Bull on The Wattle

Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges, by G. James Hamilton with Barry Sinclair; Phoenix Press, 2009, 416 pages, $25.
Popular or, as it is now sometimes condescendingly called, folk history has a long and honourable record It has, at least until recent decades, been the main way Australians learned about their past. Before history turned respectably academic, the great names were Frank Clune and Ion L. Idriess and there were many others.

It would be nice to think this story of the 1860s bushranger Frederick Wordsworth Ward, alias Thunderbolt, heralded a return to the folky side. There is a ripping yarn there somewhere, but it was still trying to get out when the book went to the printer.

Ward was a Ned Kelly figure a few years earlier and in northern New South Wales. He was jailed, possibly unfairly, for involvement with horse thieves. His feisty part-Aboriginal wife, Mary Anne, helped him in a daring escape from the dreadful Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney Harbour. After lying low for some time, he took to the road as a bushranger, robbing the usual targets—coaches, pubs, homesteads, well-to-do travellers.

North of the Hunter the crowd loved his dash and daring, his bushmanship and mastery on horseback, his gestures of concern for the little people. Unlike the Kellys, he did not kill people. He is a local celebrity to this day, a tourist attraction, and has a highway named for him.

A plague of imitators sprang up while he was alive. In Sydney the government was desperate about what to do, especially as Thunderbolt’s peak activity followed hot on the heels of the Ben Hall gang in the Central West.

Police appeared to shoot Ward dead at Uralla in 1870, but the twist in this book is that he actually escaped to California. Its claim is that a raw but ambitious policeman shot a Thunderbolt imitator, Ward’s reprobate uncle. Local police, under pressure from Sydney, claimed prematurely that the dead man was the real Thunderbolt. The regional police commander then orchestrated a cover-up worthy of Watergate and the charismatic bushranger slipped the country.

Unfortunately, the book is an example of what not to do. It is an eccentric mixture of fact and apparent fiction, ideological harangues and bits of family history—co-author Barry Sinclair is a great-great-nephew of Ward. Its understanding of the period is only fair. The dialogue is patchy, though not all bad. And the book badly needed a critical editor.

There is no indication of where fiction ends and fact begins. The book lacks footnotes or other serious indications of sources, even for its enormous claim of a cover-up extending to the New South Wales police even today, so that it is impossible to evaluate.

The pervasive ideology reads like a marriage of gumnut nationalism of the Bulletin era circa 1900 and the New Left of seventy years later. The better bushrangers are the goodies, along with Aussie battlers and Aborigines. Oppressive, greedy and bumbling authority is the baddy, along with perfidious British colonialism.Like Manning Clark, the authors seem to wish Eureka had developed into an American-style full-scale nationalist revolution, with “blood on the wattle”.

Their bleakness hardly matches the usual picture of New South Wales at the time—imperfect, but buoyant with gold, among the world leaders in democracy and lower-class prosperity and peaceful progress towards independent government.

But here Thunderbolt is represented as a rebel and freedom fighter. The authors stop short of making him the Che Guevara of the New England ranges—but only just.

Robert Murray is a frequent contributor to Quadrant on history.