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Updated: May 31, 2025


The blacks pointed to one of the bodies which lay stretched out. There was a cut on the head, and, as if just fallen from the right hand of the other man, an axe. There could be no doubt that the last act of one of the famished men had been to murder his companion for what object it was horrible to think. But who were these poor wretches? We were convinced that they were bush-rangers.

We also had plenty of arms wherewith to fight the bush-rangers, but I did not carry any myself; I left the fighting department to my mate, Philip, and to the others who were fond of war. Philip was by nature and training as gentle and amiable as a lamb, but he was a Young Irelander, and therefore a fighter on principle.

We had some expectation of meeting with an adventure, for we heard that several bush-rangers were out, who were levying black-mail on all travellers. We resolved at all events not to be taken unawares. I felt pretty sure that we might trust our new men, and Dick Nailor was a man not to be attacked with impunity even by the most daring of robbers.

"Nothing whatever, your honor," replied Wilson. "The convicts must be miles away from here." "They were not in numbers enough to attack us, I suppose," added Mulrady. "Ben Joyce will have gone to recruit his party, with some bandits like himself, among the bush-rangers who may be lurking about the foot of the Alps." "That is probably the case, Mulrady," replied Glenarvan.

They watched a hut when the hut-keepers were out, stole some guns and powder and shot, and set up as bush-rangers that is robbers. They lived on for some months in the bush, now in one place, now in another. They stole horses and food and clothes. It was a very hard life though. Every man's hand was against them, and a price was set on their heads.

That is as false as 'tis true that God is in heaven. I have desired you to send for the deserters. He had, nevertheless, turned them to good account; for, as the English knew nothing of western geography, they employed these French bush-rangers to guide their trading parties. Denonville sent orders to Du Lhut to shoot as many of them as he could catch.

The only attempt at securing order and tolerable safety was by visiting every offence, even the slightest, of which a convict was accused in a court of justice, with the most unrelenting severity; and this, of course, had the effect of further brutalizing these felon people, making them reckless of the deeds they committed, and often driving them to become bush-rangers outlawed wild men of the woods a terror to the colony.

The concluding sentences of the speech of Lieutenant Hill forcibly express the extent of the evil. "The country is free from bush-rangers: we are no longer surrounded and threatened by the natives. We have only one enemy left in the field; but that enemy strikes at the very root of our welfare, and through him the stream of our prosperity is tainted at its very source."

We decided to trudge it to the nearest place where we could buy horses, and then to make our way to Sydney as fast as we could. Somehow it must have got out that we had gold, for as the dusk of evening was closing round us on the second day of our march we were attacked by some men on horseback bush-rangers, I suppose. We showed fight, and I was hit in the shoulder.

A remarkable natural formation, leading to curious results, was last week accidentally hit upon by a party of prospectors, and by them made known to the police of the district. It may tend to solve the doubts which for the last few years have troubled the public at large with respect to the periodical disappearance of a certain gang of bush-rangers now broken up.

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