HISTORY The Golden Gan g Ian W. Shaw Simon & Schuster, $34.99 Everyone’s heard of the iron-clad exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang.
He sits atop a long list of notorious and romanticised bushrangers, along with Ben Hall, Captain Midnight and Martin Cash; wild colonial boys whose criminal exploits brought both infamy and grudging admiration. Australians have long held mixed feelings about our criminals of yore, bestowing an almost Robin Hood-like status on those whose exploits entertained the blokes in the taverns, and appalled the powers that were. Frank Gardiner (left) in 1860.
He eventually left for San Francisco after a petition freed him from jail. Credit: State Library of NSW From the heroic Kelly legend of a knight in rusty armour, wronged by the police and strung up for defending his family’s honour, and other star-crossed desperadoes fleeing a cruel judiciary and crooked coppers, to the sordid reality of hard men who terrorised travellers, gunned down bank tellers and rustled precious stock, a nostalgic ambiguity has coloured our perceptions of these men for 150 years. One of them, Frank Gardiner, is lesser known today, but was the embodiment of this reputational dichotomy in his prime, not least for pulling off Australia’s biggest gold heist.
The centrepiece of Ian Shaw’s The Golden Gang is Gardiner’s £14,000 hold-up of the Gold Escort coach at Eugowra Rocks, on its way from Forbes to Orange in NSW, on June 15, 1862. But this lucrative act of larceny was simply the crowning achievement in a life of crime, during which Gardiner (the name by which Scottish-born Frank Christie was best known) ducked and weaved his way across four colonies. Ian Shaw’s book is well researched and a rollicking read.
Gardiner emigrated in 1834 with his parents at age five, and as a young man his affinity with horses led him to work as a stockman in Victoria. He soon found that stealing stock was far more profitable than minding them. At 21, he was new to the game, and came unstuck when trying to sell horses that were clearly not his to trade, and consequently found himself sentenced to five years’ hard labour as one of the first prisoners of the new Pentridge prison (then known as the “Pentridge Stockade”) in 1850.
He escaped a year later and evaded capture by losing himself among the thousands of hopefuls then heading for the Bendigo goldfields. It is hard not to fall victim to an amused, vicarious nostalgia for nefarious deeds such as Gardiner’s highway robbery of gold digger and storekeeper Alfred Horsington, riding from Little Wombat to Lambing Flat. Indeed, Shaw’s biography of Gardiner, who was the most famous of the bushrangers of his day, is a rollicking read, with a cast of fearless and incompetent cops and robbers.
For men such as Gardiner and Hall (who was Gardiner’s apprentice of sorts before becoming an anti-hero in his own right), life was lived in the present, with loot often traded for liquor, lost at cards or invested in bribes. Some of the police entrusted with running them down were often ne’er-do-wells of dubious morals and limited intellect, and Gardiner’s bumbling would-be nemesis was the singularly ill-equipped Sir Fred Pottinger. In 1856, Pottinger, the black sheep of a wealthy English family who had imbibed and gambled his inheritance to nought in pleasure palaces and racecourses across the country, had been forced to flee to Australia in disgrace.
This CV was no impediment to a career in the NSW police service in those days, but Pottinger had about as much luck catching bushrangers as he’d had at the track, and eventually wound up fatally shooting himself in the abdomen in 1865 while holstering his own pistol. Known for missing opportunities to make an arrest when the culprit was in plain sight, he was widely derided in the press, and allegedly the original “Blind Freddy” of Australian folklore. As for Gardiner, he spent many years on the run and was in and out of prison in NSW and Queensland, before finally being freed on the strength of petitions signed by thousands of admirers on the condition he go into exile.
He set up taverns in San Francisco, but fell foul of creditors and died there in poverty in 1882. Shaw’s tale is great fun, and he does not fall into the trap of romanticising Gardiner and his associates who were, after all, gunmen, thieves and, when they deemed it necessary, murderers. It must be said that the text could have done with a better edit.
There are some silly errors that could easily have been avoided. According to Shaw, the word “bushranger”, for instance, had apparently “been in common use for at least two decades” before it appeared in the Sydney Gazette in 1805. But these are minor quibbles.
Shaw’s research is comprehensive, and The Golden Gang is much more than an inventory of a bushranger’s triumphs and disasters. It is a compelling sketch of the unimaginably hard lives led by the men and women of rural colonial Australia, a story with no heroes. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.
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