinction can be drawn, by substitution of the name of Hosie for that of Middleton in the indictment. ‘On that previous occasion, the defendant was acquitted. I say to you gentlemen that the verdict on that occasion was a just one— and the evidence in this case is precisely similar. ‘There is another point which makes this case very peculiar.While the prisoner has been awaiting trial for an offence which put his life in peril, he has been made the subject of slanderous vituperation in the newspapers. Such comments before a prisoner’s trial are unprecedented in the annals of justice.They are unfair, un-Christian, cruel and vindictive. I am sure that you gentlemen will not be influenced, terrorised or coerced into finding a verdict against the prisoner through fear of being held up to ridicule and scorn by the press.’ Well said. But the jury did not need the newspapers to terrorise and coerce. Sir Alfred Stephen filled that role himself. When he followed Isaacs with his summing-up, he endorsed their attacks and drove them home. ‘The press,’ he said, ‘has every right to question the propriety and equity of decisions given by juries. Let no man think that if he fails in his public duty he will be free from censure by the press! If a jury pronounces a verdict that is contrary to the evidence, they have no right to complain if they are subsequently criticised and censured.’ I listened with equal measure of despair and wonderment. If the press had attacked a man of privilege, he would have damned it as a contempt of process. If such a man were on trial, he would insist on all the proprieties. If the Crown had failed once to convict on the same evidence, he would, in any other instance, proclaim the rule of double jeopardy and throw the case out of his courtroom. But in my case it was the rules that went out the window. Come what may, Frank Gardiner would hang by the neck until dead. 192

Two verdicts ‘Gardiner was a reputed bushranger. Did this justify the police in acting as they did? I have no hesitation in saying that it did justify them! Who fired the first shot? Supposing that in your opinion it was Hosie who fired first—I say that he had a perfect right to do so. Was he to wait until Gardiner had fired and had perhaps shot him dead? ‘It is well known that, at the time, the country was infested with bushrangers. It still is.The police are blamed for not apprehending them. How can these bushrangers be apprehended if juries will not protect police in the performance of their duty?’ On and on he went. It was no summing-up; it was the case for legal murder, and all those who heard it were downcast by the show of spite—even Jimmy Martin, who would not meet my eyes. At 4.50 in the afternoon, Stephen finished his diatribe and let the jury go to their deliberations. On this occasion, Kitty’s face was streaked with tears.Archina and Charlotte had to hold her when she rose or she would have toppled over. I knew that if I did not hurry down to the cells, I would lose control of my rage. Beneath the court, in an effort to calm myself, I made changes to the letter I had composed earlier. It was a desperate struggle to keep my emotions in check and the words in order. Finally it was 6.30 and Officer Mason, a weary old man with a kindly face, appeared at the door. ‘It’s time, Frank,’ he said.‘They’re back.’ ‘How do they look?’ I asked. ‘They look more feared of the judge than you do.’ Looks can be deceiving. Whatever happened, the twelve good men would walk from the courtroom that night for hearth and home, their lives preserved until nature closed the book. I had a different prospect before me. Mason climbed the ladder and pushed open the trapdoor, then struggled into the dock. His offsider waited below then followed me 193

Fire in the Blood up.There was Kitty in the same bonnet she’d worn on the last day of the other trial—her lucky bonnet, she said. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, how do you find? Is the prisoner, Frank Gardiner, guilty or not guilty of the charge of wounding with intent to murder?’ The words were out before I’d had the chance to collect myself. The foreman was standing. His mouth was opening, and, in a moment, he would pronounce me dead or alive. ‘We find the prisoner . . . not guilty!’ A sensation of relief swept through me, the like of which I had never known before. It was as though my heart was pounding so fast there was not enough blood to reach my extremities. My life became my own again. I gripped the bars of the dock with both hands and held on hard as the spectators voiced their approval. If only the day had ended with those blessed words. But, in the next few moments, I was plunged from light into darkness as the foreman answered ‘Guilty’ to the lesser charge.The judge gathered himself for the sentencing. He gave me the chance to speak before announcing my fate and, after a moment’s confusion, I handed up the letter. It put my side fairly and squarely and I don’t mind admitting that I bowed and scraped.Truth is, I would have licked the man’s boots if it meant he’d cut my sentence from ten years to five; if from five to four I’d have embraced him as a brother. I had written: I beg to say that during the last two years I have seen the error of my ways, and I have endeavoured to live an honest and upright life. During this time I have had great temptations, for I was entrusted on several occasions with large quantities of gold from the Peak Downs diggings—with the first escort gold that arrived from Peak Downs consisting of 706 ounces; again, Mr Manton, whom I beg to refer to, a gentleman connected with the copper

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Two verdicts mines, entrusted to my care 264 ounces; and lastly Mr Veale did the same with 206 ounces.Yet the honest resolutions I had formed were so strong as to prevent me from doing a dishonest action on these opportunities. And I do trust that Your Honour will believe that these were not isolated cases or that I would ever again fall into those practices which I have felt for a long time past in my breast to be a sin against God and man.

I couldn’t let the Horsington matter go unanswered so I put it plain: It was I who told them to bail up, using no other words or threats. While I was directing Mr Horsington where to turn off into the bush a shot went off from one of my four men. I at the time was within two or three yards of Mr Horsington and his wife. I immediately turned round and asked,‘Who fired that shot?’ McGuinness made answer, ‘I did, but it was purely accidental’; upon which I replied that as soon as he had received his share of the spoil he should leave the party, which he did that night. The man McGuinness, who was 30 yards from away from me amongst the rest of the party, distinctly heard my question as to who fired; I also heard his reply; and yet Mr Horsington, his wife and boy, positively swear that they heard nothing of this conversation. Mr Horsington and his party assert that the robbery took place on the 10th March while it really did not take place until five or six weeks afterwards; so that if I had been inclined to stand my trial I might have been enabled to prove an alibi. This, as Your Honour will see, is not written with a view to escape punishment, for, on the contrary, it incriminates myself; my only desire has been to point out the inconsistency of the witnesses so that, had I not pleaded guilty to this charge, I might probably have escaped; so contradictory is their evidence that a verdict in my favour might have been the result.

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Fire in the Blood And now,Your Honour, as we must all on the last and great day of judgement throw ourselves on the mercy of the great Judge of all our actions, so do I now throw myself upon your mercy as my earthly judge, and pray for a lenient and merciful consideration of my case. I am,Your Honour, your humble servant, Francis Christie.

He made as to read it, though whether he did or not I cannot say. Certainly if he did he wasted no time in its consideration for he quickly put the pages aside and sought whether I had anything to add. I replied that I did not. I will not burden you with the full dish of his venom.With the first few words I knew that I had wasted my time in seeking access to his better nature. ‘I intend to make an example of you that will be a lesson I hope the community will never forget,’ he said.‘What a career you have led! You have been the captain of a band of robbers and you must be sure that you cannot escape a punishment proportionate to your crimes.’ So, I was to pay for all that had gone before, every fist raised in protest and anger, every rebellious act against the laws of privileged possession.The charges themselves were of no moment. My crime was that I was Frank Gardiner. ‘Consider the dreadful example that you have held out in this community,’ he said.‘What a career you have led. Many have followed your evil example, influenced by the animal courage you have shown. You cannot expect mercy for it would be unjust if the law were to stay its hand in your case—the character of the country destroyed, security of property and of persons travelling at an end, persons robbed to an extent that seems inconceivable. Are these nothing? ‘When I consider the crimes you have committed, can I hesitate in saying that the law at last has justly overtaken you? It is not for one offence but for many that you are here . . .’ 196

Two verdicts And on he went, working himself into a righteous rage then releasing it with a sentence beyond all possible connection to the cases against me: for the Hosie affray, fifteen years’ hard, the first two to be served in irons; for Horsington, ten years’ hard; for Hewitt in the same action, seven years’ hard. But, unlike John Vane, my sentences were to be served one after the other, all 32 years. If he couldn’t kill me outright, he could at least bury me alive. The newspapers of the day said I took my punishment like a man. I stood tall and erect and faced him without a tremor. Little did they know what strength of will and purpose that took.Then, as he did his worst, I turned to one side. I filled my eyes with Kitty, with my own Catherine.

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CHAPTER 23

In durance vile

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here were times in the days and weeks that followed when I nearly gave up the ghost altogether. My future seemed bereft of the slightest ray of hope. I was 35 years old. If I served my full sentence, I would be a greybeard by the time I was released. And, given the conditions in Darlinghurst, it was very unlikely that I would survive half of it. Lest it be thought that I exaggerate, here is testimony of the gaol from the Sydney Mail of that time. The overcrowding is such that in the morning when the prisoners are brought from their cells the stench is intolerable.This, however, will not appear extraordinary when it is known that there are now 640 prisoners confined within such narrow limits—that is, about 130 over and above the number which ought to be the maximum.

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In durance vile The effect upon the prisoner is of course debilitating and such as to predispose them to disease. It is alarming to contemplate how great might be the calamity resulting from a prison fever.

Alarming to some, but to others such as myself in durance vile it provided the only avenue of escape from a living hell. Though I had fought with every fibre to escape the hangman’s noose, I now felt the effort was in vain.Yet, even in my low state, the Ascendancy kept up their relentless condemnation of all I stood for.The screws were pleased to pass along such messages from the outside world as the Sydney Morning Herald’s gloating editorial: We hope that the name of Gardiner will be heard no more. He has covered this colony with the deepest disgrace.We hope now that the tide has turned. The upholders of law and government will have their day, however long its dawn may be postponed.

I could get no closer to my Kitty than the letters Archina wrote for her.This was a consolation and a torture in equal part. I should have closed my mind to it but in those first weeks I was tossed on the seas of emotion far beyond my control. I made a plan with a nearby cellmate, Walter Cust, to bribe a screw to organise a break-out. Cust had friends in Sydney who could do the job while I could pay for their cooperation. It was a daring scheme and it might have worked. But another prisoner, John Robinson, got wind of it and grassed on us in the hope it would reduce his sentence. The warder was caught with a letter to Cust’s mates and that was the end of it. I tried to settle into the prison routine, but something within me rebelled against it because to do so would be to surrender to hopelessness. I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I found myself seeking the latest news from outside, especially the adventures of Ben and Johnny. 199

Fire in the Blood Then suddenly there was a new warrior of the road, an old mate I had met on Cockatoo in the fifties: Fred Ward. His story and mine had much in common. He’d been born at Windsor, grown up in the Maitland area and had run foul of the law in a horse-trading deal that earned him four years on the rock. However, when he finished his sentence, he too met a woman of spirit prepared to give herself heart and soul to him. Mary Ann Bugg was the daughter of a Scottish immigrant, James Bugg, a sheep overseer for the Australian Agricultural Company and an Aboriginal woman he had met where he worked near Stroud. Mary Ann was sent away to Sydney for an education. But it was her voice that stood her out from the crowd. She could sing like an angel. She married young to some nobody and went to live with him in the Mudgee district. But the man died and, not long after, she met Frederick Wordsworth Ward. Despite his poetic appellation, Fred did not have the benefit of schooling but that didn’t matter to Mary Ann. From the moment they found each other, they were inseparable. Except by the law. It seems Fred’s ticket-of-leave required him to report regularly to Mudgee Police Station and on one occasion he mixed up the dates. When he did turn up, the police arrested him then charged him with stealing the horse he’d borrowed for the journey! So it was back to Cockatoo for a further three years. Two weeks after he was imprisoned in 1861, Mary Ann gave birth to their first child, Marina. There were no visitors permitted on Cockatoo but Mary Ann brought the baby to Balmain where she worked as a maid in a grand house on the closest point to the island. I heard tell that on a still night she would go to the point and sing the ballads of Scotland and the arias of opera. At such times on Cockatoo the prison would be in perfect silence, with every man’s ears straining for the last notes of the songs. 200

In durance vile Then, on 11 September 1863, Fred escaped, the only man ever to do so. There are many theories about how it was done—by swimming through the sharks or bribing a warder—but I believe Mary Ann planned it all and kept Fred informed by song. A couple of days before the break, she swam out to the island at night since no boats were allowed anywhere near the area and carried metal files that she secreted where Fred would find them.Then, on the night of the escape, he and a fellow convict, Fred Britten, used them to make the final cut to their manacles and swam to her shore light. She hid them in an old boiler and fed them from her employer’s kitchen until the searchers gave up.Then the two men cleared out for Uralla in the north, with Fred dressed in women’s clothes as disguise. Mary Ann gave notice soon after and joined him in the bush. By then he’d found the name that he’d be known by for the rest of his life. When he held up the customs house near Maitland, he banged on the door to rouse the receiver,William Delaney.‘By God,’ said Delaney when he opened up, ‘I thought it must have been a thunderbolt.’ ‘And so it is,’ replied Ward, aiming a pistol at Delaney’s head. ‘I am the thunder and this is the bolt.’ Soon Mary Ann would have a second child and she would carry both with them on horseback and in buggies, rearing them in caves, hide-outs and campsites throughout the mountain and river districts of northern New South Wales and sometimes over the border into Queensland. Occasionally there would be a few days of luxury in some sympathiser’s hut but for the rest of the time it was living hard. Her Aboriginal name was Yellow Long and on occasions when their food supply was running low she would make a spear from a shearing blade fastened to a sapling and hunt game the way her people had done long before the white man arrived. Somehow I took comfort 201

Fire in the Blood in their story. I suppose that in my imagination I thought of myself and Kitty in their place. Morgan, too, was back in the news. In September, he turned the tables on the police who had been tracking him on and off since the shooting of Maginnity. He became the hunter and crawled up to the tents of his pursuers and fired a volley of shots at the police. Sergeant Smyth fired back but a bullet tore into his left shoulder just over the breast and passed through his body. He staggered six or seven paces and collapsed. Reinforcements were called and they gave chase, many times having Morgan in their sights but never for long enough to fire a telling shot. Finally he escaped and Smyth died from his wound. Then, to sweeten the pot, Johnny Gilbert returned. He found Ben in a bad way. His two mates, Dunleavy and the Old Man, had left him and he’d taken on a young spark named John Dunn who had the reputation of being the best jockey in New South Wales. He was handy with his fists as well but a little too eager to use his guns. Early in November 1864, the three of them raided Rossiville, a big property three miles from Goulburn. It was owned by Captain Rossi, the son of an Italian count who lorded it over his workers and made free use of the lash. They planned to give him a taste of his own medicine but at the time he was off on a tour with the Bishop of Goulburn. News of the raid sent the Goulburn police into a panic—word spread that they were about to take the town and all the banks. Superintendent Zouch mustered his forces and waited for the attack. Instead, they seized the Great South Road from Sydney to Goulburn where they stopped the Sydney mail and robbed its passengers. But then, on 15 November near Jugiong, a new element entered the equation when Johnny Gilbert himself shot and killed a trooper. Sergeant Edmund Parry was riding 100 yards behind the Gundagai mail beside his commander, Sub-Inspector O’Neill. 202

In durance vile Constable Roche was on the coach itself and Magistrate Alfred Rose was inside when the bushrangers let the coach pass and galloped at the two police riders. O’Neill fired his rifle at Ben Hall then threw the carbine itself, which hit Ben on the head. He then drew his revolver and he, Hall and Dunn fought it out. Finally O’Neill surrendered and Roche leapt out of the coach and ran for it.The passengers later found him hidden in a hollow log. Gilbert was locked in combat with Parry. In fact, the two charged at each other like knights of old with guns blazing on both sides. But Gilbert was the better shot and Parry fell from his saddle, fatally wounded. Johnny dismounted and went over to him. ‘He was a game fellow,’ he said.‘He should have had more sense than to stand against me in a pistol fight, but he died like a man.’ Now there was no going back. Now they must have known it was a fight to the finish. Five days later, the government offered 1000 pounds each for Gilbert and Hall and 250 pounds for John Dunn. They went to Binda for Christmas, up in the Foggs’ area on the road from Goulburn and Crookwell over the mountains to the Lachlan Plains.They stayed out of town until the big ball on Boxing Day when they rode in with three young ladies of the district, Ellen and Margaret Monks and their friend Christina McKinnon. To set the girls up, they first visited Morriss’s store for some finery. Morriss was a former trooper and he did not take kindly to their arrival. So they bailed him up and, when they were outfitted with the best on offer, they took him and his wife along to the ball. There they ordered everyone to stay put until the celebrations were over. The girls, no doubt, were the envy of Binda womanhood. At 2 a.m. Morriss escaped through a side window and tried to raise an attack on the lads. They retaliated by burning down his store. 203

Fire in the Blood Ellen and Christina were later arrested and tried for arson; Margaret was excused, since at the time she and John Dunn had been otherwise engaged. But the charges didn’t stick and they were released on 1000 pounds bond each. Morriss, I heard, rejoined the police force as a special constable, determined to hunt down his tormentors. He wasted his time. So at the end of 1864, rather than my incarceration ‘turning the tide’, New South Wales had bushrangers in every district: Morgan, Thunderbolt, Gilbert, Dunn and Hall made daily news.The Sydney Morning Herald thundered against them. The government and the police—Sir Frederick Pottinger, in particular—were the objects of outrage and contempt. Their great scheme of burying the King of the Road in durance vile to end the bushranger curse had come apart at the seams. It was some consolation. But not much.

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CHAPTER 24

Farewell to my lovely

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n the six months I had been in Darlinghurst, following my one break-out attempt, I had resolved to behave myself like a model prisoner. I knew the rules well enough and I stuck to them. I was respectful to the screws; I worked a full quota; and I accepted the slop they called food without complaint. I had one object only in all this—to make a decent life on the inside and so prepare the ground for a review of my sentence. My lawyers said that once the Gardiner hysteria passed it would be clear to one and all in parliament and the judiciary that 32 years was sheer vindictive spite on Stephen’s part. If I kept my head down, and if my dear sisters kept up the pressure on the outside, I could expect to have the sentence halved and perhaps even a little better than that. But that was no use to me if life within those cursed sandstone walls was insupportable in the interim. I pined for Kitty. 205

Fire in the Blood I wrote to the new Premier, Henry Parkes, seeking an interview and, sooner than I expected, he replied in the affirmative. Parkes was a blow-hard like all politicians but he had a good feeling for Australia and its history and thought himself something of a literary man. It seemed that my letter piqued his interest. Perhaps he had some notion of writing of me in his memoirs or perhaps he was curious to meet the character whose activities had made such a mark on New South Wales. But, whatever the case, he agreed to a meeting and came to the prison governor’s office early in ’65 to listen to my petition and cast his eye over some of my fellow inmates as well. On the day, the governor allowed me to make myself presentable and, once Parkes and I were settled in the anteroom to his office, he left us with a single guard outside the door. Parkes was a well-padded fellow with bushy hair and the air of someone who thinks his words are being taken down for posterity. But he was an Australian at heart and, after a while, as I told him the true story of my young life and the fire that boiled in my blood at the power of the Ascendancy, he stopped his declaiming and settled back, asking a question here and there and—to give him his due—twisting the knife if I sought to fudge the facts. I calculated that he expected me to rail against Stephen and plead for mercy. But that was not my go. I knew it was far too soon for that to have the slightest chance.And, the fact is, I wanted something far more important: I wanted to see Kitty. I couldn’t bear the fact that she was living so close by yet so completely out of reach. I said,‘Mr Parkes, I have forfeited my rights to liberty. I have no argument there. But do my convictions mean that I must endure a life bereft of common humanity? Should I and the love of my life be fated never to have even the poor consolation of visitation, a privilege granted to men and women whose convictions far outweigh those placed against my name?’ He looked at me in some surprise.‘Your lady?’ he said.‘Mrs Brown?’ 206

Farewell to my lovely ‘Mrs Christie,’ I replied.‘We were married under the bright stars of heaven on a night that will live with me always.’ I struggled with my emotions. It stirred him. I could see that well enough. For Henry was well known for his romantic nature and my words came straight from the heart.We were soon done and he rose and left the room. I heard him tell the screw to give me half a minute to compose myself. I thought that the most decent thing a politician ever did. I wrote to Kitty, who was now staying with Charlotte, and told her of the interview. The next I knew, the two of them had also secured an appointment with Parkes. I didn’t learn the result of that for three days, and, when I did, the emotions that burst inside me were more than I could contain. Parkes had agreed, but only to a single meeting. Beyond that, it was impossible since in the eyes of the law she was married to another. His decision was final. There was no appeal. The meeting was scheduled for two weeks hence. It was to be our final farewell and I sought some way to mark it. My resources were few but at the time I was employed in the prison’s book bindery where we bound copies of the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. I applied to Superintendent Reid for permission to make and inscribe a special one for Kitty and he agreed. It was little enough. When she and Charlotte entered that shadowed room, the place lit up with the loveliness of her. In that moment, all my resolutions fled. I had decided that I would be friendly but firm. I would tell her in simple words that our time was past. I would give her the book as a keepsake, a memento that marked the end of our time together. Henceforth she should take up the strands of her life and move on. That was my intention and I believe that this was the sense of what I said to her. But I couldn’t keep the tears from my eyes or the 207

Fire in the Blood gruffness from my voice, and, when I reached across the table and touched her hand, Charlotte and the screw looked away and gave us that precious moment. The inscription surrounded by scrollwork that had taken me many hours said,‘Presented to Catherine by her affectionate Frank, 1865.’That was all they allowed me. Not love. Just affection. Kitty said,‘I will love you until I die.’ Then she was gone.

A few days before, on 6 and 7 January 1865, Sir Frederick Pottinger had committed his final act of stupidity. Though ordered to keep away from horseracing carnivals, other than in the strict course of duty, he made a great show of himself at the Wowingragong races near Forbes and, believe it or not, he even rode the stayer ‘Bushranger’ in two separate events. The Orange Guardian published an account of his antics in which it reported that ‘Ben Hall’s gang were at the back of the course, drinking and amusing themselves. It is said that when Sir Frederick Pottinger was riding one of the races, Hall remarked,“I have a good mind to shoot him.”’ Captain McLerie sent his knight errant a letter the same day he received the Guardian. ‘It being directly opposed to the regulations of the Department that Officers of Police take part in any racing matters, I presume the material in the newspaper paragraph annexed is incorrect. Sir F. Pottinger is requested to report.’ And so he did, all fourteen pages of which were later published and which caused all who read them to remark that the man was, at best, a goose. He claimed that he was in the area in plain clothes searching for Ben Hall and his gang. He had heard they might be at the races.The last race on the first day was The Ladies Bag, the prize being trinkets donated by the ladies of the district, and they pressed 208

Farewell to my lovely him to compete. Had he refused them, he said, ‘This would have exhibited an ungracious spirit and not only unsatisfactorily reflected on my character personally but also left me open to misconstructions prejudicial to my position and interests officially.’ He probably meant that the ladies would have judged him a coward when Ben and the lads were about.That simply would not do. Other papers reported that Ben and John Dunn had actually organised a footrace between themselves to the great delight of the spectators and had shouted the bar more than once during the meeting—all apparently without Pottinger’s knowledge. McLerie rejected his explanation and recommended that he be suspended at once. Charlie Cowper concurred and, on 17 February, he was officially dismissed from the New South Wales police force. The disgrace was too much to bear. The baronet decided to confront his superiors in person and on 4 March he set out for Sydney by coach. On the way, he told a fellow passenger, Dan Mayne, that he was not greatly concerned since his family was ‘very intimate’ with the governor, Sir John Young, who would soon put things right. But during the mail stop at Wascoe’s Inn in the Blue Mountains, Potty went into a nearby orchard to pick some fruit.The coach started without him so he ran and swung himself on board, but, as he did so, a pistol in one of his pockets discharged accidentally, the ball entering just below his ribs. The coachman stopped but the barrownight assured everyone he was unharmed. Only then did the seriousness of his wound become apparent and they turned back to the inn. Doctors were summoned but the path of the bullet could not be traced and it was some days before he could be moved to Sydney.Then it seemed he was on the road to recovery but, as he was recuperating at his Victoria Club in Castlereagh Street, the wound became seriously inflamed and leeches were applied. All the Hippocratic arts were in vain, however, and, on 9 April my dashing opponent expired. 209

Fire in the Blood I would like to say that I had some sense of sympathy for the fellow whose life was cut short in such a foolish manner. But at the time I felt no such thing. He was the enemy. He was the long arm of privilege.We lived in different worlds. I could say the same of Dan Morgan, but in a completely different way. There was a wildness in the man that brooked no limitation or restraint, even from his better nature. By March 1865, the Victorian government was scoffing at the New South Wales police for their inability to catch ‘The Travellers’ Friend’, boasting that any bushranger who appeared in Victoria would be captured within days. Morgan took this as a challenge, and crossed into Victoria where he bailed up stations, stole racehorses, burnt down haystacks and robbed farms.The Victorians were made to look just as silly but after a month Morgan had had enough. He was crossing back into New South Wales when, on Sunday 8 April, he bailed up Peechelba Station, a big sheep property near Corowa on the border. For the next twelve hours, he terrorised the owners and the staff. At the time, Peechelba supported two homesteads; Morgan targeted the one occupied by Charles MacPherson, which stood among trees, but only 400 metres away was MacPherson’s partner George Rutherford’s place. It was nearly dark when Morgan arrived with three captives. He had held up Robert Telford, another of the property owners on the road, and picked up a couple of their stockmen along the way. The MacPhersons had finished dinner and their eighteen-yearold daughter was playing the piano in the drawing room when there was a loud knock on the door. Morgan burst in with guns at the ready and the women’s screams brought the staff running. He demanded food and drink and the maids ran to get it. The MacPhersons had only one object—to give the man what he wanted and get rid of him. But little Alice Keenan, a maid of all work, was made of sterner stuff. When Morgan let her leave the 210

Farewell to my lovely room to tend a crying baby, she saw a station hand, Duncan McIntosh, coming to the door with a can of milk. ‘Be quick,’ she told him, ‘Morgan is here. Run and tell the Rutherfords.’ But, just then, Mrs MacPherson also came to tend the baby and, fearing that Alice had put all their lives in danger, she sent Alice to find him and tell him to say nothing.Alice ran off into the darkness and found McIntosh in his quarters. He hadn’t followed her instructions. Perhaps he was a sympathiser; perhaps he just didn’t want to get involved. But nothing was going to stop young Alice. She hared over to the Rutherfords herself and the squatter sent a man the 30 miles to Wangaratta to get the police. By seven o’clock next morning, two parties of troopers—one from Wangaratta and another under Victorian detective Manwaring, who had been tracking Morgan independently—had arrived and surrounded the station. Manwaring told his men Morgan must be taken alive. ‘So, when you see him, fire at his legs.’ The Victorians wanted to parade their success round the streets and the courts of Melbourne as a lesson to all who might be tempted to take to the road.They also wanted to show off to the New South Wales police who couldn’t take a trick against Johnny Gilbert and Ben Hall. However, among the police party a stockman named John Wendlan fired just as they reached the stockyards. Morgan fell as the bullet struck him just below the shoulder blade and severed his windpipe.The police raced forward and grabbed Morgan’s revolver. ‘Why didn’t you challenge me?’ he shouted. ‘Why not give me a fair go?’ A local Minister, the Reverend Robinson, had also arrived with the police party and he offered his prayers but Morgan would have none of it.‘Get away with yer,’ he said and died at two o’clock that afternoon. That was not quite the end of the Morgan story. People from all over the district came to look at the notorious bushranger’s body 211

Fire in the Blood and they took pieces of his beard as souvenirs. In fact, the medico in Wangaratta, Dr Dobbyn, decapitated him and sent his head to Melbourne University so it could be compared with the skull of a gorilla.The rest of him was buried in Wangaratta cemetery. The troopers who carried the head down through Victoria took great delight in showing it off along the way.Their idea, no doubt, was to flaunt their ascendancy and discourage those who would take up arms against them. If so, they calculated badly when they passed through the village of Greta.There, ten-year-old Ned Kelly watched the proceeding with his father, Red Kelly, and the coppers’ laughter burned into his brain. The father cursed them and swore Irish vengeance.The son would never forget. When news of Morgan’s death reached New South Wales, notices appeared on station gates throughout the Riverina: ‘This is to give notice to all travellers that your mate Morgan is dead, and this station no longer accommodates tramps.’

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y sisters wrote to me regularly and visited when permitted. Occasionally, if I pressed them hard, they told what they knew of Kitty. For a while she had stayed with Charlotte, but she was not a city girl and my sisters could see the sense in my plea that she make a life without me.They encouraged her to move back to the country. Her mother had sold Wheogo to Brown but she wanted no part of him. Eventually, she found a job as housekeeper with the Hawkins family on Woolonough Station near West Wyalong. She didn’t stay long there and soon drifted back to the Forbes area where she lived with sister Bridget and James Taylor. But, with Biddy’s hatred of all things connected to the name of Gardiner, it was only a matter of time before that arrangement collapsed.When it did, Kitty took off with Taylor’s brother Richard for the goldfields of New Zealand. 213

Fire in the Blood I didn’t know Richard well, beyond the fact that he too was a heavy drinker. I suspected the worst. For while his sister Mary Fogg was among the finest of all women, there was a streak in those Taylor boys that I hated and despised—their treatment of the fairer sex. Sober they were tolerable, but the drink brought out their true character and Kitty’s life could not have been easy. Indeed, I suspect the trip to New Zealand was an attempt to break him away from the places and habits he’d accustomed himself to on the Lachlan—a new start in a new land. But, alas, it was not to be.

Indeed, I remember that time as the beginning of the end, not just for my Kitty but for the lads who had taken the torch from me. When I heard of the way they had fallen it damn near broke my heart. In Darlinghurst we followed it through the newspapers and gossip from visitors and the screws in every last particular. In January 1865, Hall, Gilbert and John Dunn reached Collector, not far from my old stamping grounds between Goulburn and the Limestone Plains. Most of the constabulary were out searching for them; only the lock-up keeper, Constable Nelson, remained. When told the bushrangers were at the local Kimberley’s Inn, Nelson armed himself with a carbine and bayonet and prepared to confront them. His wife tried to stop him. ‘Now then,’ he said to her, ‘I’m just going to do my best.’ His son Frederick walked toward the hotel with him. His other boy, Henry, was one of the travellers taken on the road and was tending the bushrangers’ horses. Dunn, seeing the constable approach, called on him to ‘Stand’. Nelson continued to advance. When he was about 25 yards away, Dunn fired with a single-barrelled gun. The charge hit Nelson in the left side, penetrating the heart. He was dead on his feet but 214

All fall down staggered forward. Dunn pulled his revolver and fired again. This time he struck the policeman on the side of the face. He went down. Then Dunn fired at young Frederick but luckily the ball went wide. Nelson had been in the police force for some years and was much respected. He left a wife and eight children. Now the killings were piling up and Dunn’s wanton murder of the constable lost the lads of the Lachlan the sympathy of the people. From this point, their cause—such as it was—was lost. Soon after, they were bested in a gunfight with four young brothers from the Faithfull clan in Goulburn, true members of the Bunyip Aristocracy. Gilbert’s mount,Young Waverley, took a bullet in the head and fell dead.The gang beat a tactical retreat. When they held up a coach on the Sydney Road, one of the women passengers began to admonish and counsel them. Ben Hall stopped her in her tracks.‘We do not usually interfere with women,’ he said,‘but, in your case, madam, we’re prepared to make an exception. So hold your tongue.’ Then, in March, the rules of the game began to change. A Bill was introduced into the New South Wales Legislative Assembly that would allow the lads to be declared outlaws and shot on sight. Every man who offered them shelter would be guilty of a capital crime. On 7 April, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly proceeded to Government House and obtained the assent of His Excellency, on behalf of Her Majesty, to the Felons’ Apprehension Act. It was now the law of the land. In a twist of fate, two days later, Sir Frederick Pottinger died of his wound. Later that month, Ben Hall’s gang visited Charles Cropper’s Yamma station, eight miles from Forbes. Cropper was a voluble enemy of bushrangers and I believe their intention was to set him straight. But the man was absent when they arrived. Ben said he was determined to own something belonging to Mr Cropper so took a pocket handkerchief. 215

Fire in the Blood To Mrs Cropper and family, the lads remained respectful in the extreme. Hall took a young male Cropper on his knee, calling him a fine fellow and remarking that he would make a good man in a few years, then adding that he would like to take him into his keeping. When they left, they took a racing mare and two horses, and left behind their names carved into a wooden stool. This was Ben Hall’s last hold-up. For on this day a party of police made up of Sub-Inspector James Davidson, Sergeant James Condell (yes, the same worthy who had run like a frightened rabbit from the Eugowra escort), troopers Thomas Hipkiss, John Bohan, John Caban and Edward Buckley, and trackers Billy Dargin and Charley set out from Forbes.They had a rendezvous with ‘a person in the bush’ who had information about the gang’s whereabouts. By now, Ben must have felt that his days were numbered. The troopers were combing the countryside. He’d been on the road, dodging bullets, for three years.The gang had lately been involved in so many brushes with death that their luck must surely run out soon.The strain was starting to tell. Hall, Gilbert and Dunn made their way down the Billabong Creek. Ben parted from them—there was a lady he wanted to see and his business with her did not include third parties. The men planned to reunite at Bogan Gate. Gilbert and Dunn camped downstream on the Billabong. About ten o’clock that night after Ben Hall had made his rendezvous, Davidson and his party came upon two horses hobbled in the scrub near the Little Billabong, twelve miles from Forbes.A man appeared and shifted the horses.They watched him settling down for the night. Davidson dispersed his party and waited for dawn. At 6.30 a.m. Ben Hall was astir and apparently moving to fetch his horses. He was about 100 yards from Davidson, holding a bridle. He was not armed. Davidson, Condell and Dargin started running towards him.When they came within 30 yards, Davidson fired with 216

All fall down a double-barrelled shotgun, one barrel hitting Ben in the back. Condell and Dargin, similarly armed, then fired, both hitting his back and shoulders. Ben staggered to a sapling and grasped it. Hopkiss fired with his revolver, the bullet passing clean through Ben’s body and cutting his belt in half. According to the inspector, Ben called out to Davidson:‘I am wounded—shoot me dead.’ Now, at last, he was at their mercy.They fired their guns till all their ammunition and all their rage was spent.They cut him to pieces. On 6 May at about four o’clock in the morning, the police, led by Davidson, arrived in Forbes with Ben Hall strapped to his horse. They sneaked the body into town, Davidson told the newspapers, in case of demonstrations of outrage or an attempt to seize the corpse. A report from a special correspondent, published in the Yass Courier said: From ten o’clock in the morning of Friday, the room where the body lay was filled with persons curious to have a look at the corpse of the man who has contributed so much to bring New South Wales into disrepute. I suppose that four or five hundred persons visited the barracks, and I saw several females among the crowd. After the inquiry several parties availed themselves of an opportunity to get a lock of the bushranger’s hair. There was nothing forbidding in the countenance of Ben Hall as he lay there still in death. In fact, I heard the remark several times, during the moment I was in the room, ‘What a handsome face’. It is claimed by his relatives and those who knew him best that he was affectionate and generous. It is said that a miniature found upon his person by the police after his death is that of a favourite sister, now living on the Maitland side, and that he has constantly worn it upon his person during the last three years.

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Fire in the Blood The true identity was probably Susan Pryor, who by then had borne him a lovely girl child, Mary. But Davidson’s own words say much about the nature of our struggle. ‘Three weeks before his death he had 500 pounds in 20-pound notes,’ he wrote. ‘He went round to say goodbye to his friends about here and when I got hold of him he had only one 20-pound note—the rest he had paid his friends.’ The next day, Ben Hall was buried; three buggies and about 50 people followed the coffin to the grave. Johnny Gilbert and John Dunn probably watched proceedings from a distance. Twenty-four hours later, they were 100 miles away.They stopped two young men near Marengo but offered no harm.Their horses were blown, and, according to the Courier,‘the riders looked as jaded as their horses’. On 10 May, Sir Alfred Stephen made the first proclamation of outlawry issued under the Felons’ Apprehension Act. He named Gilbert and Dunn. Two days later, Constable Charles Hales, in charge of the Binalong police, heard that the bushrangers had bailed up the Wool Shed public house nearby. He knew Dunn’s maternal grandparents, John and Mary Kelly, lived on the outskirts of Binalong and set out with Constables John Bright and King to stake out the house.They saw nothing suspicious and, after a night in the open, returned to their station. Then, on 13 May at about 8 a.m., John Kelly turned up at the Binalong police station, apparently well taken with grog. He asked King how much reward was offered for the outlaws, and, when the constable said ‘1000 pounds each’, the old bastard dobbed them in. They were asleep in his house, he said, and the police could take them. King ran to get Hales and the three men made a plan of attack. Kelly was concerned that his role as informer would be revealed so they decided to send him back first. When they had the place 218

All fall down surrounded, he’d make a show of calling a warning to the bushrangers. That way he’d get his pieces of silver and could clear out to another part of the colony with no one the wiser for his part in the proceeding. With 2000 pounds, he could even return to Ireland if he was so minded. It was raining heavily as the police party, with the Irish Judas already in place, approached the hut. The coppers fanned out and, just as they began to close in, Kelly spotted them and called out his warning:‘Look out, the hut is surrounded by the bloody troopers— the bloody wretches!’ This was the signal for Hales and King to run to the house. Hales burst through the door and there was an exchange of shots. Gilbert and Dunn jumped out of a back window and raced down the paddock, trying to catch their horses.The police dodged from tree to tree, with a brisk fire continuing on both sides, mostly from Dunn, who wounded King in the foot. The bushrangers struggled through a fence and crossed the creek; Dunn then vanished into the scrub. Gilbert dropped down, reloaded the revolving rifle he’d taken from Squire Davis, fired one round, but then had four misfires. He ran down to the creek and along it, the coppers in hot pursuit. Hales and Bright both fired, one ball striking Gilbert in the back, passing through his left lung and his heart. He fell dead, the stock of the Tranter rifle shattering as he fell. Hales ran up and stood over my fallen mate in his fancy coloured shirt, waistcoat, cord trousers and knee boots. There were two revolvers in his belt and enough ammunition for a sizeable fight. But Johnny Gilbert breathed no more. They took one of Kelly’s carts and loaded the body in. At the Binalong police station, many came to view him in death and ladies clipped locks of his hair as keepsakes. Kelly asked to be arrested to camouflage his role, and Hales obliged. He also arrested Kelly’s fifteen-year-old son Thomas to 219

Fire in the Blood complete the picture. Thomas was soon discharged but Kelly was tried in a closed court to preserve the fiction of his role. However, no one was fooled and the word soon spread that he received 500 pounds blood money—the other half being split between the coppers. On 16 May, Gilbert’s remains were buried in the police paddock at Binalong. John Dunn escaped and headed west. Rumours filtered in that someone matching his description was in the Dubbo area. In early December, a small party of police, operating undercover as cattle buyers, tracked him down and took him in a gunfight that left him seriously wounded. Nevertheless, he escaped once again and was finally taken in a Dubbo park when he pleaded with a passing stranger for a drink of water. Instead, the man turned him in.As soon as he was well enough to travel, they took him to Darlinghurst Gaol.

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or those of us incarcerated at Darlinghurst, 1866 brought a turn for the better.The Legislative Assembly began to expand the gaol and make conditions tolerable for both the inmates and the warders. They planned three new wings with an additional 126 cells and a range of manufacturies, schoolrooms and exercise yards. Moreover, they produced a plan that had the prisoners themselves working on the building program. Of course, some of the prisoners would not be around to share the benefit. Among them was John Dunn. I saw him first in early February when they brought him in to await his trial for the murder of Constable Nelson. As a proclaimed outlaw whose life was forfeit, no trial was necessary, but the Attorney-General wanted one. They never missed an opportunity to place the bushranger in the worst light. 221

Fire in the Blood Even before the trial, Dunn was resigned to his fate.Though only nineteen years old, he had lived harder than many a man. Now the prospect of meeting his maker was torturing the poor devil to the point where he spent each hour he could with the Catholic priest Michael Dwyer. Soon after he arrived, he was approached by an old mate, John McCormack, a rough stockman who was inside for ten years on robbery charges. At the time of the robbery, he was with Dunn at Murrumburrah, 50 miles away. But, when he came to trial, Dunn was a fully fledged bushranger so couldn’t testify. Now, in the shadow of the gallows, his testimony should strike home. Dunn sought me out to help him with the writing. He could sign his name well enough but a complicated composition of this nature was beyond him. I was happy enough to help. The trouble was that to make the plea effective he’d have to name the men who really carried out the robbery. He knew them well but was reluctant to inform on them. I certainly didn’t press him to do so. About ten o’clock on the night of the robbery, the man who committed the deed returned and told me that he, with a certain other, had committed it; that a Chinaman was robbed and wounded by him. Subsequently to McCormack’s receiving his sentence I had a conversation with the person who committed the robbery which turned upon his own guilt and McCormack’s innocence. I had intended to be present at the Court-house in Goulburn at McCormack’s trial to give evidence, but in the meantime I became a bushranger. Trusting that this my dying declaration may have the effect of procuring the release from prison of an innocent man is the prayer of one who desires to die the death of a repentant sinner . . .

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Dancing the two-step In the result, it procured nothing at all. In fact, when Judge Stephen sentenced Dunn to death shortly thereafter, he said, ‘If you had robbed the rich only and abstained from other crimes, something might have been said on your behalf. But you have gone further.You have robbed the widow of her mite, the settler of his horses and stores, and the digger of his hard-earned cash.’ He saved his most cutting words for Dunn’s murder of Nelson, who he compared to his ‘great namesake’ Admiral Lord Nelson. ‘Nelson went heroically to do his duty and met his death,’ he said.‘It was a most brutal murder and it is impossible to sympathise with you . . . John Dunn, the sentence of the court is that you be taken hence to the place of execution and then, on a day to be named by the governor and executive council, to be hanged by the neck till you are dead. It would be a prostitution of the word to talk of mercy in your case.You must seek pardon from above.’ And so he did. From 19 February, when the sentence was passed, until 19 March, when it was carried out, Dunn spent his time with the priests, with his brother Edward who came down from the country and with his godmother in Sydney, Mrs Tabitha Pickard. He wrote to his mother asking her to stay at home in Murrumburrah, since their meeting at such a time would be too hard to bear on both sides. Then, on the morning of the nineteenth, shortly before 9 a.m., the lad was pinioned and led out of his cell, still limping badly from his wound.The priests flanked him till he reached the steps to the scaffold, which he mounted alone to the waiting hangman, Robert Elliot. He made no final words from the dance floor and, in the terrible silence that fell upon the gaol at that time, we all heard—or believed we did—the slip of the trapdoor and the snap of the rope. I took it hard. In my day in the saddle I never would have taken Dunn on. He lacked a compass; he couldn’t tell daring from devilry; at least,

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Fire in the Blood not until he fell into the hands of the priests and by then it was too late. But in the dark watches of the night I couldn’t avoid the thought that somehow I was responsible; that if I hadn’t stood up and fought back and set the colours flying, he might never have taken up the gun that did Nelson in and set himself up for that final two-step. But I was not so moved when it came to the Clarke brothers, Tommy and John, who roamed the Braidwood area as members of the Jingera Mob. They were Irish as Paddy’s pigs. Whether they arrived as convicts, as did the father, John Clarke in 1828, or small settlers like Michael and Margaret Connell, who came with their family from Limerick in 1839, all were treated as the scum of the earth with no rights to any stake in the land.This made them hard and bitter men; and their womenfolk, to all outsiders, were tough as nails.They would have fought back whether I’d rebelled or not. John Clarke married Mary, the second eldest Connell daughter, in 1840 and their family came along regularly until it measured three sons—Tommy, James and John—and a total of eight girls. By the sixties, Tommy and his cousin Pat Connell were among the finest riders in the colony and Tommy trained racehorses. But, with the arrival of the Major’s Creek goldrush, the old strictures fell apart. Ben and Johnny visited the area in 1865 and Tommy joined them in an unsuccessful raid on a gold escort. After the Lachlan lads returned to their stamping grounds, he cut a swathe from Araluen to Michelago with his brother John and their Connell cousins. In April, they raided Nerrigundah, the richest gold centre on the south coast, and, in the process, shot Constable O’Grady, who’d risen from his sickbed to confront them. A few days later, Tommy Clarke was declared an outlaw. Suddenly the whole place was at war. Henry Parkes sent a team of undercover agents led by John Carroll, who I knew as a Darlinghurst 224

Dancing the two-step warder, on ‘a secret expedition for the capture of Thomas Clarke and his associates’. It did not remain secret long. The bullet-ridden bodies of the agents were found in the bush. On Carroll’s breast, secured by a wooden stake, was a one-pound note. In April 1866, the authorities raised the individual rewards on Tommy and John to 1000 and 500 pounds respectively. By then, Senior Constable William Wright was closing in with his small team of crack shots and the Black tracker they called ‘Sir Watkin’Wynne. The tracks were leading toward the house of Tom Berry, a Clarke cousin who lived in the hills with his wife and family and ran cattle on the Flat.They reached the bush paddock near the hut at 8 p.m. but stayed out of sight.Two racehorses were tethered nearby and men were hobbling them for the night. Shortly after dawn,Tommy and John Clarke came out of the slab house, carrying their bridles. Suddenly suspicious at the positioning of their horses,Tommy looked about and spotted a movement near the haystack.‘Look out!’ he cried.‘Behind the stack!’ Both bushrangers drew their revolvers and, as Wright and his men emerged from behind the haystack, a volley of shots rang out in both directions. John Clarke was struck in the fleshy part of the shoulder and one of the police took a ball in the thigh as the Clarkes turned and ran back inside. Tom Berry and his wife and children fled, and the bushrangers prepared for battle.They had two revolving rifles, two double-barrelled shotguns, plus their revolvers. The three-roomed cabin was a tough fortress against the police assault. The battle waged back and forth and it soon became clear to Wright that he needed reinforcements. He sent Constable Walsh, who had been wounded, to Ballaba, and, just as he was leaving, Sir Watkin took a hit in the arm. Later, the poor bugger would have it amputated. The Clarkes husbanded their ammunition, waiting for nightfall when they could make a break for the bush. But in the early 225

Fire in the Blood afternoon Walsh returned with a big party of police.Their position was now hopeless. When Wright called on the bushrangers to lay down their arms,Tommy came out with both hands raised, followed by his younger brother who was only able to lift his left arm above the shoulder.The police ran forward and handcuffed them. A few days later, they were committed for trial for the attempted murder of Constable Walsh. They arrived in Sydney Harbour on board a steamer from the Clyde River and were soon part of the rough fellowship of Darlinghurst Gaol.

Soon after his arrival,Tommy Clarke asked to meet me but I was in no mood for it.There was nothing I could do for him and I had no desire to forge a tie with a lad so soon for the hangman’s attentions. Nor, I must say, did I wish to hear words of praise or fellowship. But he was insistent and I hadn’t the heart to refuse him. That bastard Judge Stephen drew a connection. When he sentenced the boys to death by hanging, he outdid himself in the bile he heaped upon them. And he brought me into it at every chance.‘It humiliates me,’ he said,‘to think that in this very court in which I am now sitting, one of the greatest ruffians of bushrangers, who was the very head and front of offenders, stood in the dock and was acquitted—and, I say it, acquitted wrongly—and when the verdict was announced there were expressions of rejoicing in the court such as would disgrace any community on earth.’ Oh how it rankled him. And he never understood it, never realised that the law he lived by was made by the privileged to protect themselves against the rest of us, and that when someone arose who fought back he would naturally gain the support of the underdogs. Others of like mind would follow him but, once set on an outlaw course, the fall from grace and principle followed as night followed day with fearsome acts as a consequence. I did not 226

Dancing the two-step condemn the Clarkes. I condemned the British class system that made them. Such thoughts never disturbed the equanimity of brave Sir Alfred. His only fear was that Gardinerism might still lurk in his courtroom.‘There may be some here who were guilty of participation in that most abominable and most scandalous exhibition,’ he said.When no one in the bleachers spoke out, he turned back to the prisoners. He called them every kind of misguided fool. ‘I never knew a bushranger, except one,’ he said, ‘who is now suffering a sentence of 32 years’ hard labour, who made any money out of it. And yet these bushrangers, the scum of the earth, the lowest of the low, the most wicked of the wicked, are occasionally held up for our admiration!’ Yes, it was all beyond his ken. However, in his fancy, the crushing of the rebels would bring a new dawning. ‘It is the old leaven of convictism not yet worked out, but brighter days are coming.You will not live to see them,’ he told the young miscreants, ‘but others will.You young men have now to receive the last sentence of the law. You will pass from the country which you might have helped to raise in the estimation of the world.You will pass out of the world felons, convicts, bushrangers and, I very much fear, murderers.’ Their families came to visit and the weeping could be heard. Then the Clarke brothers stepped into eternity.

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CHAPTER 27

The last goodbye

I

t is mighty hard, even now these many years hence, to tell what happened next.Truth to tell, I would rather pass over it and return to tales of the battlefield, even those that ended in defeat. But I cannot avoid it without failing the love of my life. And that I could never do.The story came to me in all its terrible detail from Archina because I insisted to know the worst and she complied as little sisters do, even when they’re middle-aged ladies. My lovely Kitty and Richard Taylor had travelled to Auckland from Sydney by steamer, arriving in the first week of December 1866.They stayed for a few days at a boarding house known as the Blue Post and, after Christmas, they headed out to the goldfields of Waipatikahu with a young prospector named James Vale and pitched their tents among the other hopefuls. By now it was Friday 10 January, and the next day Taylor and Vale went searching for gold. 228

The last goodbye They found barely a show and, on their return, Taylor started drinking. This went on through most of Sunday and by Monday morning he was talking wildly about starting a butchery on the fields and boasting to Vale and others that his woman was none other than Catherine Brown who’d been with Gardiner. On one occasion, he staggered into their tent where Kitty was talking with another young woman, Mary Smith, and demanded more money for grog. She threw the purse at him.We cannot know for certain what passed between the two women. But I have thought on it so many times that in my mind I came to hear the terrible desperation in her voice, the anger, the sadness and, finally, the despair. When he returned, it was with more brandy. He took it into the tent and told Kitty his mind was made up—here they would stay and here they would build a butchery and . . . she reached the end of her tether. She took her small pistol from her carpet bag, put the barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger. Taylor ran from the tent calling for help. By chance, Dr Clarence Hooper was in a tent nearby and he hurried to the scene where a crowd had gathered. He later told the coroner, ‘I found Catherine lying at the entrance, on her knees and right shoulder with her legs doubled under her. There was a considerable pool of blood near where she had fallen.’ She was still alive. Hooper picked her up in his arms and carried her into the tent.The ball had knocked out two of her teeth, carried away the apex of her tongue and lodged somewhere in the deepseated muscles of the neck and spine. She could still speak in a whisper and Mary Smith, who tended her, reported her words. Taylor, she said,‘drove me to this’. Should she die, there were three photographs she wanted buried with her—two of her sisters, the other of a man. Mary Smith did not know the identity of the man but I could make a guess. Later that day, Dr Hooper summoned the coroner, Alan Baillie, 229

Fire in the Blood who somehow extracted the statement from her that,‘I committed this rash act with my own hands and with my own will by placing a revolver in my mouth and shooting myself.’ I suspect they were the coroner’s words and Kitty merely affirmed them with a nod of her head. She lingered for twelve days, finally giving up the ghost on 26 January 1867, the day still celebrated by the Ascendancy as marking the true beginning of the colony when Captain Arthur Phillip broke out the Union Jack on the shores of Sydney Cove. Each year I remember it differently and for my own good reasons.

The bad news was not done yet. In January 1867, the police surprised Thunderbolt and Mary Ann in their camp and, while he escaped, they arrested Mary Ann and charged her with the theft of a bolt of cloth they had found in her possession. She said she had bought it from a store in Maitland but as she was unable to produce a receipt she was found guilty and sentenced to three months in gaol. However, they were not dealing with some illiterate Black. Less than a week after she was incarcerated, Mary Ann had written a petition to the Governor Young himself. She outlined the case, asserted her innocence and said, ‘Your Petitioner therefore humbly prays that your Excellency will be pleased to cause inquiries to be made respecting the truth or falsity of her statement touching the purchase of these goods.’ And she signed it in a bold hand. Politicians heard of the injustice and in the Legislative Assembly they rose in support of her.The governor acted on 28 February and endorsed a letter for ‘Mary Ann Ward’s immediate release’. She and Fred set up camp on Bell’s Mountain near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley. By now, the years of hard living in the bush had taken their toll and Mary Ann was a sick woman. In earlier 230

The last goodbye times, they had sung together and set the mountains ringing with their renditions of ‘Ben Bolt’ and ‘Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still’. But now she had intimations that she was not long for this world. And so it proved. Mary Ann fell desperately ill and one evening Fred arrived alone at the homestead of Mrs Bradford, a small settler. He asked if the woman would take pity and admit his wife to the shelter of her house and permit her to breathe her last beneath a roof. Mrs Bradford readily consented and accompanied him to Thunderbolt’s camp where they loaded the sick woman, helpless and speechless, onto a cart. They returned to the Bradford farm but Thunderbolt could not stay since the authorities would have to be summoned.A clergyman, the Reverend White, arrived in time and at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, 17 November, Mary Ann died.The police arrived soon after but Thunderbolt had returned to the bush. For several weeks, nothing was heard from him.Then in January 1868 he left Bell’s Mountain and headed north. He and William Monkton held up the Armidale and Glen Innes mails regularly, and after the Tenterfield races they bailed up the German band and relieved them of their takings. Monkton was taken early in 1869 and spent the next few years in Armidale Gaol; Thunderbolt thereafter operated alone, slipping over the Queensland border from time to time and returning to his favoured Thunderbolt’s Rock, just south of Uralla, when the troopers ventured too near. It was there in May 1870 that he held up a party of travellers and, having robbed them, led them to Blanche’s Inn where he shouted a round of drinks and called for a ‘toast to the Queen’ before telling them they could continue on their way.Thunderbolt stayed behind drinking with locals but one of the travellers reported his actions to the police in Uralla. 231

Fire in the Blood Senior Constable Mulhall and Constable Alexander Walker, both in plain clothes, headed for the inn and, as they approached, they saw Ward with a young man named James Coglan, whom he’d held up. Coglan had a new horse and Fred Ward put it through its paces. He was about to return it as worthless when the police appeared and Mulhall began firing.Thunderbolt took off with both policemen in pursuit. However, when the bushranger returned fire, Mulhall thought better of his prospects and wheeled away. Walker was made of sterner stuff and for more than half an hour they raced through timber, over gully and creek, dry ground and boggy,Thunderbolt doubling back and changing course—anything to escape his pursuer. But he found himself on a bad mount and all his horsemanship went for naught. When he reached a wide waterhole, Fred Ward dismounted and struck out across the lake.Walker rode up to the riderless horse and shot it dead.Then he galloped to the end of the waterhole where it became Kentucky Creek and there the two men confronted each other in a final showdown. According to evidence at the inquest,Thunderbolt cried,‘What’s your name?’ ‘Walker.’ ‘Are you a trooper?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you a married man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then keep back; think of your family first.’ ‘Will you surrender?’ ‘No,’ said Thunderbolt.‘I will die first.’ At which the trooper spurred his horse into the creek toward the bushranger.The horse went down on his knees and Thunderbolt took his chances and jumped toward him. But, as the rider went down, he loosed off a shot that struck Ward in the chest, piercing 232

The last goodbye both lungs. He fell then rose again from the water, grappling with Walker who cracked him on the forehead with his revolver, knocking him under the water. The policeman then turned his horse out of the creek, dismounted and pulled the body of Thunderbolt from the billabong. He heaved the apparently lifeless form onto the creek bank and headed off to Blanche’s Inn. They returned with a cart and were stunned to discover that the body was missing.They searched but in the darkness could find no trace of him. However, next morning they found he had crawled a little distance into the bush. He was still alive but did not survive the journey back to Uralla. Word of Thunderbolt’s passing reached Darlinghurst on 28 May 1870, the day after he fell. It was a sad day in many ways, yet it was not without its compensations. It marked the end of resistance and the triumph of the privileged. But it also meant that in the public mind an era was passed.The newspapers trumpeted Fred’s demise as ‘the last of the bushrangers’.And in a very short time the bushranging game became the world of yesteryear, a blot on the colony’s escutcheon that belonged to another time, another people. For Archina and Charlotte it was the signal to begin their campaign for my release. For the first time in years, the fires of hope were kindling.

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CHAPTER 28

Freedom?

A

fter six long years, conditions in Darlinghurst were greatly improved. By 1870, the building program was completed.The three new wings were in operation, with a debtors’ prison and even padded cells for lunatics. B Wing, where I was accommodated in a single cell of reasonable size, also contained my favoured place—the library, with its 500 volumes overseen by the schoolmaster. The food was reasonable, breakfast being a hominy of maize porridge and plenty of meat, potatoes and other vegetables.Tea and sugar were a privilege granted after twelve months and tobacco was a reward for good behaviour and industry. The manufacturies included a blacksmiths’ shop, carpenters’ shop, the bookbinding area and the place where I spent most of my days, the matting shop. We had no fewer than 23 looms working the coconut fibre before it went to the spinning jennies and thence to 234

Freedom? the binding room where the mats were patterned. In fact, in 1871 I persuaded the warders to let me strike a pattern of my own—a mat with a picture of my beautiful Darkie in the centre. I ran a team of matters—Bow, Vane and Fordyce among them— and schoolmaster Philpott called us, to his great amusement, the Had Matters in some allusion to his favourite book, Alice in Wonderland, which he pressed upon all his library customers. I read it—along with every other volume in the place—but was more interested in the periodicals that arrived each week, albeit of a period somewhat distant from the day of delivery.At least they kept me acquainted with the tenor of the political climate, and letters from Archina and Charlotte confirmed it: the time had come to petition for my release. The girls were wonderful. No brother ever had a more devoted pair of champions. By 1871 they had begun writing to politicians of all stripe to gain support for their campaign. And they were heartened when three members of the Legislative Assembly—Driver, Hill and Eckford—offered their testimony on my behalf.They were not the only citizens of consequence to lend weight to the cause. Far from it.When Archina started gathering names for a petition to the new governor, Sir Hercules Robertson, more than 500 Sydneysiders alone affixed their signatures. Robinson was a decent man, Irish on both sides, and not averse to the heartfelt supplications of two such sweet natures as those possessed by Charlotte and Archina.We knew he would consult Sir Alfred Stephen as Chief Justice, so Archina wrote directly to the man himself. No reply was forthcoming so she wrote again and again to the stiff-necked bastard. In the last, she wrote: Sir, Again I place before you the one earnest wish of my anxious heart, in the hope that you will extend your mercy to my dear brother, Francis Christie.

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Fire in the Blood Oh forgive him for the sake of those who so earnestly plead for him; forgive him as I hope the Great Judge of all may forgive you and yours when you plead for it. Mercifully grant him his liberation in the Colonies so that his sisters may draw him nearer them and farther from danger. Could you know how we have watched and waited for your answer to our Petition—an answer which seems so long delayed—you would have spared us, I believe, some of the anxious suspense. But if the answer be what we could wish, how little will the past misery seem to the boon ultimately granted. I know,Your Honour, that my brother’s sins have been many. I do not wish to think that his sentence was unjust, but punishment has been great and his reformation genuine, and may God grant that it may be your will to again restore my dear brother to freedom. With you his liberation or endless imprisonment rests, so far as earthly power rules; therefore, be that answer what it may, to you, Sir Alfred Stephen, I must look. Be merciful, when you would look at the darkest side of this man’s character, and forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you as I have done . . . Archina Griffiths.

Such an appeal, you might think, would melt the heart of the devil himself.That may well be so. It barely touched the sensibilities of Stephen. His response to her was scarcely cordial and he sent a copy to the Colonial Secretary, Sir Henry Parkes. ‘I have received a letter (one of several) from one of Gardiner’s sisters,’ he told Parkes, and complained that if only the sentence he’d passed on me in Goulburn had been served in full on Cockatoo the whole saga of bushranging in the colony would never have taken place . . . He would have had no opportunity of commencing cattlestealing at Carcoar or of robbing the Gold Escort afterwards.’ 236

Freedom? However, he did acknowledge my reformation in prison and say that any decision to reduce my 32-year sentence was not his to make; it was purely one for the governor and the executive council of Sir Henry Parkes. Moreover, if portion of the sentence were removed, Stephen, as an individual, would, for the sake of the petitioners, be glad to hear of the decision.That, at least, was something. The petition itself was written with the heart’s blood of my two wonderful sisters. They told of the two years Kitty and I had lived respectable lives in Queensland; of my refusal to be part of a gaol break at Darlinghurst (which I considered doomed from the start); of my good behaviour and work as a matter, including my invention of a new selvedge process; and finally the heart trouble my friend Dr Moffitt said he discovered during a visit to the prison hospital. ‘Your petitioners feel certain,’ they said, ‘that if your Excellency be pleased to grant him a pardon, he will be thus afforded the opportunity of redeeming the past.’ A former Colonial Secretary,William Forster, wrote in support, as did William Dalley who had represented me and was now a bigwig in parliament. Dear Doc Moffitt wrote: For about fourteen years I have been the medical attendant on the family of Francis Christie and have frequently visited him in his confinement at Darlinghurst. During my last three visits I was glad to observe that he was greatly changed for the better, having entirely lost that peculiar ferocity of character which characterised him immediately after his capture in 1864. It is my opinion that he has now completely recovered from his evil ways and that it would be perfectly safe to permit him to go at large.

Parkes sent the petition to the sheriff, Harold MacLean, who on 12 September 1872 recommended a reduction of sentence to ten 237

Fire in the Blood years.When the recommendation reached Sir Hercules Robinson, he put his stamp of approval upon it.‘If his conduct in the meantime should be good, I should feel disposed to grant him a pardon, conditional upon his leaving the country.’ When the news reached me through Charlotte and Archina, it struck me with a fierce joy and I remained in my cell until I composed myself. Suddenly, in place of 24 years, there was less than eighteen months remaining to serve. Suddenly, the future beckoned. Suddenly, I was a man again, a member of the human race. Only one who has been incarcerated and stripped of all identity would know the wild storm of emotions that bear down at such a time. For I couldn’t help but think that if only Kitty had lived she would be a mere 36 years when I was due for release. It was all made the worse because I was under strictest instructions to maintain absolute secrecy, for if word of the governor’s decision escaped, the squatters of the Lachlan and the other forces of reaction and privilege could be expected to raise their voices against me. As it turned out, we kept the secret until April of 1874, three months before my release was due. At that time, one of the squatters’ mouthpieces in the Legislative Assembly asked Parkes a question in the House and he was bound to confirm that I would walk free on 6 July. The result was a political thunderstorm.The conservatives in the Opposition lambasted Parkes and his people. Day and night they badgered the government with motions of public interest and fierce debate. But Parkes stood firm. Out in the Lachlan, my people rejoiced.A public meeting at Yass sent a strong message of support. But there were others—Biddy Hall among them—who cried their outrage and their hatred against me. By then, James Taylor had given her two more sons, John and James, and the family was living at Cadalgulee near Forbes.Taylor was well into the drink and he would die of it in 1877, aged only 46. But 238

Freedom? Bridget was like a black snake poised to attack and she struck at every opening. She even visited Archina and threatened to hunt me down if I set foot outside Darlinghurst. Now Stephen took a hand. He wrote to Parkes claiming that a ‘paid agent’ had collected the names on my sisters’ petitions and suggesting some of the names were forgeries.‘I think it a duty to let you see what kind of frauds have been committed in the matter of Gardiner’s recommendations,’ he wrote. He even attacked Newman and Ledsam, the men who petitioned for my early release from Cockatoo, claiming they were men of bad character. All this passion had its effect on the parliamentary members and Parkes’s government was threatened with defeat. At one stage, the votes were split 26 each way and the Speaker was required to save the government with his casting vote. But then the governor published his address to the Executive Council and reaffirmed his decision. It was a very long document and I will give only its most salient section: The sentence of 32 years passed upon Gardiner was imposed at a time of great excitement and his punishment would seem to have been measured more in view of the crimes with which he was supposed to have been connected than with reference solely to those of which he was actually convicted. It was probably never intended that such a sentence should be served in full; and looking dispassionately at all the circumstances of the case, I consider that ten years of rigorous penal discipline within the walls of a gaol—the first two in irons—followed by expatriation for a further period of 22 years, is a punishment amply sufficient to satisfy the ends of justice and to deter others from following Gardiner’s bad example. I do not think that sufficient weight has been allowed throughout the community to this condition of exile which it is intended

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Fire in the Blood to attach to Gardiner’s pardon. None of the old and settled countries will offer opportunities for the peculiar crime of bushranging, even if Gardiner were disposed to revert to it.

The minute provided Parkes with strong legal backing for his action but he was a canny politician and knew that another larger gesture was needed. So, in a grand speech to the Assembly, he announced that the opportunity was ripe to place the whole bushranging era behind the colony through the release of 23 prisoners held in durance vile on various bushranging charges—John Vane and my mates Fordyce and Bow among them. However, they were permitted to return to the bosom of their families and to remain in their native land. I, alone among Australians, was to be exiled. Parkes was right when he said that the community did not understand the pain of exile. In truth, at the time I did not appreciate the depth of anguish that would attend it myself. In its own way, my battle with the Authorities had been an act of patriotism and the support that attended me from the have-nots could hardly be clearer evidence of the part I played in the struggle against the vile class system that split the country. It was this that the Ascendancy could not abide. Banishment was their final solution. In Darlinghurst, of course, I was the hero of the hour. Monday 20 July 1874 was a day of glory, for then the gates opened and I marched smartly between them. The authorities had allowed the girls to send me a full set of clothes and the warders had permitted me the favour of a neat beard and civilian haircut. I was 44 years old, fit and healthy, with certain savings put aside where Archina and Charlotte alone could make access. Indeed, in my years in Darlinghurst, their value had appreciated for they were, as might be said, as good as gold. However, there was also a great sorrow to the sweetness of freedom.The authorities had kept the date and time of my release 240

Freedom? confidential, in case of public demonstration or celebration. So there waiting outside were my sisters and their husbands and half a dozen well-wishers they had alerted. I embraced my tearful girls and held them close. Only when my escort of detectives intervened did we part. They were anxious to get me aboard the steamer Dandenong that was waiting in the harbour bound for Newcastle. But, once we reached the Quay, Archina prevailed on them to allow us half an hour in a tea shop—the first I had ever entered— to say our farewells.All service in the shop came to a halt when word of my identity passed around. And though in other circumstances I would have been pleased by the attention as male and female patrons alike came to our table to shake my hand, on this occasion I would have had it otherwise. I was looking upon my family for the last time and words lacked all capacity to convey my thanks and my love. Nevertheless, I did my best and when we parted on the Dandenong’s gangway, I am sure they knew the depth of my gratitude. One of the detectives carried aboard the valise Charlotte had packed for me, while Archina slipped me the wallet that would start me in a new life. I watched their tiny figures until they were lost in the bright sun of Sydney Town. Only then did I turn my gaze to the bow of the ship with the Sydney Heads beyond. When we reached Newcastle, the coppers took me to the remand centre where I spent my last nights behind bars.Then, on 27 July, on another bright morning, I loaded my belongings aboard the Charlotte Andrews bound for China. In no time at all, we were in the open sea and I was walking the decks a free man. When I looked behind me, the land—my land—was fading from sight in the sea mist and in an hour it was gone altogether. I stayed all day in the open air and in the afternoon I found myself alone on the foredeck as the ship glided over a glassy sea. And I wept as only a man can weep. 241

Fire in the Blood I was the first man ever exiled from Australia, the land I loved, the battleground of my days, and no one in its short history had ever felt a greater flight of triumph or a more desolate fall into the pit of despair.And no one of my countrymen ever felt so alone as I did on that day of my freedom.

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Part III G A L LO PI N G for G LO RY

CHAPTER 29

Kelly come lately

T

here was a long silence as I finished my tale.The fire burning low in the grate was the only illumination in my Twilight cave. I had almost forgotten the existence of young Harry Hall, who was lost in shadow. I wiped a rough hand across my face. Now I could see the outline of his fine-boned features. The dawn could not be far distant. I settled back in my leather chair. ‘Then came Ned Kelly,’ he said. ‘Not for a while,’ I said. ‘I was gone three or four years from Australia before word of the Kellys started to turn up in Archina’s cuttings.’ ‘I know it,’ he said, and there was a tightness to his voice.‘I know it nearly to the day.’ I roused myself and dropped another log on the fire. Sparks flew up the chimney to where the early spring winds moaned across 245

Fire in the Blood the city.‘Poor devil,’ I said.‘The coppers hounded him—’ ‘I know!’ he snapped. ‘I know all of it, every damned twist and turn he made on the way to the gallows. She never missed a moment of it.’ ‘Who?’ He gave a deep sigh.The new log caught and Harry’s face leapt out of the shadows. He looked older than I remembered. ‘Who do you think?’ For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine. Then the thought hit. ‘Biddy? Your mother?’ He stared at me for a long moment, then nodded.‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It was like she was watching Ben’s life all over again. It started out as a fancy but slowly she got more and more taken up with it.’ I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my counsel. I had heard the outlines of the Kelly story but I must admit that, from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I found it hard to understand what all the fuss was about. He’d been hanged in Pentridge Gaol, where I had first tasted the dubious pleasures of incarceration, on 11 November 1880, with a flourish on the gallows:‘Such is life.’ I suppose his was a tale that went back to the beginnings of the colony. He’d had the misfortune to be born Irish; his father, Red Kelly, had been transported from his native Limerick and, when he’d served his time, he married Ellen Quinn, herself a daughter of the Emerald Isle. Ned was born in 1854 in the midst of the uprising at Eureka and grew up in the battles for land when the big squatters grabbed all the good country and left the scraps to the emancipists. Then, to add insult to injury, the Victorian landholders offered rewards to the police for any cattle that had been duffed. This put the troopers firmly in the pocket of the squatters. But, to the Kellys and their ilk, the worst of it was that most of the troopers were Irish themselves.This made them vile traitors to all they held dear. 246

Kelly come lately In 1865, Red was taken for possession of a hide with a squatter’s brand and was incarcerated in Kilmore Gaol.According to the Kelly legend it was there they broke his spirit and he died the following year when young Ned was only twelve.The boy became the breadwinner for his mother and four siblings—two boys and two girls. He did his best—horse breaking, cattle droving, anything to bring in a few pence—but it wasn’t long before the police came down on the boys with charges of cattle stealing. His little brother Jim was only fourteen when he went to gaol for three years and when he was released he was re-arrested on another charge and was sentenced to a further three. About that time, early in 1877, Ned was taken for drunkenness by two of the real scoundrels of the force, Fitzpatrick and Lonigan. The irony was that no two constables were more devoted to Brother Brandy than they. Ned escaped on the way from the lock-up and fought them to a standstill before reinforcements dragged him off to the Benalla courthouse. The following year they issued warrants for his arrest and that of his youngest brother, Dan, for cattle duffing, and in April 1878 Fitzpatrick arrived at the Kelly house alone and well taken with drink to pick them up. In the donnybrook that followed, Mrs Kelly defended her brood, and when Ned arrived he laid the policeman out. Fitzpatrick was grazed on the wrist and, when he returned to Benalla, he claimed this was caused by a bullet from Ned Kelly’s gun. Ned and Dan took to the Wombat Ranges and the small settlers thereabouts looked after them. Mrs Kelly was arrested and gaoled for three years in Beechworth Prison on Fitzpatrick’s evidence alone. That, they reckoned, was Ned’s breaking point. He was her eldest and the fire was upon him. Police parties were sent out and one of them included Lonigan who, with Constables Scanlan, Kennedy and McIntyre, were armed 247

Fire in the Blood to the teeth and determined to hunt him down. By now, he and Dan had been joined by their mates Joe Byrne and Steve Hart. The runaways were aware of the police presence almost from the moment they reached the ranges and in the afternoon they surrounded their camp. Only two of the troopers were there at the time—McIntyre and Lonigan. Ned called on them to bail up and McIntyre raised his hands. Lonigan, the damn fool, began blasting his revolver into the bush. Ned replied with a single shot that ended the copper’s life. As the others returned, McIntyre called on them to surrender, since Ned had assured him he’d let all three walk back to Mansfield unharmed. But Scanlan and Kennedy took no notice and in a shootout—and a coup de grâce—Ned Kelly killed them too. McIntyre leapt aboard his mare in the fading light and made for Mansfield with the sorry tale.After that, the Kelly brothers were on the run.The outcome was inevitable. But I’m blowed if I know why they called them bushrangers.

‘I don’t understand why Biddy was so taken with the Kellys,’ I said. ‘I wish I knew better myself,’ Harry replied. He took a deep breath, bracing himself.‘Times were tough.After Taylor died in ’76, she had their three kids to look after.’ ‘I heard there were two boys.’ ‘Yeah, John and James; they’re not even in double figures now.’ He looked at me.‘Is that all you heard?’ ‘Yes, I believe so.’ ‘I suppose your sisters didn’t want to distress you.’ ‘How’s that?’ ‘There was a girl,’ he said,‘born in ’73. She’s only seven years old, my little half-sister.’ 248

Kelly come lately ‘Why would that distress me?’ ‘She named her Catherine.’ ‘Oh.’ It came as a jolt but I handled it. The familiar picture of Kitty came to mind and faded into darkness. It was typical of the girls; they wouldn’t want to dredge up the memories for me so they just let the news pass by. I wasn’t really surprised that Bridget had named her so. In fact, I would have expected no less. ‘That’s okay, Harry,’ I said, but I doubt he heard me. ‘I was only seventeen and I was the man of the house—a bit of shearing, ringing, anything I could get to put food on the table. Sometimes there wasn’t much to eat. She wouldn’t take help from anyone. She went . . . I dunno, she lived in the past and it got mixed up; sometimes it was like Ned Kelly was Ben back to life.And, when the gang took over Jerilderie, there were stories in all the papers that they’d ridden up and down the street calling for the good old days of Ben Hall . . . she made me read them to her over and over. It got so she could recite them . . .’ ‘But Jerilderie was 1879, just two years ago,’ I said. ‘Yeah, by then it was pretty bad. It was the first time Ned had come over the border into New South Wales and she thought he was heading our way, to Forbes . . . “He’s coming home,” she said. ‘I tried to talk sense to her but she’d get a look in her eye, like she was seeing something else. Some days she was good, just like normal. But then I came home one night and she said, “He’s not coming.” She just stared at me.“Who?” I said, and she said,“No one. Gardiner’s got him.”’ The fire crackled in the grate. ‘Oh Jesus, the whole Gardiner business started up again.’ Harry took a moment to compose himself. ‘For years I thought Gardiner was a curse word.When Aunt Catherine died in New Zealand, I was just a little kid, eight years old and my mother took it so hard.“It all goes back to Gardiner,” she said.’ 249

Fire in the Blood She wasn’t the only one who took it hard, I thought, but Harry had moved on. ‘When Uncle Richard came back, he was at our place all the time, him and my stepfather, always smelling of brandy. Uncle Richard never stopped until he passed out. My mother yelled at him but it was no use; he drank himself to death. But then, after a while, she steadied my father—my stepfather, I mean—she steadied him down. They had the other kids . . . and, after Taylor’s wife died in ’76, they got married so the kids’d have a proper name. ‘A few months later, he too died of the bloody drink, and it was back to the cursing. By then I knew it was a real person. It was you. And it never stopped . . .’ ‘I never thought—’ ‘I wanted to clear out but I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t.’ The poor bugger was fighting to control himself.‘She was my mother.’ I got up and walked across to my desk, pulled out the Bushmills and poured him a tumbler. ‘Here, take it,’ I said. ‘It’s late. Make it a nightcap.We can talk about this some other time.’ He took a swig.‘No, might as well get it all out now,’ he said. I poured myself a generous measure.‘Your call, Harry.’ I returned and settled back in the soft leather. It was very quiet and the shadows made brief patterns on the walls and ceiling. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.You live with someone . . . your mother . . . and you hear the same thing every day, every night; it doesn’t matter how crazy it is, you start to believe it.You can’t help it.’ ‘I guess so.’ ‘It’s true. And by then Victoria had its own Felons’ Act, like New South Wales.They declared Ned an outlaw just like they did with Ben.’ ‘I see.’ ‘And, just like Ben, they hunted him down with trackers, and his bush telegraph kept him ahead of the game. She waited for the news 250

Kelly come lately like there was nothing else happening. She knew they were doomed. “They’ll cut him down, Gardiner,” she said.“Do yer hear that? Do yer hear that?” It was terrible to listen to her, sitting alone in her room. ‘Then came the big shootout at Glenrowan with the boys in their armour of ploughshares. What a day that was. The bush telegraph beat the wires by a country mile and the Forbes Settler put out a special paper. ‘She cried all night. The boys and little Katie couldn’t understand; they were crying too. She was sure Ned would die from his wounds. She couldn’t bear the idea that he’d hang by the neck. Couldn’t bear it. But then when it happened . . . that was the moment I lost her.’ His voice dropped to a whisper.‘She drifted off in her own world. I tried to follow along behind her,’ he said,‘I did what she asked of me. I was her son.What else could I do?’ He shook his head.‘Christ.’ ‘That was only last November,’ I said. ‘I left on the Warrego three weeks later. I had Christmas and New Year 1881 on the high seas . . . I was sick as a dog,’ he said. We sat in silence for what seemed a long time. Then he said, ‘When I came to kill you, Frank, it wasn’t really for what you did to my father. Fact is, he did pretty much what he wanted to. No, it was her. It was the way it twisted and broke her, that’s what I couldn’t take.’ I let it sink in. Then in the quietness I said, ‘I used to tell the world that I’d never hurt a woman. I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Before you told me the story I’d have said so. Now I’m not so sure. Seems to me you weren’t so much fighting as fighting back against the bastards that kept us all down. And then it got out of hand. Everyone was grabbing for their share.You couldn’t win—not then, not ever. Not when they own the all the good land—’ ‘And all the bad laws,’ I said. 251

Fire in the Blood He nodded. ‘Yeah. My mother is one of the casualties. So are you. So am I.’ ‘How could you leave her?’ He was quiet for a moment.‘She’s not raving or anything. In fact, when I told her I’d do it—’ ‘Put a bullet in me?’ ‘Yep. She cheered up right away. Put some colour back into her cheeks. For the first time in months there was a bit of peace in the place. Even when we sold Taylor’s land for the ticket.’ ‘Well, that’s something.’ We watched the fire flickering.‘What will happen when you get back?’ ‘Dunno,’ he said.‘Not sure I want to go back.’ ‘Yeah.’ Suddenly, I felt a terrible weight of tiredness.‘Harry,’ I said,‘We have given each other a mighty load to think upon. Give me your hand.’ He took it and his young muscles helped draw me out of the big chair.As we climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, I draped an arm over his broad shoulders. It was a gesture of mateship but, to tell the truth, I leaned my weight on him too.Those stairs had never before seemed so damned steep.

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CHAPTER 30

Go east, young man

N

ext morning I slept late.When I woke, I was reluctant to rise and meet the day. That was not like me.Those lost years in gaol were usually the trigger for me to bound out and make the most of every hour. But that day, and for nearly a week after, I lost the Gardiner vitality.And, from my observations, Harry wasn’t much better. God knows how long it would have stayed that way if I hadn’t received the letter, but suddenly there it was, a creamy envelope waiting on my desk where Fanny had left it, my name carved in big bold India-ink strokes across the face of it. I tore it open and, as I read, the weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. It said: Dear Frank, An opportunity has arisen that I feel sure would fit your particular talents like a calf-skin glove.

253

Fire in the Blood I realise that it is some distance to travel, even for an Australian, but if your busy schedule permits, a visit to Denver, Colorado, would, I assure you, combine profit with pleasure. The big silver strike has filled some pockets to bursting. If you feel inclined to help me lighten the ‘lode’, let me know by return mail or telegraph me at the Silver Spoon Hotel. Your Mate Indeed.

Well I’m damned, I thought, Mr Norbert Graves risen from the recent past with a beckoning hand and the promise of adventure. Damn it, why not? Colorado was not long named the 38th State and thousands of Chinese coolies had fought the cold and the treacherous heights of the Rockies to carve a railroad from ’Frisco to link up with the Union Pacific in Denver. And, two years ago, Horace Tabor hit paydirt with a huge silver strike.The rush was still in full swing—Cripple Creek, Leadville and Buena Vista were like Lambing Flat, Forbes and Canowindra in the 1860s. Besides, I had never been east of the Mountains; this was a splendid opportunity and if I made a little something to cover expenses so much the better. Then the thought struck me: why not ask Harry along—get him out to see the Wild West, take his mind off the return to his mother with the sad story that he’d failed in his murderous mission? Why not indeed? And, as I expected, he jumped at the chance. ‘Colorado,’ he said with those wide blue eyes,‘Sounds terrific.’ But that’s when things started to get complicated. First problem was Fanny.‘I want to go wiz you,’ she said and I’m damned if I could jolly her out of it. Harry was no help. By now they were saddling up every damn night and keeping other people awake with their bouncing and yodelling. I just didn’t have the heart to say no. But that meant I’d have to get someone else to manage the Twilight. Chicago Dan wasn’t up to it; in fact, there was only one bloke I trusted in the whole city. 254

Go east, young man I knew he’d do it for me but, until then, I’d had no intention of bringing him into the party.Ah, what the hell.‘Harry,’ I called,‘come along and I’ll show you something to tell your grandchildren.’ It wasn’t that far, down in the Mission Bay area, but we took a hack.‘Three hundred and eighteen Brannan Street,’ I told the cabbie and settled back as we clipped through the busy thoroughfares. Harry was full of questions but I fended them off till we reached The Palace, a saloon like the Twilight but without the gambling tables and with a slightly more genteel air to the bar and the appointments. Upstairs, I’d heard tell, they had some steam baths and, of course, all the waiters were men. Harry took in his surroundings as we entered.‘Very nice, Frank,’ he said.‘Very classy. It even smells good.’ There were a few drinkers at the bar and at tables scattered about. In the corner, a young fellow played a stylish selection on the piano.A few eyes turned our way then the big bloke behind the bar broke into a grin and hurried over to us with his hand out.‘Frank,’ he said,‘it’s great to see you.’ I took his hand and shook it.Then I turned to Harry. ‘Here’s a name you’ll remember, Harry,’ I said,‘Meet Daniel McGlone, former sergeant in the New South Wales police force, the man who captured the notorious bushranger Frank Gardiner.’ Harry was goggle-eyed.‘Daniel, this is Harry Hall, the son of my old comrade of the road.’ ‘Well, well, well,’ McGlone said, taking Harry’s hand and pumping it up and down.‘The son of Ben Hall. I never thought I’d see the day . . . and in San Francisco!’ Harry stared at me.‘Fair dinkum?’ he said.‘He’s your mate?’ The look on his face set me chuckling. ‘It’s a strange world, Harry,’ I said.‘Wouldn’t have it any other way, would we, Daniel?’ McGlone gave a grin. ‘No indeed. Come and sit down; we’ll have a drink. Come along.’ 255

Fire in the Blood He led us to a table, ordered up and we downed our nobblers. When I told him my problem, he couldn’t have been more helpful; offered to move in to the Twilight himself while his cobber Randall ran The Palace on his own for a while. ‘How long do you expect to be away?’ he asked. ‘No more than a month,’ I said.‘It’s just a quick trip; it’ll be good for Harry to see the way it was when the gold fever hit New South Wales, and maybe I’ll take a hand or two of faro—that’s their specialty out there, isn’t it?’ ‘I believe so,’ he said.‘Harry Hall . . . those were the days, Frank.’ ‘Yeah, well . . .’ I nearly said they would have been a bloody sight better without bounty hunters like him cashing in but I let it ride.Then he said,‘What about Chicago?’ and that was my other complication. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’s coming with us.’ McGlone relaxed again and began telling stories and asking Harry questions, which he answered as best he could. It’s the way of the exile—he can never get enough news of home. However, The Palace was filling up so after we’d settled the business side—he’d take a modest manager’s fee—we wrapped it up and headed back in another cab. Harry was still wide-eyed. ‘What was that about Chicago Dan?’ he said. ‘They don’t get on,’ I said. ‘Rub each other up the wrong way, you might say.’ Harry looked bemused so I told him the story. It started with McGlone’s sudden appearance at the Twilight in ’78. I recognised him the moment he walked through the door. My first instinct was to go for my gun. But then something over-rode it: the visitor from home. Don’t ask me why but the anger turned into pleasure at seeing a familiar face.And, when we got to talking, I was caught up by seeing it from his side, especially after he fell out with the authorities over payment of the small reward for my capture. It turned out the coppers were just as hopeless as I’d always suspected. 256

Go east, young man But there was something else that he wasn’t telling and it didn’t come out for quite a while after I’d taken him on as a barman. It turned out that he’d left his wife in Sydney and he wouldn’t be going back. I didn’t twig to the situation for a while. In fact, it wasn’t until a terrible blue erupted with Chicago that I realised our Daniel—well-built fella that he was—preferred the company of men. It seems he mistook Chicago’s good nature for that of a soulmate in these matters and the big bloke got a terrible shock when McGlone made a certain suggestion and followed it up with an action that took Chicago’s breath away. Took me quite a while to steady the big Yankee down. He threatened to leave unless I sacked McGlone, but I wasn’t inclined to do that. I’d been in gaol long enough to realise that men come in many varieties and only a fool would condemn them for it. But, as it happened, McGlone left soon after, anyway. He had a little capital of his own and I anted up the rest to buy The Palace. He paid me back in quick time for, once the word spread that there was a welcome establishment for men of that persuasion, McGlone did a very good trade indeed. The rift with Chicago, however, was beyond repair. So there was nothing for it but to include him in the party that bowled up to the Oakland railroad terminal that Sunday morning. A motley crew no doubt, but filled with high spirits. For we were bound for an adventure across the mighty Rocky Mountains to the Wild West of America. And it would change all our lives forever. We were a noisy foursome as we bundled into the fancy railcar. Fanny had actually travelled on trains before, starting with her journey as a youngster from Montreal to Toronto. Now she was all decked out like a first-nighter at the San Francisco Opera, supervising Chicago Dan as he loaded the goods and chattels. Dan too was no stranger to the iron horse. But still the excitement played on his loathsome features and gave him the air of a 257

Fire in the Blood frolicsome giant. His toothbrush moustache had been neglected and now straggled down the sides of his chin. However, his missing toe had healed up nicely and he bore Harry no grudge. On the contrary, he seemed to take an avuncular interest in the young man’s welfare. Harry had that effect on just about everyone who met him.They’d go out of their way to give him a hand. Now his blue eyes sparkled at the prospect of a Yankee adventure. We had a sleeping car that accommodated two people in each of its two compartments but during the daylight hours we could watch the scenery go by as though passing through one of those galleries that sells the great paintings of the American countryside. Each time you’d turn back to the window, another fine landscape would be presented for your inspection.When you tired of that, you could make your way to the club car where they served the better brands of alcoholic beverage and for Dan, whose slip from the wagon of sobriety following his pedal mutilation had been only momentary, a nice line of lemon cordial. There was even French wine to be had with dinner and Fanny came into her own once more. She could hardly contain the pleasure of it all. I’d have been more cheery if only I didn’t have to share with Chicago, whose snores drowned out all noise of the locomotive, the rails and any other happenstance within 50 miles. A mighty avalanche of snow and boulders could have been crashing down a mountainside toward us and I would have been none the wiser.That first night I was driven from the compartment by his explosive yawps and grunts and sought refuge in the club car where a small party of diehards remained. I looked them over—a nattily dressed little bloke smoking a cigar as big as his arm; a surly creature with an ugly scar across his forehead; and a well-padded gentleman with a gold watch chain and the air of a man of means. ‘Evening gents,’ I said and turned to the barman to give my order 258

Go east, young man as they responded. ‘Do you have a twelve-year-old Bushmills?’ I asked. ‘There’s a man of taste,’ said the man of means.‘Would you care to join us?’ The barman produced the prescribed libation and I took it over to the small table and cluster of chairs where Heyward Carney introduced himself and his two off-siders—Croker, the man with the scar, and the little bloke he called Jimmy the Hoop. I looked at Jimmy.‘I’m a jockey,’ he said quietly. ‘That he is,’ said Heyward Carney. ‘He’s my jockey, aren’t you, Jimmy?’ And I’m damned if he didn’t pat the little bloke on the head. Jimmy blushed and cringed at the same time.Then he tossed down his whiskey and poured another. I was decidedly uncomfortable and were it not for the bellows and lamentations awaiting me back in the sleeper I’d have made my excuses and departed. But instead I asked the fatal question, ‘And what brings you on this mission across the Rockies?’ Heyward Carney’s features fairly glowed. He opened his mouth to reply and for the next two hours he closed it only to facilitate the ingestion of his whiskey. He talked horses; and I have to say that I was happily swept along on the flow of his stories, especially when he revealed that in a special freight car attached to the end of the train he was transporting the thoroughbred, Alcibiades, right across the country to run in the Kentucky Derby. All my old memories and joys returned to me and if he’d given me half a chance I’d have met him tale for tale. But Heyward Carney was only interested in the sound of one voice. So I let the equine stories flow around me while my heart and soul went back to those other times and places of my young life. Carney, it seemed, had made his money in land speculation, and with so much that he need never work again had turned his attention to the breeding game. His big spread was in the Napa Valley and 259

Fire in the Blood it was there he’d bred Alcibiades from two English imports and turned him into a galloping machine that would buy him honour and glory among the blue-grass establishment. Scar-faced Croker was the trainer—though Carney took all the important decisions— and Jimmy the Hoop. His hoop. ‘I’d truly enjoy to take a look at him,’ I said. He was suddenly suspicious. ‘You know something about the racing game, do you?’ ‘No, no,’ I assured him. ‘But, in my native land, I spent a bit of time on horseback.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that would be Australia, would it? I thought so. I thought I recognised the cockney accent.’ Cockney? I was about to protest but he was too quick for me. ‘Always wanted to go to Australia,’ he said, as they all did,‘but it’s just too far away.’ That’s the good news, I thought to myself, not for the first time.

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CHAPTER 31

Darkie

T

he next day our team sat together—Fanny, Harry, Chicago and Yours Truly—and marvelled at the snow-bound peaks and timbered slopes of the Rockies. For a while we ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ and pointed at each new vista as it hove into sight. But then we watched in silence as nature displayed her mighty wares. One simple thought kept intruding: wonder at the hardihood of those Chinese coolies who built the thing. That evening in the dining car, Heyward Carney and his boys were across the aisle from us. He gave me a wave and a shout and I responded. Chicago caught it.‘Who’s that man, Frank?’ he asked and I told the story of the night before. They listened in silence until I mentioned the name of the horse. ‘He’s a beaut,’ said Chicago who played the ponies whenever he could afford it.‘He’s run a place in every race since he was a three-year-old.’ 261

Fire in the Blood ‘Well, they’ve set him for the Derby,’ I said. ‘They’ll get there in nice time,’ he said. But then a frown creased his ugly dial. ‘What’s up?’ Chicago shook his head. ‘The Derby’s a mile and a quarter. Alcibiades is a sprinter; he’s never run that far.’ ‘Bloody long way to take a horse for a race,’ said Harry, who had never heard of the Derby. Dan filled him in with more information than Harry needed, all about the new Churchill Downs track opened in ’75 and the feud between the Churchills and the Clarks who ran the show. I let it pass over me. I was wondering just what it was that Norbert Graves had in mind when we finally reached the Silver Spoon in Denver.

Next day we stopped to refuel and top up the boilers at Ogden in Utah territory.We all got out to stretch our legs and wander about the town.That didn’t take too long and shortly we found ourselves making for the only establishment that seemed likely to offer a nobbler or two,The Gold and Green. However, once inside, any thought of an alcoholic libation was quickly disposed of by the proprietress, one Hannah by name, who looked firmly down her nose at the very suggestion. Utah, she said proudly, was ‘dry’; and that was when I recalled the strictures imposed by the Mormons, not only on their good selves but on all travellers through their domain. Happily, I came prepared for all eventualities with a silver flask of Bushmills in a breast pocket and, as we took our coffee in a shaded portico outside, I slipped a warming dollop into my cup. I was suddenly aware of the attentions of another and, sure enough, there was Jimmy the Hoop sitting in a corner, his eyes fixed on my flask and looking very much in need of the hair of the dog. 262

Darkie Fanny and the rest were chattering away and they barely noticed as I took my coffee over to Jimmy’s table. ‘All on your Pat Malone, mate,’ I said. ‘Yeah . . . I don’t suppose . . .’ I gave him a grin and looked around to see that our hostess was otherwise engaged then brightened his coffee with a healthy drop from the flask. He was deeply grateful. He raised the cup—at least he tried to, but a wave of the shakes hit him and he had to put it down. However, his system would not be denied and he grabbed the thing with both hands and got two gulps into him. ‘Rough night?’ I asked. ‘Yeah.’ He drained the rest and held the cup out. I slipped him another short one and it went the same way.The effect was immediate. ‘Funny ideas they got out here,’ he said. ‘Pays to be prepared,’ I said as I tucked the flask back into my coat pocket. ‘Would you like to see him?’ I must have looked blank.‘The horse, Alcibiades,’ he said. ‘You bet.’ And with that we left the others and headed back to the train where Croker was leading him around while Heyward Carney looked on and gave directions. It was rough going in the area and I had to watch my footing. So it wasn’t until we were almost upon them that I looked up and gave my full attention to the horse.When I did, I stopped in my tracks. I felt my heart thumping against my chest. I couldn’t believe it—the same fine head, the same black coat, the same proud bearing and powerful rump: it was Darkie. I put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder to steady myself. ‘Well, I’m damned,’ I said. I shook my head. It was a mad fancy, of course. Darkie was probably dead and gone by now, on the other side of the world. As we got closer, I could see the deep chest and long legs of a true thoroughbred; but still the resemblance was uncanny. When we 263

Fire in the Blood reached him, he looked me straight in the eye and I’ll swear there was the same connection I’d had with Darkie, a kind of recognition that comes rarely but is never forgotten. I walked right up to him and he nuzzled me. ‘Hey, steady on there!’ shouted his owner and I stepped back. ‘Hands off,’ he said as he hurried up. ‘That’s a valuable piece of horseflesh—’ ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said.‘He’s a fine horse, very fine.’ Damned if I wasn’t fighting a lump in my throat. I turned hurriedly and made my way back to our carriage.

I was quiet for the rest of the day and that night not even Dan’s growls and gargles could keep me from a dream that took me all the way back to those days when Darkie and I flashed through the timber with the Traps on our heels, swaying from side to side between the tree trunks and heading for the wide open country beyond . . . Next day we travelled through the hills of Wyoming and ended the day at the railhead in Cheyenne where the conductor told us we had to wait for a train coming west from Des Moines in Iowa. Its remaining passengers would join our train going south to Denver, while Heyward Carney and others heading east would change to the one coming in—all the way to Chicago before heading south to Kentucky. So, once again we were left to our own devices in a strange town. Cheyenne, at least, had the good sense to provide its travellers with congenial refreshments and, after dinner, while Harry and Fanny did what lovers do to pass the time, Dan and I wandered over to The Rawhide Saloon. We were just mounting the boardwalk when Heyward Carney and his trainer burst out of the swing doors and passed us without a word. 264

Darkie Inside, Jimmy the Hoop was sitting alone at a table looking very down in the mouth, a half-empty bottle of Bushmills in front of him and a bleary look in his eye. ‘G’day, Jimmy,’ I said as we reached him.‘Want some company?’ It took him a moment to focus. ‘Yeah, sure, Frank. Have a drink . . . glasses . . .’ Chicago went to the bar for a lemonade and a shot glass for me. Jimmy was in a bad way.‘I been sacked,’ he said.‘Bastard sacked me.’ ‘Jesus, that’s no good—’ ‘Actually, I quit.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Huh?’ Chicago returned and sat quietly. I poured myself a small one. ‘Bastard,’ Jimmy said.‘Treats you like he owns you.’ ‘Mr Heyward Carney?’ ‘Yeah.’ He filled his glass to overflowing.‘The things I could tell you . . .’ And so he did. It took a while and not a little patience on the part of the listener but, by the time the train was in from the east and ours was being prepared for the journey south to Colorado, I had the whole story. Mr Heyward Carney, it turned out, was not all he was cracked up to be. Oh, he was rich enough; he had made his money in land speculation the way he said. But, in the doing, he’d broken every rule in the book. He’d lied and cheated his way to a fortune. And he’d brought the same methods to his racing ventures—he’d do whatever it took to get his horses over the finish line first. Now, I am no pillar of virtue, but I was shocked to the bootstraps when Jimmy told me what he’d do to the horses themselves—most particularly the additions to their feed, or even, he said, the fancy new hypodermic syringe. In fact, that was what he planned for Alcibiades. He was a sprinter, just as Chicago had said. His distance 265

Fire in the Blood was three-quarters of a mile, so the Derby race was not in his league. Everyone would know this, so the bookies would price him as a rank outsider. Carney had it all figured—at the last minute he’d bet big then hit the poor bugger with a ‘speed ball’ in the hypodermic and clean up a fortune.What’s more, he’d find the respectability he craved and be lauded and feted by the high-toned society of blue-grass country. As for the poor bloody horse, he would never run again. His heart would be so damaged he’d be lucky to make it back to California. ‘Rotten bastard!’ I said, and by God I meant it. Jimmy the Hoop agreed. In fact, he’d decided—with the assistance of Mr Bushmill— that he would have no part of it. By the time I had the whole story, Jimmy had emptied the bottle and was not really with us but I had no intention of leaving him in the backblocks of Cheyenne. Nor would I surrender that beautiful young horse to his fate. ‘Come on,’ I said to Chicago Dan,‘grab him and we’ll go.’ Dan lifted the little bloke onto one shoulder and we made our way back through the darkness to the train. When we got there, I knocked on Fanny’s door. Harry opened it. ‘Look after this,’ I said as Chicago dumped Jimmy on their bed. ‘If he wakes up, keep him quiet.’ I got a grin out of his startled look but I couldn’t wait around to enjoy it. Chicago and I had work to do and time was against us. Fortunately, the two trains were practically next to each other on parallel tracks. And soon after the Des Moines express had arrived, they’d uncoupled the car containing Alcibiades from our train and stuck it on the back of the one heading back east. All we had to do was reverse the process. Simple enough in theory—and the inky darkness of a Cheyenne night was on our side—but a railcar with a thousand-pound horse in it is no pushover, even for a 266

Darkie mammoth like Chicago Dan.There were times when I thought he’d burst his boiler. But in that twenty minutes or so that found us pushing it back up the track, changing the points and running it slowly back to where it originally came from, the great lummox repaid whatever debt he believed he owed me a hundred times over. The great gulps of air he dragged into that huge frame sounded like the bloody locomotive itself. There was a moment when I thought the thoroughbred would give the game away. He started prancing in the box and next thing he’d be kicking and whinnying, so I climbed up and talked to him through the bars. He steadied and was quiet. Then we closed the coupling and slipped through the darkness back to our compartments. We were just in time. No sooner we were settled than both trains blew their whistles and headed away on their separate journeys. I basked in a feeling of satisfaction. I decided to look in on Harry. From the corridor outside I could hear the high-pitched snores of little Jimmy.When Harry opened the door, he was white-faced.‘It’s like being trapped in a cage full of bandicoots,’ he said. ‘Tell you all about it in the morning,’ I said.‘Sleep tight.’ I couldn’t resist a burst of chuckles. I hadn’t had this much fun for years. I made my way to the guard’s van and the chief conductor. I had a tall tale to tell.

In the morning we kept Jimmy in the cabin and took him enough food and drink to see him through. Harry and the others were full of questions but, in truth, I didn’t have that many answers. In her womanly way, Fanny went to the heart of it: ‘You mean you ’ave stolen ze ’orse and kidnapped ze jockey?’ ‘That’s only one way of looking at it,’ I said.‘You could say I have rescued the horse and given young Jimmy a helping hand in his hour of need.’ 267

Fire in the Blood ‘You’re a good man, Frank,’ said Dan solemnly and I was inclined to agree. I suspect Mr Heyward Carney would have a different view if he knew what we’d done, but there was little chance of that.With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t know his property had gone missing till he reached Chicago.And, even then, there was no reason to connect it to Yours Truly.The real question was just what was I going to do with Alcibiades. I couldn’t take him back to San Francisco. Maybe I’d find a buyer in Denver. Hell, if Frank Gardiner couldn’t sell a stray horse, no one could! There was plenty to keep me occupied through that day as we powered south to Denver, and, when we pulled into the station that evening, a fair crowd waited on the station to welcome our fellow travellers. I looked around for Norbert Graves but without result. All about us, people were piling out of the carriages; a few were falling into the embraces of their loved-ones, but most were prospectors heaving their packs over broad shoulders and heading off into the night with that mad urgency that sets the treasure seeker apart from all his fellows. I had hardly been aware of them, packed into the sitting carriages with no access to our section of the train, but now they were part of a scene that was strangely familiar to me. I’d never been within cooee of Denver before but the feeling of the place, the excitement, the buzz of sound, the bustle all about, the smell of it, was just the way it had been in the rush at home. Fire in the blood. I looked around at Harry and I could see he felt it too. His eyes were sparkling. ‘You go with Fanny and Chicago to The Silver Spoon,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet you there shortly.’ Jimmy was not quite so chipper. ‘Stick with me,’ I said as we made our way to the station master’s office. We were halfway there as the platform quickly emptied when a bent old man with a good-looking woman on his arm stepped in our way. 268

Darkie ‘Excuse me,’ I said and touched my hat to the lady. But the old boy wouldn’t let us pass. ‘Have ye no consideration for age?’ he squeaked. ‘Are these the manners ye learned in Australia?’ ‘No, I . . .’ Suddenly the lady’s face filled with dimples and a sweet laugh followed. I was caught short. Then the old boy rubbed his grey whiskers and said,‘Hello Frank. How good to see you again.’ I knew the voice instantly.‘Norbert Graves,’ I said and he chuckled beneath the whiskers, taking my hand in his and giving it a powerful squeeze. I responded in kind.‘You’ve aged,’ I said. ‘I know. It’s the mountain air. All that stuff about it being good for you is poppycock. Sent me grey overnight.’ Now the three of us were chuckling while Jimmy looked bemused. ‘Jimmy,’ I said,‘Meet a friend of mine—’ Norbert interrupted.‘Hello Jimmy.’ He indicated the lady with whom I had been exchanging glances of more than usual interest. There was something about her, a liveliness and a grace that instantly appealed to me. Familiar too. It was like she fitted perfectly into the scene. ‘Felina Graves,’ he said.‘My sister.’ I felt an odd sense of relief at his words.We shook hands and, though she was wearing lace gloves, there was a warmth in her touch. ‘I’m very glad to meet you, Mr Gardiner,’ she said.‘Norbert has told me a lot about you.’ It was a moment before I could reply.‘Well, he told me nothing at all about you,’ I said finally. ‘Then you’ll have to find out for yourself,’ she said. I actually felt myself blushing. I’d have stood there gawking till the cows came home but for Jimmy who nudged me.‘Frank, the horse.’ ‘Oh, right.’ ‘You brought your own horse?’ said Norbert. 269

Fire in the Blood ‘More or less,’ I said. I noticed the chief conductor up ahead talking with the station master.‘But, if I don’t see to him in a hurry, there could be trouble. I’d better get to it.’ ‘Anything I can do to help?’ offered Felina. I hesitated.‘Maybe so,’ I said.‘Come along.’ By the time we reached the railway officials, there were raised voices on both sides.The station master was pointing a finger at his papers and the chief conductor at his. The difference was a horse trailer that was unaccounted for in the Denver inventory. As we reached them, the conductor turned to me with an expression of relief. ‘Ah, Mr Christie . . .’ I felt rather than saw Felina’s look of surprise. I pulled out the papers I’d been working on during the day.‘Here we are,’ I said cheerily,‘the bill of sale, fully notarised, and, of course, the witness.’ I edged him forward. ‘Mr James Hooper.’ ‘Excellent.’The conductor took the documents and, with an air of triumph, passed them on to the station master, a grizzled, pinched-face character. He snatched at them and fumbled for the spectacles in the top pocket of his uniform jacket. But, before he could cast those sly suspicious eyes upon them, Felina spoke up. ‘Good evening, Mr Quinlan,’ she said.‘We haven’t seen you in The Silver Spoon lately.’ He looked up and recognised her at once. The poor fellow seemed suddenly nervous.‘Oh, Mrs Graves, it’s you.’ ‘We’ve missed you.’ ‘Oh, well . . . oh . . . I’m a busy man.The place has gone mad . . .’ ‘That’s no excuse,’ she said, ‘you need to relax occasionally. All work and no play—’ ‘Oh, ho ho . . .’The man was undone. He looked briefly at me then back to Felina.‘Friends of yours?’ ‘Oh yes, old friends,’ she said and actually tucked her hand under my arm.‘Good friends.’ 270

Darkie ‘Well then . . .’ And, as we left the station, she kept it there, her hand resting comfortably in the crook of my elbow. The Silver Spoon, when we reached it in Larimer Street, right in the centre of town, was a blaze of light and colour.This was no saloon but a grand hotel with two storeys of accommodation, bars on the ground floor, discreet card rooms, beautiful thick carpets and everywhere a feeling of quality; everything from the top drawer. We found Harry and Chicago wandering in the big foyer, looking mightily impressed. Even Fanny conceded that it was one of the better establishments of her wide experience. In fact, when I introduced her to Felina they seemed to hit it off right away, a very rare thing for the French-Canadian mademoiselle.And, when Fanny whispered her rooming preferences, our hostess could not have been more accommodating. I left those arrangements to the ladies; I was much more interested in discovering Norbert’s plan. So, while Chicago and various bellhops lugged the bags away, Norbert led me into a downstairs parlour.‘These are Felina’s rooms,’ he said.‘This is where I stay when I come to town.’And, as he spoke, he straightened his back, took off the coat with its padded hump, and peeled away the wig and whiskers. ‘Caught you again, didn’t I?’ he grinned. ‘You sure did,’ I said. ‘Are you always an old codger when you come here?’ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Various guises. I like to keep ’em guessing. Never fool Felina, though. She can pick me a mile off.’ ‘Bright lady,’ I said.‘She’s not, ah—’ ‘Married? No, Frank, not any more. She was hooked up with a guy, a real bum; sponged off her for years. Only good thing he did for her was give her a pair of sons, Monty and Fred. Fine boys, no thanks to him.They’re off east at school.’ 271

Fire in the Blood ‘What happened to him?’ ‘Damn fool started playing cards. No one would have minded if he’d just lazed around getting drunk, but that wasn’t enough for him; he had to get into the faro. Terrible game; you can lose your shirt overnight.’ ‘Yeah,’ I agreed.‘Too rich for my blood.’ ‘He wouldn’t listen. Sad, really. They found him one morning out back here, bullet through the heart.’ ‘Ah well,’ I said.‘Maybe it was for the best.’ ‘Yeah, at least he didn’t suffer.’ I changed the subject to more cheery matters.‘So, Norbert, tell me: what’s the plan?’ And a very good plan it was, too. It had the virtue of simplicity. It centred around a gentleman named Horace Tabor—the man who, it seems, started the whole silver rush in Colorado. I had never heard of him but, according to Norbert, he’d knocked around these parts since 1859 when he arrived from Maine with his young wife, Augusta. For the next twenty years, the Tabors foraged for riches among the mining camps. Horace tried his luck at prospecting in between helping Augusta who took in boarders and ran a store, post office and bank. But, in April of 1878, Horace’s luck changed when he grubstaked two immigrant prospectors and they struck paydirt at the Little Pittsburgh mine in the Leadville area, south of Denver. One mine led to another and the money roared in like a torrent. It quickly roared out again too. In less than two years,Tabor financed two newspapers, a bank, a Leadville racetrack and a handsome opera house. But Horace’s good fortune didn’t sit well with Augusta, whose chaste New England sensibilities were offended by their sudden wealth. She still took in boarders. She refused to paint her face, preferring to remain as nature intended. 272

Darkie ‘Much as she loved Horace,’ Norbert said, ‘she could not abide any show of good fortune.’ Tabor revelled in it. When Elizabeth ‘Baby’ Doe came into his life last year, the marriage was doomed. Baby was a sparky young miss, the prettiest girl in Colorado, and Horace was thoroughly smitten. Augusta packed her bags and cleared out for California. Horace and Baby were now doing their best to share the wealth. ‘They have mansions in half the towns of Colorado,’ Norbert said. ‘Here in Denver they have a place on Poppy Hill, the other side of town, where there’s peacocks in the grounds.’ ‘Peacocks.’ ‘I kid you not.’ ‘Well now.’ Horace sounded like the perfect mark. ‘I take it he likes a hand or two of poker,’ I said. And, for the first time, a frown creased the Graves features.‘Sure he does and, when I sent you the telegraph, it seemed like a straight deal,’ he said. ‘We’d extract our share from the generous Mr Tabor and go on our sweet way. Unfortunately, in the last two weeks a complication has developed.’ ‘Oh, how’s that?’ ‘A couple of characters have hit town and set themselves up in Gahan’s Saloon on the other side of Larimer Square. Horace and Babe are there most every night. Can’t get them out of the place.’ ‘We could go there.’ ‘Sure.Trouble is, Frank, they only play faro.’ ‘Well, that’s a problem,’ I said. But then I thought of Harry, Chicago Dan and our other resources. ‘Maybe we could persuade the new boys to leave town,’ I said. ‘I doubt it,’ Norbert said. ‘Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday don’t persuade easy.’

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CHAPTER 32

A well-laid plan

‘W

ell, I’m blowed,’ I muttered. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. That was a facer. Everyone in America knew those names since that gunfight at Tombstone’s OK Corral a few months ago. ‘Not good, Norbert,’ I said. ‘From what I’ve heard, that Doc Holliday would shoot you as soon as look at you.’ ‘Yeah, he’s quick on the trigger.’ ‘And Wyatt Earp’s not much better, is he?’ Norbert stroked his chin. ‘Well, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ he said. ‘He got married here just last week.’ ‘Is that a fact?’ ‘Yep.They all arrived together across the border—Doc and Big Nose Kate, Wyatt and little Josie, the opera singer. She hit Tombstone with her company last year, took one look at Wyatt and moved right in.’ 274

A well-laid plan ‘Well, I’m damned,’ I said. A regular little love nest. This is not what I’ve been hearing about the heroes of the Wild West.’ ‘Don’t take ’em lightly, Frank.’ I laughed aloud.‘No damn fear,’ I said.‘Just seems a pity to have come all this way . . .’ ‘Yes, I’m sorry. If I thought they’d take over the Tabors the way they have I’d have telegraphed you.’ ‘Ah, what the hell,’ I said. ‘Let’s sleep on it. Maybe we’ll figure out something in the morning.’ Up in my grand bedroom, I was just about to change into a nightshirt when there was a tap on the door. I opened it to find Felina with that sweet smile. ‘Just checking to see you have everything you need, Frank.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ I said.‘It’s all very handsome.’ I invited her in. ‘Just for a moment,’ she said.‘There was something I wanted to ask you. At the station, you said your name was Christie . . .’ ‘Ah yes.’ I hesitated for a moment then plunged in with the story of my early years. I tried to keep it short but, every time I stopped, Felina would have another question and damned if she didn’t get me going again. I would like to say I told her the dead unvarnished truth but the fact is I shaped it so that part of it—my time with Kitty—never quite made an appearance. But, as I finished, I said,‘There was something about coming here that turned the clock back. I wanted to be Frank Christie again.’ She nodded and rose from the tapestry chair. ‘I’m glad,’ she said, and damned if she didn’t plant a soft kiss on my weathered cheek. Damned if she didn’t.Then she was gone.

I could still feel the touch of those lips next morning when I woke in that big soft bed with the linen sheets and the four fat pillows. 275

Fire in the Blood And for a long time I lay there thinking about the turn of events in my life and the immediate problems ahead. You’d think I’d be feeling far from home and out of my depth. But, strangely enough, that wasn’t the case at all. Something about The Silver Spoon suited me. My friends the Celestials in San Francisco would have said the place had feng shui, which in their lingo means that all the omens are nicely aligned. It wasn’t just the place; it was that special quality that Felina brought to it.The pub had only been up for a year or so but it had that sense of permanence and character that told you all you needed to know about its owner. According to Norbert, it was the last of a long line of hostelries that Felina had owned and operated over the years, each heading a little farther west. But this one was built to last.Yes, I could be quite comfortable in a place like this, I thought, especially if it came with such a sweet lady as Felina. Pretty name. Pretty face.And a very nicely proportioned figure . . . well, enough of that. The complications of the moment had to be sorted out before anything else. Here we were, a mile high in a neat little fold of the Rocky Mountains, with a moneybags crying out to share a little of his wealth and two Yankee blackguards standing in the way and copping it all themselves. And one of them—that bloody Wyatt Earp—a copper to boot. Who ever heard of it—a lawman running a card game, yet, according to Norbert he’d done exactly the same thing with his brothers in Tombstone, and Doc had been there to back him up if he needed it. Bad as the bloody Rum Corps of New South Wales. In fact, the more I thought on it, the more peeved I became at the injustice of it all. By the time I jumped from the four-poster and began my ablutions, I was fairly steamed. I didn’t have a plan yet, but I was damn sure I wasn’t going to lie down and let these Yankee bastards walk over me. And I had an idea that somehow I should be able to put that equine beauty, Alcibiades, to work. If Mr Tabor had built a racetrack for Leadville, maybe we could run 276

A well-laid plan him in a handicap under another name. I had one all picked out for him: Darkie. So, after breakfast, Harry and Chicago joined me in a stroll to the Livery Stables where Jimmy had found lodgings with the thoroughbred late last night. Luckily it was pitch dark when they had arrived, and Alcibiades was safely tucked away, far from prying eyes. When we reached his stall, he snorted and nodded his head. I’ll swear he was talking to me, asking what kind of a deal I had in mind for him. I took Harry by the arm and drew him closer.‘Isn’t he a beauty?’ It was the first chance he’d had to take a good look at him and he whistled through his teeth.‘That’s some powerful horse,’ he said. He opened the door and we both slipped inside and began patting and running our hands over those long muscled legs. The horse nuzzled us as we went about our inspection and I talked gently to him. Finally Harry said,‘So, what are we going to do with him?’ That’s when I told him about the Leadville racetrack. Harry grinned.‘Wouldn’t that be something. He’d kill these local nags.’ ‘We’ve got little Jimmy to ride him . . .’ ‘Yep.’ Jimmy. I looked around for him. He was supposed to be with the horse. Maybe he’d gone out to breakfast. I sent Dan to look for him and Harry and I walked back to the hotel. ‘The thing is,’ I said,‘we can’t have him looking like some world beater or we won’t get the odds.’ ‘That’s okay,’ he said.‘A few days without grooming . . .’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Bloody good plan, Frank,’ Harry laughed. ‘This really is some place, isn’t it?’ He waved an arm that took in the snow-capped Rockies in the distance, the clear morning air, the new buildings rising on both sides of Larimer Square, the neat framed houses in the cleared area beyond. 277

Fire in the Blood ‘Yeah.’ Fanny and Felina were waiting for us when we reached the dining room of The Silver Spoon, heads together and chatting away like they’d known each other for years.And, when she spotted me, Felina actually coloured. I figured I had been the subject of discussion. I didn’t want to embarrass her so I jumped in with lots of questions about the racing scene in Colorado. Felina was a mine of information, and what she didn’t know Norbert supplied when he joined us. It seems that, like every other enterprise in the area, Horace Tabor ran racing too. And nothing was too good for him and his darling Baby, their pride and joy being the big grey mare, Bluebelle, that had won the Kansas Gift over two miles, only last year. Norbert was dressed this morning in regular clobber, not a hint of disguise about him and, for a few minutes, Fanny and Harry had no idea who he was. When we told them, there was laughter all round and Fanny could hardly credit it. In fact, she seemed quite taken with the ‘real’ Norbert. I spent the day planning our moves and briefing my people, though I had to give Jimmy a miss. When Dan found him, he’d bought himself a bottle of rotgut and we had to let him sleep it off in the hayloft. But that was neither here nor there. It was only at the end of it that things got serious. In fact, more than once that evening, I must admit I thought I was a dead man.

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CHAPTER 33

The faro kid

G

ahan’s saloon was really buzzing when we arrived that night after another splendid feed in The Silver Spoon dining room. Felina had broken out the French champagne and I think that was the cause of most of what followed. Harry had never tasted the real thing before and he reckoned it was no more potent than the lemonade they sold at the Forbes general store. ‘It might be bubblier,’ he said.At least, that’s what he tried to say, but it came out more like blubblier and then he got the giggles and so did the rest of us.We were still chuckling when the whole party of us arrived at Gahan’s. Only Felina stayed behind to look after her own establishment and Fanny was going to leave after a while to give her a spell. I suppose we did make a bit of an entrance. Fanny would stop traffic most anywhere and this night she came in with Norbert on 279

Fire in the Blood one arm and Harry on the other. They looked pretty spiffing too since they were about the same size and Norbert had lent Harry some of his finest threads. I couldn’t have been more proud of the figure he cut than if he’d been my own son. The plan was that instead of confronting the Yankee bushwackers, we’d go the peaceable way.We’d take a hand or two of faro and, as happy gamblers together, we’d get to meet Horace and Baby. If that worked out okay, we’d invite them to partake of the special pleasures of the card room at The Silver Spoon at a time of their convenience. Well, the first part of the scheme was a good one. One look at Doc Holliday and Mr Earp and I knew we’d made a sensible decision. Holliday was a tall, thin streak with long blond hair, a cadaverous face and a graveyard cough. There were dark hollows around his eyes that glittered with the viciousness of a brown snake. He sat at the faro table, playing the occasional hand but mostly watching and drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. Wyatt Earp was a different piece of goods altogether—stockier and more healthy looking with a set of bushy moustaches and a pair of steady brown eyes. He was about 35 and dressed in a fancy waistcoat and string tie; and damn me if he didn’t carry a six-shooter in a holster on his hip. I recognised it as the latest Colt with the extra long barrel, a far cry from the peashooters we used on the Lachlan. He stood at the top of the table. He was the dealer. Earp, Holliday and the others all looked up as we entered and the noise of the crowded saloon died away momentarily. Norbert nudged me and pointed to a table at one side where two women sat with their own bottle. ‘Big Nose Kate and Wyatt’s wife, Josie,’ he whispered. They were almost as curious a pairing as their husbands. Big Nose Kate was well named.The great proboscis glowed red and was 280

The faro kid set in the middle of a round, pitted face topped with orange hair. Josie was small and neat with a wide mouth and curly dark hair. Best to give them both a wide berth, I figured. Then Norbert pointed to our real persons of interest: Horace and Baby—he a man of my own age, bordering on 50, with a face like an axe, and she a bouncy little blonde thing who looked to be travelling at least three different ways at once, putting bets on the faro layout, sipping whiskey, talking to Horace, and gathering in her winnings when the dealer turned up the two winning and losing cards, while all the time keeping an eye on the casekeeper that recorded all the cards dealt from the particular pack in play. When she had a spare moment, her eyes flashed around the saloon, checking out the company. Quite a Miss. Norbert said the French invented faro at the time of King Louis XIV and I have no reason to doubt him. The pity of it is that His Majesty ever allowed it to escape his borders and plague the rest of the world. It was easy to get started.You simply put your bet on one of the laid-out cards—a full suit from another pack being lined in front of the banker—then waited for him to turn over two cards from the dealing pack. If you’d backed the first, you lost; if you backed the second, you won. If you backed neither, your bet stayed on the layout card till the next go. The real skill, I guess, came in watching the casekeeper, an abacus-style arrangement that showed you which cards had gone from the dealer’s pack.That way you could figure the odds on what number might turn up in his next deal. But it was all pure luck and there was just no way you could tilt the odds to your own favour by fair means or foul. That didn’t bother Harry who stepped right up to a chair by the green baize table near the Tabors, bought a pile of ten-dollar chips and started betting. So far so good. The trouble was that instead of engaging the moneybags in polite conversation and gradually 281

Fire in the Blood introducing the rest of us the way we’d planned, Harry started winning from the moment he set his first chip. If he bet on a three, the first card—the loser—would be a court card; the second a three. If he bet on a king, sure enough Wyatt Earp would turn over a king the second time out. One go after the other, it seemed like he couldn’t lose.And, the more he won, the more he ignored the rest of us, and the more attention he attracted from the other ladies in the saloon, not least Baby Tabor who pretty soon started following his bets. Now this, you might think, was no bad thing. It provided just the opportunity we needed to get a conversation going. Alas, you would not be more wrong. For Horace Tabor was a man of fierce temperament and raging jealousy. And one look from the ladies at Harry with those flashing blue eyes, the blond hair and the square jaw, and the curse of the Halls descended. They went weak at the knees while Horace became red in the face. He doubled his bets, hoping to make Harry’s wagers look puny. But, as often as Harry won, Horace lost and very soon half the patrons—and most of the women—were standing around the boy as he clocked up his winnings.They even started to cheer each time he came up trumps. There was absolutely nothing I or Norbert could do about it. All this was bad enough. Our strategy was in ruins. But then the true horror unfolded before our eyes. From the side of the room, the two consorts of America’s favourite gunslingers, Big Nose Kate and Josie Earp, were drawn like moths to Harry’s pure white flame. I should have seen it coming but I was watching Harry like a bird trapped in the stare of a carpet snake. Beside me, Norbert said, ‘Oh no,’ and when I followed his finger, there were the two women standing not two yards from Harry, drinking it all in. And Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp were exchanging looks that flashed the kind of anger that precedes a hail of bullets. 282

The faro kid By now, Harry was betting in hundreds while the banker’s remaining pile was no more than a go-between, taking in Horace’s bets and paying out to Harry. As we watched, he pushed 2000 in chips onto the Jack and sat back while the crowd murmured and Baby Tabor squeezed her thousand on. For the first time, he recognised her presence and flashed a grin. He’d been practically silent up to now but at last he turned to find me in the crowd, ‘Hey Frank,’ he said in the language of the Lachlan,‘this bloody faro’s a bit of all right.’ I moved forward toward him. I had to get him out of the place quick. Slowly the dealer turned the first card. A ten. ‘Bloody ripper,’ Harry said.‘Come on, let’s have the winner.’ I looked at Earp’s face. I glanced at the casekeeper—though Harry didn’t know it, there were still two jacks remaining and only twelve cards left to play. The odds weren’t bad.Then, sure enough, he turned it: a jack.The crowd roared. ‘Je-sus!’ Harry said.‘Je-sus, you bloody beauty.’ ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ said the dealer suddenly in the tones of the lawman. ‘There’ll be no more of that foul language here.You’re barred. Get out.’ I knew a rough dodge when I heard one.‘Just wait one minute,’ I said without thinking. ‘You can’t bar a bloke when he’s on a winning streak.’ Doc Holliday spoke up from the other side. ‘Where are you from?’ he snarled. ‘Australia.’ Holliday sneered into the sudden silence.‘Convicts,’ he said.‘We know your breed.’ In a flash, the atmosphere had changed. Suddenly, all the goodwill for Harry the winner was turning to anger at the stranger come to challenge the Americans on their home turf. But I was damned if I was going to back down. 283

Fire in the Blood ‘Look,’ I said to Earp, ‘we’re only looking for a fair go. It’s your game.You set the rules and we’ve abided by them.’ ‘Yeah, well, one of the rules is you keep a respectful tongue in your head.’ Earp would have chucked us out, but that’s when Baby took a hand. She, after all, had been making a nice piece of change from following the boy. And so intent on her winnings was she that she was blind to the fact that hubby Horace had built a full head of steam. ‘Play the cards,Wyatt,’ she said, and for the first time the Deputy US Marshal looked unsure of himself. His eyes went from Harry to Baby to Horace and then to his own dear Josie. That’s when it hit me, that fire in the blood from all those years ago. The reason was exactly the same—the law had the gun so the law would decide. It didn’t matter whether it was just or not, the law would tell me what to do.Well, like hell it would. ‘Double the bet,’ I said. ‘What?’ Harry looked at me wide-eyed.The room was so silent you could hear the clock on the wall. ‘We’ll stay with the knave,’ I said. A glance at the pile told me that if we won we’d clean out the bank. ‘Who’s we?’ said Holliday. ‘We,’ I said,‘is Australia.’ And by God I meant it.You could have cut the air with a knife.Then, in the silence, Horace Tabor spoke for the first time. ‘Re-double,’ he said.‘I’m backing the bank.’ Now it was my turn to be set back on my heels. Even Baby was silenced. Eight thousand dollars was suddenly in the pot.There was no way we could raise that kind of dough. ‘How about it, Australia?’ said Holliday in that sneering way. Norbert had told me he’d been a dentist before he took to the road. I could well believe it; not even a horse doctor but a bloody . . . and 284

The faro kid with that came a flash of inspiration. I turned to the hatchet-faced moneybags. ‘Mr Tabor, I believe,’ I said. ‘That’s correct.’ ‘That is quite a challenge, sir.’ ‘Are you up for it?’ ‘In my country,’ I said,‘we’re up for anything. But since this is a matter of national pride, it should not hang on the turn of a card.’ ‘What then?’ ‘Sir, I understand that you are the owner of a racehorse known as Bluebelle that has won some minor events.’ His ears glowed red as he swallowed the insult. Baby made to protest but he quieted her with a movement. ‘That’s so.’ ‘Well, it so happens that I am travelling in company with a bush pony from my own country. And, if you’re up for it, I’ll accept the wager—a race between representatives of the two nations.’ Tabor’s thin lips opened just enough to let the words out.‘Done,’ he said.‘Provided, of course, that you can put the money up front.’ Now that was a facer. I hesitated. Holliday jumped in. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘About what you’d expect—’ A voice from the back of the room rang clear and firm.All heads turned to the door where Felina stood in all her womanly glory. ‘The Silver Spoon will stand guarantor,’ she said.

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hat a woman. The place nearly burst with excitement. In short order, they froze the game and the main players retired to the back room where we hammered out the conditions of the race. And I freely admit that this is where I made my big mistake. My only excuse is that I wasn’t used to the clear mountain air and completely under-estimated the distance from Poppy Hill to Larimer Square. I figured it was no more than half a mile, and in foggy San Francisco it would have been. But Denver was a different kettle of fish altogether. Anyway, when we decided that the Leadville racetrack was too far away, I was the mug who suggested the course from the main street to the Tabor’s mansion and back. Since the return journey was mostly downhill, I figured it would be just right for Darkie and not far enough for Bluebelle the stayer. 286

Sweet Felina Then I let that bloody Doc Holliday get under my skin. ‘If it’s gonna be Australia against these United States,’ he said,‘it’s gotta be all the way—right down to the rider.’ Naturally I’d had Jimmy the Hoop in mind for our jockey but I wasn’t about to be fazed by the dentist. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘My boy Harry will be aboard, naturally. I don’t suppose you’re up to it.’ I turned to Earp.‘No doubt you’ll be taking the reins, Mr Earp.’ That threw the bastards into confusion and they went into a huddle. Harry and Felina took the opportunity to whisper in my ear. I’d hardly known what to say to that lovely lady when she spoke up for us but I’m sure she got the message. My gratitude knew no bounds and now she was backing me to the hilt. Harry was just as fired up. The French champagne had been replaced by the sheer excitement of the situation.‘Go for ’em, Frank,’ he said. Earp, Holliday and Tabor came back to the table.‘Here’s the deal,’ Horace said in a voice like a pair of axemen chopping a gum tree, ‘You ride yourself, I take it, Mr Christie?’ ‘One of the best,’ Harry said before I could stop him. ‘Good. Then, you and your young confederate can represent Australia; Marshal Earp and Doc Holliday will ride for America.’ ‘Done,’ said Harry. Horace went on. ‘The course will be from Larimer Square to Poppy Hill and back, each rider to complete one circuit.The finish line will be right outside the prize,’ he grinned. ‘My prize—The Silver Spoon.’ I ignored his goading and did a swift calculation; the distance, I figured, was now 2000 yards, roughly the same mile and a quarter of the Kentucky Derby. No, it was too far. Darkie wouldn’t make it. ‘Look,’ I said,‘our Australian horses are bred for speed—’ ‘What, no stamina?’ sneered Holliday.‘You welshing on the deal?’ ‘No damn it,’ said Harry. ‘We’ll take you bastards any time, any place, any conditions.’ He looked at me.‘Won’t we, Frank?’ 287

Fire in the Blood What could I say? ‘You heard the boy,’ I said.‘You’re on.We’ll eat you for breakfast.’ ‘You bet we will,’ said Harry, and damn me if he didn’t throw an arm round my shoulders as we headed out with Felina. ‘Well said, Frank,’ she said with a real pride in her voice, and hooked her arm through mine. Right then I felt on top of the world.

It didn’t last. By the time we all made it back to The Silver Spoon, I was losing confidence fast. And, when I thought about climbing back in the saddle after all those years, I felt my innards turning to water. Everyone else was buoyed up with the excitement of it. Even Fanny, who had watched the whole thing in company with Norbert, seemed flushed with the pleasure of it all. I couldn’t sit or stand; I had to go for a walk, so I left them quietly and made for the livery stable. Chicago Dan had found a chair outside the hotel— he was a man of habit was Dan—and when he saw me leaving he caught up with me. ‘Did you hear the story?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, Harry told me.’ ‘I think we’ve got troubles,’ I said. ‘You been there before, Frank.’ Well, he had that right.We pulled back the big door to let a little light in.There were half a dozen horses in stalls on both sides of the stable. I called to Jimmy but there was no reply. So we lit a lantern and went down to Alcibiades’ stall. ‘See if you can find the little bugger,’ I said, and Dan began looking through the stable and loft for the jockey as I reached the box. ‘Hey,’ I said quietly and he came over to nuzzle me. Then we talked. I went inside the stall and once again felt the strength and 288

Sweet Felina power of him. I climbed onto his back from a side rail and I reckon he laughed and shook his head. But it felt good. Can’t rightly say how long we were at it but it must have taken Dan a while to search the premises. ‘No sign of him,’ he said as he returned. By then I had checked his legs and fetlocks. In the morning, we’d give him a new set of shoes. ‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘We can’t afford to leave this bloke alone tonight. I wouldn’t put it past that bastard Holliday to try to nobble him.’ ‘I’ll stay,’ Chicago said and my heart warmed to him once again. I felt a little better on my return to The Silver Spoon. But I had no desire to join the others. Instead, I made my way to my room where I climbed into bed and tried to sleep. After a while I must have dozed off but then I woke with a start and all the terrible possibilities crowded in. Harry could knock the horse up by riding him too hard at the beginning; Holliday could come up with some cheating tactic; I could fall off the bloody thing with the finishing line in sight; we could lose everything, most particularly Felina’s Silver Spoon—it was all too much. I got out of bed and started pacing. How the blazes had I got myself into this impossible fix? It was crazy, just crazy; and then the true madness of the enterprise hit me: here was I, the scourge of my country, the only man ever exiled from hearth and home, actually representing Australia in a contest against the Yanks. I couldn’t help it, I laughed aloud. In fact, it was the laughter that finally steadied me down and got me back into the cot. It may also have been the laughter that was responsible for the next event of that fateful night—the soft tapping on my door. It opened and there was Felina carrying a candle and looking so sweet in her long white night dress. ‘Are you all right, Frank?’ she whispered.‘I heard you—’ 289

Fire in the Blood ‘Yes,’ I said. The candle came closer and I reached out to the vision that held it. She came willingly and I held back the sheet so she could slip inside. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Frank?’ she said. ‘We’ll be just fine.’ Afterward, I slept, long and deep.

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Gallop for glory

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ext morning, I was in fine fettle. Felina was gone when I awoke shortly after six and, by the time I roused Harry, there was coffee in the dining room. We took a quick cup then hurried over to the stable where Chicago was grooming Darkie—for that was how I knew him now—as best he could. Jimmy had still not made an appearance but neither had anyone but the old boy who ran the stables and the blackmith who had his shop next door. So, as the sun rose over the hill and lit up the snowcapped Rockies and our breath steamed in the first golden rays, we walked Darkie the route from Larimer Square to Poppy Hill, taking turns to sit aboard. The thoroughbred snorted and pranced. He knew something was up and it took our quiet words to steady him. I was amazed at how quickly I fitted back into the saddle. It was as though part of 291

Fire in the Blood my body had been sleeping and now it awoke, stretched and resumed the activity that had been so much of it for all those years. It was a good feeling. I was home again. But, as we made our way over the rough tracks to the Tabor’s hillside mansion, I slowly began to realise just how much I’d been deceived by the clear mountain air. Poppy Hill was a long, steady slope with a couple of turns as the track zigzagged. In the heat of battle the night before, I’d calculated the course as 1000 yards for each rider; now I could see it was much more, maybe half as much again—that was 3000 all up. He’d never run that distance before. It was twice what that bastard Carney had set him for in his early races. By that calculation, our cause was lost even before the starter’s gun. I knew from a lifetime with horses that there was more to them than anything you’d find in a studbook or a breaker’s manual. But even I knew there were limitations.When we came in sight of the mansion, there was no sign of the Tabors, just a couple of workmen pegging out the turn in the carriageway in front that would take us back down the hill. Harry noticed my gloomy silence.‘You’ll be right, Frank,’ he said. ‘You look like you’re moulded to him.’ I decided to keep my worst fears to myself. ‘You ride the first circuit,’ I said,‘and, for God’s sake, take it easy. He’ll pull like hell at the start.You’ve got to hold him back, make sure he’s not knocked up when I get aboard. Okay?’ ‘Sure, Frank. Easy as pie.’

By two o’clock that afternoon I was a worried man.All around me the excitement was building as the crowds gathered in Larimer Square.The events of the night before had clearly flashed around the whole area from Denver to Leadville to Cripple Creek, and the mob 292

Gallop for glory was like a mining mob anywhere—fired with the kind of mad excitement that always travels in the prospector’s veins. Felina and Fanny took charge of our riding rig. My FrenchCanadian partner wanted to deck us out in silks and Harry quite fancied the idea but I wouldn’t have it. If I was going down, at least I’d do it in dinkum Aussie clobber, and, in the end, Felina’s choice of riding britches, blue shirt and red muffler filled the bill just right. Norbert found us a light saddle and when Chicago led that beautiful black stallion up the main street I have to say my heart filled with pride. If looks were anything to go by, we were at least a fighting chance. The Tabors arrived in a beautifully turned-out brougham drawn by a pair of gleaming pacers, and, behind them, led by a groom on a sorrel hack, was the pretty grey mare, Bluebelle, looking every inch the thoroughbred. Darkie snorted and pawed the ground as she approached and I’ll swear he knew the race was on.Then came my first shock of the afternoon. Perched on Bluebelle’s back in the racing silks of the Tabors was none other than Jimmy the Hoop. ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said, and made straight for the Tabors who had drawn up outside The Silver Spoon. I spotted Wyatt Earp pushing his way through the crowd to them. By the time I reached them, I was breathing fire but Tabor held up a hand and began talking before I could begin my protest. ‘Mr Christie, sir, I ask your indulgence,’ he said.‘I have to report that Doc Holliday has been taken ill. I checked it out myself and I can assure you it’s true.’ Earp chimed in,‘It’s the consumption,’ he said.‘He couldn’t even make it into the saddle.’ ‘You should have thought about that last night,’ I said. ‘We had a deal . . .’ Tabor drew me a little closer. ‘We did indeed,’ he said. ‘But certain information has reached me that suggests there have been 293

Fire in the Blood liberties taken with the truth on both sides of the border, if you take my drift.’ I glanced up at Jimmy and tried to catch his eye but the little bugger was suddenly preoccupied with his mount.Tabor was at me again, ‘Now we could call the race off and let the law of the west take its course.That’s one way. It might cause a little discomfort all round but we could do it. Or,’ and here he paused to let it all sink in,‘we could proceed as planned.What do you say, Mr Christie?’ Trapped.What could I say? If I called it off, we could all end up in the caboose for horse theft and I’m damned if I wanted to go through all that again. I looked around. Harry was all eagerness; Norbert and Fanny were as excited as the rest of the mob; and Felina? Well, she looked at me as though I could do no wrong. Whatever my decision, it would be fine by her.Then a movement attracted me to Darkie and I noticed something that might well have escaped the others. It was just a chance but the situation was so bloody grim it was worth a go. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I make only one condition—that Mr Earp here rides the first lap against my young colleague; I will take the second against your . . . jockey.’ Tabor looked at Earp.The Marshal nodded.‘All the same to me,’ he said. ‘Done,’ said Tabor.‘Now let’s get it under way.’ I just had time to grab Harry before he mounted. ‘Forget what I said earlier about holding him back,’ I said.‘Give him his head till you reach Poppy Hill.’ ‘You sure?’ ‘Absolutely. I want you back here with a bloody big lead.’ ‘Whatever you say, Frank.’ ‘Good lad.’ Baby Tabor, who by now couldn’t care less who won or lost, was given the privilege of firing the starter’s gun:Wyatt Earp’s extended 294

Gallop for glory six-shooter. She held it skywards in one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. And what a bang it made! Harry dug his heels into the black stallion’s flanks and they were away. Our horse whinnied and tossed his head then those great rump muscles locked in and he leapt ahead of Bluebelle. Like all Australian riders, Harry leaned forward over the horse’s neck and, with the shortened stirrup straps, he practically lay on the black mane as they bolted down Larimer Street.Wyatt Earp was the last of the straightbacks, sitting on his big mare like a mast amidships. By the time they reached the corner that led off toward Poppy Hill, Harry had opened up a 30-yard lead. After that, we lost them to sight for a while and, when they reappeared at the beginning of the slope, the gap had doubled. Dust and stones were flying out from the stallion’s hooves and he barely broke stride as he reached the first bend in the zigzag. ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said, ‘Not too fast, Harry.’ But the Halls never did anything by halves and, whenever his horse seemed to be slowing for a breather, Harry dug the heels in and set him off on another sprint. Up the slope they went, on and on until we saw them reach Poppy Hill and turn back toward town. Now the lead was 100 yards and for Darkie it was mostly downhill. However, when Wyatt Earp and Bluebelle crossed them on the way up the hillside, Harry and his mount appeared to check and the crowd drew in a collective breath. I thought for a moment he’d tripped but then he emerged from the flurry of dust with Harry still aboard and now they were cantering down to the gully where we lost them before turning and making for the edge of town. Then it was up the long main street to the square. Here they came. All my attention had been on the riders but suddenly I was aware of Felina at my side.‘You can do it, Frank,’ she said.‘I know you can.’ She squeezed my hand. 295

Fire in the Blood ‘By God, I hope so,’ I said. Harry and the black stallion crossed the line and, in the same movement, he pulled on the reins, turned the horse’s head and leapt out of the saddle.Then he was beside me, his hand under my rump and heaving me aboard. ‘Go for it, mate!’ The stallion’s muzzle was flecked with foam and his flanks glistened with sweat.The raw smell of him set my blood racing and I slapped the reins on each side of his neck.‘Let’s go!’ He hesitated just a moment then with a snort he charged down the main street, the stores on either side flashing by. I saw a trail of dust heading up toward the corner and I drew him all the way to the other side of the road as the Marshal and Bluebelle, looking far fresher than Darkie, put in the hard yards toward the finish line for the first time. As we passed them, I felt my horse shudder but then he picked up the rhythm again and we headed out of town. While we were travelling down to the gully at the base of Poppy Hill, he handled the going well. I kept him to the smooth side of the track and suddenly there came a moment at the head of the gully where I felt that special connection I’d once had with Darkie himself. It was like we were two parts of the same body and everything about us worked in perfect harmony. It was a feeling I wouldn’t swap for anything in the world. However, I knew right then that it was going to be bloody tough going if we were to make it to the finish line.The stallion’s muscles were willing but something was missing, some sense of will and direction.That’s when I started to talk to him. If my strategy was to work—and I was now sure that all the ingredients were in place— we had to be ahead when we came back down to that gully. So, with all my might and main, I urged him on and we took the gully in a couple of leaps and headed up the long hillside. 296

Gallop for glory When I reached the first bend in the zigzag, I took a good look back at the competition.The green diamonds of Jimmy’s racing silks were flashing through the trees, much closer than I expected. I turned back to my task.‘Come on, Darkie,’ I said.‘Come on, son.’ He responded to my voice the way I knew he would and, for a while, we held them. But then those great lungs began to pant and the foam flew off his mouth and flecked my face and shoulders. ‘Come on now,’ I said and once more he surged. At the next turn of the zigzag, Bluebelle had made up a few yards and, by the time we reached the mansion at the peak, she was on the other side of the roundabout that would take us back down to the valley.That suited me just fine. Once we were headed down the hill, my horse could relax a little and let the clear mountain air flow into those mighty lungs. Nevertheless, Jimmy was an experienced jockey and he knew when it was time to pounce—when the going got tough in those last 300 yards.That was the theory, anyway. But what Jimmy didn’t know, because he was a rider rather than a horseman, was that there was another factor at play on that mountainside as we made the second turn in the zigzag and headed for the gully. My big black stallion had noticed it first and I’d picked up the signals from him. Bluebelle, that sweet little charmer with the big heart and the lovely long legs, was on heat.And, every time she came within smelling distance of the stallion, a fire started in the big fellow’s blood that would not be extinguished until nature had been satisfied. Now, as she started to range up alongside, I could feel a new tension in his stride. Jimmy, the little bastard, looked straight ahead, easing her forward. He rode like a true jockey—short stirrups, nicely balanced, but he’d had a few rough days and looked much the worse for wear. I looked across at him. ‘You’re a bloody double-crosser, Jimmy,’ I shouted. 297

Fire in the Blood The words hit home. By now, Bluebelle was just drawing ahead of us, her rump bouncing sweetly along by Darkie’s shoulder. ‘Nothing I could do about it, Frank,’ he shouted back.‘Holliday came lookin’ for me, said he’d shoot me if I didn’t talk.’ He put his head down and took the mare a little farther ahead. Now she was positioned right in front of us, just where I wanted her, and Darkie had the full force of her female charms dancing before him.That’s where I had to hold her while the clear mountain air filled his nostrils with the lust that would not be denied. ‘What’s your hurry,’ I shouted.‘Don’t make us look bad, Jimmy.’ He looked back to me and eased off a little. But then fear of the bloody dentist got the better of him. ‘Not my problem, Frank,’ he said and turned back to his task. But, by now, Darkie had found that sense of will and direction he needed and, when we came up the gully with Jimmy riding hands and heels, there was a new spring in his gait and Bluebelle was no longer gaining. Just the opposite, in fact.We were reeling her in and I let Jimmy know with a clamour of cries and whoops that measured our gains. ‘Go, Darkie, go son. She’s yours; go for her. Go, go, go . . .’ Closer and closer we came. I could feel the fire roaring in his blood and, as we rounded the turn at the bottom of the main street, we were back in the running. I took him on the inside and made up a couple of yards. Now Bluebelle was only half a length ahead and we were actually gaining slightly. She gave a half snort, half squeal as the big stallion bore down, his nostrils flaring, the air roaring from his lungs.We were almost on level pegging and the line was no more than 70 yards away. I urged him one more time but now he didn’t need me. Now he had only one thing in that beautiful head with the white of his eyes flashing in the sunlight. In four strides he was up with her.We were side by side, no more than a yard apart, and I looked ahead. The crowd was going mad, 298

Gallop for glory leaping up and down and shouting our way. I pushed forward in the saddle but, in that moment’s inattention, Darkie wrenched the reins and his head went across the space between us to clamp his teeth on the mare’s neck, the way his mustang ancestors had done from time immemorial. I tried to drag him back but now both horses were breaking stride as they hurtled forward at breakneck speed. Jimmy and I both reefed on the reins but nothing would separate them as we hit the line and Darkie snapped left and sent me flying out of the saddle to land flat on my back in the middle of the road. Jimmy, poor bastard, was stuck in the saddle. His foot had slipped through the stirrup and he was trapped there as the mighty representative of Australia leapt upon the lovely Bluebelle and followed the call—nay, the triumphant roar—of nature in all her primitive glory. Now that was a sight to behold.

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The end and the beginning

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ever in the history of horse racing has a crowd so thrilled at the result as they did in Denver, Colorado, that day in 1881. They cheered, they laughed, they leapt about and everyone had something joyful to say to his neighbour. Horace Tabor, to give him his due, declared the result a dead heat and split the 8000 down the middle. I didn’t argue. In fact, I shook the man’s hand and, in a few words, we came to an arrangement about the ownership of Darkie. Horace would put him to stud in a place some distance from Denver—Cripple Creek or Leadville, perhaps— just in case anyone connected to Heywood Carney came snooping around.And, if they persisted, then a certain Jimmy the Hoop, once he recovered, would have a story to tell that might well discourage them. 300

The end and the beginning We understood each other, did Horace and I. I figured that once you got to know him he wouldn’t be such a bad bloke after all. In fact, in the glow of good fellowship produced by the aftermath, I even shook hands with Wyatt Earp, a lawman. Johnny Gilbert would have turned in his grave. The dentist never did make an appearance that day. In fact, that was just as well because something unexpected had happened within my little party and his presence might have proven awkward. I had been somewhat preoccupied but it seems there had been a certain change in the direction of Fanny’s affections since our arrival in the mile-high city.While Harry was covering himself with glory, Fanny and Norbert were discovering true love—for each other. I was not entirely surprised. Harry was a little young for any long-term liaison with her and, besides which, his place was in another country. But not before he had experienced an event that would, I have no doubt, remain with him forever. For in the afterglow of the equine carnality of the afternoon, the human population of Denver developed their own smouldering fire in the blood and none more than the redoubtable Big Nose Kate, who had been so taken with Harry the night before.That evening, nothing would stand between her and the satisfaction of those urgent desires that raged within. She bore him off, his protests notwithstanding, and for three days afterward he wandered about in a daze. But he had recovered nicely by the time we parted on the Denver railroad station. By then, Fanny had become a friend, and when Norbert and she announced that they were returning to San Francisco together they did so in Harry’s company, with his blessing, and with mine. For by then I had done a deal with the two of them to take over The Twilight Saloon holus bolus and to ship back to me all those treasures from my office—my books and papers and photographs of another world. 301

Fire in the Blood It was not an easy parting. Fanny and I had been together a long time and had shared many adventures.We hugged and there was a moment or two before I trusted myself to speak. Then I shook Norbert’s hand.We had become close already and we’d get closer. Then came Harry. We faced each other on that windswept platform and it felt as though we’d lived a whole life together.The battlefield and the prisons of my other world had denied me the right to a child of my own. Until he arrived and slipped beneath my guard to the man within, I hadn’t really understood what I’d missed. Now I did.And just as he’d filled that gap he was taking his leave. Yet strange to say I knew it was right that he should and I made no move to hold him. He was a man. It was time for him to make his own way. I gave him a package and, against my wishes, he opened it. It was the whole 4000. He started to protest but I wouldn’t take it. ‘You earned it, son,’ I said.‘And so did your mother.There were too many lost years but she should enjoy all those remaining. I know you’ll see to it.’ ‘I will,’ he said.‘Frank—’ ‘No, that’s enough.’We embraced and this time, I’m not ashamed to say, I wept. Then they all climbed aboard and ever so slowly the train pulled out of the station. Felina took my hand. When it was out of sight, we turned together and made our way back to The Silver Spoon where Chicago Dan was standing—or rather sitting—guard in his chair on the boardwalk. And this is where you find me now, in my own office, surrounded by my books and my memories.This is where I have laboured to tell my tale. Felina leaves me here each morning while I scratch away, and a little while ago she came in with my usual cup of coffee. ‘One thing I have been meaning to ask,’ I said as she placed it carefully on the desk.‘Where did the name Felina come from?’ 302

The end and the beginning She smiled and her dimples danced.‘There was Italian blood on my mother’s side,’ she said, ‘and she loved cats. So that’s what she called me—I think it means little cat.’ A strange feeling passed through me like a breath of wind. ‘Kitty,’ I said.

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Epilogue

T

here were a number of stories in the Australian papers about the fate of Frank Gardiner after his arrival in San Francisco. Most mention his Twilight Saloon and there are also references to Daniel McGlone’s arrival in the city and Frank’s purchase of the saloon at 318 Brannan Street. Two stories, are of special interest—the Murrumburrah Signet, quoting the American publication, the Sierra Citizen, said he had married a ‘rich widow’ and had acquired twin sons by the marriage. The other, a second-hand report in the Sydney Morning Herald, claimed that he was either shot dead in a poker game in Colorado in 1903 or died of pneumonia in the same area the following year. In 1912, two Americans who said their names were Monty and Fred arrived at Wheogo station, then owned by the Butler family. They asked permission of Mr Jack Butler to dig for ‘radium’ on the property and he happily agreed. They then borrowed picks and shovels from Mr Butler and began to dig in the area where Frank had his ‘cave’ and where he divided the takings from the Eugowra gold robbery. The area they dug formed a perfect triangle. After a couple of weeks, they hired a cart and took their ‘specimens’ to Grenfell, where they caught the train for Sydney. They were never heard from again. 304