Gangland Robbers Read Online Free PDF

man and horse thief Fred Ward, who went under the more imposing soubriquet of Captain Thunderbolt. Exactly how involved she was in his criminal activities is again difficult to establish. Many accounts claim she helped him by swimming to Cockatoo Island with a file, so that Thunderbolt could cut his chains in a rare escape from the island, but other evidence indicates she was miles away at the time.
    The third does seem, at the very least, to have been out and about as a poddy-dodger. From the age of eight, Elizabeth Jessie Hickman, born in 1890 at Burraga, was involved in the circus, joining James Martini in Martini’s Buckjumping Show. He was killed in 1907, and for the next three years she was ringmaster and promoter of the circus, until it was sold in 1910.
    She then met and married Benjamin Walter Hickman, and had a son with him in 1913. He joined the Australian Imperial Force and, during his absence, she turned to crime, serving short sentences for theft, including one for cattle stealing. Benjamin Hickman returned after World War I but they separated in 1924. She did not appear at the hearing when, with Hickman complaining that all she wanted to do was live in the country, they were divorced in October 1928.
    Perhaps by then she had had enough of court cases because in April of that year she had been charged in Rylstone, New South Wales, with stealing half a dozen cattle, which she had driven 50 miles to her house at Stoney Pinch where she was living with a man named Brown. The police had chained her to a fence while they rounded up the animals. She claimed they must have strayed on to her property, and was acquitted at the end of August.
    The Burial
, a novel by Courtney Collins, contains a highly romanticised version of her life, which has Hickman killing an abusive third husband and burying him in the bush, then running a gang of cattle thieves. For the last eight years of her life, she lived in WiddenValley. She died in 1936 from a brain tumour and is buried at Sandgate Cemetery in Newcastle. If Hickman can be counted as a bushranger , she must have been the last of the female bushrangers, and perhaps even the last bushranger of them all.

Early Days
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    By the 1880s, urban crime was more prevalent than bushranging. In the early morning of 3 February 1894 three visiting Victorian burglars, members of the variously called Bookmakers’ Gang or Tobacco Gang (because of its bail-ups of bookmakers on their way home from the races, and its thefts of tobacco), tried to blow the safe at the Union Steamship Company near Circular Quay in Sydney. They had not realised it had an alarm, and when it sounded, they ran out into Bridge Street, where they met and laid out two police officers, Senior Constable McCourt and Constable Lyons, with iron bars.
    Not knowing the layout of the area, the three men then turned into Phillip Street, where they almost literally ran into the arms of officers from the nearby Water Street Police Station. They knocked down Constable Alford. As they headed for the Domain, they were halted by Constable Frederick Bowden, who they also knocked down, fracturing his skull.
    The police lost one of the men in the Domain. The two who were caught and charged with attempted murder were ‘Buck’ Montgomery, better known as Millidge, and the safebreaker ‘Curly’ Williams, aka Carroll, who had met in prison. Both were convicted and sentenced to death, with Williams receiving a recommendation of mercy from the jury. Their lawyer, Richard Meager, set up a petition for a reprieve for both men, which was signed by more than 25 000 people, including Constable Bowden, and backed by Cardinal Moran. There were several deputations to the premier, Sir George Dibbs, who demanded ‘New Facts’, of which there were none. On the eve of their execution, there was a mass meeting and procession calling for reprieves.
    As for the men, they were allowed to meet each other after Williams had earlier seen