The Last Bushrangers

Map

DEDICATION

To Constable George Doyle and Albert Dahlke —

two decent law-abiding men, whose lives were taken in

such a ghastly manner

CONTENTS

Map

Dedication

1. The secret

2. A long way from Tipperary

3. The overlanders

4. War declared

5. The flashpoints

6. Murder

7. The manhunt

8. Capture

9. Preliminary skirmishes

10. The trial begins

11. The defence

12. The verdict

13. The appeal

14. The last throw of the dice

15. The aftermath

16. An enduring fascination

17. The documentary

Epilogue

Photo Section

References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

THE SECRET

It was obvious that he was dying, although he wasn’t really that old – only sixty-one. The cirrhosis of the liver had taken its toll, not to mention the cancer ravaging his colon. There were no regrets, no what-could-have-beens, because he wasn’t that sort of bloke. He lived for the day, spending what was in his pocket, while tomorrow never entered his thoughts.

The youngest of five children, he’d been told by his doting mother that he was special. Most days she got him to hide around the corner until his two sisters and two brothers had gone to school, and then he’d sneak back to spend the day with her. So he grew up a spoilt mummy’s boy, with a derelict work ethic, making and losing quick and easy money, mostly at racetracks. He became a womaniser and a spectacularly lousy husband and father. Had he used his gift of the gab and charismatic personality for the good, he could have done anything – even without a proper education. He much preferred the ‘con’, though, and the company of racetrack touts, crooked horse trainers and jockeys. He was second-generation Australian, but you’d swear he’d arrived from Tipperary the day before.

His name was Raymond Michael Munro, and he was my father. And as he lay dying in a Sydney hospice, I realised I hardly knew him. I felt, as his son, that it was my responsibility to be there for him at the end. He had already spent several months at our family home undergoing treatment, but it was more an expected duty on my part than a sincere need to look after him. He had no one else in the world. Gone were the jet-black hair and the twinkle in his blue eyes. Gone too were the bravado and the jokes that I think shielded his insecurities. He was heavily drugged with painkillers so his speech was slurred. It was a sad and lonely end. I wanted to ask him if he regretted anything – but we just weren’t that close.

My mother, Beryl, had been deeply in love with Mick, as my father was always called, and for the first glorious and irresponsible years of their marriage she had revelled in his fast and easy way of life. But by the time I was three she was fed up with irate husbands banging on her front door, trying to find my father so they could threaten him to stay away from their wives. Mum was also sick of policemen turning up, wanting to question him over yet another petty con. She was left with the choice of trying to rehabilitate her charming no-hoper husband or saving her young son from Mick’s unpredictable and increasingly erratic influence.

She chose me. One day she simply packed up and walked out of our rented home in Sydney’s southern suburbs and went north, over the Harbour Bridge, to affluent Mosman, where she became a housekeeper in a monastery of twelve Marist brothers.

I was four when we arrived at the Marist community, and would spend almost ten years there, rarely seeing my father. Mum and I were allocated two tiny rooms at one end of the complex, which bordered a school yard and classroom buildings. There was barely enough space for a bed in one room and a table and two chairs in the other tiny room. I had to sleep with Mum until I was thirteen, when she could afford to buy a second bed, which doubled as a divan during the day. There was also a minuscule bathroom with just enough room for a toilet and shower.

The endless work of cleaning, washing clothes and cooking thirty-six meals a day eventually took their toll on Mum. In the process of giving me a chance for the future, she had utterly ruined any chance for herself. During the years my parents were together, and in the years before they met, my mother rarely drank alcohol. In one of only two photos I have of Mum and Mick together, she can be seen drinking what looks like water while the other people at the table are clearly drinking wine or beer. But the long hours at the monastery, combined with desperate loneliness, turned the confirmed teetotaller into a chronic alcoholic. By the time I was five, Mum was starting her tortuous journey to becoming an afterhours closet drinker. By the time I was six, she was well on her way to becoming a tormented gold-plated alcoholic.

It was during the blur of alcoholism that her tongue loosened, and the first hint of my father’s family scandal spilled over into her almost-constant verbal abuse of me. I became the target of all her frustrations and resentments over her lost love and her station in life as a housekeeper. ‘You’re from a family of thieves and murderers anyway,’ she’d scream at me. But she would often mix it up with pearlers like: ‘You’re just like your father; you’ll never amount to anything. You’re nothing but a pasty-faced nothing.’ So being from ‘a family of thieves and murderers’ had no meaning whatsoever for me. It was just another form of drunken abuse that I became used to hearing. I heard it over and over again throughout my childhood, teenage years and even into adulthood. For half my life I put it down to Mum’s unhappiness in losing the one and only man she’d ever loved. It was as if she couldn’t bear to ever set eyes on him again but, at the same time, would never get over him.

Mum’s situation was made even more tragic because, when sober, she was a well-read woman with a great sense of humour and an incredible work ethic – albeit very little affection for me. So I grew up with this Jekyll and Hyde character, and tried to tell myself that whatever she said was only the grog talking.

Meanwhile, the verbal abuse escalated into physical violence. I’d cop beltings with the plug of the iron and the buckles of belts, all the while being told I was ‘from a family of mutilators and bushrangers’ – on Mick’s side, of course. Still it meant nothing; it was just another form of namecalling. I became immune to it and never questioned the meaning behind it. So the secret stayed hidden . . . until I sat beside my father’s deathbed.

I was in my late twenties when the mortally ill Mick announced he needed to tell me a terrible family secret. I blanched, because if wild Mick described it as ‘terrible’, I thought it must really be catastrophic. Then I wondered whether my father meant to reveal the existence of children from his numerous extramarital affairs. (Although my parents only saw each other three times after Mum left Mick, they never divorced. My shameless father told his many girlfriends that his wife and son had been killed in a car accident.) But Mick went on to say that he felt he was at last able to tell me his secret because he had only one sibling left alive – his older brother John, who’d spent his entire adult life at racetracks as a professional gambler and couldn’t care less about the family secret being revealed. Mick and ‘Jack’, as his brother was invariably called, were definitely the black sheep of the family. Their doctrine had always been: ‘Don’t grass on anyone for any reason and, above all, don’t ever become a copper.’ So was the secret something to do with Mick’s brothers and sisters? I was confused, and worried all over again.

But the moment Mick began to disclose the secret the family had kept hidden for so long, his face lit up with excitement. I immediately thought it couldn’t be that serious because he looked so passionate about it. What I didn’t realise was that, to Mick, the sorry story he was about to tell me was something of which to be proud.

‘Your great-uncles,’ he boasted, ‘were convicted of murdering a policeman and a station manager, cutting their bodies up, incinerating them and leaving the leftover flesh and bones in police saddlebags for the cops to find.’

(Strictly speaking, they weren’t my ‘great-uncles’, as the men in question were actually my father’s first cousins once removed. But that’s how he referred to them – and the tag stuck.)

I was dumbfounded, but more was to come. ‘Your name is not really Munro, but Kenniff,’ Mick confessed. ‘My father changed it to hide the family humiliation and shame. My uncles, Patrick and Jimmy Kenniff, were Australia’s last bushrangers.’

*

I was stunned. Mick told me that his father had changed his name illegally, which meant that it hadn’t been officially recognised under the law. Did that mean that we had an illegitimate family surname? How could my name not be Munro? I’d written under the by-line of ‘Michael Munro’ in newspapers in Sydney and New York for almost ten years. I’d worked in television as Mike Munro, and regularly on 60 Minutes on Sunday nights I’d announce: ‘. . . and I’m Mike Munro. Those stories and more tonight on . . .’ My mind snapped back to what my father was telling me.

‘The Kenniffs were superb horsemen who could make any thoroughbred jump any fence when they stole them. They were also the best cattle duffers in the whole of the Carnarvon Ranges and crack shots with either a rifle or pistol.’ My father was fired up. It was as if the cancers were melting away and he was coming back to full health. I realised that my father idolised these guys.

I couldn’t take it all in. My mind was swirling. This meant my wife of eight years, Lea, also had the wrong name. What about the names of the children we planned to have? What would we call them? Would I have to change my name back, having already established a career under Munro? Passports, birth certificates, bank and mortgage records – would they all have to be changed?

Then I wondered if I even believed my father. All my life, although I didn’t know him well, I knew him to be a liar. When I was growing up, he would hint at having been involved in robberies and having made glamorous and exciting escapes. I was told he had a criminal record involving stealing and larceny with intent. But despite an exhaustive search by my police contacts, no record ever showed up. Could this secret be just another one of his stories? What made more sense to me was that, in telling the story of the bushrangers, he was almost describing what he’d longed for in his own life.

This tale he was telling me was becoming more bizarre by the moment. And that’s exactly how I saw it – as a fantastic story, but with a real personal attachment. The journalist in me took over as I summed up the angles. Last bushrangers, double murderers and mutilators . . .

‘And folklore has it that they had this incredible hideout in the bush where they could just disappear off the face of the earth when the cops were chasing them. And then they’d dare authorities to prove they were in the area when they were supposedly seen one hundred miles away the next day. The thing was,’ my father said proudly, ‘they could ride one hundred miles through impenetrable bush in twenty-four hours when no one else could.’

I found myself anything but proud of the Kenniff brothers’ exploits.

I’ll never know if Mick told me the story of the Kenniffs on his deathbed hoping that I’d one day, as a journalist, write about it. But I doubt it. I think he just wanted me to know, and perhaps wanted to regain a little lustre in my eyes.

Like him, I was certainly fired up, but for a whole lot of different reasons. This was one story I ached to tell – assuming my father was telling the truth. And if it was true, I wanted to find out as many facts as possible, talk to as many people as I could. There must be transcripts of their trial; there was the supposed hideout, and of course the poor families of the murdered policeman and station manager.

So in the early 1980s I started researching the Kenniffs. I was no stranger to Ireland, their ancestral land. Lea and I had first holidayed there when I was working as a foreign correspondent in New York. And I’d been to Ireland on a number of occasions covering the ‘Troubles’. After being told about the Kenniffs, whenever I was working in Ireland I would head for Dublin’s magnificent Trinity College and its extensive genealogy department to research the family, who I knew were from Tipperary.

If the Kenniffs were indeed Australia’s last bushrangers, what had set them on that path? What might I discover about my family, and could it help explain my father’s fecklessness or my mother’s anger? What would it mean for me and Lea, and our children and grandchildren? What was the legacy of Australia’s last bushrangers?

CHAPTER 2

A LONG WAY FROM TIPPERARY

My great-great-grandfather Patrick Cunniffe was born in 1806 in Tipperary – a county smack bang in the middle of Ireland, and one of the most rebellious in the land. It was a hotbed of hatred of authority and all things English. If you came from Tipperary in the nineteenth century, you basically came from the worst place in the whole of Ireland, where tensions between Catholics and Protestants, tenants and landlords, ran high and spilled into violence. If you were Catholic, you valued kinship above all else, and you loved getting away with breaking the law.

But by the time of the catastrophic potato famine of the 1840s, when thousands of Irish tenant farmers were starved to death by their English landlords, there’s no doubt that survival was the only thing on the minds of Patrick and his wife, Mary. Two of their twelve children had already died before they eventually escaped the miserable three acres of rocky land they worked in Knigh and the tiny crowded hut in which the family lived.

Patrick and Mary arrived in Australia as assisted migrants in 1863 aboard the Hotspur, with seven of their children, including my great-grandfather, William, then just seven years old. They were sponsored by their third son, Roger, who was already living in Dungog, New South Wales. Roger’s two older brothers, Matthew and Jimmy, had also already sailed to Australia and settled further north near Taree at Kaarak Flat. (Jimmy was to later become the father of the bushrangers Patrick and Jimmy Kenniff.) Patrick and Mary joined them there.

The Hotspur’s manifest states that the Cunniffe family was Catholic and gives Patrick’s occupation as labourer and Mary’s as house-servant. It also states that while Patrick and Mary could read, they could not write, which goes a long way to explain why the spelling of their surname changed from Cunniffe to the more phonetic Kenniff once they landed in Australia. Possibly their thick Irish accents had a part to play as well.

But if Patrick and Mary were hoping to forge a new life with the help of their sons Matthew and Jimmy, they were mistaken. Both young men had already been involved in some form of livestock theft by the time their parents arrived in Australia. After settling into the Manning River area, first as trappers for possum and koala skins, then as stockmen and horse breakers, they had moved into the business of cattle and horses – primarily other people’s cattle and horses. Roger had turned to theft too. But it was Jimmy, twenty-six when his parents and siblings arrived from Ireland, who always seemed to go further with his thieving, and there’s no doubt he was the black sheep of the family. Right from the start it was obvious he was a bad seed. He became an expert in stealing livestock – before becoming completely estranged from his parents and all his brothers and sisters.

It seems that five years after the rest of the family arrived, firebrand Jimmy committed the unforgiveable sin for an Irishman, something he could have been killed for back in Tipperary – he turned informant against his own family. In 1868 he charged two of his brothers with assault. I’ve not been able to discover what the incident was all about, but the matter was settled out of court. Thereafter, Jimmy was ostracised by the family.

By then, Jimmy had already married Mary Stapleton, a bride at sixteen, who went on to bear eleven children – seven girls and four boys. Mary’s brother Tom was a cattle thief, and despite law-abiding Mary being nothing like her husband or brother, both of whom were more than happy to make careers out of cattle duffing and horse theft, she could not prevent her eldest child, Patrick, born in 1863 and known as Pat or Paddy, from thieving with his Uncle Tom Stapleton and Tom’s boys, Gus and Alex, as soon as he could ride. Mary’s second son, James, or young Jimmy, who was born in November 1870, would idolise Paddy and copy his example.

After the falling-out with his brothers, Jimmy senior (called Old Man Jimmy after the birth of James) moved his family to Casino where young Jimmy attended school long enough to learn how to read and write, something Paddy never managed. In years to come, Jimmy would read to Paddy from the newspapers about their exploits. Joining Old Man Jimmy in Casino was a career criminal, John Finnerty, who would ride and thieve with the Kenniffs and Stapletons around the cattle town. Old Man Jimmy, however, was the mastermind who decided where the gang operated and what properties they stole stock from.

So right from the start, Paddy and young Jimmy’s major education was learning how to identify prime horse flesh and then becoming expert horsemen so they could steal whatever mounts took their fancy. It was said that at the age of thirteen Patrick had stolen a horse by jumping it out of a yard, riding bareback and without a bridle. The boys’ real classroom was not the small schoolroom in Casino, but the watersheds and grazing lands of the Clarence and Richmond rivers. Both were superlative riders and they loved a thoroughbred, and the faster the better.

Paddy was only fourteen when the police first charged him and fined him £5 for rounding up stray cattle and depositing them on the family property. By his late teens he was regularly in trouble with the police for stealing and livestock offences. And by the time he was twenty-one, Paddy was not only an accomplished thief, but wild too. In July 1884 he was fined £2 for ‘riotous conduct’.

By then, Jimmy had also started cattle duffing with his father, Finnerty and the Stapletons. Over the years, young Jimmy would grow into an angry brawling hothead like his father, while Patrick, once wild, became the more measured and conciliatory of the two.

Mary Kenniff didn’t want the same life for her daughters and remaining sons that Old Man Jimmy had chosen for Paddy and Jimmy. She left Casino, taking the girls and the two youngest boys, Tom and John, to Sydney, where she became a housekeeper, just as my mother would two generations later. That left Paddy and young Jimmy to continue their ‘education’ unfettered.

So it was that in March 1887, Patrick, Jimmy and the Stapletons drove a herd of cattle stolen from Casino Common to Warwick in southern Queensland, where they sold the beasts. Once witnesses identified them as the cattle thieves, warrants were issued for their arrest. In October, as the cattle duffers were returning to Casino, the police arrested them at Mungindi on the Queensland side of the border for being in possession of stolen horses. Once the gang was in custody, the police realised there were already warrants out for them on cattle-duffing charges in New South Wales, so they were extradited and faced court. Patrick was given four years; his uncle Tom Stapleton got seven. Young Jimmy, at just seventeen, copped his first stint in prison too – three months for ‘illegally using horses’.

By 1891, when Paddy was due to be released from jail, Old Man Jimmy reckoned that the Kenniffs had worn out their welcome in New South Wales. There were too many coppers and, more importantly, too many fences around cattle and horses. Theft was becoming too difficult. It was time to move on to greener, and much bigger, pastures. A place so big and open, it had no fences.

CHAPTER 3

THE OVERLANDERS

In 1891, when Old Man Jimmy was fifty-four, he rode with his son Jimmy, as well as the Stapletons and John Finnerty, into the impossibly rugged and wild Carnarvon Ranges, 750 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.

They