The call of the Australian Bush 1880




1880 Northern Queensland Australia
Travelling through the bush in the Cooktown District

The road is rough - but to my feet
Softer than is the city street;
And then the trees! - how beautiful
She-oak and gum - how fresh and cool!

From The Call of the Bush by Dora Wilcox,

born Mary Theodora Joyce Wilcox (1873-1953) poet and playwright.

A bush home in Australia in 1895

The first settlers endured the inclement climate and the harshness of the bush as they went forth into the forest with the manly determination to reclaim the wilderness and to make themselves a home in its previously unbroken solitudes. To do this, has involved no small amount of courage, of patient endurance, of steadfast hope, of physical strength and of pertinacious toil.  Picturesque Atlas of Australasia: published in 1886.

It's hard to tell from this photo, due to the fence, whether it is a fully wooden construction called a bark hut or a slab hut or a wattle and daub home.

Bark Hut
A hut almost entirely made from the stringy bark tree which was chosen because of its straight grain. The bark was stripped and cured before being used to create the walls.

Slab Hut
A hut made from slabs of split or sawn timber, often in a vertical construction. Timber was split along the grain and used green not seasoned.

Wattle and daub
The wattle is the horizontal weaving of thin branches between vertical stakes.
Daub is the binding ingredient usually made of clay in Australia mixed with wet soil, or sand, animal dung and straw.

LINKED UP AT: History and Home

The early streets of Rocklea, Brisbane

Horses and riders outside the Crown Hotel, Rocklea, Queensland in 1899.
John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

 The town of Rocklea is nine klms south of central Brisbane. It was named after a watercourse - the Rocky Water Holes - where there was good farming land. The Crown Hotel was licensed in 1862 to Edward Barnacle, the name above the entrance.
This way of placing the licensees name prominently can also be seen in the 1880 photo of The Glenrowan Inn, site of the Kelly Gang shoot out in that year.

Lunch in the bush

Lunch in the bush, near Warwick, Queensland, ca.1893.

A man and woman stopping for a meal and a billy of tea. The horses have been unhitched from the double buggy. The double buggy was advertised as 'a must for squatters' as it was admirably adapted to travelling over huge logs and rutted ground. Travel in Australia during the late 1800s would have been very difficult.

RESOURCE: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

The Glenrowan Inn

This photograph shows the burnt remains of the Jones's Hotel, the scene of the final confrontation between Ned Kelly and the Victorian Police.

A sign still stands: "The Glenrowan Inn, Ann Jones, best accommodation".

Source: State Library Victoria

Taken by John Bray 1880

This is where Ned Kelly, dressed in home-made plate metal armour and the infamous helmet, was captured and sent to gaol.  Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne, and Steve Hart were with him and also had suits of armour.

I do not say what brought me to Glenrowan, but it seems much. Anyhow I could have got away last night, for I got into the bush with my grey mare, and lay there all night. But I wanted to see the thing end. Part of Ned Kelly's statement to the press.

The Glenrowan Inn, owned by Ann Jones, was burned to the ground by the police after the Kelly Gang siege in June 1880.

See also: The Demise of the Kelly Gang

'The Immigrants first Christmas in Queensland'

New settlers pictured outside their tent,

celebrating their first Christmas in Queensland Australia.

Copied and digitised from an image appearing in the The Illustrated News-Budget, 23 December, 1911.

Young Ben Hall

Ben Hall (9 May 1837 - 5 May 1865) 

Ben Hall was born in 1837, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. His father was Benjamin Hall born in England and his mother Eliza was born in Ireland. His parents had both been transported to Van Dieman's Land due to minor stealing offences. His father was given his certificate of freedom in 1832 and he married Eliza Somers in 1834 in New South Wales. Ben was their fourth child and as a teenager he worked on numerous cattle properties gaining a good reputation as a hard-working stockman.
At 19 he married Bridget Walsh at Bathurst and 2 years later they had a son who they named Henry.
In 1860, Ben Hall and John Maguire jointly leased a  run of 10,000 acres near Forbes, in the Central West of New South Wales.  They built a house, sheds and stockyards and became successful graziers of cattle.

“I'm not a criminal. I've been driven to this life.  Pottinger arrested me on Forbes racecourse last year and I was held for a month in gaol, an innocent man.  While I was away me wife ran away - with a policeman.  Well, with a cove who used to be in the police force.  Then I was arrested for the mail coach robbery and held another month before I was let out on bail.  When I came home, I found my house burned down and cattle perished of thirst, left locked in yards." Ben Hall.

His life changed, his wife had left him, his house and cattle were gone and he met the notorious bushranger Frank Gardiner.

SOURCES:

• New South Wales, Australia, Certificates of Freedom, 1810-1814, 1827-1867 about Benjamin Hall (his father)
• Australia Marriage Index, 1788-1950 about Benjamin Hall (his father)
• New South Wales, Australia, Registers of Convicts' Applications to Marry, 1826-1851 about Eliza Somers

Captain Starlight

Henry Arthur Readford 1841 - 1901

Captain Starlight

 

Henry Arthur Readford was born in NSW, to Thomas Readford (1790-1860) and Jemima Smith (1801-1860). His father was a convict who had been transported to Australia for stealing 4 pieces of leather and later became a publican. Henry Readford  had eight brothers and sisters and was the youngest child.

He became a stockman and drover and began his career as a cattle thief in 1870 in Queensland when he stole over 1000 cattle from Bowen Downs station where he was working as a stockman. He and 2 other men drove the cattle overland to South Australia. Readford was caught in Sydney in 1872 and sent to trial but was found not guilty as, believe it or not, the jury were so impressed by what he had achieved they let him go. Ten years earlier the explorers Burke and Wills had died attempting to cross the exact same track!

Henry Arthur Readford married Elizabeth Jane Snelle in 1871 at Mudgee, New South Wales and in 1872 they had a daughter whom they named Jemima Mary Elizabeth Readford.

Readford was immortalised in the 1892 Australian novel Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood, when he was still alive. This is where the name Captain Starlight came from and Readford became something of a national hero.

He was one of two bushrangers known by the name of Captain Starlight, the other being Frank Pearson, who was known as Captain Starlight in 1868 before the publication of the novel. Boldrewood himself claimed that the Captain Starlight character in the book was a composite of several bushrangers, including Henry Readford, but that the primary inspiration was Thomas Smith, a bushranger known as Captain Midnight. The early chapters of the book were based on Readford's exploits, and the closing shoot out was based on the death of Midnight.

An annual Harry Redford Cattle Drive commemorates Readford's exploits as a drover. A range of riders from the city and country participate in this droving expedition.

Henry Arthur Readford died on the 12th March, 1901 at Corella Creek on the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory. He drowned while trying to swim across Corella Creek which had flooded due to heavy rain.

SOURCES:
Vereker, James (2011). Harry Redford Cattle Drive. Goondiwindi: C & D Publishing
Australia Death Index, 1787-1985
Australia Marriage Index, 1788-1950

New South Wales, Australia, Police Gazettes, 1854-1930

Joe Byrne of the Kelly Gang

Joe Byrne 1857 – 1880

Joe Byrne was born in Victoria to an Irish immigrant.  He was Ned Kelly's best and loyal friend and member of the Kelly Gang and probably designed the metal body armour forged and worn by the Kelly Gang.  Byrne received a fatal gunshot during the gang's final violent confrontation with police at Glenrowan, in June 1880, even though he was wearing the armour.

The infamous Ned

EDWARD KELLY

Edward "Ned" Kelly was born in Beveridge, Victoria, Australia in either 1854 or1855, the first son of John "Red" Kelly and Ellen Quinn. His father was a convict transported to Tasmania from County Tipperary in Ireland, in 1841 for stealing two pigs.

 

Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang are considered, by many, to be folk heroes and a unique part of Australian history with many books and movies telling their story. This may be due to the fact that it was felt that the Kelly family, and the Irish in general, were persecuted by the law at the time and Neds' strong defiance of the authorities. Ned Kelly is also not considered to be a typical bushranger as he did not hold up coaches or kill people when robbing banks.

 

More information is available at Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition, published by Australian National University

 

Linked to History and Home Link Party

Who was Harry Power?

Harry Power was born Henry Johnson in Ireland in 1820 and came to Australia in 1842 as a convict for stealing a pair of shoes or a saddle depending on who you believe. (see SOURCES below) .

 

He Stole a Saddle and bridle and was overtaken illegally using a blood horse, and with this act his career in Ireland came to an end. He was convicted and sent out in 1838, under the name of Johnston, and adhered to that name until he became a ticket-of-leave man. Dropping the surname, for obvious reasons, and under the impression that Power would carry him safely over any likely obstacle he began the life of a highwayman. Like scores of his class in the early days he rob-bed and plundered wherever he could, and no one has any idea of the numerous thefts he was mixed up in with...*

Harry Power was an Australian bushranger who, some believed, gave Ned Kelly his start on a life of crime. The career of Henry Power, the Victorian bushranger who served a life sentence imprisonment at Pentridge, is extraordin-ary in its cunning and daring, and made even more remarkable from the fact that the Kellys, the Harts, the Byrnes, the Quinns, the Lloyds, and other horsestealers and lawless young men in the Wangaratta and Strathbogie country, were all his con-fidants and pupils, and supplies the true and only key to the rise of the fiendish Kellys...

SOURCES:

• * Australian Dictionary of Biography  Ian F. McLaren, 'Power, Henry (Harry) (1820–1891)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University
• LIFE OF A BUSHRANGER POWER  in Western Mail (Perth, WA : 1885 - 1954) (Perth, WA: National Library of Australia). 5 February 1910

Fossicking for gold in Australia in the 1800's

Western Australian Museum › Explore › Wa Goldfields › Getting Gold

 



Fossickers at the creek at Nerrena, Victoria during the gold rush.

 

Early Goldrush days in Coolgardie, Western Australia
via The Mining Chronicle

Gold miners outside a bark hut, Queensland, ca. 1870 Two gold miners dressed in working clothes outside a slab bark hut
with mining tools nearby.

 

TIMELINE OF AUSTRALIAN GOLD RUSH ERA

1851: Ballarat and Bendigo, Victoria

1852: Beechworth, Victoria

1858 - 1859: Bright, Omeo, Chiltern,Victoria

1863: Walhalla, Victoria

1872: Palmer River Gold Rush, Palmer River, Queensland

1893: Kalgoorlie, Western Australia

1896: Coolgardie, Western Australia

 

 

Frederick Wordsworth Ward alias Captain Thunderbolt

This photo was taken when he was dead or then again it may be his uncle Harry! (read on to find out why) 

First of all I would like to say there is much contention and misinformation about Frederick Ward even including his date of birth and death. 

During the last seven years of his life Fred Ward had supposedly done more than eighty robberies of coaches, farms and hotels and became known as Captain Thunderbolt. He was also known for never killing or shooting those whom he robbed.

Frederick Wordsworth Ward was born in the Windsor District of the Colony of New South Wales in the mid 1830's, possibly 1833. His father was John Haswell who was born in Middlesex, England in 1808 and his mother was Sarah Ann Ward but he was brought up by Sarah's parents Sophia and Michael Ward.

His first work was as a very young station hand but he went to prison for receiving stolen horses. His sentence was for 10 years but he was given a ticket of leave after 4 years which meant he had to report to police once a week. He met an aboriginal girl named Yellilong, also known as Mary Ann Bugg. When he reported late to police he was sent back to prison. In 1863, he escaped by swimming across from Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, to the mainland and hid with another escapee in an old boiler in the Balmain area. No one had ever escaped from Cockatoo Island before.

His first robbery was late in 1863, but when he found the toll keeper on the road between Maitland and Rutherford had only a few shillings he gave the money back.

Some believe he was shot by police in May 1870 and died the next day near Uralla in northern NSW, others believe he attended his own funeral, dressed as a woman with a veil, and that the man buried was his uncle William, known as Harry. For more in this fascinating story please go to Barry Sinclair's site.

One of his vantage points, for robbing approaching mail coaches in the 1860's, now called Thunderbolt's Rocks, can be seen today from the highway near Uralla.

There is also a statue of Captain Thunderbolt where the New England Highway and Thunderbolts Way intersect at Uralla, NSW.