Gangland: The Great Escapes

James Morton, Susanna Lobez

• Publisher: Victory Books Digital
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780522870237
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522870244
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the arrival of the First Fleet, thousands of prisoners have escaped from prison, police stations, courts, prison vans and hospitals—even dentists' chairs. They have driven, walked, pedalled, swum or sailed away from custody. Some have killed or been killed in the process; a few have gone overseas or escaped from foreign prisons, and a handful have remained at home, undetected. Gangland: The Great Escapes is filled with tall tales of crims—Ronald Ryan, Jockey Smith, Brenden Abbott, Julie Wright and Annie Davis, and many others—who have been recaptured in minutes and those who have stayed on the run.

Early bolters

1

Probably the first bushranger, even if he was not that successful, but certainly the first black person to bolt was John ‘Black’ Caesar, possibly born in Madagascar in around 1763. He had been transported for seven years for the not inconsiderable theft of 240 shillings and arrived with the First Fleet. From the time he landed in Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, Caesar was known as a good and conscientious worker. That is until he was again convicted of theft, this time of £12, and was then sentenced to transportation for life on 29 April 1789.

A fortnight later Caesar was off into the bush with a stolen gun. He was caught in early June and sent to work in chains at Garden Island in Sydney. Again he must have proved a satisfactory worker because the chains were taken off just before Christmas and Caesar repaid the kindness of the authorities by stealing a canoe and another gun. He lasted just over a month stealing from gardens and the Aboriginal people in the vicinity, until at the end of January one of them speared him and he returned to the prison camp.

This time he was sent to the penal settlement on Norfolk Island where, by the winter of 1791, he was allowed his own parcel of land and a pig to go with it. He then married and had a daughter but in July 1794 he made another short-lived break. The next year, after what was described as ‘severe punishment’, he was thought to be trusted enough to be sent to Port Jackson from where he made his last escape in the December. By now, as with many another after him, every theft and robbery in the locality was put on his shoulders and the somewhat curious reward of five gallons (23 litres) of spirits was on offer for his capture. On 15 February he attacked another settler and this time he was shot and died at Liberty Plains, Strathfield in Sydney.¹

Black Caesar is credited with wounding another great escaper, an Aborigine named Pemulwuy, who in December 1790 killed Governor Phillip’s gamekeeper. Pemulwuy led a series of retaliatory raids on settlers who were suspected of kidnapping Aboriginal children. He was shot and captured in March 1797 in what was known as the Battle of Parramatta but, despite having seven pieces of buckshot in his head and body and being in leg irons, he somehow escaped. According to the Eora people, the first Australians from the Sydney area, this seemingly impossible feat was achieved by his turning himself into a bird—he was known as ‘Butu Wargun’, which means ‘crow’. He continued to carry out attacks on the settlers and was eventually shot and killed on 2 June 1802. His head was cut off and, preserved in spirits, sent to England.²

It did not take long for other convicts to start bolting. At the end of September 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood escaped from the stockade and began to rob the huts at night. They were caught after killing a Dr White’s goat on his farm at White’s Creek, near Sydney. The governor had them chained together and sent back to Rosehill to hard labour on bread and water. During the overseer’s absence they escaped again and after attacking a settler stole three pounds (1.4 kilograms) of beef, one pound (half a kilogram) of flour, a frock and a book from his hut. Recaptured, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death by the Sydney Criminal Court. The next day, on 20 October, they were rowed out to Rosehill where they were hanged from a tree in front of an appreciative crowd of settlers.³

Initially bushrangers may have been driven by the need for survival. The bush surrounding the settlements was unexplored, but this did not deter the convicts from escaping with the idea of making their way to what is now Jakarta or to China. The Irish convicts were principally the ones who believed that:

At a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly.⁴

In 1791 comforted by this knowledge, twenty male convicts and a pregnant woman set off on foot to build themselves a new life. One died of exhaustion, four were speared by Aborigines and the remainder stumbled back into Sydney a week later.

The belief that China was somewhere north of Sydney lasted for some years until, in 1803, Governor Philip King had two escapees hanged and fixed the punishment for bolting at a savage five hundred lashes and double chains for the remainder of the bolter’s sentence. After that the concept was less appealing.

Not all tried to make it to where they thought China might be. Many bolters died but others survived by joining up with Aboriginal tribes or by robbing the settlers of what little they possessed. One of the survivors and a man who might be described as one of the few success stories of early escapees was William Buckley. Convicted of receiving a roll of cloth and transported for life, he was taken to Port Phillip in April 1803 in the Calcutta with a party under Lieutenant-Governor David Collins. He and two other convicts promptly absconded from the camp. Later his friends tried to return to the vessel but were not heard of again. At first Buckley fed on shellfish and berries; later he met and was accepted by members of the Wathaurong tribe from the Bellarine Peninsula, who believed him to be a reincarnation of their dead chief. He learned their language and their customs, and was given a ‘wife’, by whom he claimed to have had a daughter. He lived with the Wathaurong for over thirty years until he gave himself up in 1835. By then he had forgotten how to speak English and was identified by the tattoo WB. Buckley was pardoned and given the position of tracker. After this he settled in Hobart and became a gatekeeper until he retired in 1851 with a pension of £52 a year. He had married Julia Eager in 1840, had two children, and died in 1856. Buckley’s life is said to be the origin of the phrase Buckley’s Chance.⁵

Another who escaped slightly later, in 1827, this time from the brutal conduct of the tyrannical Captain Patrick Logan, commandant of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, was Irishman John Graham, who bolted north. In a story similar to that of Buckley, when Graham meet a tribe he also was fortunate in that one of the Aboriginal women thought he was the white ghost of her dead husband. He lived with them for five years before returning to Moreton Bay and surrendering to the rather more sympathetic James Clunie, who had succeeded Logan as Commandant after Aboriginals killed him in 1830. Graham petitioned unsuccessfully that, because of the privations he had suffered at the hands of the tribe, nothing should be added to his sentence. In 1836 he guided the party that rescued Eliza Fraser from the Badtjaka (Butchulla) people after she had been shipwrecked when the Stirling Castle foundered on what is now known as the Eliza Reef, 250 kilometres north of present-day Gladstone, and claimed to have been captured by them. Other survivors in the group claimed they had been well treated but Fraser’s myth-making tales eventually led to the massacre and dispossession of the island’s local people. Graham was given a ticket of leave in 1837.⁶

The idea was that the transported did not return to England without completing their sentence and obtaining a ticket of leave. So far as officialdom back in Britain was concerned, even if prisoners escaped from the stockades they could rape and pillage as much as they liked. It was too far for them to find their way back to Blighty, which was all that mattered. In the eyes of the British government, the whole of Australia was one huge maximum-security prison. In Western Australia, Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was one of many who believed the Australian bush was a ‘vast, natural gaol’ that would discourage convicts dreaming of escape.

In the 1840s and 1850s some escapees did make their way to the west coast of America. They set up gambling dens and brothels on the waterfront in San Francisco, where they were known as the Sydney Ducks, but they never returned to England.

On 7 December 1835 an eighteen-year-old petty thief, Charles Adolphus King, was sentenced at the Manchester New Bailey for burglary in the city to fourteen years’ transportation. He arrived in Australia on the Lord Kennedy in 1836 and worked as a gentleman’s servant until his master left the colony eighteen months later, at which time King was returned to barracks. He worked on the roads and then as a shepherd at Appin, south of Campbelltown, not far from what is now the Hume Highway. In 1838 he helped a bushranger and for this was sentenced to twelve months on a chain gang. He was then sent to a new master, but when the man left for Perth he again went back to the convict barracks. He escaped, was caught in Sydney, given a modest fifty lashes and sent to an up-country estate.

Four months later King and a John Carney escaped from that estate. They returned to Port Jackson and hid in a ship’s hold. When they were discovered while out to sea, the captain intended to take them back to New South Wales but they jumped ship near one of the Fijian islands. Attacked by natives, Carney was killed but the daughter of a native chief saved King. He had been in Fiji four months when he and the young woman got away on the Angelique, a French whaler. They landed four months later in New Zealand. Fearing he would be arrested, he abandoned the chief’s daughter after a missionary promised to return her to Fiji and he then shipped on the Elizabeth to London.

King made his way to Salford in Lancashire where in 1840 he was dobbed in. In a long speech to the judge he begged to be hanged rather than sent to Norfolk Island, but on 23 March 1840 he was sentenced to penal servitude for life, the first ten years to be in chains. King was fortunate. Public opinion was with him and his sentence was commuted to five years’ penal servitude in London’s Millbank.

How much of King’s story was true is another matter. It smacks of the stuff of convict memoirs—the escape, the romance, the penitence—all of which sold well to the public. Indeed a booklet appeared in 1840 and another version followed in 1845. After his release King seems to have made something of a living lecturing on his experiences.⁷

It is hardly surprising that escapes were thick and fast in the early days. In June 1837 Thomas Smith was appointed jailer at the prison at Batman’s Hill, Port Phillip. The jail consisted of wattle daub walls and a thatched roof surrounded by a 2.43-metre timber fence. Smith had one assistant, a part-timer who carried out floggings. On 24 July Harry Smiley escaped by cutting through the roof boards during the night but, far worse, Thomas Clarke, who was being held in irons, escaped during the afternoon of 22 September. The irons were found in Smith’s office and he was promptly dismissed. Some years later the jail was burned down by Aborigines.⁸

In a breakout from Fremantle in Western Australia on 25 January 1859, John Williams, Peter Campbell, Henry Stephens, John Haynes and Stephen Lacey escaped soon after construction of the convict establishment had been completed. The five convicts, who were on a work party, absconded into the bush and made their way up river to Melville Water. With the aid of Aboriginal trackers, the police immediately followed in pursuit. At Point Walter the convicts seized a dinghy and returned down river, keeping to the cover of trees along the riverbank. Once reaching Fremantle they rowed past the harbour lookout and out to open water. The next morning they landed at Garden Island and robbed James Reid and his wife, stealing food, pistols, water, a sword and a compass. They loaded up the family’s whaleboat and set out to sea heading north. Meanwhile, the pursuit had been delayed. While the convicts were rowing out to Garden Island, the water police boat was being used to ferry Governor Edward Kennedy to Rottnest Island, where Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was also on holiday. By the time the water police retrieved their boat and sailed to Garden Island, the five had vanished.

The convicts landed ten days later near Port Gregory when their food and water had run out and were immediately seen by the water police and chased into the country. By this time Lacey was regarded as the weakest link in the party and suspected of stealing their rations. When the other four returned from a night-time fishing trip he was nowhere to be seen. When Lacey finally returned to camp, Williams gave him a beating and later fatally shot him. Lacey was buried on the beach.

Some weeks later, again out of food and water, the four men surrendered to George Clinton in command of a government schooner Les Trois Amis. On 14 July Haynes was acquitted of Lacey’s murder and Williams found guilty. They were all sentenced to death for the robbery and other crimes but were reprieved.⁹

On 29 May 1867, William Graham used a duplicate key to unlock his cell and free Thomas Scott and George Morris in another escape from Fremantle. With heavy rain muffling the sound of their footsteps the three men made their way to the East Workshops, where they stripped leather drive belts from the machinery, tied them together and used them to scale the perimeter wall. Their escape was not discovered until muster the next morning.

The trio soon began bushranging, stealing rifles and food as they moved through farmlands north east of Perth. Police and Aboriginal trackers caught up with them two days after their escape and, during a night-time shoot-out, George Morris died after being hit in the neck. Graham and Scott escaped by crossing the Causeway and it was not until several weeks later that four police officers and three Aboriginal trackers discovered the fresh tracks they had made east of Kojonup, south west of Perth. One tracker found Graham standing sentry outside an abandoned hut and he returned to the police camp, reporting where the men were. The police made a decision that was later said to ‘cast shame on the whole force’.

The trackers were ordered to return to the hut and open fire on the building ‘without challenge’. In the morning the police found that both men had escaped, albeit wounded. William Graham dragged himself twelve miles (just over 19 kilometres) through the bush until, believing he was about to die, he surrendered to a shepherd. Scott was captured a few days later near the Blackwood River. Both were returned to prison. The police involved were dismissed from the force for what was described in the Perth Gazette as a ‘disgraceful affair’.¹⁰

An escape too many also saw the end of Bernard Wootton, aka MacNulty, transported in June 1856, who absconded along with James Holmes and Henry Davies from a working party at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum on 23 April 1863. Wootton had been serving a nine-year sentence handed out the previous January for rolling a drunk in York, 97 kilometres east of Perth. The escape was short-lived. The three men returned to York where they bailed up an Elizabeth Martin, stealing three firearms, food and ammunition. They were tracked down and marched back to Perth.

The question was whether the robbery had been ‘with violence’. Henry Davies had placed his hands on Mrs Martin’s shoulders and it was asked whether that was sufficient to establish the charge. The jury, possibly sympathetically, decided it was not and the men were discharged after His Honour Chief Justice Burt lectured them about future escapes and the probable consequences. If Wootton actually listened to the judge, he did not heed His Lordship’s words.

A much more serious escape took place on the evening of 8 August 1867 when, after the working gangs of convicts including Wootton had been marched into prison for the night, the door of one of the wards was opened and from it emerged a party of eight men, apparently under the charge of another warder. In fact it was fellow convict John Smith dressed in a warder’s uniform. He halted his party while he reclosed and locked the door, and then, giving the order to march, took them to the gate of the work yard. On the way they passed a sentry just relieved from duty who, seeing an apparent colleague, took no notice of the party. The escape was a great success but for some it was relatively brief. Fremantle’s Herald was up in arms:

There can be no doubt that the successful evasion of the police by these men tends to encourage escapes. It certainly does not give us a high opinion of the efficiency of the police for these men, unarmed and half starved perhaps, to remain so long at large. The supposition that they are harboured by companions does not in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The third way
• 1 Early bolters
• 2 Row the boat away
• 3 The killers
• 4 Dying with their boots on
• 5 Breaking out or in is (sometimes) hard to do
• 6 Just as deadly
• 7 Up and away
• 8 In and out of court
• 9 Taking hostages
• 10 Comers and goers
• 11 Again, and again, and again …
• 12 One step ahead
• 13 Staying and still out
• 14 The last great escapes
• 15 And still they try
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Select bibliography
• Index