Bushranging in the Maitland area
We cannot know the identity of the first bushranger in the Maitland area, but it is possible that he was a convict who ‘bolted’ from the penal colony in its first few years and made his way north from Sydney. Efforts to recapture escapees were routinely made by the authorities, but not all attempts were successful. Lieutenant John Shortland sailed into the mouth of the Hunter River in 1797 while searching for such men but he had no luck.
Early bushranging activities
What we do know is that bushranging proliferated in the Hunter after the establishment of the gaol camp at Newcastle in 1804. Escapees from Newcastle made for the bush and used robbery, often with violence, as their means of support. They were scourges of Indigenous people from the start, and to settlers and travellers as Europeans became more numerous in the Hunter Valley.
Some of the early Hunter bushrangers were quickly caught by their pursuers from the penal station, on occasions with the help of Aboriginal trackers. They were brought back and punished severely. Others remained at large for a time but struggled to survive in an environment with whose food resources they were unfamiliar.
Some bribed Aboriginal people for assistance and a few even joined Aboriginal groups, adopting their ways and taking wives. Others, molesting native women, stealing food or otherwise causing offence, were speared, taken prisoner and forced back to Newcastle. Some of these men were naked, emaciated and starving on arrival and experienced severe physical punishment for having absconded.
The original largely convict settlement at Patersons Plains, established on the order of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1812, was harassed by at least one bushranging gang in 1816 despite the presence of a police guard. Not long after, something similar happened at the infant Wallis Plains.
Nonetheless some bushrangers, using threats or making themselves useful to the first settlers by providing kangaroo skins in return for food and pots, were undoubtedly helped by the first convict settlers. Giving bushrangers and other escapees hiding places and trading with them was dangerous for men like Benjamin Davis of Patersons Plains who risked losing their holdings and their own freedom for helping runaways. But the convict farmers and the bushrangers had a measure of common cause and some sympathy for each other’s situations. It is not surprising that they helped each other on occasions.
The growth of bushranging during the 1820s
When the large land grants were made in numbers in the Hunter Valley to ‘men of means’ during the 1820s, convicts comprised most of the labour force in breaking in the land, planting and harvesting crops and managing livestock. Some saw their relative freedom from the penal station as an opportunity to escape completely, and others were motivated further by hunger and by mistreatment by overseers and masters. The bushranging population grew and bands harassed settlers and travellers alike. They took money, arms, food, horses, dogs, clothes and sometimes women. Bushranging became a serious threat to civil order and to the development of the Hunter while it was being settled for agricultural purposes.
The worst year for bushranging during the 1820s was 1825, when several isolated farms were robbed. At this time the most infamous gang was Jacob’s Mob, who operated mostly between Maitland and Branxton. The Mob hid out in the hills, preying on the farms located largely on the floodplain. Apart from robbing settlers they adopted something of a ‘Robin Hood’ style of operation: when they caught masters who had mistreated their assigned convicts, they flogged them.
While bushrangers were at large, both emancipist and free settlers were at great risk of attack ─ sometimes from individuals acting alone but especially from armed men operating in well-organised gangs. Some bushranging gangs were large, with 15 or more members, and a few became highly successful including the Jewboy Gang of Edward Davis which operated in the Hunter in 1839 and 1840.
The bushrangers of the early years of the Maitland area were formidable men, desperate, dangerous and often highly resourceful and courageous. Most came to painful ends, but by 1830 bushranging itself was far from being quelled in the area. In fact it was on the rise and close to being out of control.
The government’s response to the early bushrangers
Bringing outlaws to justice was a major concern and a severe impost on the resources of the military. Rewards posted for the arrest of bushrangers stimulated their pursuit by settlers and by military men on horseback. The men of Jacob’s Mob were sought for months before being captured. Several members of Davis’s gang were eventually caught near Singleton by a group of mounted police led by Police Magistrate Edward Denny Day. They were tried, found guilty and quickly executed. For a time, bushranging activity was reduced.
The response of Governor Ralph Darling and the Legislative Council to the dangers bushranging posed was to pass the Bushrangers Act of 1830. Its provisions were stern, even draconian: any citizen could arrest a suspected bushranger, even without a warrant, and people who were apprehended had to prove their innocence ꟷ a reversal of the normal procedure. Yet bushranging continued and for some time the numbers of outlaws continued to grow.
A new era of bushranging
The era of the desperate runaway convict, bushranging for survival, had come to an end by the late 1840s. Thereafter bushranging took on a new character, the convicts replaced by a new breed of outlaw ꟷ the ‘wild colonial boys’ who grew out of the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s and robbed people of their riches on the roads including those of the Hunter. They sought easy pickings rather than being motivated primarily by the need merely to survive. One of the new style of bushranger was Frederick Ward, known as ‘Captain Thunderbolt.’
Captain Thunderbolt in death, 1870, photographed by Andrew Cunningham
Ward’s criminal career began with receiving stolen horses at Lambs Valley in 1856, for which he served a jail sentence on Cockatoo Island. On release he offended again and was returned to the island, but he escaped and took to the bush. Eventually, his range covered much of inland northern NSW from the Hunter Valley to the Queensland border, and his career as a bushranger lasted more than six years. In company with others he robbed mail coaches, inns, stores and farms. Ward achieved something of a reputation as a ‘gentleman bushranger’ who was considerate of his victims even as he robbed them. A skilled horseman and bushman, he evaded the authorities until being shot and killed by a policeman at Uralla in 1870.
Thunderbolt was probably the most successful bushranger in NSW history. No others emerged to claim his mantle after his death and bushranging slowly declined in frequency and significance.
Quelling bushrangers was a difficult and expensive task in the Hunter, as it was elsewhere in NSW, and it took decades to complete. Some bushrangers continued to operate even into the twentieth century and one of the last of them was a woman, Jessie Hickman, who operated during the 1920s as a cattle thief in what is now the Wollemi National Park. She was notorious as the ‘Lady Bushranger’.
But as a genuine threat to the development and civil order of the Hunter, bushranging had lost its potency well before Hickman’s time.
Jessie Hickman, 1913.
References
Dunn, Mark, The Convict Valley: the bloody struggle on Australia’s early frontier, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2020.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Hunter’s early history of dangerous bushrangers’, Maitland Mercury, 21 May 2021.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: dwindling days for the region’s bushranger era’, Maitland Mercury, 28 May 2021.
