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 s.