Moondyne Joe

Moondyne Joe

Remnants of a fence and well built by Moondyne Joe

Remnants of one of Moondyne Joe's gates used to recapture cattle

Moondyne Joe's escape-proof cell in Freemantle Prison

Moondyne Joe's Bar and Bistro in Fremantle

Joseph Bolitho Johns (* around 1826 - † August 13, 1900 ), better known as Moondyne Joe , was the most famous bushranger in Western Australia .

Life

Early life

Joseph Johns was born around 1826 in Cornwall, England, the third of six children of the Roman Catholic blacksmith Thomas Johns and his wife Mary Bolitho. Joe was a tall man with black hair and hazel eyes, described in later records as being pockmarked . His father died between 1832 and 1841, Johns and his three brothers looked for work as miners in the copper mining industry. In 1841 the family lived in Illogan in Cornwall, in 1848 Johns worked in an iron ore mine in Wales, perhaps at the Clydach Iron Works.

Beginning of the criminal career

On November 15, 1848, Johns and an accomplice William Cross (a pseudonym of John Williams ) were arrested for stealing "three loaves of bread, a piece of ham, several cheese and other goods" from Richard Price's house.

They plead “not guilty” on charges of burglary before the Brecon jury . On March 23, the trial took place under Judge William Erle . Newspaper reports of the trial suggest an unexpectedly persistent defense that John was said to have been aggressive and defied normal court proceedings. They were sentenced to ten years of forced labor. Several comparable cases, which were heard before the same judge on the same day and in which the accused had pleaded “guilty”, ended in sentences of only 3 weeks to 3 months.

Johns and Williams were to be deployed on a local government labor column for the next six months and then transferred to Millbank Prison . On January 1, 1850, she was admitted to Pentonville Prison to serve the six months of solitary confinement associated with the sentence. The couple were transferred to Dartmoor Prison on October 21, 1851 . Soon after, John was a front Woolwich lying prison ship laid a Hulk called Justitia , possibly for disciplinary reasons. When the Justitia was destroyed by fire, he was transferred to the Defense . About a year later, he was taken to the prison ship Pyrenees to be deported to the British penal colony of Western Australia . He was supposed to serve the rest of the sentence there. Williams was deported to Tasmania in March 1852 .

Deportation to Australia

The Pyrenees set sail on February 2, 1853, and arrived in Fremantle on April 30 .

Because of good conduct, he received a ticket of leave on his arrival and on March 10, 1855 a parole. He settled in the valley of the Avon River , one of the most rugged and inaccessible areas of the Darling Range . The Aboriginal name for the area was Moondyne , hence its common name. Johns made a living by partially fencing in the springs in the area and catching runaway horses and cattle. He often received a reward for returning them.

In August 1861, Johns caught an unbranded stallion and gave him his own. This was ultimately horse theft . The police arrested him at the first opportunity. The police withheld the horse as evidence and Joe was imprisoned in Toodyay . He broke out one night and stole the horse again, taking with him the brand new saddle and bridle from the local magistrate. He was caught again the next day, but in the meantime had killed the horse and cut out its branding, thus destroying the evidence of the theft. He only received a three-year sentence for breaking out instead of the typical ten-year sentence for stealing a horse.

While Johns was serving his sentence, the prison experienced a wave of attempted and successful escape, but he did not participate. In February 1864 he received a ticket of leave for good guidance. He then took up work on a Henry Martin's farm in Kelmscott . In January 1865, a bull named "Bright" belonging to William Wallace was killed and Johns was charged with the crime. He was arrested on March 29th, found guilty on July 5th, and sentenced to ten years of forced labor. Johns protested his innocence in this case until the end of his life. He was determined not to serve what he felt was an unjust sentence, and in November he and another inmate fled a work gang. They had been at large for almost a month during which time they committed some minor robbery. At that time, Johns was nicknamed Moondyne Joe . They were caught by a police force 23 miles east of York , including local tracker Tommy Windich . Moondyne Joe was sentenced to twelve months in iron for escaping and owning a firearm and was transferred to Fremantle Prison .

Another escape

In April 1866, Moondyne Joe petitioned the Chief Justice of Western Australia and received four years of his sentence. This appears to have been unsatisfactory for him, as he received an additional six months in iron in July for attempting to cut the lock from his cell door. He escaped again in early August. After removing his irons, he met three other escapees and they were walking through the bush around Perth. They committed a number of robberies and narrowly escaped arrest several times. At the end of August, one of the four was caught by the police. Realizing that the police could not be escaped forever, Moondyne Joe planned to escape from this penal colony by land to South Australia . For this long and hard journey through an extremely dry area, you needed very good equipment if you wanted to have a chance at all. On September 5, Moondyne Joe stole the supplies and equipment he needed from his old enemy James Everett's store in Toodyay. The gang then traveled east along the route found by Charles Hunt . On September 26th, police found her tracks about 160 kilometers east of York. A police force pursued them and attacked them on September 29, 1866 at Boodalin Soak, about 6 km northwest of today's Westonia , about 300 km northeast of Perth .

Further escape and pardon

Moondyne Joe received another five years of forced labor as punishment for the escape and the crimes committed on it. Extraordinary measures were now taken to prevent another escape. Joe was chained with his neck to the iron grille of a window in the courtyard of Fremantle Prison while an escape-proof cell was being built. The cell consisted of stone walls, which were reinforced inside with jarrah wood sleepers and over 1000 nails, it was almost light and airtight. Moondyne Joe was kept in the cell with bread and water and was only allowed two hours a day to walk in the yard. At the beginning of 1867, because of his poor health, he was taken outside to break stones. Instead of using him outside the prison as usual, the comptroller-general ordered the stones to be taken for him to a corner of the prison yard, where Joe worked under the constant supervision of a guard. The then Governor of Western Australia , John Hampton , was so convinced of the measures that he was heard saying to Joe that if he escaped again he would pardon him. However, the stones that Joe had crushed were not regularly scuttled, so that over time a pile was formed that blocked Joe's body below the waist from the view of the guards. Partly hidden behind the pile of stones, he occasionally hit the limestone prison wall with his sledgehammer.

On March 7, 1867, Moondyne Joe escaped through the hole he had made in the prison wall. Despite an extensive search, he was not found. He avoided his previous environment and did not commit any crimes, so the authorities received little information about his whereabouts. Moondyne Joe's role model led to a number of escape attempts in the following months, so that he was quickly forgotten.

A few days before the second anniversary of his outbreak, Moondyne Joe tried to steal a few bottles of wine from the cellar of the Houghton Winery . The owner happened to help with a police investigation and afterwards invited the police to the basement for a refreshment. When the owner entered the basement, John believed he had been discovered and fled through the door into the arms of the police. He was returned to prison and given an additional twelve months to escape, half of which was in solitary confinement. On March 22, 1869, he was sentenced to another four years in iron for burglary. Moondyne Joe tried in February 1871 to break out of his cell with a duplicate key made in the prison joiner's workshop, but it failed. In April 1871, Comptroller General Wakeford heard from Moondyne Joe's mouth of Hampton's promise. After checking with Superintendent Lefroy that those words had actually been spoken, Wakeford notified Governor Frederick Weld , who agreed that further punishment would be unfair. Moondyne Joe was released in May 1871.

Next life

The rest of John's life was a period of good conduct interspersed with the occasional minor misdemeanor and brief imprisonment. In January 1879 he married a widow named Louisa Hearn. They spent some time prospecting for gold near Southern Cross . In 1881 he discovered the Moondyne Cave named after him while exploring near Karridale . In his final years, he began to act strangely and was eventually pronounced insane. He died on August 13, 1900 in the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum ( Madhouse Freemantle ) of " senile dementia ". The building now houses the Fremantle Arts Center . He was buried in Fremantle Cemetery in Freemantle. His tombstone bears the word "rhyddid" ( Welsh "freedom").

reception

Literature and film

In 1869 an Irish political prisoner named John Boyle O'Reilly was incarcerated in Fremantle Prison. Although O'Reilly Moondyne probably didn't know Joe personally, he must have heard the many stories about him. In September 1869, O'Reilly escaped and was rescued by a US ship. In the US he wrote a novel about his life as a convict Moondyne: An Australian Tale , whose central character was Moondyne Joe . The book was presented as fictional and neither the character nor the story bears much resemblance to the life of Joseph John.

In 1913, O'Reilly's novel was filmed as Moondyne . The WJ Lincoln film starred George Bryant , Godfrey Cass and Roy Redgrave .

Randolph Stow wrote a humorous children's book Midnite in 1967 : The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy , in which he tells the story of an Australian bushranger and based on the life stories of Moondyne Joe and a bushranger from Queensland , Captain Starlight .

In 2002 Cygnet Books published the youth novel The Legend of Moondyne Joe by Mark Greenwood. The book won the 2002 Children 's Book Award at the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards .

In 2012, Fremantle Press published a postmodern take on Moondyne Joe's life, The Ballad of Moondyne Joe , with poetry and prose by John Kinsella and Niall Lucy .

He has been the subject of several poems and songs, including The Ballad of Moondyne Joe

A popular song from the time of his escape in 1867 read:

The Governor's son has got the pip,

The Governor's got the measles.

For Moondyne Joe has give 'em the slip,

Pop goes the weasel.

In 1982 Roy Abbott and Roger Montgomery of the Mucky Duck bush band wrote and performed a musical about him.

A siding on the Eastern Goldfields Railway in John's area of ​​operations in the Avon Valley was probably named "Moondyne" more after the man than the area.

On the first Sunday in May, the Toodyay Ward commemorates the life and times of Moondyne Joe with the Moondyne Festival.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Convicts to Australia: Pyrenees arrived in WA in 1853, accessed February 8, 2014
2. ↑ Devereux, Drew: Early life of Moondyne Joe. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. In: Dollypot, Greenhide and Spindrift: a journal of bush history . 2, No. 3, 2006. Retrieved November 22, 2006.
3. ^ Breconshire Lent Assizes . In: The Welshman , pp. 1849-03-30. 
4. ^ ^{A b c} Edgar, WJ: The Life and Times of Moondyne Joe: Swan River Colony Convict Joseph Bolitho Johns . Tammar Publications and Toodyay Tourist Center, Toodyay, Western Australia 1990, ISBN 0-646-00047-0 .
5. ↑ Shipping Intelligence . In: The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News , July 4, 1851. Retrieved January 19, 2014. 
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Elliot, Ian: Moondyne Joe: The Man and the Myth . University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, Western Australia 1978, ISBN 0-85564-130-4 .
7. ↑ SUPREME COURT — CRIMINAL SIDE. . In: The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times , National Library of Australia, July 7, 1865, p. 3. Retrieved June 3, 2014. 
8. ↑ Routt, William D .: More Australian than Aristotelian: The Australian Bushranger Film, 1904–1914 Archived from the original on December 24, 2010. In: Senses of Cinema . No. 18, 2002.
9. ^ Moondyne (1913) . In: IMDb: The Internet Movie Database . Retrieved May 29, 2006.
10. ↑ Stowe, Randolph: Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy . Puffin Books, 1969, ISBN 0-14-030421-5 .
11. ^ Greenwood, Mark: The Legend of Moondyne Joe . Cygnet Books, Crawley, Western Australia 2002, ISBN 1-876268-70-0 .
12. ^ State Library of Western Australia: Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - 2002 Winners . Government of Western Australia. Archived from the original on November 9, 2014. Retrieved December 19, 2014.
13. ↑ Kinsella, John and Niall Lucy: The Ballad of Moondyne Joe . Fremantle Press, Fremantle, Western Australia 2012, ISBN 978-1-921888-52-6 .
14. ↑ Fremantle Prison: Factsheet . Archived from the original on August 22, 2006. Retrieved January 14, 2006.
15. ↑ Graham Seal: The Outlaw Legend: A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia . Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-521-55317-2 .
16. ^ Moondyne Joe / The Mucky Duck Bush Band and friends. .
17. ^ Moondyne Festival . Retrieved May 5, 2014.

Web links

• M. Tamblyn: Johns, Joseph Bolitho (1827-1900). , Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Center of Biography, Australian National University 1972, accessed online February 10, 2014
• Family history of the Bolitho family